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

Can it really be ten years ago? A whole decade, an epoch equivalent in time to the Thirties? One has to go to the shelf and verify the date from that so chaste cover of the first number. Inside, the prose is printed in a type-size that makes one marvel at one's former eyesight. It is true: the Review is ten years old.

One can't lay claims to have had any great optimism at the age of fifty, but the founding of the Review was a cheering phenomenon. Its survival has certainly been one of the encouraging features of the decade. It is a pity that it had periods of infrequent appearance but possibly these were essential for it to gain energy to carry on. It has fulfilled its critical task marvellously well. The hatchet-job side I think has not at all been overdone, while its scholarly and resuscitatory side, often overlooked, has been excellently judged. The editor's poetry admissions policy has been notoriously stringent but after all one can't think of many new worthwhile poets of the decade who haven't appeared in it. The disappointment is, I suppose, that it hasn't been a rallying ground for successive waves of young writers.

I mean by this last point that the decade has seen a proliferation of poetry magazines and books of verse marked by great self-indulgence. The notion held by the Review of an inheritance of excellence essential to maintain has not really caught on: even magazines of interest have usually had a King Charles's head of boring or dotty obsession. Through the whims of publishers and the dispensation of public money many figures have been promoted of varying degrees of eccentricity and mediocrity. Like the increase of educational opportunity, in the field of poetry the increased ease of publication and of public appearance has been of dubious benefit. On the back cover of the Review's first number was an advertisement for Penguin Modern Poets 1 and 2. Who would have guessed that the series would come to contain not merely so many but so many strange names? Who would have thought that by the end of a decade even elitist Oxbridge would have been so unsure about its preference of one poet over another?

Can it be that the growth of university English schools and of Eng. Lit. publishing has had little or no effect on the standard of taste for and writing of verse? That we are still in the conditions of the inter-war years when the public capable of judging the viably new in literature was measured in hundreds rather than thousands? I must confess that at sixty I possess even less optimism than at fifty. I detest dissidence allied to anti-intellectualism—hallmark of fascism. The cult of nastiness and ugliness, typical of the 'underground', seems to me characteristic not of the revolutionary working-class, but of the demented petty-bourgeoisie. And moving over to more serious and responsible areas, it is regrettable—and significant—that the New Left has not attached to itself creative writers in any great numbers, of any great talent.

Surely the next decade will be distinguished by the challenge of its economic and political crises. It ought to have its 'purely' literary counterpart, where the response of the poet is meaningful in relation to his depth of understanding, coherence, technique, sense of tradition, and adherence to truth. At the start of this period I don't find poets and organs of poetry fitted to see things decently through in any greater number than at the start of the previous period. On the one hand, the great academic armies interpose their turgid bodies between poetry and the reader; on the other, the ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices. the Review is still very much needed—but those behind it are, of course, also ten years older, and I would hope that quite soon it would make editorial links with the youngest generation of writers. Despite all I've said about confusion and slapdashery, there is evidence, in schools and universities, of a desire among the best to find and write poetry outside the pressures of fashion.