When I was asked to guest edit Propel I was filled up with excitement. Something about reading poets at the ‘pre-collection’ stage was especially enticing; I thought about how as poet, new to writing, you can be energised by the novelty of your voice on the page, and that this can bring a curiosity and sense of experimentation to your self-ventriloquism, which more experienced poets can struggle to summon; and I also knew there would be poets sharpened by experience, confident in their craft, but sharing something fresh and uncertain. In both cases there was the promise of poems engaging with risk, of brokering doubt against instinct. I knew it would be difficult to decide, in the end, on just twenty poems, but it would be fun, rewarding; it would be good for me, I told myself, after all, you haven’t written a poem yourself in a long while now, two, three years, has it been? Had it been so long? Yes. It had. I wanted to remember what it looked like, a new poem. Is there anything better in the world? Perhaps a new-born person or animal. Perhaps a too-hot bath, or realising you haven’t fucked up at work or it doesn’t actually matter that you have. Perhaps an orgasm with someone you particularly like, including yourself, if, indeed, you can learn to like yourself, and you should certainly try. Anyway, that’s the kind of esteemed company a new poem can keep in the wide Venn-diagram of good things.

But it wasn’t just the newness of the poems that appealed. If I am honest, I was looking for a transfusion of hope in the artform. I was looking for an antidote to the poetry I seemed to be encountering out there in the wild with increasing frequency. A kind of poetry that seemed to be predicated on something like ‘realist anecdotalism’: the recounting of ‘poetic experiences’ in order to provoke sympathetic or strong feeling without much analysis or energy attending to the nature of experience itself, and how it might be explored, felt, and shared through new configurations of language. As an editor I was hoping to find poems that didn’t take reality for granted, but through some strategy in thought and language deferred to its unlikeliness, its complexity, its unreliability, how spooky it is. I’m not suggesting reality needs to always be examined like that. I’m not saying we should move around the world with our minds constantly blown, like babies, like space-cadets, but I do think that in poems, at least, we should explore our experiences like poets. And that this might mean that we recognise that a ‘realism’ that neglects the peculiar and particular strangeness of our psychologies is disingenuous. Even if we organise our anecdotes into sonnets or sestinas, the notion of a self-evident experience is a lie. It is a lie founded on the habits of thought and language perpetuated for social convenience and practicality. For whose convenience? Right now, I would say for the convenience of Capitalism and its attendant narratives, ideologies and systems that (quite deliberately) moderate and police our thoughts and feelings, and the language we use to understand them. I admit that it is possible to find some contentment by exchanging a dulled account of being alive for the dog treats and tummy tickles bestowed upon us by whichever benevolent office or adjudicating panel, but should that suffice in poems too? Isn’t poetry supposed to transcend the habitual terms, values, rewards and horizons, and offer us a view beyond them? In recent years identity politics might have given us new terms with which to relocate ourselves, but what good are these terms if rather than give name to our uniqueness and complexity, and so free us from taxonomy and classification, they offer only new columns on the spreadsheet? We need poetry as a language for getting beyond the usual language that limits us, don’t we? I thought that was the deal? We need poems to offer something more insightful than an artfully curated report, don’t we? And I say that as someone with an Instagram account. When I agreed to edit this magazine I wanted to feel a little bit rescued from things, is what I mean. I wanted to feel a little less besieged by the relentless, reductive media of the world. 

Then I discovered that the nearly four hundred submissions I was to read in just over a month amounted to a pool of over two thousand poems, out of which I would be choosing just twenty. I peered out through the wide aperture of this realisation for several days, and I did nothing about it: over two thousand poems, in just under a month. Shit.

There would be no time to steep myself in each poem as I like to, to allow its own diction and timbre to become, briefly, my own; it would involve a different kind of reading altogether: I pictured a trail of blood leading into thick bracken; I imagined wading into a peat bog, pushing my arm in up to the elbow and pulling out, miraculously a gold tooth; I saw myself, a sleep-deprived delegate, fresh from the long-haul, the luggage carousel, the taxi, arriving through the doors of a grand conference hall, shaking hand after hand, trying to follow the subject of conversation, which was always changing…I was missing some crucial detail, I…I don’t think I can do this…I said to the face I had, in the meantime, doodled, despairingly, onto the palm of my hand. But I had agreed to do this, and nearly four hundred people were already counting on me. 

And so I took each poem into my brain for the duration of its happening, and I weighed it there as kindly as I could (as in kindred, as in kindness, as in kind-of?) while at the same time summoning the brute judiciousness required, against my nature, and I realised that all my gripes and gouts of steam about poems, and life — founded and unfounded — were perhaps not especially relevant in the end, when stood within the vantage of a poem, its dimensions and horizons, its singular creaturism. I was reminded that you should only expect a poem to be itself, and not some other poem you thought you were looking for. I am a humble platypus with this platitude. I am tired out, but replete and glad. I chose these twenty poems, and it was as difficult and delightful as I had expected.

— Jack Underwood
March 2023