fashions in poetry

June 2026. I have been trying to locate poets unknown to me, primarily through the Poetry Book Society website. It lists about 250 books a year (currently going back to 2019), and there are blurbs for (almost) all of them, by the publisher. So, you can pick possible winners using the blurbs as a semi-transparent screen through which something is visible. I am feeling good about this, having just released (through Litter magazine) reviews of four new poets: Imogen Cassels, Adam Piette, Daniel Hinds, Olivia McCannon. Two of these came from the PBS site. They all are very good, I thought. I would so much like to have a list of (almost) all the good poetry books of the 21st century, so that patterns of change or of creative optimism would become visible. I enjoyed the list of 207 poets which came back from the survey in Angel Exhaust 24, but I don’t feel it is a very comprehensive list. It suggests a spacious landscape but leaves a lot of the features out. I have also located Angela Leighton and Rhiannon Hooson through the same site, excellent poets.

I have been re-reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on hedge fund analysts who foresaw the sub-prime mortgage derivatives crisis of 2007-8 and made money by shorting the market. It presents dissidents of high intelligence who did the analytical work better than company officers of great banking corporations, and who rejected conventional analysis. This is exciting, and it is why Lewis’s book is much more interesting than most books on the crisis. But, that position is too indulgent. I don’t think the poetry business is quite so vulnerable to the dissidents as Lehman Brothers was. If the mainstream produces lots of good books, you lose your bet against them- and forfeit your money. More concretely, if you read 250 blurbs you definitely see a lot of hype. That argues a basic corruption, lurking in the process. But, I also think that a lot of the underlying product is very good. And, if you have the ability to read the hype correctly, you can let it lead you to the good stuff. The blurbs are not very honest, but they are not the poetry process itself.

I tend to regard the Blurb as like the sleeve of an LP – a piece of added value which can be beautiful in itself.

A lot of the books in these 250 or so blurbs sound very similar to each other.
I noted about 30 blurbs which describe trauma tourism. The poet has been affected by dire events, their nephew has died of plague, their cat has flu, their grandmother was a war criminal, etc., and this makes their poetry important.
Gothic/ body dysmorphia. This is an era where illnesses related to body dysmorphia, a loss of balance in the way the mind perceives physical proportions, are common and increasing. Literary opinion is able to relate this to the Gothic – horror is connected to violent reactions to the human body, and monsters are a realisation of certain pervasive fantasies. The Gothic is seen as a form of protest. If we read “[X] is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. […] You will want to follow Miranda down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self”, we see the heroine of the Gothic romance taken as a model of sensitivity and anxiety.

One publisher in particular has a line of conservatism. One gradually realises that all their authors have the same profile, and that this favoured style involves rejecting every innovation which has arrived since the 1950s. In fact, this is 1950s poetry. The blurbs do not make this explicit, for example they do not say “find an intact world in which it is still 1955 and Churchill is still prime minister” or “enter a world where literary theory has never happened”. The message is clear at an unconscious level. And you can see that that publisher is turning down anything modern. This is a “truth with lack of evidence”.

My feeling about the ideas is that the best 200 poets have nothing to do with them, and they really reflect what the publishers think will sell. This is a way of describing the fashions of the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that poets read the blurbs, see what publishers like, and are encouraged by that to design their own poetry along the same lines. Everyone wants to get published. It is also possible that the poets are more original than the blurbs, and that the publicity material makes a lot of poetry sound the same when it isn’t. The point I want to make is that you can’t describe a central fashion of the era, in the way that Auden and MacNeice were central in the 1930s. You had a small elite then, and people badly want to sound like they were part of it. They did all sound like each other. The educated elite now counts millions of people, and it produces very diverse voices. There are predictable fashions in 2026, but they are nothing like central.

Of course, the theme of ecological disaster appears in dozens of these blurbs, and that is also something which the best poets write about. That is not a very recent idea (and we don’t suppose that governments are going to make the problem go away in the short term). This isn’t a special interest issue, it affects everyone.

