"the North" (issue 67, January 2022)

"the North" keeps going - about 130 big, square, two-column pages. 136 poems by 78 poets (Philip Gross, Maura Dooley, Graham Mort, Pascale Petit, etc). There are selections from the pamphlet competition winners. There are about 17 reviews, and articles on particular books/poems. As usual there's a "Blind Criticism" article where 2 poets comment on a poem without knowing who the author is.

It's a good read.

• I liked "The Chain Ferry, memory" (Philip Gross)
• I liked "Dutch Masters in Sepia" (Maija Haavisto)
• I didn't get "From Seat E39", "On Balance", or the Jenny King poems
• I liked "Before the frost" by Anthony Wilson
• Helen Evans' "It's fun, if you're a child" is an 16 line specular poem
• I liked "Night Journey" by Jamie Coward, though I would have preferred it as prose.
• I liked "David Hockney's flip-flops" by Tessa Strickland
• River Walton has 6 pages of poems with illustrations. 6 pages too much.
• I liked most of "Rewind" by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
• I liked "Today you went to lunch with a cave" by Sarah Barnsley. Had it begun life as prose, I think it would be considered damaging to quantize it into little chunks.
• Despite the hypey puffs I didn't like any of Helen Seymour's 6 poems.

Several of the articles (and even a few of the reviews) are appreciations - of dead or favourite poets; of single poems or books. I should practice writing these, keeping all reservations at bay.

My Writing Year (2024)

This year I've written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I've radically revamped 4 old stories - by merging 2 of them I think I've produced 1 printable piece.

I've had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that's about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I'd write some proper reviews. I haven't, though I've read (or listened to) about 200 books. The nearest I've got to writing reviews is writing in detail about some short story collections (my favourite type of book, I've realised). Long ago I wrote articles/craftnotes, sometimes many of them in a year. It's a while since I've done that. Maybe next year.

Currently I've 4 stories sent to competitions, 3 stories sent to magazines, 10 flashes with magazines and 10 poems with magazines.

Lessons from academic science publishing

What is the point of periodicals?

• To make work available
• To judge which work to publish (and edit it)
• To archive work
• To record who first had the idea

The Web had changed the speed/density of communications so much that ideas and feedback can be communicated in seconds rather than months. The Web has also encouraged the call for free access to publications.

The small-press literature world I'm interested in has tried to adapt to this changing world. Here are a few observations from the science/medical world, where careers and lives can be at stake.

• Minimal Publishable Unit - If you're being assessed by the quantity of papers you publish, it doesn't make much sense to put 3 good ideas into a paper when each of them could have been the foundation of a paper. So you use "salami slicing" to produce 3 papers.
  I've seen poetry sequences that seem to be thinly spreading ideas to the same end.
• Who pays? - In the old days, papers were printed in paper journals that libraries had to pay a lot of money for. The referees who read the submissions weren't (and usually still aren't?) paid - it was a good thing to mention on CVs. Nowadays journals are usually online-only. Submission is usually free but the publication fee might be thousands of dollars. This model of publication is open to abuse.
  Many literary magazines now charge for submission to fund their free-access publications.
• Pre-prints - Free-access sites exist where drafts can be sent to get comments, and to stake a claim on work. It means that important (perhaps life-saving) findings are quickly available to all. Some grants require that all the resulting papers are public access.
• Paper mills - Some periodicals have lax quality control. People pay to be published in them so that they have a publication they can quote. There are grey areas.

Helen Ivory at CB1

Helen Ivory read tonight, along with some open-mic poets who read 22 poems. Her pieces were all from her latest book about witches, hinting at how some of the issues associated with witches/women then (attitudes to menopause, beauty, etc) persist today.

The Cambridge (UK) writing scene

Writers new to Cambridge can take a while to find out what's on. Here's a list of starting points. I've mentioned web sites though often it's better to follow on social media.

• Literary Festivals - The Cambridge Literary Festival site gives news about their 2 annual festivals and some one-off events too. There are plans for a Cambridge Poetry Festival in 2026.
• Performance -
  • CB1 hosts monthly poetry open-mics, some with guest poets.
  • Cambridge Storytellers
  • The Junction hosts some spoken word events
• Bookshops - Heffers and Waterstones organise events. Secondhand bookshops like Amnesty International (Mill Road - it has a short story section which is always a good sign) and Oxfam offer interesting collections. Bodies in the Bookshop specialises in crime fiction.
• Public Libraries - readings and regular writing events
• Evening Classes and Clubs - Cambridge writers etc. There's also a budding Mill Road Poetry Group
• Cambridge University - student societies; readings; writers in residence, etc. Varsity offers some info. You can apply to browse in the University Library.
• ARU - Cambridge Writing Centre is a recent development that promotes many events
• Local periodicals/publications -
  • Cambridge Literary Review
  • Cambridge poetry
  • Students once a year produce a literary anthology - "The Mays".
• Environs - Ely has Toppings - a bookshop which runs many events. Also at Ely there is Fenspeak (open-mic and readings). At Norwich there's the National Writing Centre.

Redundancy in prose

The novels I've recently read/heard commonly have the following type of redundancy, the voice not always being one of the characters. Even when it is, I find it distracting. Me being pedantic?

• The building was triangular in shape ("It should have been me" by Susan Wilkins)
• I watched his Adam's apple rise up and down in his throat ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• He nodded to himself ("The Maidens" by Alex Michaelides)
• I thought to myself ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• I screamed out loud ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• with audible clicks ("Dark Pines" by Will Dean)
• She lets out an audible sigh ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• hitting the ground with an audible thud ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• she paled visibly ("The Hidden Beach" by Karen Swan)
• Holgate visibly winced ("The Fine Art of Invisible Detection" by Robert Goddard)

Story magazine rankings

Brecht de Poortere's Top 1000 Literary Magazines ranks literary magazines that print fiction, 1st being The New Yorker and 1126th being Witcraft. They write that "The ranking is based primarily on prizes/anthologies. For journals that do not figure in any of these anthologies, the number of Twitter followers is used for lack of a better metric." As they point out, non-US magazines score badly with that system because UK/Eire anthologies aren't included - "The Stinging Fly" is only 299th, and "Stand" isn't there at all. Nevertheless it's a useful resource - a spreadsheet, so you can download it and add your formulae.

