If your poem’s idea of danger is a well-placed enjambment, congratulations, you’ve written a line fit for a middle-class fridge magnet. Or worse, an Instagram caption. We’ve had decades of softly-lit verse, poems that colour in the silence instead of slashing it open. It’s tired. It’s boring. It’s tedious. The kind of poetry that craves applause, not impact. Enough.
While I believe all poetry matters, it has to, not all poetry has the same purpose. Nor should it. There’s space in the world for the tender, the private, the ornate. But at The Broken Spine, we don’t pretend that all poetry carries the same weight. We celebrate the urgent over the ornamental, because the world doesn’t need another soft echo, it needs language that breaks the silence and throws sparks.
I’m done pretending that silence is neutral. That apolitical is just an aesthetic choice. This idea that poets can float above the fray like Victorian ghosts scribbling away in peace, it’s delusional. Look outside. There’s a war on: against bodies, against truth, against the marginalised. And some of you are still writing about wind chimes. Get a grip. You have a pen and a platform. Use it.
Poetry is not here to tuck you in. It should wake you like a brick through the window at 3am. It should make you clutch your pearls, then your gut, then the edge of your seat. It should rattle your certainties, unsettle your sympathies, and make you question the ground you walk on. Because poetry that plays it safe in unsafe times isn’t just gentle, it’s complicit. If it shake you, why bother? If your poetry isn’t interrogating power, if it isn’t ripping open the seams of false comfort, then it’s not just irrelevant; it’s complicit.
Let me be clear about this: I encourage all poets to write. To try. To grow. Whether your work is loud or quiet, fractured or flowing, raw or restrained, I believe in your right to create, and I’ll keep holding space for that. That’s exactly what #PoemsAbout is for. It’s a social space, not a submissions desk. It’s where poems stretch, stumble, shout, or whisper, and every voice gets heard.
But The Broken Spine is a curated press. What we celebrate on our public platforms isn’t always what we publish. That’s not a contradiction. That’s integrity.
We don’t reject softness, but we seek substance. We don’t dismiss elegance, but we demand urgency. We want poems that aren’t just technically sharp but existentially necessary, poems that lean into pain, joy, truth, danger. Poems that punch.
So no, I’m not trying to gatekeep poetry spaces. I’m not here to tell you how to write. But I am entitled to an opinion, and that opinion is this:
Not all poetry must confront, but the poetry that does matters more.
Because in a world burning at the edges, form without force is failure. We need poems that do more than shimmer. We need poems that scar. So write whatever you need to write. There’s room for all of it. But know what we’re chasing: Poetry with presence. Poetry with pressure. Poetry that means it. That’s the Broken Spine difference. And if you think form can ever be separated from politics, just look at who first tried to convince us of that lie, Ezra Pound.
Poetic form is never neutral, it always serves a purpose. The question is: whose? Let’s talk about one of poetry’s most protected corpses: Ezra Pound. The fascist whisperer of modernism. He spewed antisemitic bile on the radio, fawned over Mussolini, and still gets worshipped as a master of the form, as if that makes up for the rot in his ideology.
His commitment to pure form was never apolitical. It was a dodge. A way to intellectualise poetry while ignoring the world burning around him, burning because of people like him. Pound didn’t rise above politics. He just sided with the worst of it and tried to dress it up in cantos.
And yet he still gets wheeled out in workshops like a literary saint. Enough. You can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist’s politics are soaked into every line. Especially when that art is used as a blueprint by generations of poets avoiding responsibility.
That said, we must be careful not to flatten history. H.D., often lumped in with Pound and the Imagists, broke away, boldly. Her later work, especially Trilogy, confronts the trauma of war, the fragility of peace, and the resilience of the human spirit. She channelled myth not as escape, but as resistance. She wrote through ruin, not around it. Let’s learn from that complexity, not erase it.
The Deep Image school had radical potential at its inception. Poets like Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly envisioned poems that reached beneath surface thought, mining the unconscious, drawing on myth, and creating symbolic resonance that struck at the bone. They weren’t trying to escape the world; they were trying to get underneath it.
But then came Robert Bly.
Bly helped popularise Deep Image, but in doing so, he shifted it inward. The poems became spiritual retreats, heavy with forests, snow, fathers, silence. These were not confrontations; they were withdrawals. In his translations, particularly of Neruda and Tranströmer, he’s often accused of sanding down political sharpness in favour of symbolic vagueness. Urgency was traded for atmosphere. Protest became pastoral.
The result? A wave of poetry that prized inner landscapes while ignoring the burning world outside. And that legacy still lingers. You can trace its influence in today’s fondness for the cryptic, the scenic, the fragment. But the danger isn’t style, it’s when style becomes evasion.
