Imagine an art gallery where every canvas is the same size, every painting uses the same media, every image is monochrome.

Some may argue that it would be a fabulous art gallery to visit. You get to concentrate on the subject matter rather than be distracted by an artist’s individuality in the way he presents himself. Some may say that to create art with such constraints is a breach of the fundamentals of art. The artists themselves would most likely see it as an interesting exercise but refuse to conform to it being the norm.

Yet poets conform. Every ‘official’ representative body of the poetic world enforces strict rules on how poems should be presented to them. I presume this means that poems of other formats are not ‘proper’ poems.

I have just completed and published my second poetry collection along with another author’s, making a total number of fifteen books I have helped through to publication. Each one is unique. In some cases the author has illustrated, in others the author has asked for a settled spacing to create an additional question of the book as a whole, in one there is a blatant conglomeration of prose and poetry on the same page… and they are all magnificent.

The progression of poetry outside of the ‘established’ organisations, is an exciting transformation into a combined visual, audible, anarchical attack of the reader. And it’s thrilling. In my town, Brighton, poems are being posted in disused buildings, stickered on empty shops and every poetic rule is whipped into submission by the poet’s desire to just ‘get it out there’ because they also see the need to create a new audience and a new platform for their work.

I have no doubt that once these ‘rebel’ poets have achieved that audience, drowning out the table pounding of die-hards bleating on about meter, those same ‘official’ representatives will embrace the genre, say that it was all their idea anyway and then impose rules on how subsequent works should be presented in order to achieve recognition.

So I hereby declare the formation of the Unofficial Poetry Society. The only rule is that there are no rules. Sign up at any local lavatory wall. No subscription required.