I've only been in 1 of the top 100 magazines. Here's my complete list

The Forge Literary Magazine	87
JMWW	171
Moonpark review	236
Necessary Fiction	239
Fictive Dream	317
Worcester Review	355
Splonk	404
Brilliant Flash Fiction	416
Dribble Drabble Review	426
Full House Literary	501
Paragraph Planet	503
Unbroken	556
Ink, Sweat & Tears	595
Toasted Cheese	695
Literary Stories	716
Every Day Fiction	770
Wensum Literary Magazine	967

"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

It's a book of statements by poets about poetry. I've added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me" (John Heath-Stubbs)
• "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh)
• "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine)
• "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas)
• "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam)
• "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams)
• "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams)
• "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams)
• "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue)

Fleeting gone

The link I had to a poem in Fleeting has gone dead, so I'll reprint it here -

The Gallery Affair Then I see her, the girl of my crutched dreams - Mona Lisa smoking a pipe that's not a pipe, sipping absinthe from a fur-lined cup that tickles her moustache. We miss the train that leaves the fireplace, but anyway it's raining businessmen so we stay in, smooch to the Broadway Boogie Woogie, sleeping in this tent with en-suite Mutt urinal. We've learnt our lessons. Abstraction came too easy for Brancusi, the universe already constipated with objects. He fed his 2 white dogs lettuce floating in milk. Schiele was more realistic - he couldn't afford the paint, he said, when the judge who burnt his work in public asked why he chose models with amputated feet. Our millennium opened late for staff training. By the time we wake to Turner's blazing sunrise, it's all on video, our taut bodies reviewed as allusive symbols of when beauty was freer than porn, though the cafe's a rip-off and the Impressionists' cheap pigments are fading in the light, irreplaceable as our love, the frame and signed canvas statements in themselves.

Losing yourself

Sometimes a person retreats to a cave or a remote croft to find themselves, worried that others might influence them, that their true self will be diluted.

Some writers are rather like that, not interacting with others. If their writing's good enough for them that's all that matters. Some become famous, albeit belatedly - Emily Dickinson for example, or to a lesser extent, Hopkins. But most writers like the company of other writers, thinking that it helps their writing. Many join their local writer's groups. Some reach out further, participating in the big world of literature, thinking that the advantages of joining a local group are magnified by interacting with more people. Maybe so, but the risks are greater too - writers risk being driven by market forces and social pressure, losing their authenticity by doing anything to be published, selling themselves out.

I'm one of those people involved with bigger groups. I look upon new styles not as a betrayal of Self but as a way of exploring new aspects of it. I think some compromise is inevitable - friendships depend on it, so why not the writer-reader relationship? But if you're worried about authenticity, here are some tips on how to survive out there without selling your soul too much.

• Find out about the magazines which accept work just like yours. There are magazines specialising in "Gothic Seaside", "Funfairs", "Angels", light verse, etc.
• Don't agonise about which magazine to send a piece to. Send it to a dozen magazines at once - most little literary magazines accept (even encourage) simultaneous submissions nowadays. Mix ambitious submissions with easier, confidence-building ones. Keep lots of submissions in the post - 20 or so. If you're a novelist, write Flash too.
• Let the piece find its own level - start by sending to the New Yorker by all means, but be prepared to send it to smaller and smaller magazines if it's repeatedly rejected.
• Be prepared to re-style your pieces to suit the market or editor (just as you wear appropriate clothes to different social events). If experienced editors make suggestions, listen to them. Don't let your ego get in the way. Try different styles: a chameleon has just as authentic a Self as a toad has - Self is more than skin deep.
• Don't forget that something of value to you - a piece where you feel you've expressed your feelings clearer than ever before, perhaps - may be of no interest to those who don't know you. Though novelty for its own sake isn't likely to fool people for long, neither is submitting work too similar to what others send in. Alexander Pope's "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" still applies, but many more thoughts have been well expressed since his day, so you need to read widely, not just write.

AI

Most guidelines for literary magazines and competitions include mention of AI nowadays. It's a rather loose term (I've seen it used for computer-assisted tasks that involve OuLiPo procedures, anagram generation, or randomness) but usually people have a chatgtp-like facility in mind, the computer producing the poem.

The process can be more collaborative than that though, the human keeping control. I've heard a leading mathematician say recently that he uses chatgtp to bounce ideas off of, like chatting to someone over coffee. I use Google in rather the same way, to see what happens if (say) I search for "sheep and chess".

"AI Literary Review" is a new home for such work - "a journal of new poetry, created by humans, utilising artificial intelligence". The poets describe the process that led to their poem. See Issue 1 (Sam Riviere, Harry Man, etc).

"So Tim, here's my first question - What actually is poetry?"

Well, Poetry is as various as Music - both in style (Bach, Bebop, Bacharach, Bantu) and purpose (lullabies, soundtracks, hymns, songalongs, propaganda, etc). If two people say they like music, one might be into Garage and the other Plainsong. Two poetry enthusiasts might also have little in common.

In music, fusions are quite possible (Jazz-rock etc). I think that in poetry it's harder to see the joins when styles and purposes are mixed, and switches are more common - The Waste Land's polyphony (with some fragments a word or line long) is hard to do in music.

Music fans make no apology for specialising - if they like brass bands they choose their music friends accordingly - but sometimes I feel that poets who don't understand/like each other's work feel they should stick together anyway to show solidarity against the unbelieving masses. I think some fragmentation of the poetry world is inevitable. I know of poets who say that Larkin's not a poet. I've heard others say that Prynne isn't. And there's the stage/page split - not everybody thinks that Hollie McNish's pieces work off the page. There's Flarf, Doggerel and Found Poetry.

