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

Poetry DIY

     The Poetry Society’s website offers any manner of delights, as it ever so earnestly assures everyone that poetry is relevant and fun. It was with great pleasure that your faceless contributor stumbled on Roddy Lumsden’s ‘Ten General Tips for Beginners of Poetry’ there. As readers of issues 12 and 13 will know, Lumsden is a great friend of Thumbscrew.

     Lumsden’s tips are designed to turn aspiring but clueless tyros into Poetry Book Society Choices and Recommendations. (After recent decisions, not much of a transformation.) One technique is to move trendily between highbrow and lowbrow: “You probably don’t like and own stuff by Bob Marley and Mahler and Miles Davis and Sinatra and The Chemical Brothers, but you don’t have to, though you should know they’re all good at what they do”. We hope Geoffrey Hill bears that in mind. Having left behind his music (is this the first poet to admit to a record collection more embarrassing than Paul Muldoon’s?), Lumsden struggles manfully to find as many as ten tips. By number six, he is reduced to suggesting that one should always “evaluate the work”; seven tells the poet to “think about the subject matter”; eight opines that one should “start well and end well”, while offering no advice about the middle; confusingly, nine recommends that we should “write about what you know about and write about what you don’t know about”. Thanks, Roddy! Your contributor makes no comment about ten, which begins, “don’t take my word for it”.

No Great Matter 

     At the same site can be found an interview with Glyn Maxwell, who thinks rather highly of his new book, The Breakage: “I sort of felt that some people might think it is a retreat. It isn’t. They are better poems, finally. I’m pretty astute, and if I think that about the poems, I’m sure that most people who matter will think the same.” Because if they like the book, and agree with the poet, they obviously matter, and if they don’t, and don’t, they don’t.