Family history

My maternal grandparents came from at least 400 years of south Dorset stock. Here they seem to have just come out of hiding after years underground. Maybe they hadn't seen a camera before. I don't think she ever set foot outside Dorset. He was a hansom cab driver I think.

My paternal grandmother had over 400 years of Dorset heritage too - which doesn't mean that she knew how to have fun on the beach. My paternal grandfather's ancestors for centuries lived in the Coventry area. He came to Dorset (Bovington) as a soldier and never returned north. He was good at sport and drinking, getting banned from the odd pub (allegedly). He was a pipelayer - he dug holes. He smoked to the bitter end.

In short, I have an inauspicious family tree. More interesting are the "uncles" who don't appear in the official family tree, adopted at birth by a relative (a fact that they weren't always aware of until adulthood). One of them had a piano and started sing-alongs when we visited. His wife had a strong Spanish accent - they met in the war. They, more than my other relatives, have been source material for me.

Symbo-dumps and Spatial form

[moved to https://litrefsarticles.blogspot.com/2025/12/symbo-dumps-and-spatial-form.html]

Lavenham

You may not have been to Lavenham (Suffolk - follow the link to see photos) but you've probably seen it in Harry Potter films. In medieval times it was a wealthy town (in the UK top 20) but now fewer than 2000 people live there. It has over 300 listed buildings and still feels medieval.

When I visited the Guildhall (built around 1530) it had recently been raining. The building overlooks the square where John Lennon and Yoko Ono filmed part of "Apotheosis".

The oldest building goes back to the 1300s. The bookshop isn't so old. It sells far more than books. John Constable's school (dating from the 1500s) is round the corner. The setting for the "Hay Wain" is a drive away

More similes/metaphors from novels

Here's a continuation of a list I posted in June. Without the context it's rather unfair to assess the following fragments. From what I recall, they're mostly in the author/narrator's voice. Do they work in prose? If they fail, why? Would they be more suited to poetry or stand-up?

1. "We hide in our own pleasure" (Jodi Picoult)
2. "truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain" (Jodi Picoult)
3. a calf in the road with "the affronted look of someone caught looting" (Nikki Gemmell)
4. "Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy" (Harlan Coben)
5. "breathing like a ruptured accordian" (Stuart MacBride)
6. "slithering about like a snake in a sack of milk" (Stuart MacBride)
7. "he removed the covering from the sandwiches like someone removing their cap for a passing hearse" (Andrew McMillan)
8. "trying to pin down her last abode was like attempting to discover the whereabouts of Atlantis with a boyscout's compass." (Jane Costello)
9. "sweat-pants with an arse so saggy you could bungee-jump off a suspension bridge with it" (Jane Costello)
10. a noise like "I'd poured battery acid on a dalek and chucked it down a mountain" (Jane Costello) (character-PoV)
11. "He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat" (Alan Hollinghurst)
12. "Hank's eyes dart about like scared birds trying to find a place to land" (Harlan Coben) (character-PoV)

For me,

• 1 would work in a poem.
• 2 doesn't work because a bow is drawn across something, not the other way around
• 4 sounds like parody - maybe it's supposed to
• 5 is effective - short and expressive
• 6 puzzles me. Why a sack of milk?
• 8 is fun
• 11 has a ring of truth - a comparison that might be harder to make the most of in poetry.
• 12 has been used before - which may not be a problem

Recitativo secco and poetry

I know very little about opera, but I think "Recitativo secco" is what opera singers sometimes do between songs - minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.

I can't find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. "secco" (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes -

• "It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
• secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
• "Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces" (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/

In books like Tim Steele's "Towards a winter solstice" the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry's having a rest. In free verse books like "Bycatch" (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It's like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.

So what's wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What's wrong with passages of prose? Maybe

1. the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
2. there is a hierarchy of arts - music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose - and people prefer the higher arts
3. there's a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear - if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?

Let's deal with those issues in literature -

1. The haibun form is hybrid. It hasn't really taken off - perhaps because people feel they should stick to the rules of having a prose travelogue and a haiku. People are more flexibly combining prose and poems nowadays. However, I don't think the hybrid forms are going to be popular any time soon.
2. Are hierarchies breaking down? Rhyming poetry doesn't have a status advantage over free verse nowadays, but I think that poetry still has a higher status than prose. Flash's status is rising in the prose world.
3. Given the 2 points above, I can see why authors don't slip some prose into a poem, or combine prose pieces and poems in the same book (I think John Updike did it, but it's rare). That said, the border between free verse and prose is becoming more porous, with some writers (Carolyn Forche, Michael Loveday, etc) re-categorising some of their old poems as Flash. I can imagine a day when people who would have produced a poetry book in the past could write a book of Flash instead, using much the same material.

