I first began to read contemporary poetry in my late teens and early twenties, when the world of poetry seemed an exclusive and rarefied one to a young person doing an ordinary job for a living, far from any hothouse atmosphere a university course might have offered. I’ve no idea if there were such things as workshops and poetry groups then. Had there been and had I taken advantage of one, my own writing might have improved and expanded beyond the private scribbling that produced an occasional sense of achievement. But being young I may have felt there were more urgent demands on my time, for I had a view of poetry as a private process between the poet and the page.

When I think back to the poets I read and was aware of, they all seemed to have jobs in the real world. Edwin Brock was an ex-policeman and advertising executive, Dannie Abse was a doctor, Miroslav Holub was an eminent scientist. And later there was P.D.James’ fictional policeman and poet, Adam Galbraith, to reinforce the non-remunerative role of poetry.

Although the real world still impinges on poets today, there is a difference. The plethora of courses and workshops, on-line and real, mentoring schemes, residencies, MA’s and practice-based PhD’s produce many more talented poets writing more and more poems. And they also provide some sort of an income for those who teach, tutor, facilitate, as well as feeding the idea that there’s a satisfying and all-encompassing ‘life poetic’ to be had.

Inevitably it follows there are more poets seeking recognition and publication. But it’s a truism to say the audience and readership for poetry remain mostly other poets. We’re a population in which the interest in hearing or reading the work of others is accompanied by the desire to promote our own work, which makes for a congested environment. Where at one time you’d come across any number of familiar names in magazines and competition results, I’ve noticed recently how many new names and debut collections there are. However good the work is, and so much of it is, how much, I ask myself, could be classed as ‘necessary’ ­ – to use that favourite ‘blurbonic’ word?

Now that I’ve pulled that word ‘necessary’ out of the bag, it instantly demands definition. Used in the soundbite context of blurbs, it might sound pretentious and suspect. But beyond this there are two aspects of the word that come to mind.

Firstly, as an editor/publisher I realise I look for the quality a poem has that suggests it’s a driven matter, something the poet has been compelled to write via some internal process – emotion, memory, idea. It carries within it, by tone, style or syntax, the individual identity of the poet and a groundedness that comes from experience. I’d contrast such poems with those that, however competent, seem to have been generated for the sake of generating a poem – as in those workshop projects where we play and flex the muscles of our craft but don’t always end up with anything worth taking further.

Secondly, I go back to my original perspective, the private business between poet and the page. Surely, that’s where necessity lies, not in the publication. As with all the fellow poets I know, I do it because it’s part of who I am. And as if to prove this, I think of how out-of-sorts, diminished I feel when nothing seems to work or I’m going through a fallow period, fearing that this may in fact be irreversible climate change. I once heard Alistair Reid joke there were too many poems in the world: we should all be rationed to six a year. Well, I have tried. I really have. But it’s no good, I’m more needy than that.