Maurice Riordan, Poetry Editor The business end

I read recently that among the Tuareg the traditional job of the poet is to remember the names and the whereabouts of the water holes. The idea appealed to me first with its metaphoric implications. It suggested how poetry seeks out sources of imaginative sustenance and refreshment and makes of them a common resource. It connected in my mind with Eliot’s phrase about poetry purifying the dialect of the tribe, implying that poetry is an atavistic activity, while also being a way of encountering the modern world.

But for a nomadic people living off the Sahara, and surviving there into the twenty-first century, it has had no doubt – and continues to have – a specific usefulness. Its art of memory is perfectly aligned with the economic good of the group. I wondered if there was any sense in which the contemporary practice of poetry could be so joined with our daily business?

I don’t think so. These days, at Poetry London, we find ourselves much entangled in the business end of things. We’ve moved to new premises. People will notice progress towards giving the magazine a fresh look. Several other things are changing too. In the past year Poetry London has become a registered charity. It is now run by a board of trustees and we hope in the future we will be able to raise money to pay more to staff and to our contributors. We are hopeful, too, there are those out there, readers and organizations, who are taking notice and will help us to achieve this. 

Such changes are the consequence of a success story. As it is, the circulation of the magazine is thriving. Sales in bookshops have more than doubled in the past year. Poetry London is now in a vigorous stage of growth. It’s the one with the hormonal fire in its loins. There is no reason after all why London should not be the home of a major poetry magazine. There is no good reason, indeed, why one with this title should not be the poetry magazine of the English-speaking world.

But all this ambition involves spread sheets, liquidity, flow charts – why does the vocabulary of the office so often evoke the open sea? I’m afraid the only thing nautical about it is that the paperwork is indeed overwhelming. Nonetheless, the underlying editorial direction of our activity is simple enough. We seek to attract the best poems of the best poets writing in English. We also want to foster emerging writers – and we have a sense now that there are several new poets on the cusp of producing important work. We want these poets to take their place beside the established names, and we intend to review their pamphlets and first collections as they come along. 

In the midst of all this, I confess some envy for the Tuareg’s single task of combining the common good with the pleasure of remembering and naming. I’ve no doubt we’re forever alienated from such unity of purpose. The poems in this issue were assembled at intervals over the summer in a process that sometimes felt hurried and sporadic, and lacking the seasonal rhythm that is perhaps proper to the job. Even so, each poem was set aside in the belief that it made some small, but daring, raid on the inarticulate, or opened some window of perception – so that, I trust, they add now to ‘our stock of available reality’.