Do the fashions reflect the wishes of the audience, as a pressure which only needs articulating, or the wishes of the publishers? I don’t see any evidence which would really get to the heart of this. It would be a dream for a historian if you could take the blurbs, existing text which it is easy to collect and store, and decide “this speaks for the wishes of the audience”. Because the history of the audience is always hard to write, and less studied. It would also be satisfying if we could say “the blurbs describe the ideal and then the poets strive to realise it and fail”. That is a big win for the historian, but obviously it’s not a very sound result. Hype must represent unfulfilled wishes in a distorted form… and you can't use a special mirror to reverse the distortion.

Undeniably, a lot of the write-ups present being gay, or being on the autistic spectrum, etc., as a selling point. I just wonder if the gay poets are appealing to an audience which isn’t gay. There is an element of protest here – we are hearing feelings which were repressed in the 1950s, we are protesting against the cultural norms of the Cold War. But, these are feelings which I didn’t have. They aren’t my feelings. Published poetry covers a wide spectrum but I have a strange feeling that people aren’t really more unusual and more complex than they were in 1955. Most of the blurbs just fly past me, an excitement which I am not feeling – maybe some of the poetry also rushes past my ears without ever touching me.


I didn’t mention poems about witches. These come in at about 1 or 2% of the list, so they aren’t a large phenomenon. Obviously, the audience read their Harry Potter and want poems about witches.

I have just bought (2nd hand, in Hay on Wye) an anthology, New Poems 1953, which can act as a check on what is new in new poetry. Nobody admitted to being gay in the 1950s. No poets, anyway. It just wasn’t a move that even existed. I suppose that unchanged in the 1960s… I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry and admitted to being gay in the 1960s. This may just be my bad memory. Is that true? It would have been very difficult. And in the 1970s none of the older gay poets came out. Exceptions – Thom Gunn and James Kirkup. So the scene has been going through a phase of decompression, derepression, which has continued, probably, over half a century.
I think it’s difficult for poets today to say to themselves “when I write about the unusual aspects of my feelings it alienates most of the audience because they don’t have those feelings and don’t respond to the depiction of them”. But it may be true. It always has been true. And it may be the publishers saying “what is unusual, even perverse, even maladjusted, about you is what interests people most, so forget about writing poems about anything else”. This may be a moment of wisdom which is profoundly flawed, and which may disappear.
If the scene is so de-repressed, the editors can claim “we have no blocks on our perception so it is not possible for any gifted poet to be turned down by the editors, us”. That is a bit problematic. It is quite a gun to point at anyone who doesn’t play the usual tunes. I think there is a tier of poets who really don’t sound commercial to the editors and who really do have a fascinating artistic experience to offer. There still a line between insiders and outsiders. It may have moved a bit but it is still there.

By searching, I have found that the PBS on-line store goes back to 2016 and that it has roughly 4000 items. The search they offer scans the blurbs as well as just the titles. I searched this database with the word term “queer” and got 214 results. I searched with the term “avant garde” and got 11 hits, all of them European. More checks… the blurb writers are deathly afraid of the words experimental, avant garde, modernist, and probably see them as chilling the audience, killing sales. Well, I don’t think that there has been no avant garde poetry in Britain over the last 10 years. But, let’s be fair – they like the word “queer”, they are fine with it and a queer audience can probably also find the books they want.
(The 4000 count is not all books, it includes things like PBS press releases. But the lexical constraints are relevant in both cases.) (I know automated searches can produce stupid results. I used the string “nuance” and got 69 hits. The Find function certainly can’t tell you if the blurb writer is being sincere!) (“liminal” got 50 hits, another word which literate people use when they have no idea what to say.)
214 of 4000 is about 2%. The long-term percentage of gay people in the population is probably around 2%. Actually, the percentage of gay poets in 1955 was about 2%, it's just that they were all in a dark friendly closet together, somewhere between Soho and the BBC. I won't tell if you don't.
British Poetry Revival, one hit.