And then there's the march of time - I think some UK pieces that were considered poetry in the 1990s are Flash now. I'm reclassifying some of mine that I wrote back then. And there's the international perspective - there's a tendency in certain periods/countries to view "bad" (or rude, or unpatriotic) poetry as non-poetry.

E-mail and social media has increased the amount and speed of interaction between poets. In the old days a fashion might dominate a nation for years. Nowadays the turnover is so fast that no single style has time to take root - less fashionable styles are frequently re-integrated. This could lead to homogenisation. Fortunately, the improved communication also gives people a chance to find like-minded people, so sustainable niches are more common now, ensuring variety.

Looking back, it's tempting to label poetry eras - "The Movement", etc - but of course many styles of poetry were present in those eras. Nowadays these unfashionable styles remain more visible than before.

So my answer to the original question is the standard one - it depends who you ask, when, and why. Some texts have been considered poetry by many people for a long time. Among those people are academics who influence (at least nationally) what we categorize as poetry. More than ever though, we need to carefully think about what definitions are for.

Acumen 110

The poetry magazine Acumen continues confidently beyond its centenary issue, keeping its combination of poetry, translations, articles (this time about William Carlos Williams, "Jazz & Poetry" etc) and reviews. There are 120 packed pages (poems by different poets sometimes share a page). Here are a few snippets from the more "mainstream" pieces -

• a plane aiming blind for Leeds,/ its noselight a needle threading clouds/ like worn-out sheets in need of mending (Nancy Mattson)
• [About a kite] - You held it up like a placard,/ while I attached the string,// unreeling it walking backwards,// as if I were laying a fuse (Stephen Claughton)
• the wind toys with leaves like loose/ change in the pocket of the sky (Kathryn Bevis)
• [About an Emperor penguin's egg] - When I'm gone and the shell/ of our marriage cracks, believe that what/ we held between us all this time will break/ out live and singing (Kathryn Bevis)
• warm right arm/ of your scarlet sunglasses/ hooked// into the plunging V-neck of your shirt (Martyn Crucefix)
• to seek truth rather than being right (Gabriel Moreno)

10th Sep 2024, Devereux Pub, London

I got there early, had a chat with Matthew Stewart and Mat Riches while they were fueling up ready for their readings, then left before the start! Long story, but at least I got there. Hope they had a good evening.

Later Matthew wrote that the reading was one of 5 done in 6 days, covering over 1,100 miles. 26 books sold. Taylor Swift doesn't have to worry about competition yet.

Busy September

• A poem of mine (34 years old) is due out in Acumen and 2 poems (24 and 28 years old) will be in the final issue of South. The success of these ancient pieces has made me look through my other old, rejected poems. I've already converted one into Flash.
• Every few years I send a story to "The Stinging Fly". I got another rejection yesterday - one of over 1,400 they sent out for this window.
• A story (only 2 years old!) was long-listed in the Leicester Writes competition. Unplaced, but in the anthology.
• I'm hoping to attend a few poetry readings. Last Sunday I heard Steve Logan (new to me).
• For the first time in months I've started writing a story (not Flash!). There's a phase in my story writing when a piece becomes easier to write, the main issues resolved. I feel content then, completion in sight, the remaining challenges superable rather than daunting.
• Suddenly I've written a poem. It's only my 4th this year - none of them even sent off let alone accepted. Maybe I'll send off a pamphlet this year - it's been a while.
• I've read (well, listened to) "Pride and Prejudice" for the first time. Not for me. I can't see what all the fuss is about. I've also listened to "Julia" (a "1984" spin-off by Sandra Newman). Over-long in parts but interesting enough. I'd forgotten how many backstory/world-making ideas "1984" has.
• And the allotment's gone mad. I'll be self-sufficient in veg for a while. Parsnips failed, but I'm picking 4 courgettes a day, giving away most of them. I did a count of plants - Leeks 48, French beans 23, Berlotti beans 44, Dwarf sweetcorn 10, Dwarf French beans 16, Carrots 80+, Beetroot 32, Potatoes 28, Sunflowers 2, Parsnips 2, Courgettes 15, Pumpkins 3.

Making prose into poetry - words, ideas, forms

How can you make prose look more like poetry?

Words

We all know about poetic words - lambent, shard, etc. There are poetic phrases too. They needn't contain poetic words. There are texts that are poetic, though they might be lacking poetic words and phrases. It might be difficult to quote a powerful phrase from them, and yet as a whole they work - "Adlestrop", maybe. It's sometimes their discontinuities (what they leave out) which give them their poetic air. The more you leave out, the more that readers can add in. So try to reduce the word count.

Images

If a writer adds imagery to prose, hoping it will pass as poetry the risk is that in such surroundings the imagery might draw attention to itself - it had better be fresh, especially if it's the punchline. There are clichés that only experienced readers will notice, clichés that writers will notice but not readers, and some that only tutors might notice. Some are so common that they're tropes/memes, used consciously - for example comparing a life to the passing of seasons. There are ideas that several writers might independently come up with - e.g.

• The idea that a wife in a sad marriage is a victim of Stockholm Syndrome
• The idea that when you switch on a light in a dark room there's a moment when you can see the darkness

One way to avoid the accusation of cliché and purple prose is to get a character (e.g. a pretentious literature student) to express the idea - easier to do in prose.

Forms

I think my aversion to some poems can be summarised by the belief that performing an automatic operation on a text isn't likely to improve it, especially if the operation's reversable (i.e. from the poem you can recreate the original prose). Here are 3 instances -

• anaphora - this can be added to many poems, and just as easy removed.
• multiple negation - a special case of anaphora.
• stanza/line length - chopping a text into regular chunks won't help.

In all these cases I suggest that readers mentally compare the "before" and "after" texts and consider whether incantation or eye candy are being over-used.

