litrefs

Libraries

2012-01-17T12:17:00.004Z

There's a Middle East religion with a god that is half book, half man. He spends his time reading himself. I don't think I read that much, but libraries certainly figure in my life. Snakeskin once accepted a poem of mine called Interlibrary Love, about 2 libraries trying to chat each other up using ISBNs, and I use library imagery both in poetry and prose.

According to the OED, Chaucer's the first recorded writer to use "library" as an English word. He might have had as many as 60 texts in his own collection. The University Library, 2 miles away from here, has 8 million books or so, sorted broadly by subject, then size, then age. As long as you use the catalogue it's a mighty useful resource. My pamphlet's not in there, but it's in the British Poetry Library. If you're ever down in London, pop in. It's near Waterloo Station and is open 6 days a week (closed Mondays). You'll find books and many current magazines there. I've just discovered that it also has a folder for press cuttings about me. Ah, fame.

2 miles the other way from my house is this "library phonebox" in a nearly village - look carefully and you'll see it has shelves of books. It would be a shame if libraries disappeared. Some small ones are already disappearing near us. The University Library's collection of printed journals will surely shrink once people become used to reading them online - I can read "American Poetry Review", "Parnassus", "Poetry", "Southern Literary Journal" and 793 other literary periodicals online through the university nowadays. E-books will supplant paper versions sooner or later. But at least the University Library has a decent cafe.

A return to Form

2012-01-08T07:33:00.007Z

I've recently read "William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure" by Stephen Cushman (Yale, 1985). With "a persistance that sometimes borders on the monomaniacal ... Williams crusaded on behalf of his theory of measure for nearly fifty years". His theory was little more convincing than Hopkins'. Like Eliot and Pound he didn't think that poetry could be really Free.

Reactions to (and re-evaluation of) free verse continue to appear. Books tackling the subject include

The Ghost of Tradition by Kevin Walzer
The Ghost of Measure by Annie Finch
"Missing Measures" by Timothy Steele
"Questions of Possibility" by David Caplan

Some poets have tried to integrate old forms with new sensibilities. The New Formalists leant towards old forms whereas the Hybrid poets were true to their modern sensibilities. More generally there's a revival of some less common forms. See -

Hybrid poetry - something old, something new by Tim Love
Strange Forms by Tim Love (from Horizon Review)
Without a Net by Ernest Hilbert (from Contemporary Poetry Review)

As the final link illustrates there are dozens of forms that are rarely used nowadays. Some are gimmicky, others are waiting to be rediscovered. I'd like to draw your attention to 2 which I've suddenly seen around

Instead of rhymes at the end of lines, use anagrams
```
Beyond it, the treasure
he seeks. Walking at his side, two austerer

figures: a woman, who grips on dangling tress
of his tawny pelt as her lowered head rests
```
(by Richie Hofman, New Criterion). Jon Stone's "Mustard" (Best British Poetry 2011) has lines that end in anagrams of the title - "cry out drams", "heart's mud", etc.
"terminals" - write a poem that has the same words at the line-endings as a famous poem has - Katy Evans-Bush in her Egg Printing Explained book (she uses Pink Floyd) and John Tranter (he uses Matthew Arnold) have used this effectively.

The year 2011

2011-12-29T18:08:00.007Z

I was quietly confident about a short-list appearance at Bridport this year - poetry or Flash. No such luck. In other competitions I ended up with 2 commendeds. Magazine appearances continue to tick over.

No new venues, though not from lack of effort - I ended the year with 3 Rialto pieces in the post, 3 Magma, 2 London Magazine, 2 Triquarterly (from March), 3 Weyfarers, 4 Iota, 1 McSweeneys, 1 Riptide and a couple of competitions.

After the publication of "Moving Parts" I had trouble returning to writing. In Autumn I cannibalised my Flash Fiction attempts from earlier in the year, managing to create a decent short story or two. A raid of my notebooks sufficed to get some poems moving. The reception to "Moving Parts" has been fun to follow. Partly as a response to that I've been networking a little - Cambridge, Edinburgh, London - meeting dozens of people who I've only e-contacted before. I should develop this side of things. I'm intending to organise a HappenStance event next year.

I've been expanding my blog activity. A USB microscope Xmas present could be useful - it takes movies. Here's what happens if you analyse too deeply

Our Egyptian holiday was fun and it's beginning to get into my writing. This year I've also visited Italy and Scotland. Favorite books? I'm enjoying Burt's "Close Calls with Nonsense" and have caught up with Jennifer Egan's novels. Salt's Best British series are good news. "The Night of the Day" by David Morley might have been my favorite poetry pamphlet. "The Dark Horse" might be my favorite magazine of the year.

Torino

2011-12-23T20:15:00.017Z

We spent a few hours in Torino as part of a holiday. It's more interesting than I'd expected. I found this old bookshop ("Gilibert "?) in an shopping mall which once hosted the Ministry of Finance. Nietzsche lived there for a while. The entrance sign - "Nuovo Romano" - refers to the cinema that's still running.

I took several books to read - "Notes for Lighting a Fire" (Gerry Cambridge), "I Sing the Sonnet" (Duncan Gillies MacLaurin), "Taking Account" by Peter Gilmour, "Egg Printing Explained" (Katy Evans-Bush) and "Close Calls with Nonsense" (Stephen Burt). Connections grew between these as I read them. MacLaurin's sonnets contrasted with Evans-Bush's; Gilmour's Poet/Persona interaction contrasted with the self-construction described by Burt; Burt's description of Tranter helped me when reading Evans-Bush; Cambridge's attention to natural detail made me wonder about the nature of close scrutiny as I peered down from the plane and saw the Mole Antonelliana.

I enjoyed Burt's book the most. It was written "for people who read the half-column poems in glossy magazines and ask, 'Is that all there is?'". It comprises reprints of articles and extended reviews about young US poets, non-US poets, famous US poets and the Ellipticals. They show people like me new routes into poems without sounding too preachy, pointing out the "flaws" I see (e.g. "all [Les Murray's] books include clumsiness and redundancy, masses of lines it's hard to take seriously") while also showing some strengths I'm blind to. A chapter about Wilbur follows one on Ashbery. Armantrout and Gunn each have a chapter.

The non-politician Italian government survived a confidence vote while we were skiing. Pavel and Kim Jong-il died. Nothing much changes in the place we've been skiing in for a few years - the same people behind the supermarket counters, the same barber. The Italians have more types of Panetone than can currently be found in England. Zuppa Inglese ("English soup") is trifle.

Edinburgh

2011-12-12T14:19:00.019Z

On 10th December I attended the launch of HappenStance publications by Peter Gilmour and Gerry Cambridge in Edinburgh. Over 60 people attended, amongst them Rob MacKenzie and Colin Will. Though I arrived from Cambridge I wasn't the one who'd travelled furthest. I'd had trouble understanding people's accents so I was relieved that the readers spoke so well. Peter Gilmour (whose poems were described as having "lovely syntax" by the emcee, Helena Nelson) read mellifluously with interesting comments (for example, he suggested that mining the past to write a poem reveals memories that couldn't otherwise be recovered). I knew Gerry Cambridge as editor of the excellent "The Dark Horse" magazine ("it's an honour to be rejected by The Dark Horse", said Helena Nelson) but not as a poet. He said he was interested in Nature and Detail. Both readers seemed to know what an audience wanted and what they could cope with.
Edinburgh of course is associated with some famous writers. Conan Doyle worked in Portsmouth, my birthplace, after having been a medical student at Edinburgh, and JK Rowling started writing Harry Potter in Edinburgh. I explored Edinburgh, its vennels and wynds, finding some traditional little bookshops ("Edinburgh Books" and "Southside books" are illustrated here) amongst the impressive, imposing architecture. If you like traditional Christmas atmospheres - city centre fairgrounds, German markets, and snow - Edinburgh's the place to go. I explored the delights of Ratho Station too. I took "The Best American Short Stories 2010" with me to read - well crafted Realism without a hint of Barthelme, with at least half the stories featuring a death. I jotted a page or 2 of notes and started a story, so I'm happy.
The Scottish Poetry Library, just off the Royal Mile, was the venue for the launches. It compares well with the London counterpart. I picked up a copy of Northwords Now there, which is a good read. The Scottish Storytelling Centre is 5 years old - "the world's first purpose-built centre for storytelling". I think I'll be popping up to Edinburgh more regularly in future. An East Coast train trip's especially tempting.
You'll find more about the event on Helena Nelson's HappenStance blog.

