I've recently been asked why I named this site Poets Cornered. My answer is simple – because they are. We're pushed into a corner by external forces that arbitrarily dictate what gets read and what doesn't, regardless of the potential merit of our works. If we want to share our poetry durably beyond our immediate circle of friends, there are three obvious routes – print or online publishers, social media, or print self publishing. But each of these has its own snags.

The Downsides

Let's examine print and online publishers first. They have snags both in common and also individually. The key common snag is that they're selective for the wrong reasons. On the print front, the days of the 'gentleman publishers' such as Lane, who personally selected work that appealed to them, are long gone. Today, selection is performed by anonymous 'readers' with an eye firmly on potential revenue. So what's most likely to sell, in what is a very small market for poetry anyway, gets selected for publication. The online poetry magazines are largely run by folk drawn from that same professional readership and their decisions and tastes are a key driver for selection, as with the print publishers. It's not incidental that getting published online is generally seen as one of the prerequisites for a book contract. Now the underlying issue here is that pretty much all such pundits are literary academics, who dictate quite arbitrarily what constitutes legitimate poetry even where there's no commercial consideration at stake. So there's a small self-perpetuating clique that defines acceptable poetry, promotes and reads it, regardless of whether such poetry has any relevance for the wider population. And sadly, the evidence shows that it doesn't, which is why so many literate people just ignore it. So that's the first shove into the corner – unless you change your poetry to suit the 'editors' they'll reject it. But if you do, it won't be your poetry any more.

Now let's move on to print self publishing. It seems an obvious alternative, and indeed some self-published poetry has led to greater things – but only a tiny proportion of what's been self-published. Disregarding for the moment the (sadly numerous) shady self-publishing services, the odds are stacked against even a good and trustworthy one giving a new poet significant exposure. And that's even more the case if one undertakes the whole process oneself, because the the difficult part of the job is not production – it's distribution. For that you need contacts, volume, legal expertise, logistics, and you'll incur expenses for things such as ISBN and bar code licenses, printing and warehousing whether or not your book is selling in quantity.1 Some self publishing services do indeed manage some of this for you, but only at often substantial cost. Alternatively, you could go the e-book route to save production costs, although they're still less popular than physical books. But suppose you've got to the point of everything bar distribution being done, why not put your book up on Amazon? In reality, it'll be buried among the millions of other offerings unless you put masses of effort into promotion and you'll have to watch out for illicit clones undercutting your sales – you can actually finish up losing money on Amazon. So that's the second shove into the corner – spending lots of effort and potentially lots of money to little or no avail.

The third option is posting your poetry on social media. The reach is potentially enormous, so it seems promising. But problems abound. The first is that you utterly lose control over anything you post. It can be plagiarised without you ever finding out and you can't even reliably delete it as it may have been replicated thousands of times by other subscribers to the platform. But then there's the question of whether it gets read and appreciated. The overwhelming proportion of 'poetry' on social media currently consists of vapid one-liners (whether split into multiple physical lines or not) and these are terribly popular (presumably because they require no serious mental engagement to read). So unless you do likewise, your work is likely to attract either zero, or at worst antagonistic, attention – and social media antagonism is about as nasty as it can get. Plus of course, social media sites can remove content or shut down accounts at will, so your work might disappear unexpectedly. Self-publishing also commonly precludes subsequent submission of the same work to competitions and 'official' magazines (they all want to be first). So that's the third push into the corner – social media's probably the wrong readership for real poetry, plus the chance of being castigated or even shut down and losing some rights to re-use your work.

The Upsides

So what's to be done? The final obvious option is competitions. These are of course judged in general by the same academics that run the magazines, so the same penalties exist for deviation from their norms – you'll get a lot of rejections unless you conform. But maintain your integrity and keep trying without any expectations. Competitions have a distinct advantage over magazines, in that whereas the magazine editor is typically a long-term incumbent, competition judges commonly change at every round so your work will be exposed to a wider range of critics. One day you may just get lucky, because there are (albeit small) signs that things might be changing. If the proportion of non-conforming poetry submitted to the competitions increases significantly, eventually the judges will be forced to adapt their criteria. Over the last decade or so there's been a growing number of people arguing in public against the current narrow and rigid definitions of 'acceptable' poetry (albeit definitions that have stretched to include an oxymoronic 'formalised non-conformism').2 But it's not just a few established poets 3 and old fogies like me doing the arguing. A surprising number of articulate young people have been making their objections known,4,5 and that's very gratifying as they're much more likely to be listened to. So we need more of the same – young people prepared to express their demands for change publicly and emphatically, and that particularly includes those on 'creative writing' courses as they have a prospective future as poets. We need bold students prepared to argue against their conversion into rows of identical poetical bowling pins, even at the hazard of annoying their tutors. And I suspect that obstreperous attitude is most promising for the creation of great literature anyway.

Having subscribed in his early days to a succession of poetic groups, one of the finest Russian poets of the early 20th century, Sergei Esenin, famously stated in his autobiography (1924):

 Today I disclaim all poetic movements. I consider that a poet cannot conform to any specific movement. It binds his arms and legs.

Change is only accomplished by those who do not conform, but they're needed in large numbers to be effective against entrenched prejudice. So let's all start creating according to our personal inspiration regardless of the dictates of the pundits – writing real poetry, with our arms, legs and minds unbound.

 [1] A decade or so back I self published a CD. By the time I gave up on distribution, the cost of the bar code license had eaten away the entire small profit from sales.

 [2] Make Make It New New by Joshua Mehigan

 [3] Presto Manifesto by A. E. Stallings

 [4] Why modern poetry is terrible and how we can change it

 [5] Modern poetry has decayed into an unsubstantial shallow form of minimalism