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

In a Belfast now under Direct Rule from Westminster I am sometimes tempted to take wry pleasure in what could be diagnosed as the decline of literary London as magnetic south and ecclesiastical east, to celebrate the poetic UDIs in places like Hull, Manchester, Leeds, Orkney, Oban, Newcastle—and, of course, Belfast. But this involves a self-indulgent double-think: it still seems important to have a London publisher, to help fill the occasional column in the New Statesman. The efflorescence of poetry in the provinces owes quite a lot to the circumspection and curiosity of several London publishers and editors. Two or three have made it easier for me at any rate to stick it out in Belfast, in the arm-pit of Europe.

Then there's the good poetry which has been surfacing here for some time—especially Mahon and Heaney, some of Simmons, and now a burgeoning younger generation, two of whom, Paul Muldoon and William Peskett, are already beginning to make their mark. In an area once considered something of a cultural Siberia regular contact with writers one respects is heartening—and it's all pretty aequo animo, with little of the bitchiness that characterises the Dublin literary scene. Indeed, I would claim that most of the best contemporary Irish poetry is being written North of the Border. And when it deals either directly or obliquely with the Irish question, this poetry tends to focus more on Ulster than on the island as a whole: an indication that politically and culturally the situation is more complex than the one explored by Yeats and O'Casey (something they don't yet realise in the Republic). As a citizen I find it gratifying that at least the poets here are trying honestly to reflect in their work the tragic complexities. The Irish psyche is being redefined in Ulster, and the poems are born—inevitably, one might say—out of a lively tension between the Irish and the English traditions.

I take a proper cis-Atlantic pride in the continuing vigour of the latter. Books of the undeniable stature of Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, Hughes's Lupercal or Hill's Mercian Hymns are what really matter: they encourage a fruitful schizophrenia in someone trying to write poetry in Ireland. Then there's the emergence of some very good younger poets —fellow provincials all of them: Glyn Hughes, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn for instance. If you add a few more names like George Mackay Brown, Peter Porter, Norman MacCaig, you have a poetry scene that I for one am proud to stand on the geographical and, possibly, the cultural edge of; a vital tradition which can accommodate a few Irish accents.

So it's very depressing when a poetic inferiority complex drifts from Britain across St. George's Channel like a rain cloud. Is it really justified? Over the past decade fine poetry has been written on both sides of the Atlantic. (And, anyway, the American verse I enjoy most tends to have a European flavour—Lowell, Wilbur, Hecht, Simpson). It's alarming that the ambition of some American poets is so often confused with achievement: garrulity has become an aesthetic principle, almost. For me a good poem by Larkin or Hill weighs more than the verbal tonnage of all those trans-Atlantic Breathers and Bleeders. Dangerous too is the tendency to equate the particulars of a poem with its vision: thus Larkin is dubbed Laureate of the Welfare State when in fact he is so much more than that; at his best a poet with a truly tragic vision of life—far more disturbing than the shrill and violent exponents of naked confession we have been insidiously encouraged to consider more serious. Perhaps the trivialisation of much poetry reviewing and the trendiness of a few publishers have contributed to such misjudgments. I wouldn't know. Finally the irritating or boring manifestations of recent years—pop poetry, sound poetry, found poetry, full frontal poetry, etc., etc.—don't matter. Despite everything the real stuff still gets written from time to time and in odd places is noticed eventually. Well made poems endure.