Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

I’ve always found the summer to be the only season in which I struggle to write poetry. Of course, an extraordinary heatwave like the current all-but-unbearable one inhibits doing very much except lounging about in whatever shade there is. Jackie Wills’s brilliant new collection aside, I’m also struggling to concentrate on reading; or doing anything else of consequence for that matter, though I enjoyed watching Ecuador win last night. If only all the World Cup games were on in the afternoon and evening . . .

That said, I finished a rare political-ish poem last week and sent it off to the Morning Star, who have since said they’ll publish it in August. As a lifelong leftie, it does my heart good to help to support a publication with values broadly similar to my own. I never quite understand why poets might, instead, want to place poems in right-wing rags, like The Spectator, which gives platforms to some truly odious far-right ‘thinkers’, such as very far-right Douglas Murray (its associate editor) and Max Klinger, and is edited by Michael Gove for pity’s sake. It also happens to be owned by Paul Marshall, the hedge-funder who set up GB News. I like its poetry editor Hugo Williams and most of his corpus of poetry as much as anybody does, but, to me, The Spectator’s values aren’t in the slightest bit compatible with the inclusivity of poetry.

I don’t buy the argument that getting poems published in journals and papers which don’t specialise in poetry must be a good thing per se; or that putting poetry in front of the sort of people who like to read very right-wing tripe might broaden, perhaps even change, their minds. I suspect that is very unlikely. In the same way that publications are necessarily picky about the poems they publish, poets surely have a moral responsibility to be picky about where they attempt to place their poems.

A counter-argument is that placing left-leaning political poems in left-leaning publications like the Morning Star and the New Statesman will only preach to the converted, but how likely is it that a right-wing publication would publish a left-leaning poem or even one that, say, even tangentially alerted the reader to the horrendous adverse impacts of climate change?

In other news, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Penarth, at the weekend just gone, to read at the literary festival organised by the fabulous Griffin Books. Not just my reading itself – alongside Bethany Handley, Hilary Watson and Tracey Rhys, each of whom read an excellent set of poems – but the whole weekend. The amazing poets Stephen Payne and Katherine Stansfield co-hosted the event, and Stephen even wrote and read out a clerihew for each of us four readers.

Stephen and I also met up with about half of our fellow poetry book club members for a curry on Saturday night, and some of us went to see the ace Gwen John exhibition in Cardiff on Sunday afternoon. It served to remind me that it’s lovely to be part of different poetry communities, all of which are part of a wider, overarching one. I must mention that Stephen’s next collection will be published by Parthian Books this autumn. Parthian – website here – make beautiful books, including Tracey Rhys’s, with excellent covers and end-flaps and all.