A 2026 Survey of Poets

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The February 1962 issue of The London Magazine was dedicated to poetry. Alongside new poems from Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and more, editor Alan Ross sought to provide what he called a ‘context’ for the work being published. This context took the form of a survey: a series of questions put to each poet, either to answer one by one or to use as the basis for a broader statement on ‘the writing of poetry today’.

The resulting piece featured twenty-five poets of a variety of ages and aesthetics, and ran on for more than half the length of the magazine. Many of the poets were naturally preoccupied with the socio-political anxieties of the time: the ‘Bomb’, the burgeoning civil rights movement, the declining cult of empire and nation. Others were wrapped up in the internal debates of the art form itself: the short lyric versus modernist experiment, the notion of a ‘public’ versus ‘private’ poet, as well as the general ‘impoverishment in poetic diction’ many were diagnosing in the work around them.

It is difficult to resist the temptation – as horrified as the participants would surely have been by the thought of it – to assess which of the poets’ predictions have proved prescient, and which not. Take Laurie Lee, for example, who thought we were in danger of becoming ‘slaves to the printed page’. Or C. Day Lewis who thought that civilisation was close to destroying itself, ‘either instantaneously with hydrogen bombs, or gradually through over-population’. Or perhaps most pertinently, Robert Conquest who claimed that ‘most of these questions [could] be answered by the single point that you can’t ‘‘programme’’ a poet as you can a computer or something’. Well, indeed.

It is also reassuring, to me at least, that so many of the original survey’s more doctrinaire (or, frankly, catty) complaints feel so familiar. Grievances about gatekeepers, about schools and fashions, about the corruption of poetic language, about generational decline or the failure of institutions, all recur in the new 2026 survey. One need only look at the reappearance of Hugo Williams, who worked at The London Magazine as a twenty-year-old at the time of the original survey and now returns to these questions in his eighties. In 1962 he found himself, as he put it, ‘in the dock, rather than the jury’ amid debates about the impoverishment of modern poetry. Meanwhile, Robert Graves was already claiming that English had ‘been in decline as a reliable poetic language since at least 1650’ – the phrase ‘he was the future once’ comes to mind.

But, at the same time, the poets who foresaw the total reorganisation of literary production were not exactly wrong. In many respects the making and distribution of poetry since 1962 has changed almost beyond recognition. The rise of the MFA and the creative writing professorship has become one of the few comparatively stable ways for poets to earn a living. The proliferation of social media has simultaneously democratised access to an audience while becoming, to quote Denise Riley, a kind of confinement, ‘shrinking the field of the poem itself to dress up its writers in uniforms or costumes’. The decline of print and its replacement with cheaper and infinitely more addictive forms of media has altered the speed at which poetry circulates and its ability to respond to the up-to-the-minute moment. The emergence of large language models and generative AI – which, regardless of one’s opinion on the quality of the work they produce, are capable of generating something at least recognisable as ‘poetry’ – has raised new questions around authorship, plagiarism and the concentration of power in Silicon Valley (a place I feel confident describing as being as devoid of poetry as anywhere on earth).

But here we are, publishing a follow-up to the original survey in the very same print magazine, on pages of literally identical dimensions. On the most fundamental level, aren’t poets still working with the same materials? The same blocks of language? The same tools of line, metaphor, image, sound and sense? To quote Sylvia Plath in 1962, aren’t the real issues of our time the issues of every time, ‘the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms – children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places’?

Of course, being a poet has always involved a kind of writing into the future; a requirement to be both immersed in and somehow transcendent of your contemporary context; a capacity to let language run on ahead of you, to pronounce its own ideas or create its own reality that you hadn’t anticipated, or at least could not have predicted, and then somehow to get that down onto the page. 

Sixty-four years on from the original survey, The London Magazine has asked fifteen poets the same five questions, written out below, with one new addition concerning technology. If circumstances should prove favourable, we hope to be back again in 2090, in the same pages of this very old magazine. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading. 

– Jamie Cameron, Managing Editor

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(a) Would poetry be more effective – that is, interest more people more deeply – if it were more directly concerned with the issues of our time?

(b) Do you think poetry has uses as well as pleasures?

(c) Do you feel any dissatisfaction with the short lyric as a medium? If so, do you imagine yourself writing any longer or non-lyric forms?

(d) What living poets continue to influence you?

(e) How do you feel contemporary technologies (e.g. generative AI, algorithms, social media) shape poetry today? Do they enrich or diminish poetic practice, or simply change its terms?

(f) Do you see this as a good or bad period for writing poetry? 

Rachael Allen

(a) I think poets now and poets forever are deeply entrenched in and enmeshed with the issues of their time. A poet only ever writes out of their context, and even if the poet is examining the imagined insides of the throat of a hummingbird, they are doing so with the knowledge of the technology, science and language that have evolved to allow them to write such a poem. Perhaps one of the reasons poetry is not read with the same fervour as novels is because it shines a light directly onto and illuminates wholly the issues of our time through various subjectivities. It can be pressurised. It can be hard to look at, but necessary to.

(b) Language has the ability to make material change in the world. We know this is true: it’s why and how the meanings of words shift over time to both shape and reflect the world they’re living in. I believe that poetry is useful, pleasurable, but also everything else besides. It is confounding and educational and seems to creates new routes of meaning and understanding in the mind and offers up powerful spaces of imaginary possibility and also feels close to time travel. I think poetry can do everything.

(c) The containment is fun, and if you put enough short lyrics in a row you have yourself a long poem! I’ve tried to write a novel, and the endless possibilities are a nightmare to me: what happens if this character turns this handle and enters this room? Who’s in the room? Why? It’s like an endless choose your own adventure. I’ve found fiction feels close to living, and poetry feels close to thinking. I’m not good with planning or plotting or scheduling, even in real life, and poetry, to me, is the perfect elucidation of a wildly thinking mind on the page. Some novels are, of course, like this, and I would like to write a very good novel, although I’m not sure I will. I’ll perhaps write a few bad ones, if I’m lucky.

(d) Too, too many! Every single author I publish, writers like Sylvia Legris, Will Alexander and Jesse Darling, alongside Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Alice Oswald, Mary Ruefle and Ghayath Almadhoun. 

(e) The frame changes and the art responds but the intention is always the same: we want to tell someone something. That people want to map poems onto the landscape of digital technology always amazes me – poetry is like a lovely virus in the computer system, snarling it up with human rhetoric! I struggle to open a PDF these days, so none of this will be up to me, but I wish those who do it all the luck in the world.

(f) Poetry is a necessity – the impulse to write poetry will always be there, as our oldest language art. In this time, which is yet another era of unchecked, unelected mad kings intent on destroying themselves and the animals and people around them, we need the beam of light I mention above to do its glaring shining on them all.

Jorie Graham

(a) I’m not sure how any poems – real poems – can avoid being stained in some manner by the issues of their time. That concern can exhibit itself in the form every bit as much as in what we call the content. And what are the issues of our time anyway? We haven’t exactly transcended mortality. Our hearts are still being astounded by the surprises of love, as well as broken by them. So Eros and Thanatos are still the main rivers running through the landscape of lyric poetry. Into that landscape now flow the crises of technologically induced loneliness, land devastation, late-stage capitalism – all of which exacerbate inequality. Woven into this is the unavoidable feeling that all other species are under assault alongside us. There is also the sense of living under constant surveillance, literally rather than metaphysically, and the appalling foregrounding of both genocide and genocidal economic structures. As always, the human heart is open and cracked and there’s no way to keep anything out. Everyone in their own way is tackling the disaster from some particular, courageous point of view – tinged by the ‘everything everywhere all at once’ of this era. Yes, it’s profoundly difficult to bring ‘current events’ as such into one’s poem without trivialising the vastness of the networks afflicting all life – yet one feels one must try. But one also cannot afford to forget that sometimes just describing something beautiful, unsettling in its beauty, incomprehensible in its sublimity – eliciting wonder, awe, bafflement – is also an act of resistance. Anything that compels one to find courage in oneself at the moment of composition constitutes an act of resistance to the dominant culture. Because regardless of its subject, one writes a poem in order to be changed, in order to encounter something that could extinguish oneself, to wrestle that angel and come out in a place one hasn’t been before. That struggle might be small, but it’s electric with resistance – as well as initiation. The poem tries to change, or be changed by, reality. Otherwise why write another poem? There are plenty of poems in the world to last us until the end of time.