Web statistics

2011-12-01T07:03:00.000Z

My oldest blog is about 2.5 years old now, long enough for statistical trends to emerge. Low traffic, but it's interesting to see what's top of the charts.

Litrefs

Litrefs gets about 20 hits/day. The most popular pages have been

Poetry Punctuation (547 hits)
poetry pamphlet publication in the UK (357 hits)
Comments about poetry publishing (154 hits)

Fair enough - punctuation and publication will always be of interest to writers.

Litrefs Articles

Litrefs Articles gets about 40 hits/day. The most popular pages have been

Metaphor and Simile (2,241 hits)
Rhyme (485 hits)
Tania Hershman: an interview (129 hits)

"Metaphor and Simile" gets many Google hits in bursts. I suspect it's found by pupils doing assignments.

Litrefs Reviews

Litrefs Reviews gets about 20 hits/day. The most popular pages have been

Stuart: A life backwards (236 hits)
The Best British Poetry 2011 (125 hits)
Poetry Writing: The expert guide (112 hits)

The first and third are by authors who've been in the news recently (Masters for a new book and Sampson because of the Poetry Society). I suspect that those pages are picked up in random Google searches. Certain reviews seem to attract short-lived attention on the grapevine - BBP2011 was one of them.

Meanwhile, my Literary Quotes web page attracts about 40 hits/day. I'm surprised it's that low - review/article writers should find it useful.

Margaret Drabble

2011-11-24T18:21:00.009Z

Long ago I read a few Drabble books. A writer friend of mine read her in his twenties too. I knew about students then, but I didn't know how graduates lived, or how the middle classes lived. I didn't even know women who worked. In Drabble's books I encountered emotionally articulate women (I imagined they looked like those in David Hamilton's photographs) experiencing London lifestyles, meeting people who were interested in literature. I learnt what growing girls thought about. I saw a dramatization starring Sandy Dennis.

So I thought I'd re-read them. I couldn't recall which I'd previously read, and hardly any of her books were in the library. I found "The Millstone" in a secondhand bookshop. I must have read it but now I feel it couldn't have contributed to my abiding impression of Drabble books. I finished it, but only just. The writing didn't propel me along. Is the main character, Rosamund, supposed to come over as snobby? Maybe. When she found out that her lodger has been writing a novel about her, she was more annoyed by the novel's attack on scholarship than the invasion of privacy. But maybe it's just that times have changed. No longer do mothers stay 9 days in a maternity ward, neither do unmarried mothers have a "U" at the foot of their bed.

The character has a Ph.D so we should expect some elevated, controlled writing - "Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency", (p.9); "she wore her grief well: she spared herself and her associates the additional infliction of ugliness, which so often accompanies much pain", (p.135). It's not a style that appeals to me. In The Guardian John Mullan says "Often it is as if the sentences were being transcribed as they arose in the narrator's mind. … Her peculiar formality of tone is partly a matter of the class identity of which she is so conscious. … The intriguing coexistence of formality and informality also seems appropriate to its period. … Drabble's narrator is a creature of her times: free-thinking but proper; informal, but formal too". So I guess the idea is that one should try to interpret the at times awkward, faux-Jamesian tone as an expression of Rosamund's personality.

The baby's nameless more often than I'd have expected - "I remember, however, the night before it was born with some clarity", (p.87); "And so the summer wore away, and autumn set in, and the baby started to sit up", (p.112).

Perhaps I don't appreciate the significance of the decision she made to become a single mother, to control her own destiny. In those days it might have been a bigger deal than now. I think the plot is that she becomes more self-assured. At the start she thinks of the father that "He must be one of these bisexual people, I thought, or perhaps even he's no more queer than I am promiscuous, or whatever the word is for what I pretend to be. Perhaps we appeal to each other because we're rivals in hypocrisy", (p.27). When the child is born she has a funny feeling - "Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life", (p.98). Later she's brave enough to talk to neighbours, she realises that "If I asked more favours of people, I would find people more kind", (p.156). At the end she invites home the unknowing father having not met him for 2 years. She likes him. He asks if she'd like to travel the world with him. She turns him down, sort of - "I asked him if he would have another drink. But I asked him in such as way that he would refuse, and he refused.
'I can't help worrying,' I said. 'It's my nature. There's nothing I can do about my nature, is there?'
'No,' said George" (p.167). We're left wondering whether motherhood has changed her much. Before, she loved no-one and had a career planned. After, she has someone to worry about and has a career planned.

Then I found "Jerusalem the Golden", secondhand again. I'm sure that I'd read that too. The heroine, Clara, is affected by words that are "phrased with some beauty" (p.31). I wonder what she'd feel about the start of this book. Early on she uses big words in conversation - "And now you can see that I can substantiate my disadvantage" (p.24) The following extracts of narration (3rd person privileged though they are, and interpretable as expressions of Clara's personality) are too wordy to me.

"Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she had missed them, and whether a conjunction so fateful and fruitful could have been, by some accidental obtuseness on her part, avoided: she did not like to think so, she liked to think that inevitability had had her in its grip, but at the same time she uneasily knew that it had in some ways, been a near thing" (p.9)
In the following, the repetition of "right", "although" and "quite" seem accidental - "Although she was quite ignorant of the etiquette of such occasions, she rightly took this to be her duty; she could tell that she was right by the way that Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, although he had expressed quite other sentiments whilst sitting beside her in the auditorium" (p.10). How about this rewrite? - Though ignorant of the appropriate etiquette, she took this to be her duty; she could tell she was right by how Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, contradicting what he'd said during the performance
"Clelia was a name with which she had no acquaintance. She did not think it likely that she would ever need to use it, so she was not unduly uneasy about her ignorance". How about this instead? Again, it reduces the word-count by at least a third - She hadn't heard the name Clelia before, which didn't worry her because she didn't think she'd use it

The paragraph starting near the bottom of p.10 begins with a sentence containing "but". Successive sentences hinge about "but", "but", "but", "but", "but" and "nevertheless", "however, though", "though", "and yet" until the pattern's broken by the none too elegant "She liked to like things, if at all, for the right reasons. And all in all, she was glad".

Once the text has something to narrate and more dialogue interjects, the style loosens up. Naive, Clara emerges into a mileau she's longed for - the "Jerusalem the Golden" hymn elevated the heroine, Clara, "to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire ... where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things" (p.32). She trusts the first interesting family she meets - "Clara was impressed by the way they all managed to talk intelligently, yet without strain, without intensity, without affection" (p.136); "She took them on trust so completely, the Denhams, for as far as she could see they were never wrong" (p.156). She identifies with Clelia - when Clelia was 8 or 9 she once "confessed that she was weeping because she feared she would never be an artist" (p.137). Later, finding some of her own dying mother's letters, Clara identifies with her as she was in her 20s. In chapter 7 we have Gabriel's point-of-view. Later, Clara's and Gabriel's points-of-view alternate. At the end, events happen rapidly, and Clara, without experience, perhaps oversteps the mark. Coincidences play in her favour.

I like the last hundred or so pages - they are how I remember Drabble. I probably identified with her characters - heroines from a sheltered upbringing who have the basic brain power but lack cultural conversation and challenges to their beliefs. They meet someone who opens the door onto a new life, shows them London. They're not ready for it, they idealize their new friend, they run before they can walk, feeling there's so much time to make up.

