ISSUE ELEVEN

Introduction

In my opinion there are various and overlapping engine rooms of new writing. One is the workshop in all its many forms: there’s the get-together in someone’s house, where people sit around the kitchen table once a month and talk in depth about poems written by people that, maybe, they’ve known for years and there’s the slightly more formal setting of the University or community writing group where time is taken over new work until the new work shines more brightly.

Another of these engine rooms is the Open Mic Night, where new work is tested in the air in front of an audience of poets and the merely curious. Here is redrafting as public breathing, where a line that looked good on the page shatters and deflates in the listening room, or flies more powerfully than the writer ever imagined. 

The third of my engine rooms is the poetry magazine, like the one you’re reading now. The magazine is a real testing-ground for new work, a path for language to negotiate, a place for lines and stanzas to take their places alongside other lines and stanzas. Magazines are, or should be, safe spaces where new poems can blink in the light of day, and be welcomed into that light by readers who are hungry for untested work.

And for me there’s something really urgent and powerful about a single poem in magazine; the poem has to stand on its own feet, has to declare Here I am; here I really am without the scaffolding that a pamphlet or a full collection offers. The older I get the more I become attracted to the single poem as cultural object, as arena for debate, as meeting place for human minds.

So I hope you’ll enjoy the single poems I’ve selected for this issue of Propel; I loved the process of reading and rereading all the entries and I enjoyed the process of editing the poems into a coherent gang of work that could jostle its way onto the page. I wanted poems that surprised me, that made me gaze into space as I tried to take them in, and that made me put them on one side to return to them later to see if they were as good as I thought they were.

Take your time with these poems. Just because it’s a poem on its own doesn’t mean that it lacks the cultural weight of an opera or a three-act play. Absorb the poems. Live with them.

Then, of course, read more poems. Then, of course, write some of your own. Well, one at least. 

— Ian McMillan
May 2024

Ian McMillan is a poet and performer from Yorkshire, as well as a playwright, journalist, and all-round poetry whirlwind. As well as writing and performing his own work, for both adults and children, he is a tireless champion of poetry and the spoken arts, and a campaigner for the arts to be for everybody. He has been a poet, broadcaster, commentator and programme maker for over 35 years. His first collection, The Changing Problem, was published by Carcanet in 1980, and since then he has published nearly thirty books. He presents The Verb every week on BBC R3 and he’s a regular on BBC Breakfast, Coast, Pick of the Week, You & Yours, Last Word and The Arts Show. Previously, Ian was resident poet for English National Opera, UK Trade & Investment, Yorkshire TV’s Investigative Poet and Humberside Police’s Beat Poet. He’s been a castaway on Desert Island Discs and a subject of The South Bank Show. Cats make him sneeze. X: @IMcMillan