I've usually approached poetry magazines in much the same way as credit card companies choose to approach me. By the time you've mailed a hundred sets of six poems to a third of the 300 magazines in the UK, most of whom you've never read, you're fairly confident of having a couple published somewhere. After all, I have two visas and a mastercard.

There are, of course, several problems with this approach. Not least that you're quite likely to annoy editors by sending them poetry they would never consider publishing. But I think one of the main reasons amateur poets take this approach is because they despair of getting into the top magazines - magazines that have "friends' piles", that have been around for years, that publish the same old people with their own established magazines. That do "quid pro quo".

I hope that's about to change. "A whole new generation of poetry magazines is emerging," claims Todd Swift, Oxfam poet in residence and editor of the online anthology, Nth Position. This fact seems to have been recognised by the Arts Council, who recently stripped the establishment Ambit of funding has instead opted to sub the Wolf, which relaunched recently. Six years after the magazine was founded with a £250 bung to a printer on the Isle of Dogs, the Wolf is going from strength to strength, and not just in the UK - the magazine is stocked in LA, NY and Chicago.

James Byrne, the editor, is reassuringly confident that the UK will continue to produce major new poets: "There's a lot of good work out there, it's just a case of finding it. It is an exciting time for poetry in the UK, but we do have a generational problem. Lots of poets in mid-career are being touted as 'new' and they're not. They're part of the mainstream and the mainstream is just protecting itself. Armitage and Patterson are now just preserving their reputations and, ironically, are in danger of disappearing."

So what is he looking for?

"The best young poets I come across are gleaning from various movements to create a new hybrid poetry drawing on different strands - dadaism, futurism, modernism and postmodernism. But the language has also changed - they're not afraid to use the word 'google', for example. Older poets just can't do that without embarrassing themselves.

"My advice ... is not to worry too much about finding a voice - multiple voices are OK. Read internationally - young poets should be reading poetry from Somalia or Afghanistan. Saadi Yousef is like David Beckham in Iraq. The Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish is one of the greatest poets alive. Then ask yourself: are you writing just for the sake of it? Do you have something to say? If you do, you can hardly be afraid of rejection."

The internet is, of course, rapidly reducing the importance of paper magazines. While older poets insist on getting paid for work in print, the younger generation is more concerned with building an audience. Todd points to the fact that he's got 450 friends of Nth Position on Facebook alone. There's certainly no money in poetry, so you have to reason that this is the way forward.

Some magazines will go to PDF, like Jacket in the US. But there will always be a place for print. "What we need to do," argues Byrne, "is get away from the established incestuous mags with their favours done for reviews. 'Malignant bunkum', as Pound called it. There's too much sameness in publishing. It may be like looking for a needle in a pile of vomit, but there are real gems out there by unknown poets. They're what I want to publish."

As an unknown toiling poet, that's the sort of statement that fills me with hope. And may even save me a fortune in stamps...