You are much more likely to hear things being described as “poetic” than some thing outing itself as an actual “poem.” The adjective, derived from the Ancient Greek ποίησις or “poiesis,” refers to the emergence of something that did not previously exist. Having enjoyed particular relevance in sci-fi, fantasy and gaming discourses, it has for some time now become a buzzword for artists, curators, theorists, and the like, who might herald the dawn of a new “world” with the presentation of this or that exhibition or performance. The adjacency of such terminology to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger ought not pass the reader by. An alert author like Jack Halberstam, for instance, scrutinises the now hackneyed language of “worlding” and “world-building” as a reproduction of “the continuity of history, the forward momentum of progress and the endless focus on individual survival.” Fortunately, there is a fork in the path of poiesis, away from this aggrandising trajectory, towards something more banal, everyday, and real—and I think this path is being trodden by “poetry.”

If you tell someone you have been reading poetry—and, God forbid, enjoying it—their response will likely be similar to your recounting a mindfulness class or volunteering at a soup kitchen: the annoyance of the self-styled morally inferior announces itself with fake self-deprecation, with some sarcastic comment about not having read a single poem since high school, perhaps never out of choice. Which is to say: no one seems to know what poetry is or is up to these days. In his 2016 essay, “The Hatred of Poetry”—call it a coincidence that its UK publisher was Fitzcarraldo Editions—Ben Lerner describes encounters between the poet and “another adult” as scenes of reciprocal shaming: “Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.”

This “cannot be realized” is a kind of practical diversion from an idealism of form, or “worlding,” that I have come to perceive in contemporary poetry. But it’s not all there is. The advent of a new “poetry list” from the same house that published Lerner’s half-serious swan song for the medium’s likability offers a point of entry into forms of writing we might vaguely remember from school—the sonnet, the fugue, the haiku—while otherwise consisting mostly of free verse, with line breaks at rhythm and meaning’s discretion. But the first four volumes of the series—Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, and Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney—also mark a commitment to presence and a present which can only be mediated by the corrosive flow of language through history, experience, memory, and reflection.

The White and Blue Brand

The works arrive on the British market in a moment of seeming irrelevance for contemporary poetry in English, where even acclaimed poetry journals have been dropping like flies. The most devastating loss would probably be The White Review in 2023. (Another coincidence, which by now suggests that none of this is actually coincidental, is that Fitzcarraldo founder Jacques Testard was one of the founders of that magazine, too.) In the UK, there are still a number of smaller, independent poetry publishers to vie with giants like Faber and Granta. But nothing piques the public interest today like the frenetic commentary that swarmed the writing of, say, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in the 1970s, and the editorial intrigues that extended well beyond their deaths.

Now, anyone who has read Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman might conclude that it’s not all bad that poetry has moved on from the days of Plath and Hughes. A different kind of attention must be cultivated, which is what the new poetry list at Fitzcarraldo seems poised to do. Launched last year by the poet Rachael Allen, alongside editor and production manager Joely Day, it builds on a decade of prestige publishing by Testard, who can boast five Nobel Prize laureates (Alexievich, Ernaux, Jelinek, Tokarczuk, Fosse), many notable first translations into English, and a book design with a cultural cachet similar to Merve paperbacks in 1980s’ Berlin: fiction in blue; essays in white. The poetry series, styled white with a blue border on the cover, maintains the outward sincerity of Fitzcarraldo Editions; these are substantial books, too, all around 100 pages, if not more.