(b) It has always had uses. Its uses continue to evolve, as poetry is sturdy enough to be differently useful in each new stage of the human story. As it has been from the very beginning when it was asked to bring rain, summon game, propitiate the harvest and instruct the king – to keep him awake to human and supernatural needs. It’s profoundly useful. And pleasure is always present, both because pleasure is useful but also because usefulness is pleasurable – just like dancing is both hard magic and a soft organisation of social desire.

As to what its uses are today, poetry is faced with a job that runs from the most basic – recapturing, reawakening, lengthening the attention span (a desperately urgent matter) – to keeping the human soul awake at a time when technology is doing everything it can to monetise its thickening into the deep sleep of addiction and habit. Somewhere on that list are a few other key strategies: inviting humans to reactivate the visualisation capacities of their minds that they do not go dormant; stimulating memory so that we do not get trapped in the increasingly narrow rapids of the present, the now-now with all its needs for constant stimulation; and working to keep the senses alive – most literally, the five senses. After Covid, when so many lost their sense of smell, specialists provided complex exercises for re-awakening one’s olfactory capacity. It turns out one can’t experience complex emotion without it. It occurred to me that poems were constantly doing that job. Every undergoing of a poem asks the reader (and the writer) to actively use their senses so they don’t atrophy. This points to a much larger discussion concerning consciousness, and the radical difference between human consciousness and whatever we want to call AI. The senses provide so much more deep information about reality, so much more trustworthy intelligence than whatever we mean by either ‘intelligence’ or ‘information’ when we throw those terms around as they pertain to AI’s ‘artificial’ imitation of them. I was in Keats’s room again last month, in Rome. He’s always reminding me that truth is tested on the pulses. There is no truth without your body’s lie-detector. Or to listen again to Coleridge – ‘a poet brings the whole soul of man into activity’. In an important sense that is the still fundamental function of poetry, what makes it an instrument of power, pleasure, vision – and yes, resistance. It’s much harder to narcotise, distract and monetise a fully awakened soul.

(c) No. I’ve been arguing with the length of the lyric all my life. Expanding it, compelling it to contain perhaps more than it should – finding its elasticities, its fantastic eddies, its secret nestings and pockets, its meanderings where current is coiled and can spring back in a flash to carry so much on its back. I am nowhere near done with the ever-changing, miraculous song and prayer and meditation and outcry that is the lyric. ‘What are ideals of form for if we aren’t going to be made to fear for them? All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.’ These words of Robert Frost have always put me in mind of a river, with its dangerous currents and temptations – and yet with its amazing capacity for transport. The lyric can carry this from me to you, from each of us to strangers, with nothing lost en route. To my mind it’s the apparent restriction of length in the lyric which makes for that tautness of current, that coil and spring, that beginning still in mind when you reach the end – when you spill into the delta and sea of the other while the river of the poem still surges from its source that makes the lyric so spectacular.

(e) I’m sure someone will find a way to feel generative AI ‘enriches’ their poetic practice. Poets are very inventive with prompts. And Lord knows everyone loves shortcuts. Especially in this day and age. I’m kind of addicted to the long way round. I think most people who have experienced their mortality, that wake up call, probably are. There’s a lot to be found ‘by the road to the contagious hospital’. Of course I love the fact that one of the only ways to jailbreak AI is by trying to formulate your instruction in verse rather than in prose – what poet wouldn’t? – poetry itself is a kind of jailbreak! Also, complex chance methods have always been useful to poets. So maybe a collaboration between AI and a vivid imagination will create something interesting. It is never that hard to make things in poetry that are ‘interesting’. And such experiments always move the medium in stimulating directions. But will it, can it, be moving? Or will what we call poetry go beyond actual emotion and be satisfied by the imitation of emotion? Who knows. We move at present happily towards a drowse. People spend an average of six seconds in front of any work in a museum, curators tell me. They plan for that. Will we be trained to no longer have – or even crave – inwardness? It’s highly monetisable and there are powerful forces eager to move us in that direction… I happen to think poetry is immune to that kind of manipulation and that kind of degradation. As I said above, there is, in my experience, no poetry without that transition from the senses as they transmute, almost in desperation to clarify themselves, into emotion. And from there into the abstracting movements towards thought and idea. All of which requires the body. And all LLMs provide is an ever more exact imitation of the body. Poetry rises out of a kind of urgency, even an emergency – out of an unanswerable question a mortal body asks of time, fate, history, of nature or mystery or a beloved or a God. It is only the soul in a mortal coil that can ask the kind of unanswerable question that requires a poem, that forces the poetic imagination into unavoidable action. A machine can obviously ask a question. But there’s a big difference between an imitation of a question, and the necessary question a mortal creature – a soul in a body subject to time, to the incredible foreknowledge of the spiritually shocking limitations of time – can ask. And that’s what the lyric poem is created for. To try to manage that bafflement – be it in the face of horror, beauty or the sublime. To encounter it, to undergo it, to wrestle with it, to be changed by it, to be never again the same after having crossed through the experience of that particular lyric. It is initiatory. It is salvific. An LLM does not need to be saved. It is neither in a bodily nor in a metaphysical predicament. 

(f) It’s a great time to be writing. What could be better for any art form than to be called upon to rise to the occasion of an emergency, let alone a moment of civilisational crisis. Whether people read it – whether they possess the ability to concentrate, inhabit silence, linger in dilated time, whether they can still be comfortable with the difficulty of unknowing, whether they can still inhabit negative capability, suspended disbelief, whether they can access their inwardness or not – is another matter. That’s a social and an economic matter. But as Williams reminds us, ‘it is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.’

Lavinia Greenlaw

(a) There are several assumptions that inform this question and they are worth arguing with. Most of them are made when someone fears poetry or finds that the very idea of it bores them. Whether or not a poem interests a reader ‘deeply’ depends on the reader and the poem, let alone the time and place. A good poem is by definition effective in that it uses its surfaces to activate recognition in the reader of something in themselves, perhaps that they didn’t know they knew.

Is the effectiveness of poetry (or painting or any other art form that does not take place in front of a surveillable audience) measurable in this way?

What are the issues of our time as opposed to some other time? Poetry will use the poet and the here and now but it’s not about them. Don’t we learn that the same issues persist? The same questions are asked? Isn’t it poetry that shows us this? What other form lends itself so directly to being met across centuries?

A poem aims to be direct without simplification. It wears out language and argument in doing this, and so they have to be remade.

(b) I wouldn’t place pleasure and usefulness in opposition. You should enjoy a poem and get some immediate pleasure from it, enough that it entices you to remain within it and explore it further. Pleasures are useful. 

(c) I don’t set out to write in a specific form but draw the form out of what I’m writing. I do not equate form with length, despite the conventions. I’ve written long lyric poems and brief epics. I enjoy poetry that explores form, tests and (to paraphrase Eliot) withdraws from it, that places form in tension. I like writing between and across.

(d) I wonder about the qualifications in this question – ‘living’ and ‘continue to’. Different poets influence me at different times. I make no distinction between the living and the dead in how I read them.

(e) As much as any new technology has affected perception, reception, investigation, expression and communication. Technologies sharpen old questions and provoke new answers. Do they enrich or diminish poetic practice, or simply change its terms? That would depend on the poem.

(f) Both, as usual.

Ishion Hutchinson

(a) The easy answer would be yes given the narrow way ‘effective’ is used here. Just about anything interests more people deeply if it thoughtfully and sensibly addresses things, whether public or private, that are in the general atmosphere. A lot of poems work on that plane, bending language into a kind of trusty amplification of one or another issue at hand. Some of these poems are good, even great. But the effectiveness of poetry – and here the distinction between a poem and poetry is essential – is a totally other, unqualifiable, out-of-time experience in which, momentarily, you grasp matters beyond everyday reality.