Comedians in novels

I've talked to a few amateur stand-up comedians, including those who've attended comedy workshops. I've watched many stand-up shows (including some open-mic ones) and can see how it's a fertile source of literary material. The author's problem is how to cope with the "tears of a clown" cliche.

Joseph O'Connor's short story "The Wexford Girl" has an obsessive joker, and I've read other short stories about sad stand-up acts. Novel-length attempts are rarer, not least because so many jokes are needed. I've read/heard -

• "Good Material" by Dolly Alderton - Andy (35, a comedian who does a lot of other bit-jobs) has been gently dumped. The PoV is shared by him and his ex. It's like a Nick Hornby novel.
• "A horse walks into a bar" by David Grossman (Jonathan Cape, 2016) - Dovaleh, 57, is doing his act. We're given it nearly verbatim - his life-story rather than jokes, though he has jokes ready when he needs them. The audience trickle away. In the end it's only him and a judge he'd invited along. They'd been schoolfriends, etc., though they've not met for decades. The judge and comedian take turns with the PoV.

In both we learn tricks of the stand-up trade. Confession and self-humilation on stage can be like an author's performance in a novel where life and art mingle - how much of it is therapy?

Margate and Canterbury

This charity bookshop with stained glass in Margate used to be a bank - I took the photo from its first floor. "The Margate Bookshop" nearby has an excellent range of poetry books. There are some interesting arty shops and markets in the "Old Town"

It was only when I arrived in Margate that I found out that the Turner Contemporary Gallery's there. This sculpture's dress is in the form of cowrie shells. One of Gormley's statues is nearly visible through the window. It was half-submerged way out at sea when I was there. An old swimmer had just entered the water by it.

Canterbury cashes in on Canterbury Tales (one is set only a mile or so from my house in Cambridge). It's an interesting city to walk around, especially if you like eating and drinking. If you prefer history, there's still more than enough to see. Were I a student again I'd be tempted to go there.

Canterbury too has decent bookshops, including an Oxfam bookshop and the inevitable Chaucer bookshop.

The main point of my trip was to attend "The Sampler" (part of the Canterbury Festival) with Barry Fentiman Hall, Jessica Taggart Rose, Maggie Harris, Katy Evans-Bush, Rosie Johnston, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn and Mat Riches. There were some good poems (my favourite was about the Gormley statue) but I didn't stay to the end because the event looked like it would last 50% longer than I expected. The open-mic readers weren't the only ones with time trouble. Not for the first time, the ones whose introductions went on longest were the ones whose poems I wanted to fast-forward through. In a competition where poems can't be longer than 40 lines, winning poems can be a lot shorter than the maximum allowed. I think the same might apply at open-mics.

Rewriting the classics

I've seen Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I've read Joyce's "Ulysses". I've not seen Disney's "The Lion King". These works all allude to earlier texts - some more explicitly than others. For the reader/viewer some of these works are enriched by knowledge of the original but can stand alone, whereas others almost require pre-knowledge of the original.

In the last few months I've listened to two fairly recent novels that rewrite a classic from a different Point-of-View, sometimes injecting anachronistic concepts -

• "James" by Percival Everett - I've not read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", which remains (in revised ways) controversial. James (Jim) is Huck's slave friend.
• "Julia" by Sandra Newman - this uses much (maybe all?) of Julia's dialogue from "1984". Julia is Winston Smith's girlfriend. By presenting her words in a new, more feminist context, they take on new meanings. This idea (of not changing the original words or action, but letting them take on new interpretations) is used to a greater or lesser extent by other works of this type.

I enjoyed both novels. Knowing the original means that there are spoilers, though the treatments continue to offer surprises. The authors needed to decide how much the original work would be used as a constraint - how closely their book needed to track the events of the original. I suspect that they didn't want to contradict anything in the original - it's better to leave an event out entirely rather than bend it to fit the new plot. The picaresque nature of Twain's work eases Everett's task in this respect. Julia isn't so central a character as Jim, so Newman had more space to work in - more back-story to add. Reviews of "Julia" often comment on the ending, which goes beyond the time-frame of the main body of "1984".

Some of the satisfaction of reading such novels derives from recognising the borrowings from the originals. My memory of the originals is hazy at best. I found myself at times wondering whether details were in these books because they had to be (being in the originals) or whether they were significant additions by the author. Did the original Julia work in Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth or is this a meta-fiction twist? Did Jim really tell Huck that Huck was his son?

I've recently listened to "The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang. It parallels "The Brothers Karamazov" though I only realised that when I read the reviews afterwards. I think it works fine as a stand-alone book. It deals with son/father conflicts in a family of Orientals in the States. I've not read "The Brothers Karamazov", but reading the Wikipedia summary of it I can see how close the parallel is. It's clever - Chang had to find analogues for many features, in the way that Joyce did.

