More On Young Poets

I’ve been commenting, no doubt at more length than necessary, on the ongoing young Scottish poets debate over at One Night Stanzas.

My main points are – high quality will be key to the success of any young poets pamphlet series in Scotland; there are no “right people to know” other than people you sense an affinity with in any case; if you want to be part of a local poetry scene, you have to make an effort to join in. The ball is in your court; publishers and editors always want new talent, but simply aren’t going to scour the internet to find it; there’s a huge amount of goodwill out there towards young and emerging poets; if people do all the self-publicity stuff and the poetry isn’t good enough, it will mean nothing.

It could be that I'm not quite right on some of these matters, but I thought I'd throw out a few ideas.