Line-breaks

Of course, adding line-breaks is the easiest trick. In Seam 27 some years ago Michael Bayley began his review of Helen Mort's "The Shape of Every Box" poetry pamphlet with

Perhaps one of the more interesting developments in poetry over the last fifty years has been its overlap with short story writing. It's unsurprising that poetic language has relaxed into an easy colloquial manner but maybe what wasn't expected is the way poetry's taken on the subject matter of prose forms. The evolution took a leap with Philip Larkin, but when Douglas Dunn published Terry Street, a book whose themes leant more to the 50s novel than its poetry, it seemed that poetry had taken a detour down a side road.

For some, that side road led to Flash and Novella-in-Flash, but that detour has become part of the main body of poetry. If in doubt, add line-breaks.

My book and magazine collection

The messy bookcase downstairs mostly has kids' books and books in Italian. Roget's Thesaurus is there, and a few reference books.

My literary collection is upstairs, hidden away in a fitted wardrobe. I've just sorted it out - long overdue. I don't keep all the things I've ever read, though I try to keep an issue of each periodical, and I don't give away anything I'm in. The sections are

• Annual story anthologies (35)
• Story anthologies (25)
• Poetry anthologies (25)
• Flash monographs (15)
• Story monographs (75)
• Poetry monographs (160)
• Novels (10)
• Craft/theory books (20)
• Short story periodicals (35)
• Periodicals (70)
• Things I'm in (225)

I don't keep novels. I sometimes re-read books. More often I use the books for reference. Now that I've put the books in order I'll be able to find what I'm looking for without being waylaid by discoveries.

Magazine news

• South - this printed poetry magazine is about to publish its final issue after decades
• Bad Lilies - ominously this was in haitus, but now it's requesting submissions for a 2025 issue.
• Flashback - historical Flash. In haitus.
• Powercut - New! "We like landlines and record players, secondhand dog-eared books and small TVs you can’t talk to." It wants writing set in 1930-1999.
• Prole - I listened to "A Literary Magazines Masterclass" podcast (part of the MK Lit Fest) with Brett Evans and Phil Robertson of Prole. One of the editors described themselves as left of Jeremy Corbyn, which was no great surprise. I have a couple of issues and have sent them a story or two, careful not to be too pretentious.

  They started 14 years ago. The magazine cover price of issue 1 was £5.50. Half of the magazine profits went to the authors. The cover price is still £5.50, but there are no longer any profits, so for the last 2 or 3 issues authors haven't been paid. They lost most of their overseas subscriptions after Brexit. It's a struggle.

  About 10% of prose submissions are published. They get about 200 stories a year. Both editors have to agree to a piece being accepted - they think it possible to appreciate the quality of a piece even if they don't like it.

Submissions

I think some of my unpublished pieces deserve to be published on merit. I've other pieces that I'd like to have published for sentimental reasons. The pieces I have most trouble getting published are stories in the 2k-3k words range. It's not easy even finding a plausible place to send them to (not in the UK anyway).

But today I'm happy because I've finished sending off all but one of my pieces that I want published. It wasn't cheap - over £30, including fees to submit to magazines.

• Stories to magazines - 6
• Stories to competitions - 4
• Flash to magazines - 6
• Poems to magazines - 12

Chances of success? I wouldn't be surprised if they're all rejected. But at least I feel I've not let my stories down. I can focus on writing rather than marketing for a few weeks. One of the 2.5k word stories I've sent off used to be 4.8k words long - my longest piece. I'm thinking that maybe I should slim down some of my other pieces too - ostensibly for marketing reasons, but often the resulting story turns out to be an improvement aesthetically too.

Flash Fiction Festival 2024

I'm back from the weekend's Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol. I'd recommend anyone interested in Flash to go next year. Indeed, I think some poets and story writers would benefit from it too. I like Bristol - while wandering around I saw this sculpture.

It was my 3rd time. After the 1st one I thought that everyone was better than me, able to produce finished works in 10 minutes at the workshops. After the 2nd one I thought I wasn't so bad after all. Now I've gone back to accepting that most of the other writers have produced better work than I ever will. My advantage is that my pieces might be more radically various - a likely disadvantage were I trying to put a collection together. People talked about the importance of having layers. That's where I start. It's the other aspects I need to work on.

When readers were introduced, many had competition achievements. I've never entered a Flash competition though many exist nowadays, not least the Bridport. Maybe I should work on that too.

I think the workshop session I'll find most useful long-term is Stephanie Carty's "The Writer Self in Flash Fiction", which was about how to analyse one's Flash to learn about oneself. Things to look at include word frequencies; number of loner protagonists; moods that never appear in stories; traits in stories that aren't replicated in one's life. Needless to say, it's not an uncharted topic for me, and the narrators have been known to psycho-analyse the plots they're in. My pieces are often over-crafted (contrived?) but that just means there's another level to burrow through before getting to the interesting stuff.

I came back with

• "Ed's wife and other creatures" - Venessa Gebbie
• "The lobsters run free" (Bath Flash Fiction V2)
• "Things left and found by the side of the road" (Bath Flash Fiction V3)
• "Flash Fiction Festival two"
• "Clearly defined clouds" - Jude Higgins

Berkeley, Bugan and Yoseloff

Today I went to a poetry event where Tamar Yoseloff (I've recently read her "Belief Systems"), Anne Berkeley (I thought her "River" poem was the best of the evening - looking back at my notes about her book, I note that I liked it when I first read it) and Carmen Bugan (new to me) read and did a Q&A session. The latter 2 poets had written several of their poems during lockdown.

The event was organised by the ARU's excellent Cambridge Writing Centre.

The book/magazine hierarchy

When I read a poetry/story book where few of the pieces have been previously published, my first reaction is "if they're not good enough to get into magazines, why should they be preserved in a book?" I then wonder about how many of the pieces are padding, there only so that the few good pieces can be sold in a book-length package.

But now that e-mail and submittable has helped to increase the number of magazine submissions by an order of magnitude or so, magazines may not be as reliable gatekeepers as before. On X recently Matthew Stewart pointed out that "Submittable lends itself to poems that generate an immediate impact. There's no time for a poem to grow on an editor, for apparent simplicity to reveal its depths." It's similar with stories. A piece whose strength is the acculumation of small domestic details is going to struggle. There's no point in dropping little depth charges that will be detonated by a little phrase near the end, because by then the overworked editor (or intern) will be onto the next submission.

