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

No doubt the salient development is the one (consciously?) signalled by your use of the phrase 'the poetry scene'. It is not new for poetry to seek theatrical means of expression, but it is unusual for poems to do so. This is not always discouraging. I rather think that some musical collaborations have developed from the vogue for stage-readings, rather than from any older tradition of the composer seeking out a poet to write a libretto. Poets have tried, at any rate, to benefit from the present liquidity of dramatic form, and the in-formality of dramatic presentation. On the other hand, I don't really believe that the common manner of poetry of the last decade (granting for the moment that there can be such a manner) is ideally suited either for theatre or for music. Many turbulent inventive writers do have what one would call a sense of drama, but they either do not mount the stage in any sense or, if they do, fail to project that dramatic sense through clinging obstinately to the intimacy and finesse of the printed word.

A minor, though dispiriting, development has been the sheer amount of verse published over the last ten years. It is not reasonable that poets of talent can respond to the attentions of even the most discriminating of little presses so long as major publishers attempt to maintain their own series. Ten years ago the expensive 'big little' presses were hardly to be seen, and the kind of list that smaller, one-man presses now put out would have seemed extraordinary. Talent spreads very thinly these days, and the resulting dilution only gives encouragement to bad poets. Readers (and potential buyers) of poetry are given no firm standards by about half of the reviewers in the major papers. The result is a natural apathy.

My hope for the future is a decisive revolution in the publishing of poetry. The demand is too fragile to support the economic burdens upon it, though the publisher who airily proposes a £10 advance is clearly a swindler. No poet who is any good at all fails to get printed these days, but the crunch comes when the decent poets don't sell (a) because their volumes are too pricy, and (b) because their volumes simply aren't in the shops. When the Review began I had just published a hardback at 10s. 6d. Ten years later I have just published a similar hardbook at £1.50. It hardly seems worth binding 64 pages into cloth if the result is going to be beyond the means of the people one wants to read it. Luckily my last book is also appearing in paperback, and this is a more reasonable proposition. Why a bookshop should take 50p on the hardback, when it gives the travellers ulcers to make them take three copies in the first place (relieved to sell out, and unthinkable to reorder), I just don't know. There are other places to sell books, of course, and I don't see why publishers don't open their own shops for the London market, selling a third cheaper on their own premises in 17th century fashion. Final hope: another ten years for the Review.