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

I struggled with this book, trying hard to work out what it all added up to and also attempting to get to grips with its spasmodic rhythms and staccato statements. A hundred or so pages of lines like the following are hardly conducive to pleasurable reading:

Who sits with me?
Once I thought to think till opened up.
The frost in the distance takes in light.
In front of my eyes day and night appear.
They act like truth. They come at me.
I am weaponless do they not know it.
There is a god here but it is not shaped.

I know that I’ve pulled those lines from the many that make up this book-length sequence, but it seems to me that they’re fairly typical. There are, to be sure, glimmers of light when things can be seen in the text and little pictures emerge from the welter of words. But they are few and far between, even if they do have a minute charm:

I wanted you to listen to the bells,
holding the phone out the one small window
to where I thought
the ringing was -

That’s from the title poem and it’s one of the best parts of the book, but I could find few of the same qualities elsewhere. I can sense shifting relationships in Graham’s writing, and a searching for certainties, but the determination to deal with them in a way that becomes an intellectual exercise instead of a desire to communicate surely restricts the work to an audience so small and specialised as to make it almost a private language.

     If there is such a thing as academic poetry then this is probably it. There was a time when the term was used carelessly to refer to verse disliked by the avant-garde because it was said to be over-earnest and dull. But things changed and the avant-garde got into the universities and since then it really has been a case of the plain reader be damned. Academic poetry is now written within the conventions of modernism (or post-modernism, some would say) and is designed for use by other academics. It lends itself to analysis of the sort that has affected English departments in recent years, with the critical apparatus based on methods derived from philosophers and theorists. It is, in other words, aimed at an audience largely made up of its own practitioners and the criticism used is not designed to discover if the poem has actually said anything of value but rather to see how it has worked within the critical framework applied to it. Swarm appears to be an example of the kind of academic poetry I’m talking about.