When editing a magazine, I get anxious. That’s not exactly news: making a cup of tea is enough to get me palpitating with apprehension most days. But this concern is particular – the process of sifting through poetry submissions creates the subtle but insistent fear of abundance as well as a vertiginous dread of my own temporary despotic power. Texts are living beings. To engage with poems that their authors have released gently into the wild is a great responsibility. All those scurrying lives.

Moreover, I was editing this issue of Propel over the Christmas holiday period and in its aftermath. Abundance and guilt were Big Themes: food and drink, the pressure to overspend, the opening of gifts and the monumental production of waste, the over-saturation of images on social media. It was all around me, tinsel-like, glittering and shedding.

I was spending my time looking through 507 separate poetry submissions, a record number for Propel. My concern in these cases is that I’m going to end up feeling like one of the dozen commuters I used to pass every day after work in Leeds station Marks & Spencers, glassy-eyed in front of the sandwich counter, paralysed by choice, by the sheer fact of abundance. You could recognise it in each person’s stance – this evening decision was freighted. What if they chose the wrong filling and had to live with postmodern-cheese-savoury regret? Bread-based ennui? I worry that I won’t be able to ‘see’ the poems any more, just a wall of best-ordered-best-words, all equally appealing. 

That’s what festive holidays will do to you: you wake up one day unable to tell the difference between a poem and sandwich. Obviously, as soon as I started to read the many and varied submissions we’d received for the issue I remembered. It’s ok! Stand down! Abundance in poetry has a different, unmatched quality. In fact, in late capitalism, it is an indicator of counter-cultural health. So notions of  ‘choice’ take on a new, refreshing quality too. I felt hopeful that so many writers were producing and sharing work in midwinter gloom, when all action can seem futile. That over a year since the genocide in Gaza began, poets like Sallyanne Rock and Helena Fornells Nadal are still writing pieces which subtly investigate the partiality of how we engage with complicity and conflict, how we ‘see’ or choose to unsee; that Ger Duffy was re-imagining place so effectively; that Daniel Nixon found potent metaphor in a drive towards Axe Edge; that Laura Strickland was addressing the body tenderly ‘as though she is a child scared / by a sudden knock at the window.’

I was soon happily lost pieces I was reading, their wit, warmth, sharpness and generosity, the impulse that led Rency Raquid to write ‘To The Tall Man in Queen’s Library’. And the poems I wished to include rose to the surface. At the risk of reiterating a cliché, it isn’t a matter of selecting ‘the best’ pieces, with the inference being that anything which isn’t chosen fundamentally lacks something. There were many great poems I couldn’t include in my selection of twenty. Its more like the process of building and arranging a bouquet – you can’t have all the stems and flowers, you pick ones that work together, that you’re drawn to on that particular day, in whatever weird convergence of place and time and mood.

Some of the poems I liked stood out because they really intrigued me – Julie Kennedy’s piece ‘Change of Purpose’ is a great example of this. I read it many, many times. I admired longer poems like ‘Cyanotypes’ by Brad Cohen, but I was also drawn to really short poems, admiring their suggestive, compact power (read Ben Verinder’s ‘Lavender’ if you want to see this in action). But I’ll give the last word to Abhijeet Singh, whose piece ‘Reading Emily Dickinson’ instantly caught my attention:

Between you and me, there are things in poetry

one must not answer.

I hope you enjoy the questions these poems provoke and that they inspire you to add to the abundance of the literary landscape. It is a form of plenty we can feel comfortable with, thankful for, even.

— Helen Mort
January 2025