This blog is a part-time hobby. It began when I noticed that many visitors to my own site were young South Africans from various backgrounds Googling ‘how to publish poetry’. They’d ask me questions that almost always required the same answer: ‘read more, practice more, submit to magazines’.

So the advice on this site can be summarised is one sentence: Keep improving your poetry by reading and practice, and one day you’ll get published.

Please note that I cannot and do not review poems. Reviewing poems is a job for paid professionals, and I have another full-time job. Anyway, the best review you can get is an acceptance or rejection letter from a poetry magazine, or someone actually paying for your own self-published leaflet.

I’m Arthur Attwell, and in 2006 my collection of poems, Killing Time, was published by SnailPress in the UCT Writers Series. I don’t write a lot, but I have published poems in New Contrast, Carapace, and Magma. I was, for a time, poetry editor of New Contrast, and, after the publication of my own book, became the publisher of the UCT Writers Series, in conjunction with the UCT Centre for Creative Writing.