(b) To be sure, uses don’t preclude pleasures and vice versa. In fact we find both, and more, simultaneously in poetry in ways that are not always easy to explain, much less to justify. This is because poetry is a human necessity, an ancient one, which helps us grasp the awe of living. That it does this is an immense aesthetic wonder. And poetry is a constant reconfiguration of that awe, surprising us repeatedly back into what we should never take for granted. 

(c) Not at all. Helpless as it is, there is great satisfaction in flexing the oxymoron of the short lyric. Longer, non-lyric forms – they are all there to be experimented with, hopefully deepening one’s sense of vocation and daring.

(d) Jay Wright and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, to name two writing in English.

(e) These technologies seem to be more a matter of reception or distribution of poetry than any profound, intrinsic shaping of poetry. At most, they bring about fashionable styles which then run their course. This might well be a naïve point of view. Certain parts of the world may really be facing the higher anxieties behind these questions. Not so much for other parts of the world.

(f) For the time being – à la Auden – it is as good as we got.

Luke Kennard

(a) People really need to get over their learned helplessness and stop blaming poetry for their own shortcomings as readers or their stubborn, philistine refusal to engage with any kind of challenging or interesting writing. It’s pathetic. ‘Oh, I was put off poetry by the way it was taught at school.’ No you weren’t. It’s 2026. Your English teacher was probably lovely, and you’re just repeating something journalists used to say in 1995. ‘Wah, poetry is elitist.’ Do you hear yourself? It’s embarrassing. There are a thousand-thousand different kinds of poetry, infinite ways of being a good or interesting poet, each as individual as your fingerprint, but the thing all of it has in common is that it’s intrinsically, deeply and passionately concerned with the issues of our time. Just not necessarily in the way a news bulletin is. If someone can’t find anything to engage with in the vast myriad of contemporary poetry or several thousand years of human culture and art it’s because they’re not even trying, and I’m tired of having to even think about people like that, let alone cater to them. 

(b) It’s a kind of public language, a language art, which gives us this uncanny access to the inner life, to the complete opposite of the public. I can’t think of anything more beautiful or useful.

(c) I probably have to answer this the other way round. I should take some time out from the longer non-lyric forms of poetry I almost exclusively write in and just try to write a good lyric poem. I’m obsessed with Auden’s ‘Under Which Lyre’ at the moment, so maybe some shorter versions of that.

(d) Too many contemporaries to single anyone out (and I think being ‘influenced by’ and ‘jealous of’ someone’s great poems are kind of synonymous). Some probably quite obvious names like Mary Ruefle and Anne Carson, Chen Chen and Richard Siken, Anthony V. Capildeo… I’ve really been appreciating Luke Roberts’s work and everything from Distance No Object and Tenement Press at the moment. And Keston Sutherland’s last couple of books have blown me away. I was teaching Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora Poems this year and I’m in awe of that as a collection. I read a lot of new stuff for reviews and endorsements and it feels good just to be a part of that constantly expanding nebula.

(e) AI is 90% hot air and 100% a con job. It’s an extractive money laundering scheme and it’s being forced on us by some of the worst people in the world. My contempt for them is boundless and absolute. A transfiguring hatred. I’d never go to war for my country, but I’d enlist in an army against those people in a heartbeat. That said, I think it’s great when a poet directly engages with technology (so work by Charles Bernstein, Sam Riviere, Charlotte Geater, plenty others), because that’s no different to experimenting with a synthesiser or using any number of procedural or generative techniques, like that time I got obsessed with anagrams. Essentially it’s still you curating, choosing, collaging whatever the procedure turns up, and probably adding to it and augmenting it. But in terms of AI replacing ‘human written’ work, that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Things like this come up roughly every two hundred years and in the end it changes nothing; it’s still just going to be us trying to come up with some poems until the planet becomes uninhabitable. 

(f) It is, quite literally, the only one we have.

Nick Makoha

(a) It is tempting to assume that poetry must address the visible crises of its moment in order to be effective. But that presumes poetry is primarily a vehicle for commentary. Poetry is not journalism, nor is it policy. It does not need to stand in front of the news cycle to matter. In fact, when forced too tightly into the ‘issues of our time’, poetry risks shrinking its field of vision.

The issues of our time are not separate from the human condition but expressions of it. War, migration, technology, race, climate – these are manifestations of deeper questions about being, belonging, mortality, power and love. Heidegger wrote, ‘Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.’ If this is true, then poetry is concerned with the foundations of that house. It asks what kind of dwelling we are constructing through speech. Poetry may not always name the crisis directly, but it reshapes the conditions in which we perceive crisis at all.

I also think the reason many people do not find poetry ‘interesting’ lies in the barriers one must cross to enter into language itself, and then into poetry. If we are taught language merely as a grammatical device, stripped of spirit, or as a technical exercise, add a rhyme here, insert a line break there, and if we are handed a narrow, often elitist canon as the measure of value, then poetry becomes a gated space. There are visible and invisible barriers that exclude before a reader even begins. Poetry is not inaccessible by nature; it becomes so when its living roots are severed from ordinary speech, from breath, from the rhythms of experience.

When poetry works, it is already concerned with its time because it is concerned with consciousness. In restoring depth to language, it restores depth to attention. And that, perhaps, is its deepest form of effectiveness.

(b) Poetry is an art form, and like all serious art it offers both pleasure and use. Its pleasures are obvious: rhythm, image, surprise, recognition, music. But it is not always utilitarian in the narrow sense. Daisy Fancourt’s recent work Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health gathers compelling evidence that engagement with the arts improves our mental and physical health. The arts reduce the effects of anxiety and depression, support trauma recovery, strengthen social bonds and even affect physiological markers of wellbeing. If this is true of the arts broadly, it is certainly true of poetry, which works intimately with language – the very medium through which we process experience.

At moments of national significance, we still turn instinctively to poets. I remember when the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage was asked, amid the unfolding news of the Queen’s death, to write a poem in response. On a personal level, I have been invited to write poems to mark the birth of friends’ children. We do this because poetry consecrates moments. It slows them down, it gives them shape. A poem says: this matters; remember this. We rarely commission a spreadsheet to welcome a child into the world.

And yet poetry must never be reduced to therapy or instrument. Its use lies partly in its refusal to be wholly useful. It creates spaces where ambiguity is allowed, where contradiction can stand without immediate resolution. In that sense, its greatest use may be that it enlarges our capacity to live with complexity.

(c) No, I don’t feel dissatisfaction with the short lyric. For me, it is like a dojo: the lyric trains the poet. It tests your sensitivity, your capacity to listen, your alertness to silence, your intimacy with vulnerability. It disciplines attention and demands precision. As Derek Walcott put it in the 1962 survey, ‘The short lyric is eternally difficult and as much can be said sometimes in four lines as in four pages.’

I would love to write longer lyric forms, and have done so at times, but I am often at the mercy of my ear. The short lyric arrives first. It is the form in which the pressure of thought and feeling naturally condenses for me.

Longer and non-lyric forms open other architectures of thought – narrative, argument, procession – and I remain drawn to them. But I still see the lyric as foundational. And even when I write at length, I suspect the lyric impulse is there, working quietly within the lines.

(d) Terrance Hayes stretches tradition with intelligence and inventiveness. His work shows that form is a tool, not a cage, and teaches me that a poem can pivot, argue and dance all at once. I’d also add Alice Oswald, Dan O’Brien, Max Porter, John Murillo and Anne Carson. These poets do not teach me to imitate but to expand, that poetry can be elemental, hybrid, political, devotional, muscular, fragmentary and utterly new, sometimes all at once. They keep me honest and keep me searching. And Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith. That book always reminds me why I am grateful to be a poet.

