The Pommunist Manifesto
by and published in Edition Ten of Pomegranate
This is Pomegranate’s tenth issue in two and a half years, and the first to appear with our brand new Arts Council funded design. It seems like a good time to reflect on what we’ve done and look at why we’re still needed.
When we decided to found a poetry magazine in 2007, it was for quite selfish reasons. We were all young poets around the age of eighteen, who had no idea how to get better at poetry or find a nook for ourselves in the terrifying world of Proper Writers. Back then, established older poets seemed like gods; not just all-powerful and unfathomably skilled, but dignified and distant, usually with grey hair and long beards. We wanted to be real poets, and aspired to that level of ability, but didn’t fit the brief.
In starting Pomegranate, we wanted to add to ‘poet’ the definition of something inbetween the fully-formed writer (the laureates and stalwarts of Radio 4) and the stereotypical, angst-ridden, isolated teenager. We wanted to make a place for urgent and carefully worked poetry by writers lost in the ether between school poetry competitions and a Selected Works. We wanted to meet other young poets who were sassier and more confident than us, to give us hope, and we wanted to get to know other young writers who lacked the network of support that we already had. And we also wanted to have a massive poetry party.
I think, in some ways, we’ve succeeded. Not the party – that’s still in the works, and it’s going to be epic when it happens – but the leg-up to new writers, and the community of improvement. But we’re not done. There is still a lingering tendency amongst older writers (and critics) to dismiss poets under thirty as inexperienced and unable really to write a good poem. To ignore the output of a whole group of people is to miss a trick, and in any case this sort of attitude is damaging to the writers themselves. While it seems a great deal of fifteen-year-olds write poetry alone in their bedrooms, few make the leap towards improving it, workshopping it with other writers, and giving it to other people to read. Fewer still continue doing so into their twenties and thirties. School is a good place to be a poet, but once that poet hits eighteen any poems she enters for competitions or magazines will be competing against those of writers three times her age, with a raft of publishing credits and awards to their names. Suddenly abandoned, the young poet’s work seems to her embarrassingly inferior to poems by her older peers. This confidence knock can stop someone writing forever.
But there is a growing movement of younger poets and projects who are helping other young writers to be taken more seriously. Projects and publishers like FuseLit and Mimesis, and Bloodaxe anthologies and pamphlet series by Faber and tall-lighthouse, are all now doing their bit and, though it would be horrifically Sunday supplement to say that “for the youngsters, poetry is cool”, at least there are a lot of us doing what we love now, and helping others do the same. As The Beatles would say, it’s getting better all the time.
The benefits of encouraging young people to write are more than therapeutic; we let young poets drop off the radar at our peril. The poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy had her first poems published when she was 15, and Seamus Heaney when he was 23. As poets, they were not born fully formed at 45. Writers need to be taken seriously to start with and then pushed towards improvement. The more we do this, the better our literary culture will be; both energetic in the short term, and high quality in the long.
Of course, there’s a time limit. We won’t be under thirty ourselves forever, and as we all creep further towards that milestone it’s inevitable that the tone of Pomegranate will become more like that of a genial older sibling than of a poetry-loving best mate on a sugar high. But if we achieve what we hope to achieve, then there’ll be a new generation of writers snapping at our heels long before our time is up, ready to tell us we’ve got it all wrong, changing things more than we ever did. And they’ll probably have a snappier name. I can’t wait to meet them.
Charlotte Runcie
Charlotte is Pomegranate’s editor. She won first prize in the Christopher Tower poetry awards in 2007. When she’s not being a poetry editor, she’s a student and a journalist, and was named Columnist of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2009. She’s a big fan of photography and is a connoisseur of exotic teas. You can usually find her living in Edinburgh or studying at Cambridge University, but she may occasionally be elsewhere. Her first pamphlet of poems, seventeen horse skeletons, is published by tall-lighthouse.