Interpretive frames

Everything you understand is received within a context. The context may be very general, implicit - for example in an English context if you read the word kind you're unlikely to think that it means "child" in German, even if you know both languages. The context may be social (the expected behaviour at a funeral isn't that of a wedding). It may be quite specialised, though it uses words/images from wider contexts ("sheafs" in maths, for example). To understand something it may be necessary to first identify the context - before you can understand a story it helps to know whether it's for infants or adults, for example.

With some things, their context is intrinsic - text written in English looks like English; Abstract Expressionism looks like Abstract Expressionism. At other times, the observer needs to work out the context. Artists/poets/comedians may exploit that uncertainty. For example, a realist story may turn surreal. The observer may not want to play along with the game, or may be unable to. Someone unfamiliar with Surrealism may dismiss the later part of the story as unrealistic, normalising it as a dream, or a character gone mad.

These contexts go under various names - "interpretive frames", "discourse contexts", "genres", "language games". In conversation, the context can be fluid, but there are settings where there are "rules" to follow. At an appointment between a GP and a patient for example, a patient is expected to react to the doctor's invitation to informality, seeing it perhaps as an indication that there's nothing seriously wrong. The GP on the other hand might be trying to extract a less inhibited description of perhaps significant symptoms from the patient. The patient may try to keep the conversation light, knowing that you're not supposed to spoil the mood by giving bad news.

A feature of painting and sometimes poetry is that there are many schools/genres - overlapping, contrasting, etc. A painter may go round a gallery looking at the paintings and think that being a painter is enough to understand paintings, but until a painting's genre is identified, the meaning may be hard to interpret. A naked body needs to be interpreted differently depending on whether its Religious Art or Impressionism.

How is someone new to Art expected to know all the genres? Dare one open one's mouth? It depends on the language game you're playing. If you're going around a gallery on a first date the rules will be different to if you're being interviewed for an Art College application. It helps to be aware of some genres/contexts but inevitably you won't know everything. And anyway, aren't some of the genres silly - Emperor's New Clothes?

In literature I think some modernist writing poses problems. Readers don't notice that there's been a shift of context, that the language game has changed, that the discourse frame is different. They think that because they're good with language in one context (writing novels, for example) they have transferable skills, but recognition of frame/context-changing may not be one of them.

How can one identify a context switch? I think in conversation we're alert (often subconsciously) to these nuances of register change - to how they're signalled and what their purpose is. In a text it's sometimes signalled by the use of italics or a paragraph break though sometimes there are sudden, unannounced context changes without there being body language or voice inflections to help. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is challenging -

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images

Suppose you didn't know that there were languages other than English. Line 2 wouldn't be a indentified as a language-switch, it would be nonsense - a misprint. But there are other switches here too - rapid changes of register (changes of intimacy, intensity and voice). Bakhtin suggested that poetry is marked by heteroglossia, which perhaps what this is.

I suspect that in writer's groups there's more of a variety of language games than in many other situations, and the switches are more sudden. Orwell's advice was prose style should be transparent, that you shouldn't be distracted by the language, but apparently he was in favour of The Waste Land (in principle anyway) and was obsessed for a while with Ulysses, more upset by its lack or political awareness than by its obscurity. I think that many prose pieces can still be read (by non-deconstructionists) as if language were like clear glass. However, I think much modern poetry (and especially discussion about poetry) requires an acceptance of the "play" (looseness) of language and context, of the (possibly) uncertain context affecting the meaning of words, of the context being retrospectively changed.

Magazine survival

What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers - you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils' aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.

In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.

Some paper magazines have become Web-only with mixed results. For some, the reputation that their paper issues built up over decades hasn't carried over to the web version. And whereas paper issues might be archived for posterity by libraries, web versions are less reliably archived (the British Library store a few).

Why don't more magazine editors give up? It's a labour of love (the excitement of discovering new talent), and who knows, a fairy godmother might suddenly appear. "Poetry", a Chicago magazine that started in 1912, battled on for years. They rejected several poems by a Mrs Ruth Lilly. In 2002 she gave the magazine about $100 million.

Workshop critiques and variety

There are many styles of critiques. Some have names (Narratology, Deconstructionism, etc), some are tendencies (character-based, language-based, publishing-oriented etc).

There many types of reader. Some have one style of critiquing (whether or not they can relate to the main character, for example - a Goodreads favourite), some have a preferred style, some try to choose a commenting style most applicable to the work, or mix styles.