Richmond, London

It's where Alexander Pope lived for a while, having made money from doing translations. A memorial to him includes some quotes from his works including "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

An old prefabricated urinal is hidden away there. Having recently been to Paris I can say that the Richmond one compares well with the competition, though Paris also has urinals for females.

I visited Eel Pie Island too, where a now defunct music venue hosted Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc.

Liverpool: summer milestones

Over summer,

• my litrefs reviews site got its millionth hit
• my litrefs articles site got its half-millionth hit

I've retired too. This may explain why I've already written more prose this year than in any previous year: 32 Flashes and 6 stories so far. I've only written 3 poems though. None of the 2025 stuff has been published yet.

In the last month I've visited Paris, Nottingham, Chester and Liverpool. In my travels my biggest surprise was when I visited the Liverpool street where I used to live - much smarter than how I recall it. It's cobbled with a stylish bar at the end, and closer than I thought to the landmarks I recall - the 2 cathedrals, the Unity Theatre, the Everyman Theatre and the Casa.

I'm surprised that the Casa still exists. In my day it had soggy carpets, cheap booze and dubious curries. We went there after the pubs closed. It didn't draw attention to itself. It looks smarter nowadays but still seems rather out of place. Without the barrels and the letters over the door it might be just another family house. The old Casa (short for Casablanca) "nightclub" is now the Community Advice Service Association (CASA) set up by sacked Liverpool dock-workers, with a bar and performance area.

While I lived in Liverpool I went to a Writers club. I wrote some SF and got a poem on BBC Radio Merseyside, but I was too busy doing a Masters to progress much with my writing. Now time isn't an issue.

Paris

While in Paris last weekend (I stayed near the 13th's Chinatown) I visited some less central places and galleries that I'd not known about - MAC VAL, Belleville, Parc de la Villette - and some of the literary ones I knew of but hadn't been to before. Shakespeare & Co bags are seen around Paris. There was a queue outside the bookshop that I didn't join.

I wasn't tempted to try "au lapin agile" either. Opposite it is a vineyard, the vines draped with fine meshing.

AI vs AI

When e-mail replaced paper mail as the way to submit, the volume of submissions soared. One way the magazines coped was to use facilities like Submittable to deal with masses of submissions, passing the cost onto the submitting authors.

Writers started automating their simultaneous submissions. They found AI useful for content enhancement too. Most magazines said they didn't want AI work - though if authors do use AI, magazine editors won't be able to find out. A few magazines asked that authors should say if their work used AI.

Magazine editors are now using AI to fight back. Becky Tuch, who runs the ever-interesting litmagnews site on substack, mentions Dapple, a new rival to Submittable, Duosoma, Oleada, Moksha, Fillout, etc. Dapple lets editors add tags like “serial submitter” to authors (so watch out!). More interestingly, editors can outsource tasks to Ash, an AI assistant. It can generate forms. Maybe it could send out automated rejections for pieces that exceed the wordcount or use the wrong font, or have a low-quality list of previous publications. The Dapple site has videos to show you what might be possible.

Where will all this end? I suppose eventually AIs will submit material to AIs. But paper hasn't completely died out. I know of at least one magazine that still insists on printed submissions through the post.

"The Dark Horse" (issue 48)

It took a while coming but it was worth the wait - 182 big pages with essay-reviews about Michael Longley (by Edna Longley), a Hecht biography, Kathleen Raine, Edward Thomas (especially his reviews - 1,900 in 10 years), Heaney's letters, etc. The editor Gerry Cambridge reviews the layout and content of "Irish Pages" (the Scotland issue), "The Little Review" (I attended the launch), "Free Bloody Birds", and reports on the state of Scottish poetry in general, mentioning Freedom in the Arts (which I didn't know about). There's poetry by Sean O'Brien, Polly Clark, Robert Crawford, etc.

See The Dark Horse website for details.

Reactionary writing?

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There's nothing very pure about the Arts. They're used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They're used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA's home page currently says that "Approximately 34 Percent ... of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities", which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

When I read a magazine I sometimes gather stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn't it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Gender

There are disagreements about the definitions of "Male" and "Female", but I think that whatever the definitions, one would hope that roughly as many females as males appear in literary books and magazines. In this regard there has been progress. The New York Times had a piece out on December 7th 2024 entitled " The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone" about male/female statistics in literature -

• The New Yorker hasn't published a work of literary fiction by a white American man born after 1984.
• according to the job information company Zippia, 58.5% of agents are women
• According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, women authored 30% of published work in 1970 and produced the majority by 2020.