In a Paris Review interview by Barbara Milton, Drabble says

"I was rather a lonely child when I was small. I made lots of friends when I was about thirteen or fourteen - when it became all right to be intellectual. But when I was a little child I was often ill. I had a bad chest and was always rather feeble - hated games. I make myself sound very pathetic, which I wasn't, but I certainly didn't feel I was part of the mainstream. I used to spend a lot of time alone, writing and reading and just being secretive"
the idea for her first novel ("A summer birdcage") "must have been related to my feelings at finding myself, at the age of twenty-one, free, unemployed, wondering where to go, watching my friends and contemporaries to see where they would go."
"Most people have a rival figure or model figure while some of us have lots of both. I suppose in my case this was either my older sister, or my best woman friend whom I've used again and again in my novels. The friend was very much a Celia figure to me in that she came from a more sophisticated background."
"The problem in my early novels was that I simply hadn't the ability to express the range of my feeling. I couldn't technically do it. When I wrote my first novel I didn't know how to write a novel at all. … In the fourth [Jerusalem the Golden], I tried to write (not very successfully) in the third person ... I'm slightly fed up with The Millstone, but I think that's probably a reaction against everyone else always liking it best. It's the most often translated into other languages. I get far more letters about it. I'm bored with it."

On enotes it says that

"The Millstone, and Jerusalem the Golden are semi-autobiographical"

So maybe my doubts about the books I've recently read match her own doubts, and the reasons I liked the books were to do with the reasons she wrote them, though I think I'd get on with her sister A.S.Byatt better.

In the Paris Review she says she finds it difficult writing

"about men. I used to find it difficult because I didn't trust myself to know what they were like. I still feel uneasy when I describe men's clothes and their offices. I have to do research, find out what they really look like, how they talk, and what kind of work pattern they have."
"about very stupid people. I'm aware that my characters tend to be not only intelligent, but intelligent about themselves."

I didn't notice a man problem, but the characters do all seem equally self-literate, plot turns tending to happen when a character becomes suddenly more or less self-aware than usual. Also on enotes it comments on style, saying that

"Her works have consistently been praised for their wry humor, their mannered style, and their uniquely literate approach to the culture of the twentieth century."
"Drabble is hailed as among the few living writers who continues to embrace the style of nineteenth-century novelists such as Austen, James, and Thomas Hardy. As Drabble bluntly stated to one interviewer, she prefers to participate at the end of a dying literary tradition that she respects rather than to join ranks at the forefront of one she dislikes."

However, Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker writes that "Drabble has joined the strengths of old-school realism with the playful detachment and blatant mythmaking of postmodernism". Jon Self on his The Asylum blog says "Drabble’s style remains similar through many of the stories: a subjective third person narrative which comes close to stream of consciousness in its detail and absorption of the characters’ thoughts (at times I was reminded of Mrs Dalloway). This enables her to impart her characters’ histories and impressions together, in a way which can tip from showing to telling"

I've seen little Drabblian postmodernism or stream-consciousness so far. Maybe I should read her later books. I'm surprised that she's written short stories, but she has a collection of those out, written over a space of 40 years. That might be interesting.

1200 Literary Quotes

2011-11-13T09:57:00.003Z

My Some Literary Criticism quotes page now has 1200 entries. Here's a selection

"You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse", Tolstoy (to Chekhov)
"poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry", Hollander
"I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry", A.E. Housman
"What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral ... he continues to visit the grave", Graves
"[poetry is news] brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo", Milosz
"the great changes in literature are non-literary in origin; and the same causes that produce the new work produce, in time, its audience. Wordsworth's poems did not produce Wordsworthians", Jarrell
"as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines", Macaulay
"a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning", Valery
"to write a poem is to find a way from exile into pilgrimage", Gunn?
"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth", Larkin
"Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini", Paul Muldoon
"We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other", Wittgenstein
"[Plath] was always a posthumous person, but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style", Helen Vendler
"We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs.", Don Paterson
"magician and trickster are the 2 positions left once language slides from the world. The magician seeks to reconsile language and reality, the trickster accepts the rupture and exploits the resulting possibilities" - Adorno?
"Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping", Jean Cocteau
"Gay men growing up in the mid-century in Scotland necessarily found tricks of concealment, and the 'avant-garde' offered an environment in which creativity could be engaged in without too much awkward self-revelation and without having to decide exactly how serious one was about what one was writing", D.M.Black
"The twentieth-century avant-garde liked to embrace boredom as a way of getting round what is considered to be the vapid 'excitement' of popular culture", Kenneth Goldsmith
"many poets of the following generation - the fourth after Lowell - who write nonmetered poetry no longer seem to have the example of metered verse within the ear, with the result that many of their lines appear flaccid and lack any apparent reason why a line is broken this way rather than that. Their lines often read like prose", Stephen Dobyns
"[Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos] was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem ... it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry", Stephen Dobyns

"Moving Parts": reviewing the reviews

2011-10-25T20:13:00.004+01:00

Thanks to Helena's efforts I've had 10 reviews in 10 months - "Acumen", "Envoi", "New Walk", "Other Poetry", "Under the Radar", "Weyfarers", "Bow-wow Shop" and 3 in "Sphinx". I'm grateful to all the reviewers - it couldn't have been easy. Time for a summary.

Poems mentioned

Some poets moan that reviewers ignore their books. I'm not going to moan that 4 of the 28 poems weren't mentioned, though it's interesting to note that amongst those 4 are a poem from Stand and a minor prize-winner. "Escape" received the most attention - it's pivotal according to one reviewer. It has the most-quoted lines too - "I magnify the moment, hold an uncorked bottle to my mouth two-handout like a clarinet and play the blues."

Like many first collections, the poems were written over many years. I initially sent in about 60 poems. I find it hard enough to compare my poems with each other let alone with those of other poets, so I mostly submitted published work. Helena made an initial selection and we negotiated from there. Most of my more recent pieces lost out in the process. My worries were that the collection would have too much variety and that it would be unrepresentative, leaning towards poems like "Touch". In fact, there are more than enough challenges for the target audience. Inclusion of poems like "Touch" means that readers might give me the benefit of the doubt when the going gets tough.

What I've learnt

That reviews don't worry much about acknowledgements and prizewinners
Reviews help sales though they might not cover costs - at least 2 buyers said they bought because of particular reviews
Christopher J.P. Smith attempted a tri-partite classification that I wouldn't argue with.
A few people see difficulty, or can't find what a poem's "about", which is no surprise. More surprising is that some of these people in other reviews have appreciated non-representational pieces. It doesn't help that some poems are simple whereas others are deceptively simple. As readers go from one poems to the next they may need to change the aesthetic framework. Worse still, they need to change from line to line. It's more like reading Don Paterson than, say, Pascal Petit. I think "Misreading the Signs" is typical from its title to its punch-line - by drawing attention to sign/signified issues it breaks the mimetic spell - the sign saying it's not quarter past six really being a "don't turn right" sign. It's person-centred but wanders into abstract/essay territory using juxtaposition.
One particular kind of difficulty often mentioned is the "puzzle". Jim Murdoch has written about this, and I don't disagree with anything he says. I could have made some things easier without losing artistic integrity. People sense that they're missing something or that something needs assembling. Yes, I sometimes use juxtaposition, and no, I don't include instructions or a picture on the box. I think I'm a hard-edge (rather than soft-edge) writer - as with Pound's "Metro" poem or Magritte's surrealism, the objects aren't fuzzy or obscured. It may be this that makes readers assume that the rest of the poem is equally clear. More than one person said that "Giraffe" was difficult. To me it's just a "Martian Poetry" metaphor-fest.
Nobody's suggested that there should be notes. I've not (unlike Kona MacPhee) written about all of the pieces online, but there are some notes

Possible Puffs

"A very satisfying collection"
"A fine intelligent collection"
"remarkable for their freight of experience, assured grasp of line, and a poetic sensibility as confident as it is unusual"
"unmistakeable authority of experience"
"precision and tactile immediacy"
"a wonderful ear"
"an intense and rewarding read"
"he writes exceptionally well about children"
"What’s most winning, for me, is his really human touch"
"The strength of the personae in the pamphlet is the thing that attracts attention"
"Tim Love is probably a magician"
"The language is deceptively plain but is deftly spiced with originality"
"skilled metre is matched by a deep understanding of the measured world"