There are many types of stories and poems. Sometimes the type is obvious (a story may be for little children, for example) and people find it easy enough to provide appropriately styled comments. Sometimes though the type isn't obvious (or commenters don't know about it) and the story/poem might look more like a poor example of a known type rather than a good example of a new type. As an analogy, consider someone who's only ever seen old still-life paintings of fruit. If they see a Cezanne they might consider the blotchy apples as bad realism. If they see a Cubist piece they might be perplexed, but at least they'd understand that it's not trying to be realistic.

To confuse the issue even further, some pieces (Modernist ones in particular) switch between types. If transitions happen at the ends of chapters (e.g. Joyce's "Ulysses"), inexperienced readers might cope. Problems arise with something like Eliot's "The Waste Land" where the mode might change line-by-line without warning.

All this can make workshop meetings confusing, especially to newcomers. It's like the blind men and the elephant, only worse. It's nice to have a mix of comment styles at meetings so that the text is looked at from various viewpoints. Alas, the approaches clash.

• A publishing-oriented commenter may say that a story is not worth working on because the plot's too common ("No Covid stories", I've heard publishers say. "Please, no more dementia stories" I've seen guidelines say) while the prime reaction of those who empathise with the characters may be that the piece is very moving, and the first commenter is insensitive
• An Identity Politics commenter may be outraged that a white straight man is writing a first-person story about a persecuted afro-american gay, whereas a New Criticism commenter will deliberately ignore what they know about the author.
• A person who mostly reads whodunnits might judge stories by their plots, thinking that something is defective in a vignette, mood piece, or a story by Beckett.
• A person who wants to see interiority may not be impressed by a story in the style of Robbe-Grillet.
• Readers impressed by florid imagery may highlight for praise the very sentences that other readers condemn as purple prose.
• Confessionalist poets and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets might not see eye to eye.

As in the still-life analogy, problems arise when the genres are close or overlap. Commenters are often advised to determine whether a piece is "good of its type", but if they don't know the type, such an evaluation is difficult. Even when they do recognise the type, there can still be problems - discussion might be more about the genres than the piece itself.

Just as texts can belong to genres, so can comments, and similar evaluation difficulties apply. A commenter may disagree with another's comments because they've not recognised the comment's style.

On top of all that there are personality differences between members in a group.

• A strident Identity Politics person can use their moral compass to censor stories.
• A listener can feel they should interrupt a reader to ask why there hadn't been a trigger warning (sometimes with good reason, though as Clare Shaw in "Poetry projects to make and do" pointed out, for some people "poetry around abuse and assault could leave them feeling validated and heard, whereas poetry around happy, carefree childhoods could trigger feelings of grief and isolation")
• Some authors write primarily for themselves. They enjoy writing and reading out. They won't take their stories beyond the group. Others are trying to have their work accepted elsewhere, using the group as alpha or beta readers. The last thing they want is flattery (one of them said that instead of the "say 3 positive things for each negative one" rule, the rule should be "say a negative thing for each 3 positive ones")

There aren't easy solutions to all this. Groups that are big enough are sometimes carefully split into two to reduce the friction. It's all very well suggesting that commenters be tolerant of other types of stories and critiques, but what if they think that Cezanne's apples are Vermeer's on a bad day? What if an author wants feedback that others might think unconstructive - should it be supplied by mail after the meeting? What if an author brings a piece in that they know to be bad in order to assess the usefulness of the group? I've seen things like the following happen -

• A person who thought that a piece was poorly written - fragmented etc - was told that it's Modernism. The person said that they knew a bad story when they read one (though they said they'd not read any Modernism before).
• After receiving some suggestions for tweaks from various people, a person was told that their story wasn't worth working on - flogging a dead horse. At the end of the meeting, once the final commenter had left, the author was apologised to on behalf of the commenter but the author wanted just that type of helpful comment - they'd tried something in a style new to them and knew that the commenter was familiar with the style.
• A poet was praised for their ironic use of cliché. They hadn't been aware that they'd been using clichés.

