Dear Readers,

Cambridge Poetry was founded by me - author, poet and musician, Dan Leighton.

I studied Biological Anthropology at Churchill College, Cambridge and subsequently have had careers in technology, publishing, secondary education and product creation.

The magazine came about for three reasons. Firstly I’ve struggled with the fallout of having ADHD my entire life and became increasingly irritated by the (inadvertently) unclimbable barriers placed in the way of neurodivergent authors by many magazine, journals and publishers.

Douglas Adams said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” For sufferers of ADHD, that noise is the sound of sadness and frustration. It is the sound of yet another failure to remember an important thing. So, as a consequence, I set up this magazine with very different policies around publishing to allow everyone to feel comfortable submitting their work. Make it easy to submit. Don’t fret about choosing. We can help.

The second reason was that we want to share the music, the joy and the beauty of language. This means we are always looking for poetry which sings to people, emotionally, aurally, technically and even when simply read on the page.

I had a strange and intriguing thought one day, not so long ago. It occurred to me that poetry is almost unique in how we experience it. Unlike art, music or a novel, which we experience as an observer of the artist's brush-strokes, a listener to someone's voice or instrument, or an absorber of the novel’s narratorial or character voice - poetry is something we typically experience in our own voice (or voices) when we read it from the page. Unless the author has a very strong characterisation of voice within the poem, I suspect we experience it as our own internal voice.

And it occured to me that perhaps this is what makes poetry so compelling as an art form (and why it has continued to hang about for so long!) - because it inherently resonates and connects with us in our own subconscious.

So, within the pages of the magazine, we hope to find, select, promote and publish poetry that has a space for each reader to experience the emotions as themselves - even if the poem is narrating a totally different world. We are looking for connections with each other.

The third reason for starting the magazine, and one that only became obvious to me after creating our ‘After Development’ acceptance category, is that I really miss teaching! I have done a lot of mentoring since leaving classroom teaching and schools in 2016, but there is nothing like helping someone in detail to improve their work. And my goodness, this seems to have worked well. We have some outstanding work arriving after development. So keep sending us what you have and we shall do our best to help!

But, I need to ask for help here. Let me be honest, every time I reach out to a poet to say words to the effect of, “Look, there’s something here, but it needs work…” I have my heart in my mouth. I have been badly burned in the past when working with poets who I thought wanted to improve their work, but it turned out they just wanted to have someone validate their (poor) choices. This is why I totally understand why many other journals send bland rejection letters and try to be as inoffensive as possible. But, I just can’t do it myself.

If I can see someone’s work has power, meaning and a vital spark - but it is being lost in the mix because the technique, experience and craft is not yet there - it is almost impossible for me not to want to reach out and offer to help. So, please, if you get a message offering acceptance after development, be ready for the challenge because we hold the opinion that, if you are going to expect others to take the time to read your work in a magazine, what you want to say is irrelevant if the writing is not up to scratch!

Once a piece is published it, in some ways, becomes the property of the mind that reads it - it is, after all, being heard in their head. So forgive us everyone, we are going to be brave, and risk being yelled at - and continue to offer development advice for as long as we have the time and capacity to do so.

A final thought, none of this is to say that the magazine is going to accept work which is not of a decent quality. We don’t expect work to be perfect on publication. But we want every piece to have something new, fresh, exciting, resonant or emotionally engaging about it. We love the idea of publishing established poets with decades of polished, beautiful experience right alongside poets that are raw, fresh, vibrant and new. No poem or poet is ever fully complete after all.

So, it only remains to say, very best wishes to you all and we look forward to reading your work and sharing the joy of it with others!

Dan Leighton

Editor