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Like more people than you would imagine, I once had a spreadsheet keeping track of the poems I had written, where I had submitted them, and the results. I rarely look at it now. I have not published many poems recently, either. Partly this is just life. Letting go of a poem – researching magazines and preparing submissions, writing cover letters – takes a lot of time and effort.

The digital world, and the amount of opportunities it engenders, creates the impression that getting a poem published is easier than it is. That ever-growing number of opportunities is at least partly a function of magazines being able to find their own audiences and more people having the tools to put platforms together in the first place. The benefits for writers and readers, no longer reliant on a narrow set of outlets, are considerable. The effect on how we think about our own work is more ambiguous.

On the one hand, given the deluge of text anyone encountering poetry online is exposed to, it’s easy to get unrealistic expectations about how much anyone can or should be publishing. On the other, rejection (always the most likely outcome) only feeds a desire for more rejection. Comparisons with social media are hard to avoid: for every tweet you put out which gets no ‘likes’, you want to do another. Every poem which gets turned down is a reason to submit another elsewhere.

I have got a great deal out of writing this blog recently. The feedback is as immediate as social media and more fulfilling. There is always a chance someone will get something from it, so it never feels entirely pointless. I write about whatever I want, however I want: that anyone is listening at all is a luxury.

Having had a month or so away, though, I can see how my relationship with blogging might have some things in common with submitting poetry to magazines or using social media: that feeling that I need to just keep publishing; that fear of rejection, which only feeds the desire to publish more.

Is there a solution? Jonathan Davidson suggests we broaden our understanding of what sharing poetry entails to include different kinds of reading and to reach more non-poets – for instance, out loud, or at special occasions. Davidson is mainly talking about collections, but the insight can be extended to individual poems too. Why should the default ‘end point’ be publication in a magazine?

For most people I know, poetry is a marginal art, so it’s a fair assumption that by placing a poem in a magazine you will have a greater chance of finding an appreciative reader than sharing it directly. But the end result of this way of thinking isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy which keeps poetry on the margins: it has implications for our idea of what a poem is.

There are ways of rethinking how we share poetry among regular writers, too. I suspect a lot of writers engage with readings and workshops, at least in part, as steps towards publication. But there is no reason why they have to be. I attended a regular poetry evening at university (I knew how to have a good time). None of what I wrote then will ever see the light of day, but I have rarely felt so much like I knew why I was writing it.

My own solution over the last few years has been to try to publish less poetry and more writing about poetry. I can see this wouldn’t appeal to everyone. (It can see the end point being not publishing any poetry at all.) But I’ve also found that I appreciate poetry – writing it and reading it – more, not less.