So I'm beginning to accept that some pieces may have to first appear in a book.

Authors of quiet pieces can wait until they have a book-sized collection. But such a book isn't likely to be a new author's way to burst onto the scene. An alternative is to compromise by putting a teaser in the first paragraph - hinting at trauma to come rather than beginning with a dead body or madness.

I think magazines are aware of the problems caused by too many submissions. Already they're restricting the number of submissions they get. Submission windows are getting shorter (a fortnight a year sometimes) and submission fees are more common. Niche publications (specialising e.g. in "Seaside Gothic") may be an option too.

Impartiality

The standard Lady Justice sculpture is of a lady holding scales. She's usually blindfolded too. But when judging poetry, impartiality is not as easy as that.

When I'm commenting about poems I try to be aware of some of my prejudices -

• I fall for poems about unwanted childlessness and dying children.
• I like new metaphors (though I take marks off for ones I've heard before).
• I admire technical mastery (e.g. a sestina that works!).
• I like poems that seem to be about one thing until the last line makes me realise the poem's really about something else.
• I'm suspicious of "simple but strong" poems.
• I distrust poems that look too much like confessions or therapy.
• Poems like "The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin trouble me too. It's prose until the killer final line. Should a single line be sufficient to win a prize? If it's memorable enough, perhaps it should.

I try to compensate for these idiosyncrasies. But what about the ones I'm unaware of?

I wonder how competition judges feel about this? At least at workshops when commenting on pieces I can admit my prejudices and shortcomings, and withhold evaluation if I choose. Judges in their normal 9-5 Creative Writing jobs might be unable to say that they don't understand Jorie Graham at all. What if a good Grahamesque poem is entered by someone unaware of the inevitable outcome?

In the end of course, people entering a poetry competition just have to accept the judges' inevitable baises without knowing what they are. It's the only way - Simon Armitage isn't going to refund the entry fee if a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem is submitted.

Jigsaw puzzles

Yesterday I attended the UK jigsaw championships as a spectator. It's moved to a big, plush venue. I've already written a story involving the event, so I thought I'd better do some research - not only to improve my writing, but to study the participants' techniques. I might enter next year.

There were various categories. The "Elite" zone reminded me of the chess tournaments I used to attend. The "Fun" zone was more relaxed with small groups around tables, like at Christmas.

As part of the 5 day festival of events there was a church full of completed jigsaws for sale - mostly 1000-piece ones.

Submissions and perseverance

On Facebook recently, Judy Birkbeck wrote "Yay! Another of my short stories has been shortlisted by the Bournemouth Writing Prize. Made my day. ... It's encouraged me to keep going. I've submitted this story 61 times! Perseverance is key."

I can't match 61, though a few of my pieces are approaching 20 rejections. I think some of my best stories have been repeatedly rejected. I send them out to the best places first, so they're going to be rejected often even if they're reasonable. And they might be bad - I may be attached to them for non-literary reasons.

I've 2 poems out that have been rejected 14 and 17 times. I'll keep trying, because sometimes perseverance works. Sam Gardiner, who won the National Poetry Competition long ago, told me that the poem had previously been rejected by many magazines.

Earlier this month I got £50 for a 250-word piece that's been rejected 15 times (mostly in a longer form). It was a competition where the pieces were read out and judged by the audience on the night, with Zoom participation.

I recently had a short story accepted at the 17th attempt. I've a story (neurodivergent female 1st-person PoV) that's been rejected 19 times. I'm about to send it out again. I'm giving up on another piece of prose that's been rejected 12 times - it's dawned on me that it's not very good though I can see why I like it.

IIse Pedler at CB1

On June 3rd, Ilse Pedlar was the main act, reading from her Seren book, her prize-winning pamphlet, a competition anthology, her phone, and sheets of paper. She concentrated on her main themes (vet, step-mother) at first, before reading some newer Lake District pieces. Her books seemed to sell well.

There were 17 open-mic readers too, so no lack of variety.

Flash collections

On my Reviews of Flash collections page I have links to write-ups of most of the Flash books I've read. A third of them are anthologies, which is an indication, I think, that it's still an evolving market.

Who buys Flash books? At least with anthologies the contributors might be buyers, but how many of those people will buy single-author books? Who are the trusted publishers?

Reader expectations are maturing now that people are no longer buying only books written by friends. How good should a book be before it's publishable? I think the bar is rising. Should it have sections, like many poetry books have? Will readers accept a mix of prose-poems, dribbles and narrative Flash all in the same book? Are Flash pamphlets viable? Are more Flash books being published by non-Flash-specialist publishers?

At the moment I'd guess that only Flash writers buy (or know about) Flash books. If the customer base expands, are poets or short story writers the most likely additions? Books of short stories and poems aren't flying off the shelves either, but at least the Flash market is expanding. I think Flash might appeal to (narrative) poets who feel that modern poetry (obscure, or "exploring issues") has abandoned them.

Isobel Dixon

On the evening 11th May I listened to Isobel Dixon read outside at Magdalene. I liked what she read, and the Q+A session was useful.

Looking back on my write-ups (which I don't really trust) of her books it seems that I wasn't always convinced that her poetic rendering added enough to the content. I think in a poetry reading it's useful to read pieces with relatable content, so at readings such poems aren't a problem. And the layouts seemed to be trying too hard (also not a problem at readings)

2024 so far

A third of the year has gone and I've written 1 poem. Prose is gushy in comparison - 2 nearly-finished stories and 4 completed Flash pieces - about 5k words. Nothing written this year has been published yet. Old stuff is being accepted about fortnightly. A few of these pieces are old favourites of mine.

Victoria Moul, reviewing a Poetry Review issue, wrote "I think a new reader would be forgiven for concluding that if you want to write a straightforward poem, which uses language in a fairly conventional way, or has any significant narrative content, then you do so in prose." I think I do this nowadays, sending the result to prose/Flash (rather than poetry) magazines.

