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The market for new poetry is small; it is not bought and sold like modern art, or hankered after by the very wealthy. In fact, if you consider poetry by brutal commercial rules, it is a miracle it exists at all. Yet not only does poetry exist, it is flourishing – and not just among the grand old oaks of literary society, but in the grassroots of bohemia. New, young writers are using poetry to break rules and free themselves creatively.

Many credit the internet for bringing youthful poetic creativity out of bedrooms and private notebooks and into the light. Since 2003, when the internet had finally found its way into the majority of households, submissions to both the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the Poetry Book Society have doubled. And the website Poetryarchive.org now gets one million hits a month.

More recently, Facebook has made it joyfully easy for young poets, typically shy of announcing their poetic proclivities to anyone, to find each other. The Wolf magazine, for example, edited by James Byrne and published three times a year, has its own Facebook page, which encourages submissions by e-mail. “You can’t be too traditional these days,” says Byrne. “And the internet is the best way of communicating with readers all over the world – it massively increases your audience.”

Fellow poet Laura Dockrill is not on Facebook, but she uses MySpace in exactly the same way. “I wouldn’t have the career that I have now, if it weren’t for the internet,” says Dockrill, who posts up her work online alongside links to performances, readings and news about forthcoming books. “I am Kate Nash’s top friend on MySpace, so people who are fans of hers might come to my page afterwards.” Laura also invites people to submit poetry in a sort of online workshop.

After airing tentative scribblings on the web, an emerging writer may be further encouraged by one of the prizes on offer that are specifically for young poets. The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, for 11 to 17-year-olds, annually attracts 12,000 poems from 5,000 applicants (the closing date for this year’s entries is July 31; see www.foyleyoungpoets.co.uk). Amy Blakemore has been a Foyle Young Poet of the Year twice (15 overall winners are chosen each year); first in 2007, at the age of 15, for a poem about Peckham, and then last year with You Envied the Stars Their Height, about a friend’s drunken fall through a window.

Then there are the Eric Gregory Awards (past winners include Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney) for poets under the age of 30, which each year attracts some 150 applicants. And this year the TS Eliot prize (which rewards the best new collection of work by a poet of any age) was won by Jen Hadfield with Nigh-No-Place – at 30, its youngest winner.

Olivia Cole, an Eric Gregory Award winner in 2003, says such prizes are vital to encourage young poets to take their writing seriously. “Winning it dragged my work into the light. When I was younger, I was very shy of showing anyone my work, but after the award, it no longer became embarrassing.”

It doesn’t help either that there is almost no financial incentive to devote anything more than the odd bit of spare time to scribbling verse. Not one of the poets in our photo shoot said that they introduce themselves to people as such – that part of their lives always comes later. Luke Kennard, for example, says he teaches in a university, Olivia Cole that she’s a writer, as does Joe Dunthorne. “Although even saying that I was a writer felt fraudulent for a long time,” observes Dunthorne.

“I do believe that poetry can be beautiful, but I’m so wary of the romantic ideas about it,” says Kennard. “There are all sorts of assumptions that go with the word ‘poet’ that I don’t feel comfortable with at all.”

The lack of money in poetry can also make the creation of it seem undemocratic – profits from publications are small, and while poets are paid for live readings, it can be the case that only those who can afford to write without payment, or for very little, produce work. Yet our young poets continue to write, and despite the hardships of cutting it as a poet, the future looks bright for the form.

Quizzing ten of Britain’s most successful young poets, it is clear they would be writing no matter what: money or no money, fame or no fame. Why? Simply, because they enjoy it. Musa Okwonga puts it very simply when asked what he gets from writing poetry: “Freedom.”

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