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

Emotions.  Horrible messy things, and the British, traditionally, don’t like them.  In recent years there has been quite a debate about whether the stiff-upper-lip tradition is a good thing or whether it is more healthy to talk openly about our feelings. There is much to be said on both sides, but the rules which govern personal codes of behaviour have little to do with creativity.

I got the idea for this issue when various people sent me some remarkable pieces dealing with violent and extreme emotions.  Lust, rage, murder, madness, exile, anorexia - you get the picture.  (Although genius and high achievement, remember, are also ‘extreme’).  When I asked for more work of this kind I was almost swamped, and was moved by how many of you felt able to write about intensely private experiences.

Maybe writers have more breakdowns than other people.  Certainly they have better access to Heaney’s ‘door into the dark’,  the creative right half of the brain which is so different from the part that writes business letters and solves crossword puzzles.  But of course I didn’t want work which was just a formless  mass of emotion.  If you are going to plunge into those deep and dangerous waters, you will have to come up with a fish or a pearl.  I am impressed by the way in which so many writers represented here have wrestled with their demons and produced something worthy.  There is a nod to the ghost of Larkin, that most ‘British’ and understated of poets;  otherwise, the writers in this issue are reporting from the wilder shores, or ‘the edge’.