Show not tell? Nouns not verbs?

The novel I'm currently listening to has "her eyes sad but resolute". The point-of-view is of somebody else, so the author knew that "She was sad but resolute" would be wrong, but giving eyes such expressive ability isn't the solution, unless the observer's analytical abilities are being mocked.

The same book has "she had a flirty smile on her face". Why the noun "smile" rather than the verb "smiled"? The phrase "on her face" is redundant anyway. Perhaps the answer is that with nouns you can use adjectives rather than adverbs, and "flirty" sounds better than "flirtily"?

Another book has "There was an audible trembling in his voice". I don't know why "audible" is there but I'm more puzzled by why the noun "trembling" is preferred to the verb "trembled". What's wrong with just "His voice trembled"?

Yet another book has "a scream came out of her mouth" rather than "she screamed". Perhaps there's an attempt at distancing, of making the scream more real by making it into an object. A potential advantage of this construction is that extra verbs and adjectives can be used - "a stifled scream burst from her mouth" maybe.

Free Verse bookfair 2024

This was my first visit to London since Covid. There were at least 70 stalls this year. I bought "Southwords 45" (from Cork, Ireland), "The Cold Store" (Elisabeth Sennitt Clough) and saw some familiar faces. In the LRB bookshop I bought "Reverse Engineering II" (a story collection with explanations from the authors). Given the cost of postage nowadays, I didn't need to buy many books to nearly cancel out the cost of the train ticket.

Short story collection sales

If poets think the publishing world is against them, they should consider the story writers. Conan Doyle could earn enough to live just by writing short stories. More recently, John Updike (thanks to the New Yorker) could sometimes (with the help of reviewing) be in that condition too. The trend has been down ever since.

• In the UK in 2002 "fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad" according to Debbie Taylor (Mslexia, Spring 2003).
• In 2017, The Bookseller announced that "Short story anthologies are enjoying a boom in sales, rising by almost 50% in value, to reach their highest level in seven years." though Hanks and Jojo Moyes accounted for 22% of those sales. The Guardian's Complete fiction: why 'the short story renaissance' is a myth article gives more details.
• Sales were static during the pandemic, while sales of novels increased.
• In 2022 Miranda Bryant wrote a Guardian article, "Tales of the unexpected: the surprise boom in UK short stories". In it Nicholas Royle points out that "Salt Publishing, Comma Press and Nightjar Press, and prizes such as the Sunday Times short story award, the BBC national short story award, the Manchester fiction prize and the Edge Hill short story prize ... have played a key role."

Comprehensive statistics are hard to come by. e-books and freely available Web-published pieces confuse the issue. The stats probably don't cover books sold at readings, but that's where poets have another advantage over story writers - there aren't many story readings.

In some countries (Eire perhaps) things may be better though when I was last wandering in Paris (2019) I got the impression that short stories were struggling there too. This photo of Maison Poésie's front window, isn't very clear, so let me translate the little comic strip.

1. Short story
2. "Would you like to publish my short stories?"
   "No"
3. The End

Alice Munro's Nobel success, Tom Hanks' book of stories, and Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Visit from the Goon Squad" don't seem to have changed public opinion.

Sometimes story writers try to make their collections look like novels. A more recent trend is to try to attract readers of Flash by having a mix of short and long pieces. Claire-Louise Bennett's "Pond" combines both of those ploys. Stories from The White Review, Stinging Fly, Harper's Magazine and New Yorker form an episodic novel of sorts. Several of the pieces are less than a page. Did the trick work? I don't know, but it was widely and well reviewed.

Stuart Henson and Martin Figura

On 4th April I attended an Engage afternoon event at Huntingdon Library with about 20 others. Stuart Henson spent about half the time reading some of his poetry. He began by saying he was happy for people to comment and query at any time. The rest was Q&A and discussion. He was described in the announcement as a local poet (ancestors many generations back being local too) and read some poems inspired by local/family details. An Eric Gregory Award winner, he's published several books, mostly with Shoestring. He illustrated the various things poetry can do. I enjoyed the session and liked the format.

On 7th April I attended CB1 to hear Martin Figura, who read at CB1 in 1991. It was his 4th gig in 4 days. I liked best his poem about an imaginary meeting with Larkin. There were about 40 people (including his son) at the event, about half of them reading.

Paying for help with writing in the UK

Maybe you've never had a poem or story published. Maybe you've already had a book published. Whatever level you're at, you may feel that your creative development need an injection of pace. What options offer value for money? Options include

Writers Groups

Local writers groups might offer monthly meeting for maybe £20/year. Quality is variable, and you need to give as much crit as you get. There are online forums too.

Evening classes

Quality is variable, and like writers groups, they take months to have an impact.

Specialised Courses

The Poetry School is an example of an organisation that offers 1-day sessions (e.g."Short order poetry to go" - 72 pounds) and courses (e.g. "The Construction of the Poem " - a 30-week course)

Residential courses

The most well-known is Arvon - about £700/week. There are many beneficial side-effects. Immersion for a week in a writing environment helps people to start thinking of themselves as "writers". See the post by John Foggin

Festivals

Some festivals/conferences offer workshops as well as celeb events

Critiques

Several magazines, often as part of the standard submission process, offer critiques with quick turn-arounds. See for example https://theshortstory.co.uk/critiques/

Degrees

It's not so much the academic surroundings that attract late-comers -

• It's a way of finding a peer-group which might last you way beyond the length of the course.
• You may appreciate the disciplined approach, the lack of distraction, the easy availability of help.
• Unless you show you're serious about writing, your family won't take you seriously and won't give you space.
• A Masters is a way to validate your skills - even if it doesn't help you write better, the certificate at the end will open doors.
• It will show the grandchildren that you're not over the hill yet.

