Hi there. Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie here, welcoming you to the launch issue of The Friday Poem.
This is our hope for The Friday Poem: Good poetry, hell no, great poetry, and an array of interesting features and reviews, available to all, on a fine looking site that functions well. Friendly, open, and maybe just a little bit irreverent.
We are not aligned to any particular school or type of poetry. Long or short, old or new, lyric, narrative or dramatic, from haikus to epics, from sonnets to soliloquies, from ballads to blank verse, it’s all good. Poetry can be political, elegiac, prophetic, obscure, but it must be honest (by which we don’t mean autobiographical) and crafted. The poetry we love is arresting, felt. Submit yours. Surprise us.
We want The Friday Poem to be accessible to everyone. This means it must be free to read. It means we have made the site work for blind people and people with impaired vision, through – for example – underlined links, semantic headings (read about semantic structure here), alt text and and high contrast. It also means we welcome contributions from anyone. (It’s traditional to stick a list in here – any gender, any colour, any sexuality etc, but we just mean anyone.)
Enormous thanks to our team of writers / contributors this month, especially Helen Ivory and Bruno Cooke, and our reviewers Richie McCaffery, Mat Riches and Emma Simon. More from all of them coming soon. Thanks to Giles Turnbull for advice on accessibility. And thanks especially to Meg Peacocke for our first Friday Poem, and good luck to her with her forthcoming collection, The Long Habit of Living, which will be published by HappenStance Press later this year.
We’ve done our bit. Now we rely on you to send us your poems, your ideas for features, the books you want us to review and reviews you want us to print. We hope you will subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and also follow, like, share and tweet, if that’s your thing. And we hope you will read it – read the poems, read the Frip – and let us know what you think. Over to you …