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

Great poetry appears at its own pace and hasn't got much to do with decades, but in the last ten years or so we got lucky at least twice. On the European scale, Montale published La Bufera at the far end of the decade and Satura at this end—poetry worth learning a language for; civilized, tender, spell-binding, mind-scouring, majestic. On our own patch we got The Whitsun Weddings, and perhaps the most encouraging thing about the last ten years is the way Larkin has emerged into unassailable uniqueness despite criticism's plain failure to do its job. Criticism has never yet managed to demonstrate —although reviewing has managed to assert—Larkin's quality as a poet: it has caviled, carped and niggled at his work but has been unable to celebrate its felicities except in parentheses. Why this should be is a constant worry, but while we're worrying it's some comfort that the intelligentsia has reached general agreement about Larkin's primacy, learned his poems by heart and taken his phrases and cadences into its common voice—and done it all without benefit of clergy. All the conditions of a living, receptive culture are fulfilled in that fact. The sales figures of The Less Deceived are probably the most important culture-and-society data since the War: despite all the boom, bust and sweaty rumble of the literary roller derby, a small book from a little-known press found its public—or rather the public found it. Larkin built a better mouse-trap, and the world beat a motorway to his door.

I can't get discouraged or even bored by the success of the Liverpudlians in particular or the artless unwashed in general. The Roy Fullerish mandarin disapproval—ramrod-backed on the last bastion, defending standards to the final yawn—is precisely the tone I wouldn't care to take. In the first place, there is no telling if something good might not come out of the hubbub and catch the guardians flat-footed. As Montale said in Auto da fe, it's not the man who wants to who continues the tradition but the man who can, and he's sometimes the man who knows least about it. In the second place, the ever-burgeoning market for trendy gunge has got less to do with the falling standards of the optimates than with the non-standards of the rising semi-intelligentsia: upfloaters rather than backsliders, they are sociologically a quite new group, and not to be reformed by earnest lectures. Culture is going to be split-level from now on and anyone who doesn't realize that is a dreamer. It's only by seeing reality as it is that we can effectively defend the right. For instance, it's totally useless to blame an audience at a poetry-reading for preferring the instant effects of a poem written specifically to be heard to the muffled effects of a poem written in the first instance for the page. If you want to cop the laurels at poetry-readings, write directly for the ear. If not, stay out. When you think, though, of how easily McGough could be out-Rogered by anybody with a touch of class, it seems a terrible pity that serious poets let all the available enthusiasm go by default to twelfth-raters.

I've been much more discouraged by some of the serious poets themselves—especially by the miniaturists. I can think of two influences at work here. First, there is the specific influence of Ian Hamilton. When the first pre-war Mercedes 646 h.p. cars went racing, a wooden box accompanied them on their travels, and inside the box—finely drawn and glittering—were scores of tiny needle-jets for the carburettors. Hamilton's poems are like those needle-jets: when you read them, you know the car is around somewhere, even if you can't see it. When you read his imitators, this sense of hidden power is precisely what you don't get. Second, there is the general influence of this magazine. I am very proud to write for it, and when reading my complete file of it I am compelled to wonder if any magazine has ever done such a good job of evolving and applying tests of falsity in poetry. But the Review's success as an antibiotic has helped breed a new strain of super-resistant sub-microscopic bacterial poem that can bore you to death without showing you anything to fight against. Committing no blunders, such poems can't be criticized. Finally this is part of the larger question about a criticism which knows what ought to be absent, but can't decide what ought to be present.

Further glooms about the past decade are already passing, like the decade. The extremist heavies got misrated, rather than overrated, mainly from an historicist impulse that never had much to do with history or anything to do with literature. Intelligent men put it about that suicide was a full stop rather than a row of dots. Many were impressed, few convinced.

The next decade is already happening, and will bring with it the usual spectacle of fast-looking horses collapsing splay-legged on the track under the weight of critical bets too abruptly placed. Alvarez, attired as a crow, will leap from the top of the Matterhorn and in the few seconds before he reaches terminal velocity write all there is to be written about Ted Hughes. Out in LA, Thom Gunn, bombed out of his boots on STP, will take over as first reserve conga-drummer for Santana. Hopefully, somebody will come out of nowhere and commence publishing the stuff which all intelligent men at all times have always recognized to be the genuine article. It will be argued yet resonant, considered yet unselfconscious, disciplined yet free, enthralling yet sobering. I'd like that to happen.

But there's something else I'd like to see happen even more, probably because my own creative commitment is to the song-lyric rather than to poetry as such. I'd like the intelligentsia to realize at least the possibilities of the modern song, even if they can't be bothered to pitch in and start sorting out the actualities. There hasn't been such a chance for a serious popular literature in a hundred years. I think the common people are right to want art, even if bad art is all they can contrive to get—and I'd still rather believe something had gone wrong with art than believe something had gone wrong with the people.