Submissions closed – a personal note

Dear Reader,

 It is time that I dedicated myself to my own writing.  As a poet, I feel that I have endured active marginalisation that has been profoundly destructive to my health.  However, the writing is the thing and I will be focusing on my own work from here on in. I believe that the Irish writing establishment does not like being challenged and that Poethead represented a thirteen-year weekly challenge to their very basic and sexist worldview of poetry.  

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.There has been constant failure to confront the causes of women poets’ exclusion meaning that exclusions will recur. At this time, Irish poetry has become a professional college-led activity saturated in identity politics and dominated by under forty-year-olds who are thrust into positions of authority on attaining their first book. One feels that the bloated professorial class is living vicariously through its student body.  The politics of identity that currently dominate the cultural narrative often exclude women’s voices. I am uninterested in argumentation that contributes to the further marginalisation of women artist’s voices, I don’t care how fashionable the repression is. If you exclude poets on the basis of class, income, age, sex, religion, race, formalism et al then you are simply prejudiced and quite likely a terrible snob with no imagination. The decisions made now about confronting canonical lack will echo for decades. As historical decisions to limit the narrative to the heroic and post-colonialism led to the exclusion of hundreds of women poets over many decades. 

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To the poets that I have published: thank you for your beautiful work, your emails, and your support over the past thirteen years. In particular, I have found solace and wonder in your work throughout the very difficult year of 2020. It was a great honour to work with you and to hear updates about new possibilities for your writing.

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The only  lesson every poet must learn is to protect and nourish the root of their work. Persistence and practice are key to the art and making time to work at poetry is imperative. I have started a personal poetry-centred site at text-work.

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.The site in its current form will remain available as an archive, but no more updates will be made. Please visit  the Poethead Archive  

Chris  Murray  (Updated March 2021/ November 2021)

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Detail from “Making Den of Sibyl Wren” by Salma Ahmad Caller (2018)

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