Not Here for the Performance

I didn’t come to poetry because I wanted a profile, a brand, or a place within a literary scene. Like many people, I came to it because I was trying to make sense of things. The world, other people, myself. The poems that stayed with me weren’t necessarily the most fashionable or the most celebrated. They were the ones that gave shape to experiences I couldn’t quite articulate on my own. They sharpened my attention. They made me question assumptions. They reminded me that other people had wrestled with the same fears, losses, contradictions and uncertainties. Years later, those are still the poems I remember.

Perhaps that’s why I find so much contemporary literary culture frustrating. An extraordinary amount of energy is spent talking about poetry while far less is spent talking about why poetry matters in the first place. Conversations about visibility, publishing, prizes, platforms, audiences and personal brands often seem to overshadow the work itself. Poetry is increasingly treated as a career path, a networking opportunity, or a performance of cultural credibility. None of that interests me very much.

What interests me is writing that leaves a mark. Not because it shocks, provokes or attracts attention, but because it tells the truth. Not a fashionable truth or a marketable truth, but something real. That truth might emerge through politics, memory, grief, joy, anger, love, work, family, friendship or any number of other subjects. The category matters far less than the honesty. I am interested in writers who are willing to look directly at something that matters and resist the temptation to reduce it to a slogan, a pose or an aesthetic.

I believe poetry should remain connected to lived experience. The lives of ordinary people are not secondary material waiting at the edges of literature; they are its foundation. The realities of work, community, identity, care, survival, injustice, desire, memory and change are not distractions from poetry. They are where poetry begins. Too often literary culture behaves as though poetry exists somewhere above everyday life, untouched by its difficulties and contradictions. I have never found that vision particularly convincing. The world is already here. The task is not to escape it but to pay closer attention to it.

The writing that interests me most tends to ask difficult questions rather than offer easy answers. It remains curious where certainty would be more comfortable. It understands that beauty and struggle are not opposites and that human beings are rarely as simple as our public narratives suggest. Good poetry should be capable of holding complexity without flattening it. It should make room for uncertainty, contradiction and doubt without collapsing into cynicism or despair.

Community matters too, though not in the way the word is often used. I am not interested in community as a branding exercise or a marketing strategy. I am interested in the genuine exchange of ideas, support, challenge and generosity. A healthy literary culture is not built through gatekeeping, hierarchy or personality. It is built when people create space for one another, especially for voices that are routinely overlooked, dismissed or expected to remain grateful for whatever scraps they are offered.

Independence matters for similar reasons. The work that excites me rarely emerges from established centres of power. It tends to come from people willing to take risks, experiment, question assumptions and support one another without demanding conformity in return. Independence is valuable because it creates the conditions for honesty, and honesty remains far more important to me than approval.

Poetry cannot solve every problem, nor should it pretend to. What it can do is help us pay attention. It can help us remember what we might otherwise forget. It can help us imagine lives beyond our own and recognise ourselves in the experiences of others. In a culture increasingly driven by speed, spectacle, certainty and distraction, there is something quietly radical about language that asks us to slow down, think carefully and remain open to complexity.

That is the kind of poetry I care about. Not poetry as ornament, performance or status. Poetry as a way of paying attention to what is real, and of finding the words to share that reality with somebody else.