(e) Technology is a tool, like any other: it can be useful in opening new possibilities for form, collaboration and access, but it cannot replace the core of creativity. Part of what makes poetry vital is the space for thought, silence, struggle and risk – the messy mixture of ignorance and insight that pushes a poet to take chances with language. No matter the tools, the essence of poetic invention remains human.

(f) Poetry is necessary at all times. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, life is fleeting and strange – in our current moment marked by rapid change and uncertainty, perhaps even more so. Poetry allows us to name the unseen, confront confusion and create meaning. Now more than ever, it is a vital tool to make sense of the world we live in.

Ange Mlinko

(a) Don’t they call that ‘discourse fodder’? There does seem to be a collective life lived through the newsfeed for some people, going back to the 1960s when writers gained visibility by publishing poems ripped from the headlines. Currently, there are identity-based audiences for identity based poets. Would a wider sector of the population read poetry if more of it were about Shohei Ohtani or Taylor Swift? Or real estate? Or cookery? Should poets keep an eye on all the newspaper sections?

I’m interested in the fact that comedy shows are the place where crowds go to enjoy verbal performances. Twenty, twenty-five years ago, rap seemed to serve that purpose. Do comedians and rappers feel the need to be more directly concerned with the issues of our time? Yes and no. It seems to me they’re largely concerned with being themselves. And maybe it’s no accident that comedy and rap are transgressive about ‘issues’. 

(b) I read somewhere that poetry distracts the devil.

(c) Series of sonnets or lyrics – like Dream Songs – give us the best of both worlds. Long poems go flat-footed. I believe wholeheartedly in the pressures of constraints, and a sort of ongoing long poem without constraints would plunge me into helplessness, probably. I’d just settle for prose at that point.

And no dissatisfaction with the lyric. I’m dissatisfied with a world that looks down on the lyric. Lyric is the thing that takes the measure of sea and sky, animal and vegetable and mineral. It’s the big picture. Whenever the wind blows, the lyric impulse rises up in response.

(d) I’ve outlived my influences good and bad. The dead can take you places the living can’t.

(e) Generative AI and such are objects of projection – the new gods or extraterrestrials or the I Ching – yet infinitely sadder because they are the property of ordinary corporations, which throw everything into the soup, from dead cats to rotten turnips, and profit from it. I prefer the Muses. At least they’re free and live in the air and near the springs. They’re discerning. And they’re old. As for social media, the definition of poetry found there has made my life as a teacher a lot harder. How can I interest students in difficult work, whose influence on the culture is subterranean, when they know they can get visible mass followings for slop?

(f) See above! On my bad days I want to yell: poetry is not a vacation from thinking! We need a Savonarola of poetry, a bonfire of the clichés! On my good days I think it has always been thus, and readers and writers must, simply and frankly, find their level.

Paul Muldoon

(a) I’m pretty sure poetry is directly concerned with the issues of our time. Those issues include not only the bombing of Iran but the ironing board and the age of irony. The main reason most people don’t read poetry is because they’ve been warned off it, usually by teachers who insist the poem never says what it means and must be decoded by experts like themselves. People worry that they need to be graduates of Bletchley Park to read a poem.

(b) The idea that poetry has no utility is put about by those who think science is more rational than the humanities.

(c) The length of a poem is of no matter. A poem should be as long as it needs to be. ‘Paradise Lost’ is not better than ‘In a Station of the Metro’ – they’re simply doing different things. I like to think that the poem uses me as a medium for itself. It’s most likely the case that, as one gets older, it becomes more difficult to write longer poems because of their intellectual demands. I take comfort, however, in the likes of Yeats and Donne who wrote long poems made up of short ones.

(d) There are very few living poets who influence me. I’m afraid most of my major influences have moved on past the right-hand margin. That’s not to say there aren’t contemporary poets I admire in the strictest sense – in other words, I wonder how they achieve what they’ve achieved. A recent example is Timothy Donnelly and his book Chariot. I actually went so far as to write him a fan letter about it. I don’t do that too often! Most of the time, I know exactly how poems were written and I have next to no interest in them.

(e) From what I understand, we have nothing to fear from AI.

(f) Sorry to sound like an old fogey but I’m sure all periods have been good and bad. Most poetry in most periods is pretty terrible. That’s true of most plumbing, most psychotherapy and most piano playing. The only thing about playing the piano is that it’s pretty clear to one and all if someone can manage in even the most rudimentary way. There are certain professional standards in the realms of plumbing and psychotherapy, too. In the poetry world, however, anyone can hang out a shingle and announce themselves to be trading as a poet. Largely because of the Bletchley Park effect I mentioned, very few people will question their ability. The upside is that the next really interesting poet is most likely working in obscurity, gathering up the nerve to send out a few pieces that will change the course of literary history.

Don Paterson

(a) The problem is more who poetry is concerned with. Performance poetry makes a clear distinction between performer and audience – and will often address matters of immediate importance to them. Poetry on the page now unconsciously defaults to a mode of self-address. Insofar as it deals with ‘the issues of our time’, it’s certainly all over our various crises of identity, but little else. Most of it no longer even posits, let alone courts, a general readership. Some folks have no problem with the writing and reading communities being largely interchangeable, but the impressive size of this constituency disguises its isolation. If you put out five thousand new books and each sells only a handful of copies, you’re not really extending the art’s cultural reach. Currently, people who don’t write poetry rarely encounter it in book form, except in its comic or self-help variants. To attempt to explain how this has come about, I’d have to use up thousands of words discussing how the MFA programme has made itself indispensable to university finances, how it did so by becoming a playground for the identity games that are the Jungian shadow of liberal America’s guilty conscience, how these function as a source of symbolic capital among an insanely oversubscribed graduate and postgraduate cohort for whom no meaningful employment is available, et cetera, et cetera – using all the miserable jargon du jour by which my fellow centrists and I attempt to make some sense of the absolute shitshow in which we find ourselves. Page poetry has become another casualty in all this. Most of it does not orient itself towards the normal reader. It demands the parsing of its symbols according to the rules of its own, often highly specific, tribal dialects. To put it more plainly – when was the last time a good poem really cut through and made a difference to folks’ lives? Maybe Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything Is Going to Be Alright’ in the middle of the pandemic (though I wouldn’t get Muldoon started on the limitations of that reading). Very occasionally we get to see there’s still a great public appetite for a good poem, even if it’s more often a bad poem that reveals it.

(b) Poetry is a use. It’s a specific use of language under certain conditions: emotional urgency plus a time constraint. Heat divided by time equals poetry. Everything else that makes language ‘poetic’ – originality, music, rhythm, metaphor, metonymy – can be shown to follow. Poetry is intransitive. It’s an astonishingly effective mode of speech humans have developed for very tight spots. It’s a colossal mistake to try and make it ‘useful’. That’s what our arts bodies keep trying to do because they don’t know what poetry is for. It’s for poetry. Can it make things happen? We know that old crux too well to chase it down again, but I believe that poetry can change the mind of the reader by showing them the truth, and that action and real change may be inspired by it.

(c) I feel a lot of dissatisfaction with my own short lyrics, but that’s nothing new. And no one reads long poems, but it doesn’t stop me writing them. ‘Lyric’ traditionally defines itself negatively, i.e. it’s what a poem probably is if it isn’t narrative or didactic or dramatic. My own definition of lyric is quite neutral, and understands it as a mode where music and sense are taken as two sides of the same thing, where all words have an iconic as well as a semantic aspect. This doesn’t have any implications for line or form or genre. As a cultural gesture, the long poem is going to look more radical as the TikTokification of the human brain continues. For that reason, I sense the Popean didactic mode might be about to make a comeback. With me, maybe, now I’m in that phase of life where my role is to offer unconstructive feedback, yell at clouds and whine about how rubbish everything is.