Race

This is a thornier issue than gender. There are women-only presses and literary magazines (though perhaps they're on the decline). Segregation by race is more common. There are expectations for equality of M/F representation in many countries. Perceptions of race are less clear and more regional. For example, in the UK the race ratios are very different in London (45% are White British) and amongst younger generations. If you live in London, you might expect much greater than 3% of poets to belong to black groups, but for the country as a whole, that ratio's roughly representative according to the latest census.

Push back

• Social Media is used as a means of cancelling and virtue-signalling. Campaigns against (for example) Kate Clanchy have hit the headlines. Nowadays such campaigns can provoke orchestrated reactions.
• There are stories of WASP writers getting little success until they pretend to be African/Asian LGBTQ+ people.
• Literary magazines haven't all decided to follow the crowd. In a 2019 Acumen editorial it said "I feel that [the Arts Council] are diverging from the path which Acumen wishes to follow. This is to accept all poems on merit and not be influenced by gender, ethnicity, religion, fame or anything other than the value of the poem".

For more details, see my "A guide to diversity/inclusion for writers and editors" article

A burst of activity

I've recently managed to put the finishing touches to some pieces that been hanging around too long (the result of attending some inspiring workshops, I think). I've also written some 100-150 word micros (the result of a workshop that analysed micros - I can see more in them now). I've even written a poem in 2 days (only the 4th poem this year). So I've been sending things off. I feel calmer now that I have over 30 pieces out again. No simultaneous submissions - most magazines allow them nowadays, but they're an admin overhead for both me and the magazines, so I avoid them if possible.

I tend to stick to magazines I've sent to before. I don't send to magazines until they've already published 2 or 3 issues, and I read the author bios as well as some content before deciding whether to submit.

I've had no poem accepted written after January 2024, and no prose accepted written after July 2024.True, I've often been editing/submitting older pieces, but all the same, it's a trend I need to keep my eyes on.

In 2025 I've written a piece a week on average, and I've had an acceptance a month. This has been at the cost of short-story writing - only 3 pieces are over 1,000 words long, and none are over 2,000. I aim to write at least 1 proper story by the end of the year. And I really should try to write a proper review.

"New British Poetry", Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), Graywolf, 2004

It's taken me over 20 years to catch up with this. It was written to show Americans what British poetry is like. Here are extracts from the front matter -

From the Preface by Simic -

• Until thirty years ago, one could still find ample selections of British poetry in North American school books. ... What [my professors] liked about the British was their reluctance to innovate ... Reacting to such views, the poets of my generation, and I imagine other readers of poetry, began to ignore what went on in Britain ... The rediscovery of British poetry on this continent in the last few years has a lot to do with the popularity of Irish poetry ... If the Irish poets were so good, one thought, then what about poets in the British Isles?
• It was contemporary North American poetry that I now found wanting ... formulaic. The favourite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience ... The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent
• Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than the past. We are wary of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience

From the Introduction by Paterson -

• Modernism fed into British poetry as a new, invigorating tributary to the river of the old tradition. In the main ... it did not present itself as the revolutionary alternative it was for the US
• There is still a powerful sense in the UK that, despite having lost much of its core readership, poetry can and should matter
• the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely
• the Mainstream insist on a talented minority, and a democracy of readership; the Postmoderns on an elite readership, and a democracy of talent

36 poets each get 5 pages or so. I'm looking forward to reading the best of what Britain could offer then.

Freston Tower

I had the 5th floor of Freston Tower all to myself for 3 nights - one room/floor and the staircase goes through the rooms. No en-suite. It's said to be the nation's oldest folly. Built in the 1500s it overlooks the Orwell estuary.

From the top you can see Orwell bridge, wading birds (Bar-tailed godwits, Oyster-catchers etc) and, if you're lucky, your own shadow. Not an ivory tower, more a writers retreat with exercise built into the life-style. The spiral staircases and a 30 mile cycle ride kept me fit. Sun, hailstones and lots of mud.

We walked down the coast to see Arthur Ransome's house. I've not read his books, some of which were set in the area.

Further down the coast from Pin Mill was a little village of houseboats. Unlike those I've seen on the Cam, some of these had big new superstructures, and didn't look mobile. One was called "The Ark".

Further down still were abandoned boats. 2 men with tripods and cameras were there. I can see the attraction of the setting.

This museum was a surprise - the naval training establishment closed in 1976. The view from it of Harwich container port appealed to 2 men with a tripod and drone.

The 3 Ds

I've recently heard 2 female competition judges discourage writers from entering stories about "The 3 Ds" - "Death" (especially of babies), "Dementia" and "Domestic violence" - there are many entries on those themes. Increasingly, the same advice applies when sending to magazines - when the success rates get into the 1% range, and editors need to quickly read 100s of submissions, stories need to stand out, and editors don't want too many stories on a single theme in a magazine.