The Reviews

Among high spots in Moving Parts by Tim Love are 'Therapy' (Look for a sign ... / Memorise it. Look away. If the sign's changed when you look back / you're dreaming) and a painfully moving poem in which a young hospital visitor brings his favorite toy car so you could brrmbrrm it along the sheets and get better
(Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, Other Poetry IV.4)
Starting Tim Love's Moving Parts came as a revelation. The wonderful first poem 'Love at first sight' at first put me off the scent about what I was really reading - about meeting a newborn in an incubator. The language is deceptively plain but is deftly spiced with originality:
```
When you reach together into her world
there's no alarm, because in that first hour
there's a glimpse of what's to come
```
So far so good - a not-too-difficult start to the collection but I was already hooked and knew I'd be on a roller-coaster ride. The pamphlet's title led me to expect a mechanical, Heath-Robinson-type contraption but, after a time, I couldn't discern the connections. I kept thinking "Try harder" because, at the same time, I was wanting to unravel each of the mystery parcels. Each poem gave me this sense that I was inside a puzzle and it was an experience that, on the whole, I much enjoyed, for most of the poems rewarded the work I put into them.
And, sometimes, I did have to work quite hard and, in several poems, I was not successful as in 'Giraffe', which baffled me. I think this poet knows a lot of things I don't know, scientific and philosophical things about particles and for a start he's trying to make sense of his very complex world, a world that is much more complex than I could ever grasp. You have to believe these poems.
In 'Escape' where the tables are turned on the man trying to enjoy 'a last minute from snow's routine'; and who ends up feeling like the outsider, stared at through the gate by a legless man, sleeping under the flashback of the moon
```
They've proved that lab rats dream of their mazes.
I dream of a brass doorknob whose dimple
my thumb always finds.
```
Astonishing images like that mean that we don't have to know what it's about to get it. The poem ends with:
```
I magnify the moment,
hold an uncorked bottle to my mouth
two-handout like a clarinet and play the blues.
```
'The fall' is one of those poems I almost understand but won't forget, for its elegant phrasing and incisive imagery:
```
because all languages have the same 
word for olive, they grow on the hillside
where language first grew
```
Having said that, some lines fall short because, for me, they are simply too much like clever puns - 'because you didn't burn your bridges'. But I am really rather hesitant to mention what I didn't like because I think Tim Love is probably a magician, especially when he writes that Odysseus's children have 'eyes the colour of their footprints.' And 'In the soul's darkroom' which I'll quote as a whole:
```
Stare and slowly pale visions will appear,
bathed in red, their darkness soon deepening.
There's no going back. Words hold beauty still
only for that moment before the lies -

as water-lily buds ache inches clear
of fixing fluids before opening,
resting back on the loving surface still
bright and reflective even when it dries.
```
I felt that my understanding of these poems was also like a photograph being slowly developed in my mind's darkroom.
(Envoi, Rebecca Gethin)
'She has no imagination', Tim Love writes in 'Giraffe'. 'When she wakes, the lions are for real'. This is Love at his best in Moving Parts: understated yet imaginative; fanciful yet intelligible; sincere but not sentimental; cerebral but not pretentious. With child-like wonder, Love notes the giraffe's 'brown birthmarks big as dinner-plates'. While 'Giraffe'. finds its impetus in the exotic, poems such as 'Forever' owe their force to a charged rendering of the quotidian:
```
A cathedral's beauty
is the shared silence,
not the stone - 
whether the fireworks
are over, or whether
it's just a pause -
```
As one would expect, Moving Parts contains the inevitable missteps: the preciousness of lines like 'the reeds / all sway together like memories of first love' (from 'How we make love'); the bizarre intersection of Custer and a Dylanoid (Highwa 61-like) mania in 'Fossil expedition'; and the shallow wit (read: poop jokes) of "'Poetry is the deification of reality' - Edith Sitwell". One gets the sense that the lighter poems in this collection are meant simply as breathing room between the more substantive ones.
At its most powerful, Moving Parts gives us gnomic, often short pieces tinged with a sense of the inadequacy of knowledge, the ubiquity of loss, and the nagging intimation that we are forever ruled by both. Take 'Crows' nests', perhaps the pamphlet's most accomplished piece:
```
Autumn's X-ray reveals them,
the trees suddenly old,
the crows gone, spreading.

...

Now you want to hide away there,
sleepness nights alone waiting

for the first sight of land,
the darkness flapping,
so close to you, so huge.
```
If Love's collection seems forgivably uneven, ...
(New Walk 3, Nicholas Friedman)
A very satisfying collection is tucked into the pamphlet-sized MOVING PARTS by Tim Love. The poetry is elusive, subtle and rewards several readings. The artist gives an angle on gaining evidence from witnesses for an ID photo. 'We begin with the eyes - the hardest part for me:/ we'll correct them later but she says / that faces grow from the eyes.' Quietly, disturbingly the poem goes on to say 'They're under pressure to make an arrest. The deadline's / soon, so though she's hardly conscious / I have to hurry her ...' The conversational tone runs with fine music, sharp dialogue, character depiction and imagery: ' ... A constable pop his head in, taps his watch. They like my work, / want me to go full time, give up my sunsets ...' The instability of scientific information and its relation to ordinary life appears in Action at a distance: ... The love poem, Sunday in the Egyptian Gallery has a strange, ethereal sense, like a shifting cinematic image: ... A fine intelligent collection.
(Weyfarers 110, Stella Stocker)
Moving Parts, which appears to be Love's first collection, shows that (relatively) late publication can be a good friend to a poet. Tim Love's poems are remarkable for their freight of experience, assured grasp of line, and a poetic sensibility as confident as it is unusual. His originality shines through in 'Giraffe', whose subject is by turns 'failed model', yacht, and in a lurching turn, 'oh god, I've left my handbag'. But Love's vision is both respectful and exact, noting the giraffe's 'birthmark birthmarks'. The originality of the eye provides the final surprise in his poem 'Iron Birds':
```
how their vapour trails are like the broadening,
fading scratches on your lover's back
```
Sex is one of the liveliest threads in this book, often arriving - like a friend, unannounced - at the end of poems, discreet but unmistakeable.
The unmistakeable authority of experience can be heard in Love's account of a visit to dying relative with his son, 'Taking Mark this time'. (he writes exceptionally well about children, with clarity, without sentiment: 'You still look just the same to him in this strange bed'.) Sadly unusual in poetry, Love's scientific and technical knowledge pervade his poems, but, like a good friend, never dominate or domineer. Their rewards are lines whose skilled metre is matched by a deep understanding of the measured world: 'all falls obey the same laws of motion'.
Yet the poem later confides: ' There is still so much we do not know.' Love is skilled at sketching landscapes, but their final details are often unsettled. 'All over the city. alarms are sounding.' Straightforward facts followed by the irrational and elusive, prose, then poetry: 'I shake the sugar sachet before tearing it./Sometimes feeling precedes a reason'.
Love's ear is equally acute for words and raw sound. In 'The fall', a fascinating poem about change in language, he notes that a fire engine now 'goes wow wow wow' instead of 'hee-haw'. He will, successfully, risk a desperate lyricism: 'death [...] sweeps your petals into heaps.' Boldly and bleakly, he will mention beauty 'only for that moment before the lies'. But his words enter into poetry's intense conversation:' What have you forgotten?' Their ending open, briefly as flowers: 'play the blues', 'It's not too late.' Do poems speak when friends fall silent?
Before silence, the pamphlet's last poem, 'Crows' nests', takes a remarkable turn, The nests, revealed, typically. for Love, by 'Autumn's X-ray', become masts, viewpoints
```
for the first sight of land,
the darkness flapping,
so close to you, so huge.
```
The function of intelligence, in poetry, is to move beyond itself. Tim Love's poems achieve this, beautifully. 'My cleverness runs out', he writes. In the darkness beyond is loss regain, the potent, overwhelming words of a child.
(Alison Brackenbury, Under the Radar 8, July 2011)
The short blurb tells you something vital about the pamphlet: 'His poems challenge perception. Sometimes they aren't what they seem, but then again, they are. They offer themselves like canvasses in a gallery, the white box of the page inviting the reader in. The process is playful and serious and, like all good art, demands no less than absolute attention.' Despite the somewhat Derrida-in-English-translation overtones of this (horresco referens), I almost know what he is suggesting, amongst the plurality of reading, the inevitable slipperiness of language, the Glas-like ambiences, back to the 'white box' of the page: ... ('How we make love') This is one type of poem in the pamphlet. It is a challenging style. Another type demonstrates the precision and tactile immediacy of the poetry: ... ('Escape') The strength of the personae in the pamphlet is the thing that attracts attention, in poems such as 'The Artist', 'Eclipse', 'Odysseus', 'Action at a Distance' and others. I especially enjoyed the somewhat Deconstructively-voiced, Brief Encounter-ish 'Paradox' ... (Acumen 70, Christopher J.P. Smith)