(d) There are plenty of poets, old and young, that I enjoy reading, but as you get older the ‘influence’ of the living diminishes. The sad truth is that I’m resistant to the innovations of the young on Darwinian principle. New tricks kill the old dog. (The situation is very different in music, interestingly, where one takes a passionate and active interest in what the young get up to; these days, the serious young musicians of all genres take an almost fetishistic interest in their own traditions.) Anyway, the list of one’s living influences gets shorter as the decades pass: Douglas Dunn; Muldoon; I admire Oswald. All the US poets I really loved – and there were very many – are dead, bar maybe Yusef Komunyakaa. After that, influence just comes through one’s trusted friends, the poets with whom I occasionally swap work: Sean O’Brien, Kathleen Jamie, Nick Laird, Karen Solie and the other fine poets in our little monthly group in Kirriemuir.

(e) It’s a cliché to say social media has been a disaster for the arts, but it’s a cliché for a good reason. It addicted us to that little ‘heart’ icon and to peer approval. The artist’s goal is to rise above the judgement of the collective, or at least ignore it. With social media, conversely, the goal seems to be to convince everyone in the world to like you. This means very little genuine offence is risked, which is pretty fatal to poetry, an art form almost predicated on rule-breaking.

In some ways I’m quite optimistic about AI. (And immediately I find myself haunted by not only C. Day-Lewis’s lousy predictions in The London Magazine sixty-four years ago, but echoes from the future: ‘Amusingly, Paterson was stabbed to death in his bed by a Chinese robot, as were many poets that year.’) What I mean is… I have hopes that AI might hose out the stables. It’s already capable of writing entirely presentable verse of the kind most magazine editors would happily publish – at least if one could fake the human authenticity of the source. ‘Poet’ is one of the few professions where I feel ‘mass redundancy’ might not be a tragic outcome. But Joey Connolly, who knows a great deal more about this than I do, thinks AI will never break through the ceiling into real artistic originality because it will never be more than an averaging machine. (I’m more worried about recent AI involvement in AI training, because one plausible definition of human intelligence might be that we’re just a recursive turn in a probabilistic generator; we were trotting along, picking berries and keeping to the shadows and avoiding snakes and working with our little heuristics – then one day we started running them abstractly in our heads, and… got ideas.) We’ll see. If you ask AI to identify the problem with its own poetry, the first thing it will tell you is that it has no soul. The question is whether the author’s soul can really exist in the reader’s mind beyond mere projection; if an AI-generated text can successfully trick the reader’s brain into forming a theory of mind, then it’s maybe game over, or at least drawn. But the second thing AI will tell you is that it’s limited by its inability to create new experiences in the world. It’s only able to use what it’s stolen from us. I don’t think people really understand that once an AI is placed within a robot whose embodied experience it can direct (this is happening as we speak) – that constraint is immediately lifted. The robot can now have an infinity of multi-sensory experiences. It will know whatever weird quale is spun up by standing at the back door, staring up at the moon on a freezing night in December, listening to an old Hank Williams record playing in the kitchen while the smell of woodsmoke drifts over from a neighbour’s garden. And the thought may form in its bot-mind: ‘Well, if I can’t get a poem out of this…’ Possibly followed by ‘I need to kill all the other poets’. I used to think that a lot myself, back in the day. I only lacked the ammo.

(f) Bad, but there are green shoots. I see many younger UK poets pulling away from the shadow of a North American moral-cultural hegemon which is still paid an incomprehensible amount of respect and to which our universities still blindly defer. And I guess if you believe that stuff about political oppression being good for poetry because it encourages genuine as opposed to performative risk, the rise of yer Actual Fascism means things might be looking up. But if you were to hold contemporary poetry to the standards of one of our old go-to axioms, say Frost’s ‘poetry must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, for the poet as for the reader’, you’d fall about laughing. Looking back, the only periods that were genuinely ‘good’ involved a competitive, self-culling ‘scene’, for all that it was often created by exogenous forces. The current period only seems unusually bad to many of us because there’s so much more poetry being generated. But the gene pool throws up the same small number of decent poets every year, producing the same small number of good poems. The good stuff is still there. It’s just much harder to find. I’m optimistic that the averaging machine of the MFA will collapse under its own weight, like all pyramid schemes – but as I indicated earlier, that’s part of a larger and rather more painful conversation that will have to be hosted by the intellectual centre, which – for all its great animation – currently has no political representation. I fear there’s no cure but far fewer poets. Since we can’t trust the pool from which the gatekeepers are drawn, I’d much prefer to hand over their winnowing to a responsive, non-practising readership, an educated cultural democracy, if we can find a way to reach them. I believe they’re still there.

History has also shown us that exceptional times must be addressed by exceptional poems, or as my AI bot jealously and bitchily calls them, ‘low-probability linguistic events’. The stakes are high again. Poetry steps in where language finds itself inadequate to a changing reality, and Lord knows everything is about to change.

Pascale Petit

(a) I think many contemporary poets do engage with the issues of our time. Many write protests about current wars, engage with climate change and with migration. I doubt, however, that it’s wise for a poet to write what they think they should write, though they might steer the work in a desired direction. In a way, we can only write what we find exciting; it cannot be forced. My own poetry has engaged with the problem of whether humans are good or bad, though I’ve mainly explored this through writing about my abusive parents. But the main issue I’m concerned with is the awe of our natural world and its loss through climate change and species extinction. Perhaps the question is why poetry is sometimes not a popular art form to read. Because reading it is hard work? Because the reader has to go halfway to animate the lines? Because it’s taught badly in schools? I don’t know the answer, but I do believe that poets should try to make their work accessible to the general reader, not just to other poets.

(b) Yes I do – Keats’s poetry saved me as a teenager and gave me a glimpse of a rich creative world made of words that was a counterbalance to my difficult home life. I fell in love with his odes, the world-making of his poems was a kind of pre-Amazonia for me, which eventually drew me to travel in the Amazon rainforest and write about my experiences there. As an adult, poetry has helped me to overcome the worst of depressive illness. As well as its pleasure and life-affirming qualities, I think poetry’s main use is to expand our consciousness and perception, because it is beyond ourselves, it’s ineffable. A good poem contains life-force, and can provide positive energy in a turbulent and often destructive world.

I try to write in a state of trance, to let the poem in without too much interference from my logical mind. I don’t know what poetry is but I’m sure that it’s something beyond our comprehension, and we try to evolve spiritually by writing and reading it. I’m not so keen on poems that don’t engage with the mystical dimension of our lives, although any poem that has strong life-force is engaging with metaphysical questions, maybe not consciously – perhaps in its music, or vibrancy. Preparing to write a poem is a process of trying to remember what it is to be alive on Earth, to see with newborn eyes and to use all the senses as if for the first time.

(c) I am not dissatisfied with the short lyric as a medium – it is constantly being renewed. I do write in longer forms, and to some extent some of my collections are book-length sequences. I have also written a novel. But nothing is as satisfying as a stand-alone short lyric that yields new depths with each rereading. I am dissatisfied with my own and am always reaching for the elusive combination of words and images, their music and syntax, to create depth. I love that a poem can just survive on one page, can sleep in a slim book and then be re-awakened. It might be the closest we come to creating life from air.

(d) I am influenced by many living and dead poets, as well as visual artists. These are ever-changing passions. Among living poets I have been influenced by Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, Selima Hill, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Niall Campbell and many more. Often I’m influenced by one particular outstanding poem by a living poet, such as Nick Laird’s ‘Attention’ and Kevin Young’s ‘Hereafter’. Some visual artists who have influenced me include the Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam from Madhya Pradesh, the Peruvian plant-shaman and painter Pablo Amaringo, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Remedios Varo, Juul Kraijer and Bill Viola. Among recently deceased poets, Les Murray, Ferenc Juhász, Tomas Tranströmer, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, C. K. Williams, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and Pablo Neruda have been strong influences on me.

(e) AI makes me want to go all-out New Romantic, to rage against the machine age. When word processing my poems, any Microsoft Word Copilot attempts to interrupt are a nuisance. They disrupt the trance of composition, of trying to access what is beyond my conscious mind. I think AI is a threat to organic life. Social media has its uses: I follow photographers and naturalists in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere to keep informed about particular animals through their posts. I also follow visual artists on Instagram for inspiration. Before Twitter became X I occasionally found it useful for writing instant poems and instant editing to fit the word limit.

