On Retiring From Poetry

The other day, I had need to go through old Substack posts. I noticed a theme: "My Indefinite Hiatus From Poetry”, “What Where I See Poetry Now”, “Against Community”, and further realised anxieties concerning poetry has popped up in otherwise unrelated posts.

There’s clearly something I didn’t realise I needed to say. This happens with writing, especially Substack. Blogging is great to work out ideas and experiment with style. Inevitably, repetitions - none of which are fully fleshed out - happen, creating a need for an explicit post.

This will be the last post on the matter.

I can’t see myself writing poetry anymore. Or, if I do, I can’t see myself pursuing a public persona as a poet. I will continue publishing others through Hem Press and my informal, infrequent, podcast will continue. The challenges within UK poetry are too widespread and, crucially, too normalised for me to feel comfortable being a part of it.

Some of these challenges are no secret. The last three years, editors have been vocal about the realities of running independent presses. In part because of the lack of infrastructure - whether that be funding, marketing or book sales - but also because of experiences they had with poets.

The ways I’ve seen poets behave are immature and irresponsible. They’d be considered self-serving if their actions weren’t so detrimental to their careers. As a result, it creates a poetry scene (let’s, please, stop functioning under the pretence of “community”) which needs to be tiptoed through by the rest of us. As a publisher, I can curate a platform where this is not the case. As a poet, it’s like swimming in the middle of the ocean with no team or equipment: exposed without boundaries.

The first author I put out on Hem (now removed from the website) threw a full blown - full blown - tantrum at me because I favourably compared his book to authors he hadn’t heard of on social media. Alongside this, I was sent unprofessional comments concerning other poets. I won’t reproduce the DMs here because it isn’t fair on the others cited. No one in poetry should have to receive these messages, especially if they spent hundreds of pounds of their own money on someone’s book and launch party with all the subsequent manual distribution.

Another poet, whose manuscript never saw the light of day, maintained infrequent comms in the lead up to publication claiming eye surgery as she updated her Instagram with selfies in public. I spent the whole of December 2022 typesetting her visually labyrinthine chapbook.

Or the US distributor, now credited for having saved indie press distribution, who blanked Hem Press before SPD went bust in favour of better known publishers.

Or the member of a UK press’ team who, on finding out I was in a year long correspondence with a younger female poet about a potential Hem release, felt threatened enough to assume I was moving in and told me to take up correspondences about her book with him in the future.

Now, take these (by no means comprehensive) examples and link them up with other editors’ experiences. Then, link those up with the wider challenges UK publishing is facing. Does this sound like an attractive “community” to you? These might sound like problems exclusive to a publisher, but poets who act this way don’t realise the relationship isn’t contained to a press. The scene is small and, like the waves in that ocean, you’re going to get crashed into eventually.

I’m tired of feeling I have to protect the reputations of these brats. I woke up this morning, sat with my cup of tea, looked out my window and realised I had to be open about this for me and me alone. This post isn’t going to damage Hem Press sales; it isn’t going to damage my book sales; fuck, it isn’t going to touch the careers of the poets I’ve implicated: they’ve got too many mates protecting them for starters, and there’s not enough attention - not for this Substack, anyone else’s or UK poetry’s most well known journals - for it to matter.

This could be read as calling for blood, like so many presses and editors did circa 2020, as if that has ever caused positive systemic change. I know from talking to poets “on the ground” that call out culture alienates those who partake in it as everyone else harbours bitterness against them. The poets who aren’t involved know full well that ideological pretentions are being used to get ahead but, as is always the case when Emperors are naked, no one dare says what’s happening because it’s too easy to be tarred according to whatever pseudo-left position is in vogue on social media. This is the mechanism that perpetuates toxicity in the first place: sincere poets are sidelined in favour of whoever can say The Right Thing the loudest, as if having a good soul is contingent on how many Das Kapital memes one can repost.

If I’m calling for anything, it’s for poets to start being honest with themselves and each other. But then I realise: I’m not calling for anything. I don’t want sympathy; I don’t want support; I don’t want more readers; I don’t want to write… I just want to run my adorable little press and publish human beings I want to see more of. If I was to try and create a better world, I’d think doubling down on publishing good people would be more impactful than your social media feed.

I wrote this to give me some form closure, to cohere my thoughts from those previous posts and express a definitive stance. Closure, that is, because it isn’t right for anyone to be sidelined, to be carrying around such emotional baggage while working themselves into the ground for… Well… You. This isn’t about changing anything other than my emotional wellbeing, which has been meaningfully wounded by these things for too long.

Having said all this, I would like poets to find healing and buoyancy irrespective of anything, including their alleged politics, no questions asked.