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

Reading through the last issue of The Wolf (November/December 2003), several powerful images got my attention:

             and talk amongst the losers of a face
             I can’t forget, and of a special hurt
             bleeding like footprints scattered over snow. 
(“Broken Hearts” by Jeremy Reed)

             If all things are made of glass
             you are fresh and cut for new wine 
(“A Clergyman on Being Alone” by Soraya Maciel)

             […] Forever
             it seems as if we are half-trying to land  
(“Our Silent Fathers” by James Byrne)

   Although diverse, these images have one thing in common: they are Petrarchan. The term is used to acknowledge individual and creative ways of engaging with the poetic ideas of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) within a lively poetic discourse now over six centuries old, which has swept over Europe and involved poets such as Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare.

   The imagery in our samples can be traced back to Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a sequence of poems telling a story of quest for love and glory. With the possible exception of Homer’s Iliad, this could very well be Europe’s most influential poetic work. Its idiom has found its way into the very fabric of our culture, and informs the way we think about desire and poetry.

   So how is Petrarch relevant today? As a critic, I am impressed by his innovation, courage, clarity of purpose and imagination. As a migrant and translator, I respond to his idea of building a sense of place through language. As a woman, I debate him on ways of seeing. Whatever the angle, I have been properly engaged; it is as a poet that I best appreciate that.  Ultimately, people write lyrical poetry to make their hidden selves visible to others; they read it to find their own reflection in other people’s words. While this is equally true of modern and old poetry, seeking a reflection in an old mirror can be a discouraging process. But Petrarch makes it difficult to give up trying. While by no means transparent – for it is built out of dense layers of myth, philosophy and poetic references – his 14th Century verse is still excellent reflection material:

a solitary,
wandering deer that moves from wood to wood
still I flee the rage of my own hounds                        (23:159-60)

A mortal tongue can never touch the state
of her divinity; love draws and drives it                    (247:12-13)

I steal myself from me at times
and search for her                                                      (169:3)

Dead in the waves is reason as is skill
and I despair of ever reaching port                           (189:13-14)

   Petrarch’s focus is firmly on the self of the speaker (the “I” of the sequence), on the workings of his mind caught in a labyrinthine web of desires and fears. As no aspect of this strife is ever fully revealed, the reader experiences splintered identification with the speaker, and is galvanised into seeking logical connections and filling in the blank spaces, driving the reading process forward in the absence of a conventional narrative. The appeal of the game has yet to be exhausted.

   There is no doubt that engaging the readers of his and future generations is exactly what Petrarch wanted to do: “to stun the mind of anyone who listens” and “stir, perhaps, some pity in
the eyes /of someone born a thousand years from now” are his professed goals. (Six hundred thirty years on, and we are still talking). But despite his confidence, and the eminence he achieved in his lifetime, his speaker still embodies the duality found in every poet: on the one hand, there is the isolation, the contempt for the uninitiated majority and suspicion towards public approval; on the other, a deep need for audiences and their attention.

   In relation to other writers, Petrarch worked – in his own words - like a bee, producing the one from the many. He used the material and ideas of other poets and philosophers before him, seeking to shape it into an original result. At a time when sin was a weighty concept, Petrarch outlined his autonomous poetic universe by casting his beloved, Laura, as God and his Christ, thus defying the First Commandment. It is the fact that Petrarch deeply feels the moral ambiguity of this approach, yet feels compelled to explore it - that gives his verse its edge. By confronting the sins of idolatry and self-love, Petrarch has accorded them legitimacy as poetic subjects and opened a space for discussion.

   Petrarch’s treatment of Laura also raises interesting issues. Laura - white skinned, red-cheeked, golden-haired and distant – became, through the medium of Petrarch’s poetry, a paragon of beauty for many centuries to come. What this beauty stands for is no less interesting: Petrarch imbues the relentless quest for physical and creative repose – both centred in her - with an almost visceral intensity. There are many layers to Petrarch’s Laura: she resonates with Daphne, the nymph turned into a laurel tree as she fled the unwanted advances of Apollo, god of poetry. The laurel tree is a symbol of poetic glory; it is only by seeking to reach and immortalise her, that Petrarch will become crowned with laurels. This creative interplay between a writer and his Muse is addressed by a constant reversal of acknowledgment and denial: Laura’s words and intellect - while appreciated as indispensable to his creativity - are never quoted: Laura remains “light and mirror”, the poetry that contains her the only true measure of her silenced eloquence.

   Strikingly at odds with the professed desire to immortalise her for her virtue and beauty, and resonating with Dante’s domina petrosa (stony mistress), Laura is also cast as a Gorgon whose face turns men to stone. Implications of Laura’s cruelty are surprisingly pervasive in the Canzoniere: “Little by little”, says Petrarch’s speaker, “she consumes and saps / and like a lion above my heart she roars”. Much frustrated desire, thwarted patience and implied punishment seem to be simmering beneath the surface:  Laura appears “carved in living laurel”; or, in a poem containing six visions of her death, as a “torn-out laurel”. In addition, having created – Pygmalion-like – his perfect being, Petrarch offers her to other people’s gaze:  “she merits higher, finer [words] than mine, / who does not trust me, come and gaze on her”.  The implied violence is chilling.

   Laura died twenty years before the Canzoniere was finished. In the second part of the sequence, she visits Petrarch in his dreams – a part of the long tradition of ‘dream sequence’ poetry, in which sainted visitors offer comfort and wisdom. The dialogue within the poet’s mind, held in his room at dawn, is more intimate and tender than anything written during Laura’s life.

   Petrarch renounces Laura in the final, 366th poem. In a gesture of apostasy, he repents his sins and offers a passionate prayer to Virgin Mary. Here, as elsewhere in Petrarch’s work, gender is used consciously: by choosing another woman - not Christ, or God – as the recipient of his passionate recantation, Petrarch aims to make the full effect of his transformation felt. The effectiveness of this approach is at best uncertain, as well as theologically dubious: the conversion is thus, indeed, striking – but unconvincing, not least because it rehearses the familiar rhetoric of adulation, most of it already used in relation to Laura.

The known list of places Petrarch lived, stayed or visited on diplomatic missions is impressive. At one time or another, Petrarch made his home in Pisa, Montpellier, Bologna, Avignon, Vaucluse Padua, Parma, Milan, Venice and Arquà. He visited Civitavecchia, Rome, Verona, Montreux and Mantua; in Naples, king Robert of Anjou examined him for several days before pronouncing him worthy of his poetic laurels, which he received in Rome in 1341. He was sent to Flanders, France, Germany and Prague on ambassadorial posts; he undertook a peace mission to Venice barely a year before his death.  Even though he resisted the invitation of his younger friend Boccaccio to return to Florence to live (Florence was home-city of his parents, from which they were expelled before Petrarch’s birth), which revealed that his exile become a matter of choice, Petrarch saw himself as “conceived and born in exile”, and his Canzoniere teems with references to a sense of nostalgia and non-belonging. If his poems reveal a sense of place, it is found in tranquil moments of solitary work, as well as his language, which he builds as a home, “with lime and stones and wood”. An island in the sea of Latin in which all his other works were written, the Italian of the Canzoniere represents place revered and cultivated in lieu of an imaginary homeland.

   Petrarch’s legacy of the poetics of antithesis – themes offset by feverish reversals and palinodes – enucleates the tantalising inability of language to access higher truths or prevent loss of artistic and personal certainty in the face of reality. Despite this, poetry, for Petrarch, remains the only way to transcend the triviality of our world.  It will not be surprising, then, if the Petrarchan idiom continues to haunt our poetry, it is as vital to it as our alphabets.