See Should I do a Creative Writing MA? (Emma Darwin)

Books

Many "how to write" books have exercises. A good example is "52: Write a Poem a Week. Start Now. Keep Going." by Jo Bell (Nine Arches Press, 2015)

Consultants/Mentorship

Mentoring is about $40/hour, and 60,000 words cost at least £400 to be evaluated. Regional Arts Boards can sometimes help with funding or at least offer recommendations. Even if you find a reputable company, you won't know beforehand how useful their comments will be, but even their help with the all-important first few paragraphs may make all the difference. In an advert I recently read, "Established, acclaimed authors offer aspiring writers ten hours of consultation time, usually spread out over a year. In between, the mentor reads the work for a further ten hours" for £2600.

DIY

Write your own syllabus for the year, combining some of the elements above. If you have the self-discipline you could plan a year-long programme tailored to your own needs. Creative writing syllabuses are online to give you ideas. Festivals, readings, short residential workshops, private study, and competition deadlines can be time-tabled into a year of activity. The NaPoWriMo might be useful stimulation, or competition deadlines. Holidays can be integrated into the scheme too.

Artists and writers

This is how a now dead artist I knew left his studio. Clean.

This was during our Turkey trip I think. Note that he's making the mosaic with the back uppermost - he can't see what he's making.

How I drafted the graphics for my computer game a long time ago.

If only I could make short stories that look like this - baffling until you look at them the right way.

An extract from my notebook. All my poems and most of my stories begin here.

This is on sale at Science/Medicine museums - it looks like a syringe though it's a pen. I'll leave you to work out the symbolism.

Sitting in Roald Dahl's chair, hoping for inspiration. He used a brush on the felt table-top to start his writing sessions.

Looking through my photo archive for this blog post I found this photo. I think the tookbox is upstairs. Maybe I should open it again.

It's personal

By default in poems, "I" is the poet. In a poetry book with several poems about "mother", it's tempting to assume they're all about the same person. These assumptions aren't always correct. At the very least, names might be changed to protect the innocent. Details might be adjusted to improve a poem - events might be conflated or exaggerated; surplus details and people might be edited out.

Policies vary. In "Material" by Ros Barber (Anvil, 2008) there's little to stop readers identifying the persona with the poet. The Acknowledgements page ends with "Finally, apologies are due to all those individuals who find themselves incorporated as 'material' when they would have chosen otherwise"

Robert Lowell used quotes from letters by (ex) wife Elizabeth Hardwick when writing "The Dolphin". He did so without permission. When he changed details for aesthetic reasons, it sometimes made Hardwick look worse than she was. The book won a Pulitzer.

Perhaps more writers should wear a tee-shirt like I got one Xmas. Don't worry - I don't write novels. Anyway, I'm careful when writing about people living or dead. More than once I've shown someone a poem/story, asking if I could publish it. And the "I" in my poems is often not me even when the details come from my life.

3 events this week

On Sunday I went to CB1 - live, open-mic poetry in Cambridge. Maybe 30 people were there. My favourites were a poem about grief (with mirrors and boxes) and a comic piece that kept coming up with good lines (I wish I'd written some down). I read a 250 word piece of Flash - maybe the shortest piece of the night.

On Monday I Zoomed into a Milton Keynes Lit Fest event - a discussion about Flash with Electra Rhodes and Jupiter Jones. About 70 people attended. Rhodes gave some useful checklists of ways to improve a text. One idea is to use vocabulary from one domain (e.g. knitting) for a piece that has nothing to do with that domain. What most struck me was the number of Flash pieces she's published given that she only started writing Flash during Covid. I manage about 5 published Flashes a year.

Tonight, Thursday, I Zoomed into a Matthew Stewart reading (Fire River Poets) - about 20 people, half of them doing open-mic. There was a short discussion after about Factual Truth vs Poetic Truth, and the influence of Larkin. When Larkin wrote "Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true" maybe by beauty he meant poetic truth.

Drafts on paper

When I'm at workshops others seem to come up with finished products in minutes. Not me. My first drafts (even of poems) aren't much good. I'm a rewriter.

My first drafts are always hand-written. When I transfer them to a computer I still mostly edit on paper, printing them out so I can scribble on them. I use arrows (or sometimes numbers) to indicate changes in the sentence and clause order - I'm not good at getting the ordering right first time. I usually add more text than I take away. The closer to a final draft I get, the more I take into account the reader viewpoint. Just before I send a piece off I sometimes make changes purely for the editor (paying particular attention to the first paragraph, etc).

Editing on paper is becoming a lost art. Fortunately, Flaubert’s messy drafts have been scanned in – see for example "I, chap 7 : La levrette Djali - définitif, folio 91". My rewriting workshop talk has more examples.

Substack

For years I've used Twitter, Facebook and Blogger. I look at Twitter and Facebook maybe twice a day, posting infrequently if I have publication news. I use Blogger more often, for storing and making posts. I've 1300+ mini-reviews there and many articles. It's easy to use and it's uncluttered. I've been using it since 2011. The stats (over 1.2 million hits) aren't especially meaningful because there's so much bot activity. Here they are anyway -

Blogger's become less useful as those I used to follow (and who followed me) are leaving it. One of the common places they're migrating to is Substack, which offers syndicating and monetising features that Blogger lacks. If you put material there, it can be mailed to subscribers, and you can add material that only paid-up subscribers will receive. It's good for things like newsletters, and good for bait and switch. I'd have used it for publishing my articles and workshop notes had it existed a decade ago. I've started playing with it now, without knowing what I'm going to use it for. I'm watching the way people like KM Elkes use it, to get ideas.

2024 - a quiet year so far

• Only 1 acceptance.
• 1 piece of Flash nearly written.
• 1 short story from years ago 30% rewritten, incorporating 2 recent Flashes.

I don't feel as if I'm bursting with ideas, so it's time to focus on sending off. I've 6 stories, 8 Flashes and 9 poems out there awaiting judgement. 1 of the poems is in a competition (first time for years that I've tried) and 3 stories are in competitions. I've 7 stories to send off, and some poems that have recently been returned to me. Once I've dealt with those I really must get back to writing again.

