Castle Poetry

Thank you all for being so patient while I (and Castle Poetry) took a much-needed summer break. But now we’re into the autumn and it’s time to get working again.

Castle Poetry is still essentially a one-woman magazine, though with much appreciated helpers on the side – thank you! – and I have so much career work on in 2026, I know it will be hard to keep to a regular publishing schedule, as was mostly the case in the first half of the year. So the magazine is moving to a more irregular publication of work in future, rather than strictly fortnightly, starting with all the poems, reviews and podcasts that have been backing up over the summer months.

Thank you all for continuing to submit work, visit the site and share the magazine while it has been on summer hiatus. If you’re still in the queue for a submission response, hopefully it will come soon!

2026 has been an odd summer here in the UK, especially in the far south-west where Castle Poetry is based. It’s been incredibly hot and dry, with repeated heatwaves, some of them astonishingly intense for our usually rainy island nation, and because of that, it has felt like an eternal summer at times. I’m old enough to remember hot summers like this in the 70s, of course, when it felt as though we were living on the continent rather than good old Britain, the weather was so fine and sunny, day after day.

I imagine this unprecedented heat will have spawned thousands of summer poems among UK poets – or climate change poems, perhaps. I look forward to reading some of those during the cold and wet winter months, and remembering…

Now, though, the colour green is already returning to our gardens, parks and playing fields, spurred on by the recent heavy rain. Much needed though this is, I’m hoping it will not cause too much flooding in baked-dry areas. Though I suspect it will. I look forward to some green regeneration poems, and unfortunately a few flooding poems too.

Making a space for poetry in our lives – reading and experiencing poetry, as well as writing it – has never felt more important. The world has become harder, darker, more hostile in recent years and months… It has also become dominated by AI and a fight for truth and reality over the grim opposite.

Poetry is one way we can combat those struggles, with hope and creativity, with self-expression that reaches out to others, as poems to be read and heard and identified with. AI can write poetry, of course. But that’s not human expression, merely a regurgitation of other poets’ work scraped by machines and rehashed. I myself have received a few suspicious poetry submissions that read like AI. It can be difficult to tell fake poetry from the real stuff, written by humans for humans. Essentially, it can be hard to find truth in all this unreality.

But clear human communication can solve so many of our problems, from hostility to AI fakes, especially when it comes to our creative responses to war, disaster, emergency, human need. So let’s make a space for human poetry this year, and let others know that we write it, and where it can be found too.

Poetry is not a magic bullet but it may be a golden ticket, granting each of us access to a magical and empathetic world some people are never lucky enough to find. Let’s help others find it too. So read, write, dig deep, and consider human poetry. But, above all else, share it.

Jane Holland

Editor, Castle Poetry