In ‘How we make love’, the narrative voice tells us:
```
     The way synapses alter when we learn
     is adapted from the healing process
     as if our ignorance were once a wound.
     There is still so much we do not know.
```
And my ignorance of how to fully embrace the more abstract elements of this collection soon began to feel like a wound—a slight deafness or flaw of vision that hindered me from fully engaging with what was being said. Often, I felt as if I was visiting these poems in an American, high security penitentiary. I pressed my fingers on the bullet proof glass and tried to have a conversation . . . but the glass was always there.
When friends take me to an exhibition of abstract paintings, I stand in front of each one whispering to myself, Don’t look for narrative. Don’t look for narrative, hoping that eventually I will see something I recognise. In Tim Love’s ‘Escape’ I recognised the chaos of Cairo airport where, “more lost air luggage ends up than anywhere else” and I could see myself “shake the sugar sachet before tearing it”. I know the ’”phantom-limbed sadness” and the sky at 3am. Long after I had closed this pamphlet I could hear the music made as the speaker in ‘Escape’ concludes,
```
     I magnify the moment,
     hold an uncorked bottle to my mouth
     two-handed like a clarinet and play the blues.
```
I have no idea what the “moon-flavoured sweets” mentioned in ‘Estuary’ taste like but I’ve had great fun imagining. And I have no idea how, in ‘The Fall’, I can be in London and New York on the same autumn day
```
     . . . and because it’s autumn, London leaves fall
     yellow as cabs.
```
But I recognise that kind of dichotomy from having seen it before, for example in stanza XIII of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘Thirteen Ways to look at a Blackbird’:
```
     It was evening all afternoon

     It was snowing 
     And it was going to snow.
```
And I seem to remember reading somewhere that subatomic particles can be in more than one place at once so maybe readers of poetry can be as well. Again I’ve had huge fun imagining what that might be like.
Seeing Custer’s name in ‘Fossil expedition’, made me think I knew what to expect. More fool me. Tim Love is skilled in defying and subverting expectations:
```
     ‘Gotta show the three wise men the way,’ Custer said,
     winking to his lieutenant as he left the fort.
     The scholars were sweating in the morning sun.
```
They ride silently through the Badlands then the three men dig for hours. At the end of a long day:
```
     ‘Nice suit you got there, sir,’ said Custer.
     And all the way back he could hear bones rattling in their saddlebags.
```
To my frustration, I can hear things rattling throughout this pamphlet that I can’t fully understand or grasp firmly enough to fully appreciate. I’ve hammered and hammered on the glass but I just can’t open up a crack.
In ‘Windmills’ Tim love tells us, "Quixote had no chance." And we all know the flaw was not with the windmills but with the Don. Sadly, if this pamphlet is a windmill, I am the Don.
(Sue Butler, Sphinx)
Tim Love is a writer who grew on me. His collection is held together by its title: Moving Parts is, I think, absolutely apposite. It captures brilliantly the predominant flavour: a melding of science, and heart—to cope, really, with what it is to be human, "the darkness flapping/ so close to you, so huge".
Love has a wonderful ear. To read him is a pleasure. His words fit together, sentences flow, themselves like a well-oiled machine. And time and again he touchingly pulls together that vast ‘flapping’ system, with the human, personal. He links things. So, in ‘Windmills’, he writes:
```
     and in Soham on the Fens, I bought a bag of flour
     only hours old, ground by the wind that made

     my cycling here so tiring.
```
What’s most winning, for me, is his really human touch. This builds. I wasn’t so convinced in early poems like ‘Iron birds’ and ‘Giraffe’, lessened for me by an almost macho note. But I was won over by the end. Take ‘The King’, with its one super long sentence flowing from verse to verse. At its core, for me, sings the single line: "he can’t bear to throw away her see-thru shoes".
Some of Love’s more ‘obvious’ poems are, arguably, his less successful. ‘The artist’, for instance, for me, tries too hard. Similarly - although, of course, it’s touching - ‘Taking Mark this time’ could seem a little obvious for Love at his very best. (That said, this poem’s most abiding image for me—of the young boy’s "doll eyes/ briefly opening", as the poet carries him to bed—has firmly stayed.) Equally, one or two poems were so abstract I couldn’t wring much meaning from them: ‘He understands but he doesn’t love’, for instance. On the whole, though, it’s the way he balances abstract and concrete that works so brilliantly.
The, for me, pivotal ‘Escape’ starts off slightly unpromisingly with a potentially rather clichéd contrast between the luxury of a "last minute break" in a gated haven, and a legless beggar glimpsed outside the enclosure. Love goes on to make this notion entirely his own. Somehow it’s his isolation we feel, sealed in a world he can’t quite get the measure of - just like our own (where "Newton was quite wrong", but "got us to the moon", as he puts it elsewhere).
In ‘Escape’ he writes: "I dream of a brass doorknob whose dimple/ my thumb always finds". This single image, for me, is the most memorable. What else, then, is there? "I magnify the moment," Love writes,
```
     hold an uncorked bottle to my mouth
     two-handed like a clarinet and play the blues.
```
(Charlotte Gann, Sphinx)
The title of this collection naturally conjures up images of machinery, but what kind of machine exactly? Having read the 28 poems inside, I can’t help thinking of one of those enormous Heath Robinson-style contraptions, full of weird and wonderful parts, but whose ultimate purpose isn’t always clear.
Many of the poems take the form of condensed thought experiments. ‘Paradox’ is a good example and short enough to quote in full:
```
     You haven’t left her, only she moves
     and when she has stopped moving
     it’s as if you left each other
     and it all makes sense on paper
     until the platform moves
     and you are not moving.
```
Most readers will pick up the allusion to relativity and the idea that a person in motion experiences time differently to one standing still. The poem draws a nice parallel between that scientific abstraction and the emotional reality of waving someone off on a train platform. There’s also the suggestion of a more permanent separation, with the speaker unwilling to accept its reality, but equally unable to deny it.
The poem doesn’t seek to resolve or explain the paradox of the title, but it successfully transports us ‘into’ the problem. I felt an almost physical sense of disorientation when I got to the closing line. The poem keeps repeating the idea of motion in the words ‘move’ and ‘moving’, but suddenly leaves you standing stock still. It’s very effectively done.
‘Paradox’ is typical of the collection in the way it mixes the abstract and the particular, the philosophical and the personal. ‘Forever’ is another example, beginning "A cathedral’s beauty/ is the shared silence", but ending somewhere else entirely:
```
     sunlight’s momentum
     dragging colour from stained glass
     onto marble; years of believers
     wading through, smoothing tombs;
     how you wake me
     to finish what I thought
     we’d finished the night before.
```
Elsewhere, we encounter musings about whether strawberries would taste the same if they were blue, and whether the light in the fridge really goes out when you close it. It makes for an intense and rewarding read, where each poem gradually reveals more of itself the harder you look.
That said, my nagging feeling was that some of the poems remain a little blurry no matter how hard you look. The poet’s mind is so lively and lateral that it’s hard to stay on one train of thought long enough to get anywhere. But even as I write that, I’m reminded of the train paradox above and the warning that things only make sense until you realise they don’t. Maybe the poet knows what he’s doing after all.
(Nick Asbury, Sphinx)
Tim Love's poems are experiences of the world, embodying the moment, the reality; poems that don't exactly go anywhere, but inhabit where they are, while leaping across gaps in a satisfying way: 'of course words aren't the world / but they take us where we want to be' ('Action at a distance' ). The poems themselves aren't at a great distance from the poet and the reader, but there is a detachment from the self as well as the observed scene.
'Taking Mark this time' is about bringing a son to a dying grandparent, whose condition 'I decode /… /until my cleverness runs out'. Tim Love's is a cleverness that's clever enough to be aware of its limits, and is balanced by a lot of feeling. This includes enjoyment of things being both systematic and personally felt:
```
I bought a bag of flour
only hours old, ground by the wind that made
my cycling there so tiring. ('Windmills')
```
'The fall' puts the changes in the world into a pattern for timescale and perspective, with the rate of mutation of chromosomes from which 'we can / recalculate the evolutionary tree', and the rate of linguistic change known to be 1.5% a century; but the scientific is combined with the mythic, including the calculation of biblical creation to October 4004 BC; 'there must once have been / a common tongue, a first kiss'. The crossing-over of perspectives then moves deftly to the divergence of American and English exemplified in fire engine sirens, and we are where 'London leaves fall / yellow as cabs'. (Peter Daniels, Bow-wow shop)