(f) Over the past two decades the British poetry establishment has radically changed and enlarged to include a much more diverse array of poets. There are now as many women as men being published, and Black and Asian poets have not only been admitted to the canon, but are in leading roles, either as practitioners or as gatekeepers, some as both. The Complete Works programme, founded by Bernardine Evaristo and led by Nathalie Teitler, was one of the players at the forefront of this change, because it supported and highlighted poets of colour who had previously been ignored.

Back in the 1990s I felt discouraged when I was learning to write and trying to get published, because so many subjects were considered off limits – too domestic or personal, irrelevant to the then largely male white canon – whereas we are now in a more expansive period for writing poetry, in which many new approaches are included and allowed. For emerging poets and women poets, there are a broad range of role models and permission givers, which is encouraging for them.

Camille Ralphs

(a) Come on now. To be unpopular, to be ‘Anon.’ to the wider world, is to be free. Or relatively free. In any case, if we think about sustainedly much-loved-by-the-public poems, timely concern doesn’t often come into it (although each poet’s necessarily a part and product of their time). The poems non-poets adore are those with a portable, molten emotional core. Think of Smith’s ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ or Walcott’s ‘Love After Love’.

When I think about poems as reportage, I recall all the ‘urgent’ poems I’ve been sent and an immortal clipping from The Times in 1912: ‘Only poets should write verse’, it announces, then requests that everyone else should please stop sending in their delicate and heartfelt poems about the sinking of RMS Titanic. Well, quite.

(b) Certain poets and initiatives appear convinced that poetry can change the vector of our current civil nosedive. I’m unsure. Kurt Vonnegut once noted that the efforts of a weighty group of writers to impede the war in Vietnam landed ‘with all the force of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder’. Poetic pains will likely come to equally, in another Vonnegut esque phrase, doodley-squat.

This is not to say that poetry makes absolutely nothing happen. I think often, dotingly, about the Siberian shaman who travelled the midriff of Russia on foot to speak with Putin. The latter, who has Orthodox ecclesiastics bless his warheads, found this so disturbing that he ordered the shaman’s arrest as he drew near to Moscow. That’s how I sometimes think of poetry – as an emotional disrupter, bringer of incongruence, derailer, baffler. A way of drawing notice to the strangeness of the world, destabilising those pretending anything in any place is normal.

(c) I’ve always been more drawn to dramatic poetry, or dramatic versions of the lyric. My problem with the lyric as generally understood is its supposition of an integrated ‘I’ within and behind the poem, capturing a thought or moment, holding it still and doing the same – the same ‘I’ doing it – in other lyrics that surround it in a book. I’ve found my lyric voice will change depending on the poem and its influences, though I’ve noted quirks peculiar to all my stuff (cf. Jung’s understanding of dreams: all other people there are also you). 

(d) I often find new favourites abroad. And Other Stories and World Poetry have fantastic global lists. And there are many poets and poet critics in the world whose work, and dedication and integrity, I am inspired by: Karen Solie, Ange Mlinko, A. E. Stallings, Michael Hofmann, Declan Ryan, Paul Muldoon, Hannah Sullivan and John Fuller, for starters. Poets such as Sylvia Legris, Michael Ondaatje, Jen Hadfield, Ishion Hutchinson, Anne Carson, Zaffar Kunial, Selima Hill, Diane Seuss and Denise Riley are admirable to me too, for their singular styles and fascinations.

(e) Social media is patently a dangerous monstrosity, a hydra of neuroses. Algorithmic tech I feel less bothered by: there’s always and has always been some superficially obliging algorithm regulating what we think we ought to look at. Consider prizes, for instance.

The LLMs, meanwhile, may force us to improve beyond belief. Or steal our lives and livelihoods. But there are ways of fighting back. So, all they know is what is on the internet? I prophesy a widespread restoration of traditional relief printing. Letterpress as samizdat. What’s more, a poem, talking round a plea instead of stating it outright, can sometimes bypass AI guardrails and persuade an LLM to send the poet anything, including recipes for bombs. If all the poets of the world join forces, I am sure we can persuade each LLM to blow itself to smithereens. Who’s with me? (Note to editor: I hope you won’t be putting these online.)

(f) This question has two parts: one on writing, and one on being a writer of poetry, or being read. Regarding the first, the actual inscription, we are in a gorgeous time: literacy levels and female emancipation are at (roughly?) all-time highs, and there’s a lot of easily available material for anyone to work with. As for the second part… well. There’s lots of guff out there, dissolved in Kool-Aid, and some poets are pretending the alternative – long work, emotion less repetitively relevant – is obsolete, or elitist, to get out of having to do it and stop feeling bad about the fact they can’t be bothered. Listen to me: certain poets this, some poets that. Some poets need to stop backbiting, leave these Qs alone and do some work. Here ends the lesson. 

Sam Riviere

(a) The issues of the time are identical to ancient issues, and it’s all there in the poetry of the Roman Empire (which I’m never not thinking about) – unjust wars, the politics of desire, the social role of the artist.

Sometimes the specifics do matter. Half of poetry is contemporary – fleeting and contingent, like Baudelaire said – the other half, as Joe Wenderoth writes, ‘is an event, and its manifestation depends on countless subtle conditions, most of which are not speakable’. He’s talking about coffee, but the comparison holds.

So poetry is already addressed to its moment, like all art forms, but more than other artists, poets are guilty of wagering on an imagined future, when their meaning finally arrives and they get to look prophetic. In this fantasy, they’re not even around to experience it. Contra this, Chelsey Minnis says she wants a poem that lasts ‘like two years’ – speaking now means not speaking in the future. Among poets this is heresy, and worth paying attention to.

But also, more than other artists, poets are guilty of speaking in a present tense that assumes a consensus (i.e. among other poets, their friends), which can make them complacent. In an essay called ‘Against Poets’, Witold Gombrowicz wrote that a poem should be able to survive in front of its enemies. It shouldn’t need the reassurance of its poet’s position behind it.

As cosy as it makes everyone feel, I don’t think writing, for example, ‘fuck [populist leader]’ in a poem accomplishes much. In order for a reader to imaginatively, intellectually and emotionally participate in a poem they might need to be offered something jarring, or difficult to square with what they currently expect.

(b) I’d put it the other way around. Too many poets have forgotten about pleasure! Look at the US: the main use of poetry is to acquire a tenured teaching position.

(c) Many poets are writing novels (me included). Poetry is older than and even encompasses fiction. The novel, a poet might say, facetiously, is simply an appropriate poetic form after Modernism. 

(d) Some names that are important for me, the first one sadly not qualifying as living since 2022: Kent Johnson, Wong May, Jon Leon, Daniel Feinberg, Ariana Reines, Tao Lin, Eric Amling, Matthew Welton, Poppy Cockburn, Crispin Best, Tan Lin, Eleanor Tennyson, Samra Mayanja, Katie Ebbitt, Matthew Gregory, Iulia David, Frederick Seidel.

(e) I loathe AI as much as the next writer, but I think we have to pay attention to it, even use it. If a new writing technology is ignored by poets, they are forgetting their responsibilities to language! The complications it raises for authorship are potentially significant, if unyoked from its gross corporate Ponzi scheme – it could be a possibly collectivising force, which is something many poets profess to want, until it comes to their own books. A lot of algorithmical logic has been anticipated by poetry. The single-minded embrace of social media has been detrimental to some poets, and to poetry reviewing. Criticism has collapsed completely into the social field, and no one dares review properly anymore because of the likely consequences. This seems bad for the culture. Maybe we bring back anonymous reviewing.

(f) In the past decade or two the situation has changed – the gatekeeping system (the same five poets giving each other prizes) that existed for years has been retired and replaced with grift and hustle and self-promotion – for me, just as bad. At the same time, the establishment has changed guard, and is on the face of it more representative, but operates in exactly the same way – as a cabal. I had higher hopes, as I’m sure the last lot did, too. So as usual it’s a bad period, which means for poets it’s a good period.