I often try to write stories that are quiet. I've even tried to write about middle class families who have middle class problems. The characters are not so content that "happiness writes white" (i.e. that you don't see the white ink on the white paper) but nobody dies, goes mad, or gets hit. In fact, nothing much happens. If artists can do still lifes with apples, grapes and shadows, why can't I do a story about getting the kids off to school and taking a thoughtful walk back along a stream?

Not only do I leave out dramatic events, but I'm careful with the language. Any striking phrase/image that comes to mind when I'm writing prose tends to be diverted into the poem I'm currently writing (which becomes a rag-bag of fireworks at best).

Even if the resulting story is good, its effect will be cumulative, hidden in plain sight. Judges and editors don't always have the time to delve. So where do the carefully wrought mainstream stories go? In a book I suppose.

As a compromise I sometimes put eye-catching phrases in the first and final paragraphs, hoping to convince judges/editors that it's worth reading more. And I'm more careful about titles than I used to be.

Flash Fiction Festival 2025

I'm back from the Flash Fiction Festival at Bristol. It's the 4th consecutive one I've been to. About 120 people. Full immersion. Less than 20% males, I'd estimate.

I've come to use it as an annual review - of my writing, and also the state of Flash. I think the Flash written nowadays is better than ever, but the readership has plateau'd, and mag/book publication chances have if anything shrunk. Newcomers can develop quickly now that there are more supporting resources. Meanwhile I've been static. I can feel crowds of writers whizzing by.

The weather and the karaoke were too good for the quiet room to be needed - a shame, because some useful resources were there.

I liked nearly all the workshops. One that I hadn't expected to like - but did - was about non-writing issues that affect writing (writing for the wrong reasons; finding time/places to write; how to take breaks).

I came away with "This alone could save us" (Santino Prinzi), "In the debris field" (3 NiFs), "Landmarks" (NFFD anthology 2015), "Sleep is a beautiful colour" (NFFD anthology 2017), "Root, Branch, Tree" (NFFD anthology 2020), "And we lived happily ever after" (NFFD anthology 2022).

Stand-up comedy and humorous literature

[Some preliminary notes about connections between the two media.]

Literature

• Novels - Some commonly mentioned comic novels are -
  • "Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis
  • "Ulysses" by James Joyce (a comedy according to Joyce)
  • anything by PG Wodehouse
  • "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
  • "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
  • "Pride & Prejudice" by Jane Austen

  Sometimes the characters have all the best lines. Sometimes (as with the Montelbano stories) there's a "clown" character. Sometimes (as with Jane Austen) the narrator is crucial to the effect, using dramatic irony.

  Comedy can be used to contrast with another effect - whodunits and tragedies use it.

  A comedian can be the main character - in "A horse walks into a bar" by David Grossman (which won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize) the narrator is a stand-up comedian.

• Short stories - Lorrie Moore ("Birds of America", etc) and Katherine Heiny write comic short stories. The story writer (and novelist) A.L. Kennedy has done stand-up.
• Poetry - Wendy Cope, Pam Ayres, Roger McGough, John Hegley, etc

Stand-up comedy

Comedians and writers have some shared interests. For a start they try to engage the audience -

• Asking questions - comedians ask "Any Germans here?" Writers can ask questions too.
• Relatability - comedians mention something that relates to the audience (help-lines; car-parking apps) - observational comedy. Writers can do that as well. What do you do with your spare hand when brushing your teeth or putting petrol in your car?
• Confession/cringe-comedy - comedians engage the audience with sad/embarrassing autobiography - but is it true? It's a ploy novelists use too - how much of "All Fours" by Miranda July is autobiography?

Some standard comedy devices can be used by writers -

• Connect 2 random things - used both by poets and comics when writing material
• Surprise - a common exercise is to take a statement and think of an unlikely continuation. Better still, choose the least obvious of a few interpretations. E.g. given "My wife's a heavy sleeper", one continuation could be "she's no lighter when she's awake"
• Callback - refer back to an earlier detail (the more this sounds like an ad-lib, the better)
• One-liners - you can keep a handy list. "She ... dons a pair of oversized sunglasses that make her look like an insane welder" (Katherine Heiny)

See also

• Jokes and poetry

My rejection spreadsheets

My spreadsheets of rejections are growing. Here are their current sizes -

	Magazines	Texts
Prose	165	95
Poetry	61	136

Conclusion: I write more poetry than prose, yet I send to many more prose magazines than poetry magazines.

Here are the stats for how easily I give up -

	Times a mag has rejected me	Most times a text has been rejected
Prose	6 (Interpreter's House)	17
Poetry	34 (Acumen)	20

Conclusion: I'm just as stubborn with prose as with poetry, though I tend to give up sending to prose magazines if they've rejected me a few times. The reason I've had so many rejections from Acumen is that they've been around a long time, and between the rejections I've had successes too.

Similes/Metaphors in prose

Read these quickly, making a note of any you like, or any you think don't work in prose.