The phase of the writing process that gives me the warmest glow of satisfaction is when a story I'm working on suddenly falls into shape - I can see what's not needed and where passages need to be added. Completion isn't far away and won't be hard to achieve. But reaching that phase is a struggle. Nowadays especially, as soon as a story reaches Flash length I'm tempted to stop, and start a new piece. My plan in the next month or so is to try the reverse - put some Flash pieces together to make a story.

UK Literary magazines in print

Call me old fashioned, but I still like literary magazines that are printed. There aren't many left. Recently it was announced that Planet and New Welsh Review are ceasing - together they've been going for 130 years. I realised recently that Dream Catcher (poetry and stories, with a few reviews) is still going, so I've subscribed to that. I already subscribe to

• Under the Radar (poetry and stories, with several poetry reviews)
• Orbis (poetry and a few flash-length stories, with several poetry reviews)
• The Dark Horse (poetry and essays)
• Postbox (all stories) - no subscription. I buy it when when it comes out.

"Flash fiction as a distinct literary form ..." by Shelley Roche-Jacques

In "Flash fiction as a distinct literary form: some thoughts on time, space, and context" (from "New Writing - The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing") Shelley Roche-Jacques look at some aspects of Flash, prose poems and short stories.

• She suggests that Flash has a distinguishing feature that prose poems don't need - "I am of the opinion that something needs to happen, or perhaps more importantly, that a context needs to be created in which there is the possibility of something happening"
• When comparing Flash and short stories she thinks "most critics and writers seem to suggest the difference is more in degree than kind"

That seems fair enough to me. I think it's useful to restrict the "Flash Fiction" category to pieces which acknowledge the concept of narrative. There are pieces of short creative prose that aren't prose poems or CNF, nor do they create a narrative context, but such pieces (on the essay/flash spectrum maybe, or shaped prose, or triptychs, etc) can fend for themselves.

She makes some other observations that I agree with too -

• "As an avid reader of flash fiction, I have noticed the prevalence of the simple present tense. ... Perhaps, as Flick points out, because of the simplicity and sense of immersion it offers."
• "the brevity of the flash fiction form perhaps affords the writer greater freedom to play and experiment. The deft use of deictic elements can be seen as a way of establishing swift immersion and/or negotiating the spatio-temporal layers and landscape."
• "Due to the limited space in flash fiction, a popular and effective technique seems to be to have the protagonist ‘thinking forward’ beyond the end of the scene"

I think lots of U.A. Fanthorpe's pieces could nowadays fit in a short text category, but that's another story ...

My out-of-date contributions to the debate include -

• Flash
• Short Fiction
• Recent UK flash fiction
• Adapting short texts for the market

Seán Hewitt

I went to see Seán Hewitt at Pembroke College tonight (in their new auditorium). He has degrees from Cambridge and Liverpool, and lectures at Trinity College Dublin. About 80 people attended, 20 queuing at the end to get books signed! He said that writing his second poetry book he was conscious of writing a book rather than a set of poems. That wasn't so with his first book.

How to review poetry

A while ago Charles Boyle (CBeditions) noticed that a book he published which the TLS described as "an astonishing achievement" and the Literary Review described as "a masterpiece" sold fewer than 100 copies in its first year.

In ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem) from "The Friday Poem" Jon Stone "illustrate[s] what he thinks we need to do to broaden the readership of poetry"

Helena Nelson has a piece in the same issue. In "Are poetry reviews pointless?" she writes "First, I want to test out Stone’s theory that I can profitably respond to a set of poems as “toys”. Second, I want to review a book in a non-typical way, avoiding “florid” terms and a standard evaluative stance."

When I read a book, I write it up online. I used to try the odd review-style write-up - I keep a list of longer poetry reviews online. Nowadays my write-ups are mostly jottings. I posted a write-up each Wednesday and Saturday, which used to match my reading speed. Now that I'm reading (and listening to) more books, I'm filling up future Wed/Sat slots so fast that I'm up to April 2025. So to slow myself down I think I'll try to write some reviews again.

Rather than toys, I think I react to poems as if they were disposable alien technology - if I don't understand what a part does, I remove it to see what happens, or re-assemble the pieces. Biologists try to understand DNA that way sometimes. However, I have a feeling that I might end up writing similar reviews to before, "fun to play with" becoming a substitute for "good" when describing a poem.

When a new art form (e.g. Cubism) emerges, at first people don't know how to react. There are many individualistic responses. Many will be resistant to change, pointing out how the new work lacks what old, familiar works have. Before too long, collective experience will come to a broad consensus about an interpretative framework. That framework can become too rigid though - a new orthodoxy that fails to keep up with new ways of looking. So let's see what happens if things are shaken up.

Formalish verse

Deviations from standard forms are common - to reduce rhythmic monotony; to surprise; to emphasise a word/phrase, etc. These deviations work because of readers' expectations. In mosques, Islamic art deliberately breaks the pattern too.

But other deviations are harder for me to understand. Here are some comments by poets about their poems in "The Best American Poetry, 2000"

• Olena Kalytiak Davis's "Six Apologies, Lord" is one of a "sequence of 'Shattered Sonnets' that sort of simultaneously distort, discard, and highlight formal, thematic, and rhetorical sonnet conventions."
• Adrienne Su says of the 6-stanza "The English Canon" that "I deliberately ended the first four stanzas with '-ing', which is a kind of cheater's rhyme, and the last two with the imperfect rhyme of 'combat' and 'scratch.' I threw in 'protest' and 'trust' near the end, for fun. Between the cheating, the imperfection, and the distance between rhymes, I hope that the poem reads as free verse, yet looks formal because of the tercets. The combination of the free and constrained, of modern and traditional, seemed suited to the subject, writing to and from the canon".
• Mary Jo Salter says "The poem was a liberation to write, technically speaking; though it rhymes, the rhyme scheme changes every stanza, and the meter is deliberately clunky."

In my Relaxed Forms article I list further examples. I still struggle with the idea of random deviations - if I can't see a reason for breaking a pattern, my instinct is to query the craft. I'm most suspicious when the deviation comes in the lines which the poet particularly wants us to understand, as if clarity and form are in opposition.