We’re not singing anymore. 

What does the dominant aesthetic of contemporary poetry tell you about us right now? In much published work, there is a tendency towards fracture and disconnection. Maybe that’s where we are. The ice-caps are dissolving. Deadly fires dance across continents, along with catastrophic floods, and hailstones the size of human hearts. Thousands of civilians are being slaughtered in the Middle East, in Sudan and many more parts of the world. And today (just like yesterday or tomorrow or the day after) there are tens of millions of people displaced from their homes by war, persecution or famine.  

What do we do about this as poets? There is not one answer. But could we do more than simply be the wreckage on the page? Right now, we need connection. We need to hear and understand each other, and find places where we can meet. When the quality of public debate on the things that matter is pitched deliberately to fracture us from each other, it seems like a bad time to stop singing.  

Form is bodily. It is your breath, your pace, your heartbeat. No doubt in the history of poetry, it has been trussed and wielded to exclude many of us. But to attempt to erase it altogether is to be less human. Forgetting dressed up as craft. Would you trust a government that told you everything that has happened in the last 20, 50 or 100 years could be dismissed or simply forgotten? Why would you trust a poet who told you the same thing about poetry? Song came before speech. The sound you make is important.  

We set up Black Iris because we think there should still be a place for singing. We’re not the only place. But we believe there is room for more of us, so here we are. If we have a creed, it is for work that says something – personal or political or both – about what it means to be human. Be unapologetic. Be serious. Be unapologetic about your seriousness. Above all, say everything well with a human sound – horribly, beautifully or with humour, traditionally or untraditionally.  

Will we make a difference? We can’t promise that. To quote Ilya Kaminsky, in his brilliant annual lecture for the Poetry Society, “…in a time of crisis, the language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows us the changes within us…” We will start by building a space where we can be serious together, and treat our dying world and its inhabitants (including ourselves) with care. It may be that the best we can be right now is palliative. But what is more human than that?