REASONS FOR YOUR RHYMES

Not all successful poets are starving to death in a garret or dying of TB while pining for the (latest) love of their life.

Best-selling poet Blake Auden is a normal 36-year-old bloke, who seems perfectly healthy, and lives in Brighton with his two dogs.

In fact he doesn’t seem very miserable at all. “I have a wonderful family,” he says, “including a younger brother and sister, and I spend a lot of time in the West Midlands visiting my folks.”

With news that poetry is to be dropped from next year’s English GCSES, it’s heartwarming to hear that poetry writing is alive and well and thriving on social media.

In fact, people are buying and reading poetry more than ever before and 2018 was the best year ever for poetry sales.

Blake is one of the many poets using the power of Instagram to attract a mainly younger audience. He says: “Poetry is quite hard to make a solid living from, but I’ve done quite well so far out of self-published books.

“My first print run sold out in six months, and the second print run took six weeks to sell the same number of copies.”

A quick look at Blake’s Instagram shows he’s very popular with the ladies, and much of his poetry is about heartbreak.

He says: “As Robert Graves once said, ‘To be a poet is a condition, not a profession’. My work focuses mainly on love, loss and mental health. But I’ll write about anything that really resonates with me. Lately, I’ve written quite a few lockdown poems!”

Blake’s not the only one who’s been putting pen to paper over lockdown – my inbox practically overfloweth with poems from talented readers, so next weekend we’ll be launching a competition to find two Daily Mirror poets. As a judge for our new poetry competition, Blake says great poetry is “anything that’s honest and vulnerable. I want to read something that feels like it has the author’s soul in it”.

Many people believe it’s not a poem if it doesn’t rhyme, but Blake is adamant: “Not at all! Some of the greatest poets in history didn’t use rhyming structures!”

By Blake Auden Blake Auden’s debut book Tell The Birds She’s Gone is available now, and his second collection, Beekeeper, will be released next month. Find his books at blakeauden.com, and follow him @blakeaudenpoetry