The Best British Poetry 2011

2011-10-21T10:29:00.000+01:00

I've now read The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden, (Salt, 2011) - my comments are on my reviews site. Here are some extracts -

This anthology picks solely from magazines (both paper and online), an idea I welcome - I subscribe to 7 of the magazines listed, and read several more. It's modeled on the US version, conceptually and visually, with nearly 40 pages of notes. I didn't find it an easy read. Even mainstream poets are represented by their more artistically engaged pieces, free from the distractions of unemployment fears, computer games, car accidents, mobile contracts, sleeze, comedy, and aging parents.

The most recent rejection slip I received said "I found these poems difficult to read. ... Try writing more simply and directly. Complex things _can_ be said in a simple, clear way". In what way do I find the poems in this book harder than mine? Some of the poets clearly don't like making things too obvious.

Abigail Perry rather gives the game away when she writes "It grew out of my revisions for another poem, one cluttered with clumsy polysyllables that were, nonetheless, semantically economical: they nailed the point I'd been trying to make. It was this that sounded the warning bell. A poem, I realised, should never 'get to the point'." (p.145)
Katharine Kilalea writes "On the surface, it seems a difficult poem, but it's only hard work when you try to make it meaningful" (p.134). It depends of course on what is meant by "meaningful".
Eoghan Walls wrote "I stuck to half-rhymes, and hid them from the eye by splitting the rhymes with a verse-break" (p.152). Why? What would have been wrong with rhyming couplets (though "rising/sink", and "cities/sky" are barely half-rhymes)?

In the olden days, writing poetry was a 2 stage process for some people. Poets had ideas that they dumdeedumdeed into a poem, choosing a title to pre-empt "What's it about?" questions. Even famous poets would to-and-fro between poetry and prose to clarify plot or sound. The 2nd stage was sometimes clumsily done (the meaning mangled to fit the form, words inverted, strange words used to satisfy the rhyme scheme).

Times have changed. Poems needn't pander to the masses or even to the non-poet intelligensia. "What's it about?" is no longer a question to fear. Moreover, there's no point anyone shouting "He's wearing no clothes!" because the masses aren't listening, and fellow poets are faced with too many vested Creative Writing interests. Some poets, consciously or otherwise, still write in 2 stages, the 2nd stage rendering the ideas to suit the expectations of the era. The aim is no longer to be easily paraphrasable - au contraire, the 2nd stage brings in language effects to disrupt the standard prose routes from words to meaning - Giles Goodland wrote that he "let the words play around".

But what is the equivalent of the beginner Formalist's clumsiness? Some poets in this book seem more to be avoiding simplicity than confronting complexity. They rough up the surface of their poems until their poem might be given the benefit of the doubt. My problem with many of these poems is that I didn't see what this 2nd stage added to the works; it obscured rather than augmented the effects.

Stephen Burt in his "Close Calls with Nonsense" wrote that he rather misses "in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries". I rather miss those features too. And linguistic transparency. If readers can touch the bottom of a poem (rather than feeling out of their depth) it's not a disaster. If the water's clear enough for them to see their own feet, all the better. I think it's a viable form of poetry (indeed, Lumsden's written many good poems of that type in the past), but it's almost entirely absent from this selection, which after all, isn't supposed to be representative.

For those who want an update on "Identity Parade", or want to see the type of British poetry that becoming increasingly popular, this book is just the job. It's a book that looks ahead, rather than back, and ambitious and/or career UK poets would do well to read it. It's useful for non-UK readers too - they'll get a feel for the type of UK poetry that doesn't always reach foreign shores on paper.

3 poets to watch

2011-10-14T10:42:00.005+01:00

When I wondered about which poets were underestimated, 3 names came straight to mind. It's perhaps unfair to single them out, but I can see why I grouped them together. All these poets have a body of work behind them, and depth as well as breadth. They've already achieved a measure of fame, and their names crop up in various contexts. I've met them and I've heard them read their poems.

Emma Danes

She used to be a member of Cambridge Writers and often attended our monthly meetings. New members sometimes start with a good poem or 2 then tail off. She kept delivering excellent poems. She appears in "Best British Poetry 2011". She's not published a book or pamphlet yet (though she's come close to winning pamphlet competitions - shortlisted in the tall-lighthouse pamphlet competition.).

I don't think she frequents the physical and virtual haunts of poets and publishers. She doesn't even have a web page. Perhaps her work tackles too few topics? Perhaps she's too busy doing other things? Time's on her side though.

Peter Daniels

At home I have a stapled heap of photocopies, the cover page saying "PETER DANIELS Seminars for Nomads". My guess is that his mother gave me this a decade or 2 ago. An early poem in the pamphlet is "A video of my father" (his father was a Cambridge Stats prof). He's an experienced poet with an impressive list of credentials. As it says on his web page "He has won first prize in the 2010 TLS Poetry Competition, and before that he won the 2008 Arvon competition, the 2003 Ledbury competition, and was twice a winner in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition."

He writes that "When I won the 2008 Daily Telegraph Arvon International Poetry Competition, Book Brunch referred to me as a "hitherto unknown poet" yet he's published "Peacock Luggage" in 1992 (Smith/Doorstop, he has 50% of the book - maybe my photocopies; Alvi has the rest), "Be Prepared" in 1994 (Smith/Doorstop), "Blue Mice" in 1999 (Vennel Press), "Through the Bushes" in 2000 (Smith/Doorstop, again through their competition), and "Mr Luczinski Makes a Move" in 2011 (HappenStance Press). Maybe he suffers from having published pamphlets rather than books, or not being in quite the right place at the right time. He took a break from writing, which may not have helped. He's London-based and he networks.

He's been involved with editing and creative writing - an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, plus involvement with Bow-wow and Poetry London Newsletter. He's involved with translating, Quakers, Jewish, and gay poetry, so he may be able to exploit niche markets unavailable to the other 2 poets I mention here. He's older than the other 2, but that might not be a problem - well over a decade ago I recall his mother (about 80 then) regretting having to give up her upholstery evening classes, though she was still going to read a French novel a month. If Peter Daniels has those genes his best years might be ahead, and he has an impressive back catalogue to draw on.