1. "He cranes himself nearer without moving either of his feet - looks increasingly like a ski jumper leaving the slope that will take him up inside thin air: that big downward slide that looks proper mad when you see it on the telly" (A.L. Kennedy)
2. "He sailed in on a sea of excuses" (Polly Samson)
3. [The dealer] "had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man's reputation" (Nicole Flattery)
4. "black as a sleeping whale" (Polly Samson)
5. "the sun rises like yeast from the bowl of the mountains" (Polly Samson)
6. "The morning's just-visible moon pulled the sea an inch inwards as if for a waltz" (Eley Williams)
7. “[the fenicular carriages are] built at an angle, like the dipping hat of someone who doesn't want to be recognised” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
8. "He looked as if he'd been poured into his clothes and someone had forgotten to say 'stop'" (G.K. Chesterton)
9. "The road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills" (Richard Brautigan)
10. "The washing piling up like nasty thoughts" (Tobias Hill)
11. "grass sprouts from the rafters of the Big House now, like hairs from a pensioner's nose" (Caitriona O'Reilly)
12. "with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else" (Dickens)
13. "[a voice] like an English lesbian preventing some rude tribesman from maltreating a donkey" (William S. Burroughs)
14. "Individual snowflakes are dropping past the window like fluffy paratroopers" (Katherine Heiny)
15. “The big willow down by the river thrashes with outbreaks of silver, upturned leaves like startled fish that can't escape” (A.L. Kennedy)
16. "Puking like a fruit machine" (Joseph O’Connor)
17. [She sees a white carrier bag flapping] "like a happy ghost" (Nikki Gemmell)
18. "the couple next to me ... are snogging so furiously that they could have dived for pearls since they last drew breath" (Jane Costello)

Now list the factors that influenced your decisions – are they funny? True? Distracting? Puzzling? Cliché? Purple prose? If they don't work in prose, could they work in poetry?

Some people keep a list of similes that can be added to stories. I keep a list of half-similes. Here are a few of them

• like feeling for a pulse
• like the silence after a story’s read at a workshop
• like an arsonist lingering in the growing crowd of spectators
• like a password you have to change
• like phonelines across a busy road

Interpretive frames

Everything you understand is received within a context. The context may be very general, but it still has an impact on interpretation - 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 it's 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 identified 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

An updated version of this article is on Litrefs Articles

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.

Getting short stories published (with a UK bias)

Let’s face it, short stories aren’t popular 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" (Debbie Taylor, Mslexia). Things have improved since then – mostly because of small presses. Even so, when a collection does well it’s because the author’s already famous - Jojo Moyes, Tom Hanks, etc.

Before you try to publish a story collection (or publish it yourself) it’s a good idea to get individual stories published (not least because publishers look in magazines for authors). There are several ways to find the right place for your stories -

• Each year Salt publishes “Best British Short Stories”. All the stories have been previously published, so you can find out where the stories come from. Alas, none of the 20 stories in “Best British Short Stories 2024” came from English literary magazines, largely because hardly any exist (Scotland’s “Postbox” is the only UK paper-based story magazine I know). The best-represented magazine was US-based (online) “Fictive Dream” with 3 Flashes from UK-based authors.
• If you like a short story collection, look at its Acknowledgements page to get ideas for where to send stories.
• There are several online lists of magazines that accept stories. One of the most useful ones is Brecht de Poortere's, freely downloadable from https://www.brechtdepoortere.com/rankings which tries to rank them objectively, 1st being “The New Yorker” and 1126th being “Witcraft”. It’s a spreadsheet with many columns of information so you can add your own formulae to search etc.
• “Stand”, “London Magazine”, “Granta”, “Dream Catcher”, "Confingo", “Orbis”, and “Under the Radar” are about the only UK print literary magazines that print stories between poems. In the USA and Ireland the situation is much better.
• There used to be quite a few themed anthologies – SF in particular. Nowadays they're not usually open-submission - they tend to be themed around illness, ethnicity, LGBTQ, etc
• There are Facebook groups that tell you what opportunities are available – e.g. “Submissions: Magazines and publishers”
• Many magazines use Submittable to deal with submissions. Magazines have to pay if they get too many monthly submissions. Some magazines stop accepting submissions once they reach their limit, so submit early in the month. Duosuma - is an alternative to Submittable, more focussed on writers’ needs. They have details on over 7,500 publishers/agents which can be searched using over 20 search criteria – free for a trial period.
• You often need to pay to submit nowadays - $3 is typical. Sometimes you get money if your story is published. If you’re going to pay, perhaps you might as well enter competitions. Several produce anthologies of the long-listed pieces, and publishers notice prize-winners. I wouldn’t bother entering competitions unless the 1st prize is at least 100 times the entry fee.
• Flash is the big growth area. There are many online options available, and collections are increasingly common. Flash can be as long as 1500 words - a short story!