This isn’t to deny Deep Image’s poetic value. There are moments of real insight and resonance in its best works. But the movement’s later drift toward disengagement, toward mysticism without material, still casts a long, shadowy influence. And in a world that’s ablaze, we don’t need shadow, we need fire.
We can’t talk about poetry that punches without mentioning the Beats. If Deep Image turned away from the world, the Beats kicked down its front door, with all the brilliance and damage that implies. They helped blow the walls off the polite, conformist verse of the 1950s. They shouted sex, rage, dissent, addiction, madness, queerness – everything society wanted to bury. They mattered. They changed the air.
But let’s not mythologise them. The Beats weren’t pure revolutionaries. They were messy, often misogynist, sometimes exploitative, frequently inconsistent. Some used marginalised voices as aesthetic flair. Some punched down even as they claimed to be punching up. And yet, for all their flaws, they didn’t avoid.
They gave language to people America wanted silent. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl wasn’t just a howl of grief. No, it was a roar of refusal. A refusal to be quiet about queer life, about madness, about state violence and capitalist rot. He paid for it, too, Howl was dragged into court on obscenity charges, because it actually said something.
Jack Kerouac was a different beast. Sadly, too often apolitical and increasingly conservative, but he still gave voice to the drifting and disillusioned. His work lacked Ginsberg’s edge, but it caught a generation’s alienation. Even as it glamorised restlessness, it also documented it. Restless is still better than resting on nothing.
And Burroughs? Genius. Predator. Visionary. Problem. All at once. His work shattered narrative structure, cracked open language, and saw the state as a system of control long before most writers dared say it. But that brilliance came wrapped in harm. He cannot be uncritically celebrated. He must be reckoned with. I’ll get into that another time.
Though rudimentary, that’s the truth of the Beats: they risked something. They failed often,but they reached. They didn’t stay safe. And in that way, they cracked the door for generations of poets to kick it off the hinges.
If the Beats did one thing right, it was this: they refused silence. In a time of crushing conformity, they said the unsayable. That’s a lesson worth holding onto, minus the blind hero worship.
We’re not against beauty. We’re against beauty that does nothing. At The Broken Spine, we won’t reject a poem for being soft, but we’ll always ask: does it speak? Does it risk? Does it mean something?
Poetry is a vast terrain. There’s room for quiet, but not for cowardice. We want your work if it speaks truth, if it interrogates power, if it does something more than just look good on a page. This isn’t gatekeeping, it’s clarity. We’re not curating comfort. We’re curating consequence.
The point I’m making is that poetry isn’t precious. It’s potent. It’s a truism that language builds worlds, and it can tear them down, too. Look at any regime for who they silence first. The poets. The journalists. The ones who turn language into resistance.
This is why it matters when Robert Sheppard dissects British political rot, turning figures like Gove and BoJo into grotesque reflections of themselves. It’s why Andrew McMillan writes queerness and masculinity with the raw heat of lived contradiction – no sanitising, no performance. Why Jenny Mitchell traces the scars of empire in real time, crafting poems that double as testimonies. It’s why Jericho Brown burns with every line. Brown doesn’t just explore Blackness, queerness, violence, and hope. No, he reshapes the very form to do it. His Duplex structure doesn’t just experiment, it reclaims. His poems don’t flinch. They testify. They sing. They refuse to be ignored.
This is poetry that matters. This is poetry that works.
When governments crack down, they don’t raid the botanical gardens. They raid the presses. Because poems that speak the truth are dangerous. Because language, when wielded like this, can destabilise everything.
And now? With the alt-right platformed and energised, with fascism wearing a populist grin, you’re still posting your poems on legacy platforms, as if the world needs another soft observation about petals or weather. You’re still pretending that brevity is depth, that restraint is somehow radical. But let’s be honest: most of these fragments aren’t distillations, they’re evasions. A carefully curated line about a falling leaf isn’t enough when rights are being stripped and cities are burning. The image alone won’t save us. If your silence is aesthetic, it’s still silence. Who’s still treating that space like it’s neutral?
Ask yourself: what kind of poet are you, really?
Sure, you can write for comfort. That’s valid. But don’t call it radical. That’s not fire. That’s furniture.
Poetry can’t just be about beauty. Beauty is too small. A poem that doesn’t disturb, provoke, or demand attention might still be art, but it’s not protest, and it’s not power. It’s got to be about truth. It’s about saying what others won’t, can’t, or are too afraid to. It’s about speaking into the fractures and staying there until something cracks open.
If your poem doesn’t shake someone, if it doesn’t rattle the frame, bruise the air, or force the reader to rethink, then what is it doing?
For me, poetry has never been about safety. It has always been about risk.
So write like it matters. Because it does.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
