Editorial

‘You are really living the writer’s life, aren’t you?’ Such was a friend’s opinion when last year I was working as a night manager of a fairly dodgy hotel. I would work from 11pm until 7am, return home to get my son ready for school, sleep for a few hours while he was away, only waking to collect him. Here, I would have a few hours of lucidity before a second, post-meal sleep – and beginning the cycle again.

The Writer’s Life, my friend called it. This intrigued me. That such a life might be defined as much by what we do to allow the writing to happen as by the act of writing itself. The writing life, I would call it, during all the hours when I was not at the desk.

Those nights when I was working in the hotel, I began to sense more of this relationship to the writing life. A sense, maybe, of how the working life impacts and colours the relationship to poetry.

During my time in the hotel, I saw drug use, escorts, violence (particularly aimed at women) – where can poetry find its way in such a place? Inevitably, no matter the turmoil of the night, around 3:30am everything calmed and even the most troublesome guest usually faded into sleep. Poetry, then, became something synonymous with the calm of the aftermath. In this little respite until the first guests re-emerged around 6am, I would listen through one discreet headphone to different recitals: Seamus Heaney, Alice Oswald, Derek Walcott or Jorge Luis Borges.

I can attest to how different their words and voices seemed at that time, after those things, than to any other time I have engaged with their work.

On my nights off there was no point in trying to return to sleeping through the regular hours of the night. I learned early that such attempts only deepened the disorientation. The exhaustion. It was better to live with the inverted circadian rhythm than to labour under the mistaken belief that it was a wholly malleable thing. It was better to stick to the night pattern. On these off-nights, the main writing life did happen. I stayed up and wrote – but in the way that the poetry of others was changed by the work, I felt my own writing was altered too.

Around this time, I received an email from a younger poet asking why it was proving so difficult to find a job in poetry. I wondered about the disservice we do to younger poets by sometimes hiding or covering over the work we do to support our poetry. There are few jobs in poetry – and, indeed, who is to say the jobs in poetry are beneficial for the poet? Here, then, is why I was so interested in this first issue to have poets discussing the work that supported them while the writing happened.

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As a small addition to these thoughts, I also want to touch on something of my first few weeks in this role of editor. My vision for the magazine is centred around partnerships. I see Poetry London as being a place to celebrate and showcase poets and poetry (and what great work we have in this first issue) but I also hope to spotlight something of the activities of other arts organisations who endeavour to bolster our cultural lives in an increasingly difficult landscape.

Starting from this issue, I am pleased to have The Society of Authors trust us to give the Eric Gregory Awards a regular home in our summer issues. We look forward to sharing the work of these talented poets. Likewise, in presenting translations of Laura Wittner by Juana Adcock, this issue also displays the quality of the work done by the Poetry Translation Centre. It would also be remiss of me not to spend a portion of this first editorial thanking the Fenton Arts Trust who have recently given funding to re-establish the Poetry London Mentorship Scheme. And thanks, too, must be given to The Royal Society of Arts, The Cockayne Foundation, The Eliot Foundation, for their support in helping Poetry London reach new audiences.

I hope you enjoy this first issue.