If by the third line I'm struggling to keep my heart in it, that's a bad poem. I also look for poems that grip you from the beginning: not just from the first line but from the title itself.

There are so many poems that we receive at the magazine that feel as if the poet wrote them because that's what they thought they should write, rather than because they wanted to. JD: It's painfully clichéd, but primarily I look for an original idea in poems. TC: So what does good contemporary poetry mean to you? Contemporary poetry in my eyes is far more concentrated on detail, on minute matters, than what it used to be when poets tended more to contemplate subjects as vast as love, death, life and so on. The general perception is that contemporary poetry is much worse, much more volatile and shallow than it used to be, which I think is a gross injustice. JD: There's this definite divide between those people who like to constantly reference previous greats and those people trying to push the great poets of today. TC: Your theme for the next issue is 'This Is Modern Living.' Is this admitting a problem with the canon: that it's very hard to write poetry with a long historical perspective, because people feel that modern living is distant from even the recent past? There's so much comment on the poetry of the past that many people are completely unaware that poetry is still being written. Unfortunately, most people's perceptions of poetry are still stuck in the times of Milton and Wordsworth. JD: A lot of the poetry that they push in schools and the great poems that are handed down to us as classics are miles away from the poetry being written today. TC: There seems to be a huge divide between the poetry people read for pleasure and a lot of 'great' poetry: do you think the canon can still be read by most people for pleasure? I've always been a massive fan of rhyme but there's very few people that can pull it off eloquently. We learn how to appreciate rhythm and meter as children with the plethora of nonsense poetry and hand-me-down children's rhymes. JD: I think it came from a deep-rooted love of children's books. As I saw it, poetry was busy burying itself in a cloud of mystery and exclusivity whilst every other art form was effortlessly making itself more and more accessible. JD: From a standpoint of naivety, primarily. TC: And how did you come to be the editor and founder of an (infamous) poetry magazine? Jacob Demo: I'm 23 years old, currently residing between Oxford and London and the editor and founder of the infamous Popshot magazine. Tom Chatfield: Tell me a little about yourself. Almost by accident, I also ended up agreeing to contribute an interview with the poet Paul Farley to the current issue… Started on a shoestring budget from the kitchen of an Oxford flat, within four issues Popshot has become the first UK poetry magazine ever to gain worldwide distribution, combining poetry and illustration, and putting some of the best voices of the performance generation on paper-where, it seems, there's a vigorous demand for their wares on paper as well as in person.Ī few months before the fourth issue of Popshot appeared, I met with Denno to talk about his perspective on poetry, why and how Popshot came into being, and what written poetry might mean in a digital age. Both poetry's written and its spoken words tend to be, in their respective ways, introverted and distant from the mainstream of literary culture.Īnd yet-founded in October 2008 and edited by 23-year-old Jacob Denno- Popshot Magazine has almost by accident begun to challenge this orthodoxy.

Very few poets sell more than a few hundred books more poetry is written and taught in universities, on courses and for competitions than exists outside of them and the burgeoning performance scene is usually seen as more an offshoot of the music scene than a new phase in the literary canon.

The future of poetry is a quietly boring question that's been hanging around British letters for the last few decades.

Popshot writing contest