"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 The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories.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.