Judy Brown

I was on the same Smiths Knoll weekend workshop as her a few years ago. She's in "Best British Poetry 2011" and "Identity Parade". She's published a pamphlet - "Pillars of Salt", (2006, Templar Poetry) and a book "Loudness" (Seren; Shortlisted in the The Forward Prizes for Poetry 2011). She also won the Poetry London competition in 2009. She's been a lawyer, and spends some of her time in London. She has a page on poetry pf. She was involved with Magma, so has contacts in the trade. This might be her breakthrough year.

Problems

So why aren't they better known? They're all mainstream (and I suppose rather unadventurous far as poetic styles are concerned) so they're in a crowded marketplace - they have no unique selling points. On average they're roughly my age - too young (or late maturing) for Next Gen; too old to be part of the current new generation. They all have other things to do - they can't pop off and be a writer-in-residence for a year, or drift around until a creative writing tutorship becomes available.

I think all the 3 poets I've mentioned should be at least as well known as some well established poets. Maybe some of the 3 already are recognised as such by those who matter. We'll see.

Tania Hershman: an interview

2011-10-05T12:49:00.002+01:00

I've been a follower of Tania Hershman for a while, partly because she and I both have science-related degrees. For years was a science journalist, publishing in magazines like WIRED and "New Scientist". Now she's had stories in "Nature" too. She's interested in the interaction of Science and Fiction. I was impressed when she appeared last year on a BBC Radio 4 discussion program called "Blinded by Science". I wouldn't be surprised if she does more media work. She's currently writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University and has just received a grant from Arts Council England to write a collection of biology-inspired short stories.

I've kept tracks on her also because she writes Flash as well as short stories. With her Flash Fiction Tania's managed to reach parts that I thought Flash could never reach - pieces in "London Magazine", and even a week of her stories on BBC radio 4! Her first collection The White Road and other stories (commended in the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers, and included on a list of "10 collections to celebrate the strength of British short story writers" compiled by booktrust) contained many Flash pieces (some as short as 50 words) and also short stories (3000 words or so). To me, she seems equally at home with any length. She's also been involved with adaptions of her work to video and the stage. She continues to appear in magazines big and small, paper and online.

When she's not writing she seems busy being on festival panels, workshopping, judging, and spreading information to other writers via her blog. Writers have further cause to be grateful to her - her (Non-Complete) List of UK and Ireland Lit Mags Which Publish Short Stories is invaluable, and she founded The Short Review, a review of short story collections - stories need all the publicity and critical attention they can get.

As an old cynic I find her enthusiasm refreshing and her willingness to explore new subjects and genres exemplary. This interview was conducted via e-mail in Autumn 2011.

What came first - Science or Fiction?
Definitely fiction! I started reading at a very early age, apparently, according to my mother (yes, she does say I was a prodigy, she is my mother) and stories were a big part of my childhood. Science came later, I have vague memories of reading some children's book about Famous Scientists but have no idea when that was. It was at school that I fell for maths (gosh now that sounds odd). I just loved solving equations, loved the right-or-wrongness, the lack of greyness, although now I understand far better that science and the scientific endeavour are full of grey areas. I didn't get on with English at school, I didn't like deconstructing stories, didn't agree with my teachers' assertions about what Dickens, for example, must have been thinking when he named Estella in Great Expectations. Perhaps it was a nascent rebellious streak, or some foreshadowing of my own path, but I couldn't help thinking, Well, maybe he just liked the name? I just loved stories, but found that I wasn't really allowed to write what I wanted to write or read for pure pleasure. Science at school was the fun part. I got to university and it got rather more serious - and difficult. That's when I discovered I wasn't the scientist type!
If you were 18 now, would you be thinking of doing a Creative Writing degree?
At 18 I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, I think I had vague thoughts about a career in science (see above) but didn't imagine that, although it was a childhood dream, I could be a Writer, that that was a career option. I suspect my parents, both very academically minded, would have shoved hard away from a Creative Writing degree, but I can't be sure. I'm not sure either that that's the way to do it. I took a circuitous path to fiction-writing - via degrees in Maths & Physics, Philosophy of Science and journalism and a career as a science journalist - and I am glad for it. I got to a point where I found I couldn't not write fiction, that the voice in my head wouldn't stop nagging. I think it's valuable to find that out, and had I gone so young into a CW degree, I might not have left the space to know that.
I notice that The White Road is available on the Kindle. Has it changed your life? Will it change all our lives?
I am assuming you mean the Kindle and not my book! I am of two - or perhaps more - minds. Everywhere I go now, someone whips one out and declares that they read more, they buy more books, which has to be a good thing, right? But I despair that you can't share books through the Kindle - and, as someone pointed out the other day, you can no longer see what someone's reading on the train, for example. It seems another step in the move towards only reading/buying what you think you want and an end to browsing and stumbling upon things you didn't know you wanted. But it is definitely opening up markets for short story writers who, I see, are beginning to publish single stories or sets of stories straight to the Kindle. I don't have one but have the app on my iPod (can't believe I use these terms sometimes... ) and have purchased a few stories. That's got to be a good thing, right? Not necessarily a changing-lives thing, but an enrichment, I hope.
You don't seem to be an SF addict. Have you ever been? Do you have any favorite SF authors or stories?
I was brought up on Star Trek from a very young age, and Doctor Who, and loved them both, the sense of adventure, of limitless worlds and possibilities. But I never read SF until founding "The Short Review". I asked for some review copies of short story collections for myself, the kinds of things I wouldn't normally read - the Logorrhea anthology edited by John Klima, Kelley Eskridge's "Dangerous Space" - both described as SF, and I found new writing worlds opening up to me. I really felt, "Who has been hiding this wonderful writing from me for so long?" That simply by not visiting those shelves in the bookshop or in the library, I'd been missing out on all these incredible, imaginative, magical stories. More recently, being introduced to Carol Emshwiller's work was one of those experiences, where you feel that your writing will never be the same as before you read a particular work. I love her writing, am terrified to think I might never have read her books, what an enormous tragedy. What else am I missing??
I would rather not say whether any of my own work is SF, I don't feel qualified for that. I call some stories "science-inspired" and for me that is purely a description of the process not the end product. I prefer to stay away from labels. I've now had a short story published in Nature's Futures section, which I believe is called SF, so who knows? All I know is that I will never dismiss an entire section of a bookshop again. I've recently been turned on to crime, too (ahh, Fred Vargas!). It's all about great writing, great stories, great imaginations, isn't it?
So when are you going to start writing novels?
Nice one. You should be a stand-up comedian!
Stories like "Hands" (from "The White Road") are more poetic than many a poem I've read. Do you have any plans to focus more in that area? Maybe it's just a matter of sending the same work to different magazines?
First, thanks so much for saying that. Funnily enough, yes I do have plans in that area. I recently went on an Arvon Foundation course in Writing for Radio and one of the tutors was Simon Armitage. I deliberately chose this course in order to meet him after hearing him read at the TS Eliot Poetry Prize readings and being struck by how close his newest collection is to flash fiction. I am really interesting in writing radio plays too, so it seemed a great opportunity to explore both. Simon was very encouraging about some of my work actually being poems and recommend some reading material including James Tate, the Pulitzer-prize-winning American poet. His work was a revelation - surreal, funny, wonderful! That has made me take a look at a number of what I thought were flash stories and rethink them. And I have sent a few out as poems - just had a very short poem and a prose poem published. We will see what happens in that direction but I am very excited. I was nervous of poetry, felt I wasn't "qualified" to talk about it, to claim I might be writing it. I am feeling a bit bolder now.
Sorry, but I have to ask - who's your favorite scientist?
It's a little clichéd, but it's a toss-up between Einstein - a large picture of him with the caption "Imagination is more important than knowledge", hangs here in my writing shed, just by my side - and Richard Feynman, what a character. And also all the researchers in Paul Martin and Kate Nobes' lab at Bristol University where I have been writer-in-residence, they are all wonderful, and were very patient with me!
The story of how you got published is already online. Are things getting harder or easier for budding prose writers?
Hmm, well, if you are talking about within the short story world, I think things are easier in that there are more and more publications calling for prose submissions. There seem to be more and more lit mags, each with their own specific likes and dislikes, which has really helped me find places that like my particular brand of oddness, and I am sure it's helpful for others too. And there are loads of new print magazines too. But when it comes to short story collections, things are definitely not easier, from what I can see. Even some of the small presses who championed short stories are finding it so hard to sell them that they are pulling back. It makes me deeply sad, since to me short stories are purely sources of joy, and I am talking about the dark depressing ones as well. I love to read them, they make me feel better, they make me better able to cope with life, I think. Ali Smith said at Small Wonder recently that she believes the short story is intimately tied up with mortality, because it is so much about its ending, and perhaps that explains its appeal, to a certain sector of the reading public - and maybe its lack of appeal to the majority! I would encourage budding writers to read magazines and send their work out to places whose writing they love and where they feel they might fit. And to understand that rejection is an essential part of the process.
The recent Forward poetry prize all-male shortlist raised again the issue of gender bias in the literature world, and science is supposed to be a male-oriented profession. That said, this year's Hugo awards shortlist had 4 women and one man. Have you noticed any particular problems?
This doesn't really come up in the short story world at all, and the lab I was writer-in-residence in, a biochemistry lab, had an every-changing population, sometimes with more women than men and sometimes the reverse. But it seems that things haven't changed much in the UK in Maths and Physics since I studied those subjects, 20 years ago, when there were 20% women. I have heard that the majority of the Italian physicists working at the CERN particle accelerator are female, which is thrilling! Re writing and gender, I haven't run into problems myself, that I know of, but I do wish that these prizes were judged anonymously. I know it's hard with book prizes - but surely it should be about the writing?
Job interviews sometimes end with "Where do you see yourself being in 5 years' time?". Well?
Ha! Urgh. Still writing, I hope. If it's what I am supposed to be doing. I can't plan ahead. I have a booking to teach an Arvon course in Nov 2012 and that freaks me out. I'd like to just think about today, this moment. I'm not writing as much as I want to be, I am not very good at carving out the time, I feel so lucky to get wonderful invitations to do short-story-related things, and many of them pay well, but it's hard to reconcile that with writing. And if I don't write, well... the invitations will dry up, won't they? Was this a job interview? Oh, oops, not sure I got the job then...