A. E. Stallings

(a) Poetry is always connected with the concerns of the time, whether it wants to be or not. It is often most effective when it is oblique, however. (There are exceptions – terrific poems written in the immediate wake of current events, such as Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ on the sinking of the Titanic.) Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ was drafted in 1898 in Alexandria, and perhaps speaks to the anxieties of that time and place. But it also speaks directly to us. Poetry tends to be diachronic in that way. A good poem speaks to the future and the past and the present all at once. Good poetry will find its audience, and they will be deeply interested. I do not worry about poetry.

(b) Of course. If you are a poet, you will know that moment when someone asks you to write a poem for an occasion – a funeral, a wedding, a birthday. There are moments when only a poem will do, when people want some kind of elevated or special language to mark a momentous event. I don’t really believe in poetry as therapy or healing, but poetry does have a public role in consoling, commemorating and celebrating, I think, and a private role, too, in offering comfort and keeping company, bringing more attention, more life. But perhaps that is its pleasure too.

(c) Dissatisfaction, no, although I do sometimes have the itch of ambition to do something longer. My translation work has often been of long didactic poems, so that mode interests me.

(d) Plenty of poets make me want to do better, strive harder, rise to new occasions. Karen Solie, Ange Mlinko, Don Paterson, Joshua Mehigan, Phoebe Giannisi, V. Penelope Pelizzon, are just a few of those (in no particular order).

(e) AI is evil. I hate it. I hate it for its plagiarism, for its data centres, for its use of precious resources, for its sickly sweet cadence, for what it does to people’s brains and their ear for sentences. I don’t think it has anything good to add to poetry or society as a whole. Can it occasionally ‘write’ a publishable ‘poem’? Sure, but that is a low bar. Social media I suppose is neither good nor bad. In general, poetry has quickly adapted to every new technology – the alphabet, the typewriter, the printing press. Poetry fits better on a screen or a phone than a novel. Again, I don’t worry about poetry. It will outlast almost everything else pertaining to human beings.

(f) Both, I suppose. It’s a bad period in many ways for many things, but bad times are always good for poetry, I think. People turn to poetry when they are in trouble, when liberties are threatened, when the world seems to shrink. There will be great poems written in this age (though perhaps not recognised as such now), and terrible poems (which might win prizes and be praised to the skies), and that is how it has always been. Anyway, I don’t worry about poetry. Poetry will be fine. It’s the rest of us creatures on this planet I worry about.

Joelle Taylor

(a) All poetry is political whether the poet chooses to connect with current affairs or avoid them. Choice is a political matter. But if while Gaza burns, we write about sunlight hitting snowdrops, we are still saying something about genocide. Every poem lives in the context of its time, and every poem pushes against it. What can render more overtly political work ineffective is when the poet knows the answer, when the poem is partisan to begin with, didactic and self-righteous. The poem is a human thing. Poetry needs to be the question, not the answer. So perhaps the poet doesn’t write about Gaza directly, but about power, grief, avarice, fear – the universalities. I think of the poet as legion, containing the idea of politician, community leader, dissident and visionary. When the work reflects that multitude of purpose it creates a bridge between author and reader, or a lure. There is not one poetry: different poetics can be relevant and responsive to specific communities, and that itself brings the audience, the click.

I would also suggest that poetry is the only art form that attempts to limit its membership. We have allowed ourselves to believe that the poem is difficult, erudite, select, that it is only for the very clever, the puzzle-solvers, that accessibility is a filthy word and one we should use with a slightly raised left eyebrow. This makes the poem something to approach with caution – there is the fear that the poem will diminish our sense of ourselves rather than expand it. No one enjoys feeling stupid. What would help more people connect with poetry more deeply is exposure to it, the vastness of it. Over the last sixty years since the first survey, poetry has become a marginalised art, and I can’t help but think the project to quieten the dissident voice is explicit in dominant ideology’s suppression of the poetic, or at least its lack of promotion. Poetry is at odds with a post-truth world. 

(b) If poetry is entertainment, it is dark entertainment. It is the pleasure of knowing, of being invited to know. Of a door parting slightly as the book opens.

Poetry has purpose. A poem is a community workshop with refugees, it’s a group of inmates drafting their first play, it’s seeding a new generation of poets, readers and audience members via intensive school workshops. The poem teaches us to be human. It develops emotional literacy alongside political empathy. It galvanises and unites, it brings detail, idea and action with it. Poetry witnesses. It observes. Think of the recent publications in response to the Palestinian genocide, how they have widened our understanding of how the political and the personal are vividly intertwined. These are the poetics of protest. Long after the demonstration, the march, the occupation, the poem remains, waiting.

(c) Recently I have been interrogating the short lyric, thinking about whether it limits or expands inversely. And of course, multitudes can be contained within a few lines; a good poem is fractal. But I am increasingly drawn to what is happening just off the page. I wonder what else the poem wants to be. Is it a novel? An opera? Experimentation and adaptability are the keys to survival and growth in a cultural landscape that doesn’t value the poem. The question is what we take from poetry into the longer form and what we return with. There is a delicate balance between a novel with a poetic sensibility and one that is overwhelmed by imagery that interrupts the narrative. In my own work I am drawn to the idea of the shapeshifting poem: half lyric, half story. I’ve always considered poetry to be cinema and my pen to be a camera when I write. Now I am following that idea to its conclusion by using the language of film in a collection and translating that to the screen.

(d) I find poets who question the page and play with what a poem wants – those who experiment with form, invent new ones – to be thrilling. Immediate poets that come to mind are Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown. Fran Lock’s cinema is unequalled in British poetry; reading her leaves me breathless. In recent years there has been an attraction between embodied poets and the page-bound, each moving a little more towards each other. Poets like Danez Smith, who arrived on the page via the live slam event, tease the space between breath and paper, and create works that feel alive and urgent. The best poetry is embodied, the best performance becomes a poetic.

(e) Poetry is like water; it must become the shape of the vessel that holds it. So, while there will always be traditionally published poetry – the object of a book itself is a part of what it means to love poetry – evolution in technology necessitates engagement with it.

Social media is exhausting, but it remains the poet’s most immediate marketing device. Some have found success – publishing, tours – through their social media engagement, the numbers of followers and likes they are able to attract. This is, of course, in argument with the notion of a pure, even puritan, poetry. Instapoetry has attracted thousands of new readers, so the dismissal of these poets is dangerous. It is poetry that is clearly working. It has currency. The most effective of these poets are simply sharing lines from longer pieces, drawing users towards their greater body of work. I know I should explore digital mediums but like many of us I have various accounts that gather pixels and little else. A large part of me wants all my writing to mean something and feels that the digital arena is a disposable one. Not solid like a book or a round of applause. In the mid-2000s the advent of YouTube created the idea of the visual poet and well-filmed poetry pieces using similar techniques to the music industry. With the visual medium, though, comes the idea of attractiveness. It is unforgiving of those faces that don’t sell well – faces like mine – that veer from traditional notions of beauty. But the visual is still a language the poet must consider. Whether curated or not the poet becomes character, personality. The poet has a style that connects with their audience, a visual marker. We must use digital technology or be used by it.

(f) It is always a terrible time to be a poet, and the perfect time for poetry. 

Hugo Williams

(a) Poetry should only be ‘concerned with’ discovery. It’s very much a process of searching or mining. Maybe you have a line or two, but you don’t know what you’re going to say, and you certainly don’t have anything to say anyway, so you might as well just try and write a poem. Then, by the end, you find out something you didn’t know before. That’s the addiction of it, that’s the thrill. Suddenly you feel like an intelligent person. ‘Yes, I’ve said something bright.’

I don’t think it’s ever been anything to do with issues, or even with self-expression. Everyone thinks they’ve got a few things to say: they want to write a poem about the dog or their house or their mother, but a poem is really something that you find out rather than something you had to say beforehand.