Warning – for any decent magazine, acceptance rates are likely to be below 1%.

Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I've already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I've not read Laurie Bolger's book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger's anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I'm looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father's death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn't respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn't a space. This all makes sense to me - some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be "stage" versions of "page" poems.

Spain

I stayed a week in Spain, mainly based in Sevilla, which I've not seen before. Beer's cheap, drivers are very well behaved, and OAPs get 50% discounts on many of the attractions. We walked over 15km/day, seeing most of the attractions and chancing upon other things - covered markets, the Hungarian pavilion of the Seville Expo '92, a multi-venue craft fair in courtyards/studios etc. We tried a tapas bar, a vegan restaurant, a roof-top bar, a Michelin-listed restaurant (I tried calamares) and the same "family restaurant" twice.

We didn't hire bikes - cycling up to Toledo would have been a struggle. Once there, I saw chess sets, swords and marzipan. Jews, Muslims and Christians sometimes lived together, sometimes fought.

In Cordoba, the Mezqita (Mosque) incorporates a 16th century cathedral. The river's wide enough to have had 4 watermills. A big Arabic waterwheel had been copied.

Culture wars continue to this day. Here someone (a purist Italian maybe) has defaced a menu, crossing out the Hawaii option.

In a church shop they were selling this nativity scene accessory - a version of the "Jesus saves" joke.

The Alcázar was impressive. The peacocks performed for the tourists. The place appeared in Game of Thrones. We also went into the smaller but still impressive Casa de Pilatos - a private house

The Arabs in Sevilla had a notable poet long ago.

The later Cervantes' name and characters appear in several places

This bookstall was part of the big flea market in Madrid.

I hardly saw any charity shops. This, I think, is a charity bookshop.

And here's an English language bookshop.

Madrid has a cemetery of 5 million graves (we saw it from the train), and much else besides.

States of Independence, 2025

Today I visited Leicester's "States of Independence" event - crowded as usual with small press publishers and writers (Roy Marshall, Emma Lee, etc). I bought the 2020 and 2021 "Leicester Writes Short Story Prize" Anthologies (a bargain), and "Flash Fusion" (by South Asian Writers) - the pieces I've heard from it so far sounded good.

Sleepy heads

When Italian artists began to imitate classical statues, they copied the blank eyes. On rare occasions a statue’s eyes were closed, not blank. If the figure was in action we had to imagine that their pose showed us their dream. More commonly such statues were lying, or at least their head was sideways, like this sculpture in a village outside Cambridge.

Sophie Cave's "The Floating Heads" (Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) uses another trope - floating, which is more to do with dreaming, I'd guess.

In painting, the "sleeping lover" is a genre, but that's not what Dali's depicting in "Sleep" - the head looks more like a dirigible that's lost all hope, precariously propped up. In paintings, closed eyes can mean death, but except for crucifixions statues of the dead are rare. I suppose using stone to represent death is too literal.

But couldn’t these figure with eyes closed be blinking? We spend about 2% of our waking life with our eyes closed. Perhaps Venus de Milo was caught in the moment of blinking so we can see her but she can’t see us. Nowadays kids sometimes paint eyes on their eyelids. Eyes, after all, are the windows of the soul. If Michelangelo had known that old statues had painted eyes, would he still have given David sculpted irises?

Vona Groake and Karen Solie

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room - a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristram Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I've read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening's poetry - "fog makes surprising what it does not conceal", etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance to read one's poems out is worth paying for. I didn't read but at least half the attendees did.

Character-based stories - trad vs frag

Traditional character-based stories often depend on traditional notions of self and psychology - religious ideas of Soul having morphed into Freudian concepts. Stories reach a climax when the protagonist learns/accepts something of their "true self" after removing repression or discovering/remembering some key event in their past.

Trad writers who write for/about themselves tend to measure success by how well they think they've expressed in words what's inside themselves.

Various 20th century developments have confused the situation -

• Modernism - Kafka, etc
• The trend towards interpersonal methods of growth
• Socialisation (including the effects of social media, role-play, compartmentalisation, etc)
• A distrust of unification and tidiness, and a greater tolerance for neurodivergent PoVs

- all contributing to a more fragmentary concept of self/selves and a consequent change in the character-based story template. Linear plots with epiphanies and happy endings no longer seem to model typical characters. Frag writers who write for/about themselves might measure success by how many Likes and hits one of their online personas get.

I write trad stories, but not very well. When I write frag stories, I'm conscious of omitting the very features that people would like in a trad story. I don't know if my frag stories are any better than the trad ones, but there are more outlets for them in this fragmentary publishing world.

