Welcome to the home of missed the boat, a poetry magazine for anyone who feels like it's too late. What does that mean? Great question. What's missed the boat all about? A second great question............
When I graduated from my undergraduate degree and left the beautiful town I studied in, I moved to a grey city (sorry to any residents of the grey city in question), got rejected from approx 9000 jobs, and ended up working in retail (many such cases.) Gradually, the creeping sense that the trajectory of my life had ground to a halt began to set in. I deleted Instagram from my phone in an attempt to feel better and then didn't feel better. All the opportunities I had been too afraid or too busy to take suddenly seemed like the missing pieces of a puzzle I could no longer ever complete.
In many ways, this was a complete overreaction. But I know that I'm not the only person to have come face to face with this feeling of having arrived too late to your own life.
& in the midst of all this was poetry. I had studied and loved and written it for many years, but it was during this evil transitory period that I realised just how passionate I am about it: its singular ability to allow its writer to shapeshift and to hide in plain sight, its reader to see the world anew. When I felt unsure of everything, I was tethered to myself and to the world through my own practice of poetry and by reading the work of others. There is a lot that I can’t do anything about, but it is in my power (and would probably be pretty fun, I thought) to share the thing I love with others, and allow others to share it with me.
And thus, Missed the Boat came into the world to celebrate and share poetry of all forms and kinds, to be a home for the work of anyone who feels like they’ve missed their boat, and to prove by its small existence that it isn’t too late for any of us. Yippee!!!
The Missed the Boat team consists entirely and exclusively of me! Subsequently all your submissions are run by me and are therefore subject to my tastes and general whims. With the exception of what's in the submission guidelines there are no official parameters to what you can send me, but I'm particularly fond of stuff that's surprising, recklessly truthful, and a bit weird. If you're looking for inspiration, I love the work of John Burnside, Raymond Antrobus, Alice Oswald, and Rilke, and having a look through all of the poems/poets published in our previous issue might also help you get a sense of what I'm looking for. Ultimately, though, I'll read anything and everything you send my way. You should totally do it. ↓