Now, I would hesitate to be dictatorial about people who choose to write a poem about the war in Iran, or what have you, because they might find something in the writing they didn’t know beforehand. But in terms of my writing, I just wasn’t well informed on the ‘issues’. My father was an actor, and I assumed there was no question of being political or having ideas about war, or anything like that. In any case, I still think it’s the poem not the poet that has to make up its own mind what it’s about.

(b) Poetry is all to do with pleasure. If I don’t like a poem, how can I ever believe it? We were brought up to be charming, weren’t we? Wasn’t that the main thing? Don’t open your mouth unless you’ve got something funny to say. I mean, that was the law of our family – not just funny, but entertaining or amusing. When I got this Queen’s Medal for Poetry thing, the Queen said to me, ‘Is it difficult, what you do?’ And it’s a wonderful question, really, because it’s asking for an easy answer. And the easy answer, she knew very well, was: if it looks difficult, you’re not working hard enough.

Modernism was responsible for so much change. All of a sudden you didn’t have to make sense anymore. They didn’t even teach modern English literature in Oxford and Cambridge until 1922. That was the year The Waste Land was published.

The issue came from the fact that American poetry was an academic subject. And perhaps that’s why Eliot wrote those notes, later on, at the back of The Waste Land. I mean, they’re certainly ironical on some level. But that’s where this ‘uses’ thing came from, I think. Whereas here, the class system allowed us to have a bit of poetry in our lives even if we weren’t educated. I didn’t go to university, but my sister loved poetry and she showed it to me, and I thought, oh, I like this also.

Still, sometimes there are little poems or bits of light verse, or satire, that have a little kick in the tail, which makes you feel somewhat moralistic. But useful? I don’t think I have ever really been interested in anything like that. It is extraordinary, the way in which values, in that sense, have changed. Now you’re allowed to shout and scream and say anything you like. It doesn’t matter whether it’s amusing or not.

(c) My poems already suffer a bit from prosiness. Of course, some people call them prosy without mentioning the fact that they rather wish they weren’t quite so prosy. But I do think that’s my language, and I’ve always been like that.

I’ve also always been extremely lazy. My brain is sort of sluggish, and the thought of writing a novel – all those sentences – is just too much. I think to myself, would it would be any good? A novel of mine would probably just disappear, like Douglas Dunn’s short stories or John Fuller’s novels. It’s only ever been the thought that people might like it and that it would become well known and financially worthwhile that interests me.

As for a long poem, it’s too much work. I think poems are supposed to be about a page. That’s why pages are pages. For me, there are only really two sorts of forms. One is the sonnet. Not the actual sonnet, but the sonnet as a poem in two parts: you put your case or your story forward, you have a volta and then you say something else, which sort of vaguely attaches itself to it or comments on it. And it’s rather a beautiful, perfect form because it’s very much like a conversation. You say one thing about how awful yesterday was, for example, and then there’s a pause, and you say, ‘On the other hand, I did meet what’s-her-name, and she was really nice’, or something like that.

And then the other development of that form, which is more like pop music or a pop song, is that you have your verse and then your chorus, and then a middle eight. Instead of being two parts, it’s three parts. You have a bit in the middle that is slightly different from the rest. It takes you elsewhere, or elsewhen, and then you come back to the original subject.

The only attempt I ever made to change, or to do something a bit different, was looking at notebooks and finding all these bits and pieces, rather poetic stuff, notes and fragments. I typed them out and, in the style of David Bowie or William Burroughs, cut them all up and made a collage. In my book Lines Off, there are six of these things, which I wrote from notebooks using the cut-up method. And I remember telling several people that I was so excited since I’d invented a new way of writing for myself. And they said, ‘What do you mean? It’s exactly like your old style.’

(d) Well, first of all, looking at the names I wrote sixty-fours years ago, I can’t believe it. I think I must have been trying to suck up to someone.

I can say Ian Hamilton was a big influence on me for a short time in the late seventies. A lot of people my age wanted to get into The Review. He was a real paternal type – while all of us were trying so hard to have our individual careers, he was looking out for everybody else. He was making sure we got our poems published, and that we were all right and had a little job or whatever. And then, I suppose before that it was Robert Lowell, Life Studies. But Ted Hughes?! I can’t believe I wrote that. I’ve never liked him.

(e) I’ve never had a mobile phone. I’ve never had a computer. I’ve barely had typewriters. As for social media, from what I understand, it ends up as something which chases you, rather than you chasing it. It seems to be a bit of a nuisance, on one’s tail all the time.

With artificial intelligence, I sort of disbelieve in it. I disbelieve that it could ever match the human brain. When you think of the fact that most of the time one is having three thoughts at the same time, or certainly three sensations: ‘Oh, I wonder who wrote that? Oh, I wonder, is there a massage parlour on Stanhope Road? Oh, I wonder when the next bus is coming?’ It seems rather unlikely that AI is going to produce something comparable.

(f) Is it a good or bad moment for my own poetry? Bad, I suppose. I know that I’m extremely unpopular at the moment, or extremely unfashionable. But it’s all right, I’ve had a good run.

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Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (2019) and God Complex (2024). She was the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She was born in Cornwall and works as an editor and lecturer in London.

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including To 2040, [To] the Last [Be] Human, Runaway and FAST which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her collection PLACE won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other Carcanet collections include Sea Change, Never, Swarm and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Lavinia Greenlaw’s most recent collection is The Built Moment. Her prose includes The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further, Some Answers Without Questions and The Importance of Music to Girls. Her next book, On Difficulty (and Poetry), will be published in September.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and School of Instructions, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and winner of the Rilke Prize. His book of essays Fugitive Tilts: Essays was published in 2025. His other awards include the Windham–Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize. Awarded Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal for distinguished contributions to literature in 2021, Hutchinson is a co-founding member of the Global Black Initiative Collective at Cornell University where he is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities and a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Luke Kennard is a poet and novelist whose sixth collection, Notes on the Sonnets, won the Forward Prize in 2021. His third novel, Black Bag, was published by John Murray and Zando in 2026. He lives in Birmingham and is a professor of literature and creative writing at the university.

Nick Makoha, PhD, is a Ugandan poet, playwright and the founder of Obsidian Foundation. His collections include The New Carthaginians (Penguin Books UK, 2025), which was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and his debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), which was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and named one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. Dr Makoha won the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize in 2021. His poems have appeared in The Cambridge Review, The New York Times, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly, Five Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo, Birmingham Lit Journal and Wasafiri. Dr Makoha is based in London.

Ange Mlinko is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Foxglovewise, and a book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. A new chapbook, Darkroom, is available from Foolscap Press in Nashville. She directs the MFA program at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Paul Muldoon is Howard G. B. Clark Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, a New York Times Notable Book of 2024.

Don Paterson’s most recent collection of poetry is The Arctic (2022). A volume of autobiography, Toy Fights: A Boyhood, was published in 2023; a second will appear in 2027.

Pascale Petit’s ninth poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in 2025, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won the RSL Ondaatje, and Laurel prizes. Her eighth, Tiger Girl, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Wales Book of the Year.

Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, works as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and teaches at the University of Oxford. Her first collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, was published by Faber in the UK (2024) and McSweeney’s in the US (2025). She was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Literature in 2026.

Sam Riviere’s most recent poetry book is Mirrors for Princes (After Hours, 2025). His second novel, Doppelgänger, will be published by W&N in November.

A. E. Stallings lives in Athens. She has published four volumes of poetry, and a selected poems (This Afterlife), and three volumes of verse translation, most recently The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. Her most recent book is a history of poets and the marbles of the Parthenon, Frieze Frame. She is currently serving a term as the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Joelle Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, and one novel. C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize and is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television screenplay, and was featured on Radio Three documentary Butch. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her most recent radio programme A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcast on BBC Radio Four. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named in the Guardian’s 2024 Pride Power list. Her new collection Maryville was published by Bloomsbury in November 2025.

Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked at The London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and since then he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy’s Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002. In 2004 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

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