See also

• Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation
• People who need people (a workshop about character)
• Empathy and literature

Punctuating poetry

There is

• text that uses full punctuation and no line-breaks - this is how prose is usually rendered. Some poems use this style too.
• text that uses full punctuation and line-breaks - this is how much poetry is rendered. Punctuation has various uses - "there was a movement away from rhythmical-oratorical punctuation to grammatical-logical usage between about 1580 and 1680 ... It was only in the decade of the 1840's that the grammatical-logical theories finally triumphed." (Mindele Triep). Line-breaks have several uses too. Poets often break lines at the end of clauses, which is where punctuation usually appears. This leads one to wonder if both line-breaks and punctuation are needed.
• text that uses line-breaks and no punctuation - some poetry is written like this. The amount of punctuation perhaps "reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language" (Baron). Or maybe the poets feels that the little black marks make the page more messy. In general, readers have little difficulty adapting to the style. All the same, I have a few objections to it
  • If the poetry does need to be parsed into phrases, the structures need to be simple, otherwise readers will need to backtrack in order to work out whether ";", ":" or "," is missing, or whether the sentence is a question. But why risk the reader needing to backtrack? Why simplify the sentence structure?
  • Line-breaks already have several uses. Burdening them with further duties risks overloading them, making the reading process harder
  • Line-breaks seem in some poems rather a blunt instrument, used in poetry like they are in tele-prompts and adverts as an alternative to underlining.
  If line-breaks and punctuation seem to be doing much the same job, why not jettison line-breaks rather than punctuation? Perhaps because the writer, like Tony Curtis, thinks that "writing in lines ... is all that distinguishes it from all other forms of writing".
• text that uses line-breaks and few punctuation marks - Some poets use varying amounts of indentation and between-word spacing, partly to compensate for the loss of punctuation. Commas can be replaced by between-word spaces. Full-stops can be replaced by line-breaks or paragraph breaks. Other punctuation marks (e.g. apostrophes) can be used. To me, the big white spaces can make the page look messy.

For more on punctuation see poetry punctuation

The Friday Poem and The North - poetic language

In "The Friday Poem" (31st January 2025) Stephen Payne articulates a feeling I've not been able to put into words - how the language of some poets is slightly, persistently, non-standard. Reviewing 'The Island in the Sound' by Niall Campbell he writes that "This is immediately interesting writing. The syntax is ... reduced or disrupted ... There are a few part-rhymes ... There's the playfulness ... the verb-choices are novel: I'm sure I've never seen 'comb' as an intransitive verb meaning "to become a honeycomb" or something similar."

It's not a style I can do. I wish I could. In my self-doubting moods I feel that poets who write like this are "thinking in poetry" rather than translating into poetry. The review points out that "All these aspects of the surface language – syntax, sound effects and phrase-making – ... combine to achieve a dense and intense lyricism. ". There are radical ways for poets to make readers distrust words/language. I think this gentler style stops language being transparent (the way it tends to be in prose) without making it opaque.

"The North" (issue 68, August 2022) is subtitled "the Caring issue". It's guest-edited by Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia. Many of the 150+ poems baffle me, not least because of the surface language. It's probably unhelpful to quote extracts of poems out of context but I'll do it anyway -

• "First I died to my feet. Then I died to my pride"
• "I'm neither dreaming nor/ running release me slow the/ attic skylight floods so much/ rain glass grey the day ahead/ blurred a chrysanthemum/ paperweight in the palm a/ flaming porcupine" (the poem justified like prose to form a rectangle)
• "So let's asphalt cognition behind, grandly dandled by on cloud rests we lay.// One bicycle wheel is left to signal to the intermitting friendship of a butterfly:"

Lucy Allsopp has 2 side-by-side poems each entitled "Collateral". The poems are the same except that one uses "/" instead of line-breaks.

I liked "Predation" by Caitlin Young (maybe because it's micro-fiction). I think there's only one poem that used a standard form - Sarah Tait's "Brack" rigourously uses iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme being roughly xaxa xbxb ccccdd.

Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review

A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid.The've all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I've not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.

• The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags' reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
• Magma's issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn't one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
• The North has so much in it that there's bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They've rejected me the last few times I've tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck - have they changed or have I?
• Poetry Review is the Poetry Society's magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit'n'miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn't like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews - too much waffle and mutual praise. What's wrong with good old-fashioned essays?

In the mags I read there were 2 multi-page sequences that included illustrations - I didn't like them.

There were 3 poems that used graphics in other ways (a flowchart in Poetry Review, a boardgame in Magma, and Bingo in The North - click on the images to see clearer versions). I always want such experiments to succeed. In these examples I didn't see how the words had much to do with the form. Why does the flowchart just use rectangles? Why aren't there snakes in the game? Do the items in each row/column of the bingo card have anything in common?