I think writers groups are likely to have more problems than many other types of groups -

• There are more neurodiverents than average
• The "support group" and "study group" models can clash. Some writers (especially when they pay for sessions) expect to be told how to improve their work (which will involve mentioning bad as well as good features). Others need their self-confidence boosted before they can write - one piece of negative criticism is enough to stall them. In "How to be a poet" poet and editor Jane Commane wrote "I was unfortunate several years ago to be in receipt of some bad advice about my writing ... For more than three years I wrote little poetry, and lost faith in almost everything I had ever written ... I'd been reading and editing manuscripts for several years by this time, as well as teaching workshops and mentoring poets"
• There are many more genres/types to flick between, many language games to negotiate, and texts have levels that readers can travel through, up and down. A person who's adept when at (say) committee meetings at work may not have the agility to notice or keep up with all the unsignposted context switches when visiting a writers group (especially a poetry group).

Text versioning

When I write computer programs I use a free system (git with vscode) that with a click lets me save and recover versions. I can create branches - the diagram on the left shows how, from the bottom, a file evolved, splitting into branches then mostly merging. I can compare versions side-by-side, the differences colour-coded.

It's possible (I haven't done it, but I've seen it done) to analyse the development of a text, colour-coding the lines according to age or number-of-changes.

With a click I can back-up to the cloud (free - github). In my will I can leave the instructions to make the back-up visible to all. Nothing's lost - even my mistakes.

I could use the same system for poems/stories too. Already I have long/short versions of a few poems. Because of the various word limits for prose, I have 3 versions of a few texts. One recent short piece had so many UK/US issues (gear-sticks, supermarket trolleys) that I keep 2 versions of it. But I'd be most interested in watching how a story develops - which paragraphs changed the most? which paragraphs never changed? when were the growth spurts? (I think there's often an initial one, then I fiddle around, then I realise what the story's about and quickly add many more words).

The transparency of language

George Orwell suggested that prose/essay style should be transparent - the less we notice it the better. With poetry, the language is more like stained glass than a clear window. The stained glass can be more interesting than what's beyond.

Sometimes in Book Groups people get frustrated by the comments about language - they want to focus on the characters and their emotions, not syntax. It's a fair enough approach - though we can't know about the characters unless we read the words first, we might not miss much by "seeing through" the words in the first instance. That approach doesn't work well with novels like "Finnegans Wake". That's an extreme case, though even with more mainstream novels it may not be ideal - 'Grief is the thing with feathers' merits careful reading, and a review of an Alan Hollingsworth novel said that you could read it just for the language.

I was wondering about how other arts manage in this regard.

• If you watch Macbeth, you'd certainly comment on the acting. If you watch a new play, you're more likely to comment on the plot and characters
• Looking at a Van Gogh, you're likely to comment on the brushwork and how it contributes to the effect. A Vermeer doesn't provoke such comments.
• If you've been to film school, you might watch a film with more awareness of camera angles and background music than the general public does. One person might say "Didn't you notice how lonely Sue was?" and another reply "Didn't you notice how the Sue character was always framed alone, even in a crowd?"

In Poetic Opacity (How to Paint Things with Words - Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, 2014) the authors take the painting/writing analogy further, listing some ways that a poem might be opaque - "flowery, obscure, metaphorical, rich with allusion, ambiguous in narrative voice, and constructed in metric schemes that depart away from ordinary linguistic usage". They point out how technical writing can have a different type of obscurity, and that "Aesthetic opacity stems from our conventions for individuating artworks. As Goodman (1968) observes, every form of art comes with implicit norms for tolerable variation."

I think I tolerate more opacity in prose than most readers do. That's partly because of the "Macbeth" point above - I've read so many books that not many are "new", so I'm interested in how the familiar theme is re-interpreted. I read more "Van Gogh" style novels than Vermeer ones. And I certainly have a "film student" approach to reading a book.

Floods and trickles

Some people (I've seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I'm one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it's a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there's a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences -

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don't want to waste it. I'm likely to use it even where it doesn't quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They're likely to be overwritten.
• I'm usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it's finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I'm not going to write novels.

I think my creativity is not unconstrained - it's more like that of an engineer subject to the laws of physics than of an artist. Working within constraints has never troubled me. Indeed, pushing against contraints gives me dynamism - if you're stuck in a cell, you might as well explore all of it.

Of course my lack of ideas is a consequence of premature filtering, and there are workshops to deal with that. At a recent one I went to the tutor said don't worry about clichés because they can be edited out in a rewrite. I'll try to use that approach more often.

Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair 2025

I visited today's Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair in London. Poetry book publishing still looks healthy. The books are well produced too.