Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In the margins of my Poems on Various Subjects
(a modest success in 1796),
in the head, the tail, the inner and the outer,
not to mention the interleaving paper
(provided so that friends might annotate ...
though in the event there were very few comments),
in these same margins of my remaindered book
William and Dorothy took it in turn to write
the first draft of his divine pastoral "Michael":
his hand more spidery and copper-plate, even in haste,
hers rounder and stronger, though in the heat of composition
it is not always easy to tell the two hands apart.
Didn't they ever notice the canvas on which they worked,
on which they painted the worthy, the admirable shepherd?
Sometimes the hungry brown ink lopes over black print;
often it feels as if ink consumes print entirely.
Did they never notice my "Frost at Midnight"
or "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison"? No!
His brand-new blank verse poem "Michael" trampled
all over my discursive low-voiced laments.
And now I have nothing to offer the partnership,
my family, or the world. What kind of poet am I?
I am the one who consumes too much laudanum
for the toothache, the headache, the racking pain in my soul.
Such narcotic draughts fostered my "Kubla Khan" …
but I can do nothing for the Lyrical Ballads.
I know what brother and sister are saying about me,
even she who illuminates the dark caves in my soul.
She has such an eye, a sensitive way of seeing -
His poetry is so often based on her vision.
I can only envy my friend his genius
just as I envy him his muse of a sister.
What inspiration did I ever get from my lard-like wife?
Witness the wretched depths of my degradation:
the margins around my best conversation poems,
the finest of my literary achievements,
are scrap paper for the world's greatest Poet's scribbles!