Thanks Tania!

Here are some forthcoming events where Tania's taking part. If you're down Bristol way, you've no excuse -

Oct 18th - Reading at Bristol University Festival of Arts, 4-5pm. Details online
Oct 18th - Launch of 2012 Bristol Short Story prize, Foyles Bristol, 6.15pm-7.30pm. Details online
Oct 21-22nd - Taking part in "Unputdownable", the first Bristol Festival of Literature - see A Bristol Citywide Story Pt.3 and Tania Hershman's Cure for Writer’s Block

Freeverse Poetry Book Fair

2011-09-24T17:53:00.009+01:00

The Poetry Book Fair in London at Exmouth Market today was launched by the "legendary" Michael Horovitz. I met several people I'd only read about before, including Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving of Sidekick Books (I bought their "Coin Opera"), Matt Merritt, Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press (the last 2 and Jon Stone are in "The Best British Poetry 2011" which I bought from Salt's Chris Hamilton-Emery), and Sue Guiney. Amongst those I've met before were Katy Evans-Bush (whose "Egg Printing Explained" I brought), Peter Daniels, and HappenStance's Helena Nelson (from whom I bought Michael Loveday's "He said/ She said"). I sold 7 books (one of them mine, though I only told the buyer afterwards) while looking after the HappenStance stall for an hour.

It was good to see that poetry books are still being bought. I was struck by how nice people were about each other - especially behind their backs. The small press scene's a funny old world. The most common phrase I heard was "you don't look like your poetry".

"Reality Hunger" and "Close Calls with Nonsense"

2011-09-21T14:04:00.014+01:00

Yesterday I managed to browse through Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense and read David Shields' Reality Hunger. These books have been on my reading list for a while. Both are worth reading. Burt's is probably worth buying, though getting it in the UK might not be easy.

Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009)

This has sections trying to explain the work of some supposedly difficult poets - contemporary US (e.g. Armantrout) but also WC Williams and GB poets (Denise Riley and Muldoon). His name's associated with the term "Elliptical poets", those who "broke up syntax, but reassembled it; they tried (as had [Jory] Graham) to adapt Language poets' disruptions to traditional lyric goals (expressing a self and its feelings), and tried (as Graham did not) to keep their poems short, song-like or visually vivid". In his introduction he points out that one needs to keep an open mind

"Some of the most celebrated "difficult" poetry of the past ten years seems to me derivative, mechanical, shallow, soulless, and too clever by half"
"In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. I miss, in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries (and in WH Auden and Marianne Moore)",

The explanations he gives are helpful, as are his tips - "Look for self-analyses or for frame-breaking moments when the poem stops to tell you what it describes". His writing style's approachable. As usual, Minimalism seems hard to explain, and I sometimes had trouble seeing why less ambiguous/challenging alternative methods weren't used by the poets. For example, on p.331 he quotes from "To a Poor Old Woman" to show "how Williams's line breaks work"

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her.

They taste good to her (you might not like them); They taste good (not merely adequate); she tastes them, taking them into her body, rather than merely contemplating them.

To me, italics would have made the points better (if indeed these were the points). Breaking the line after "good" is rather like putting a dash there - it emphasises "to her", thus making the statement more subjective. He reads it as if "good" is emphasised (because it's at the end of the line, I suppose). But at least Burt has expressed himself clearly; it's possible to agree/disagree rather than merely feel baffled. I'd recommend the book to anyone who feels that the current crop of young poets are unreadable.

Reality Hunger (Penguin, 2010)

A plea in 618 numbered paragraphs for fewer standard novels. He begins with "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art" (p.3). He mentions that "extended aphorisms [Ecclesiastes, Confucius, Heraclitus] eventually crossed the border into essay" (p.8), that "essai" means "experiment", that "fiction" derives from "fingere" meaning "to shape", that according to Coetzee, the word "novel" "meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along". He likes a return to these original notions, where facts can be experimentally shaped. He likes mixed-form novels that combine essay, memoire, reportage, fable, etc (he mentions Sebold, Brian Fawcett, Bernard Cooper). He likes sampling (in this book he doesn't separate quotes from his own words, and he sometimes adjusts the quotes. The last section of the book lists the sources)

He distrusts the supposedly factual, quoting Marshall - "Autobiographical memory is a recollection of events or episodes, which we remember with great detail. What's stored in that memory isn't the actual events, but how those events made sense to us and fit into our experience", adding that "As a work get more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes" (p.27)

He dislikes chronological narrative as the principal structuring device - "The grandfather clock is the reflection of its historical period, when time was orderly and slow. .. By the 1930s and 1940s, wristwatches were neurotic and talked very fast. ... Next, we had liquid-crystal watches that didn't show any time at all until you pressed a button ... Now, no one wears a watch; your phone has the time" (p.123)

He likes Proust. He points out that Marcel plays a similar role to the "I" in poetry as regards the stance viz a viz the author. He writes "The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they're both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems - The Dream Songs, the long prologue to Slaughterhouse-Five, pretty much all of Philip Larkin and Anne Carson, Annie Dillard's For the Time being" (p.202)

He likes short-shorts (Jayne Anne Phillip's "Sweethearts", Jerome Stern's "Morning News" etc) because they focus on the essentials. He likes novels that are more short story collections. He's not keen on books like "The Corrections", preferring "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", "Nadja", "Letters to Wendy's" etc.

I guess he feels it's more psychologically honest to show that there's an author, to follow the twists and turns of thought rather than fake objectivity and watch the clock

"Serious nonfiction removes fiction's masks, stripping away monuments to civilisation to arrive at truths that destroy the writer and thereby encompass the reader - the last shred of human expression before silence seizes all words", (p.149)
"The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art"", (p.166)
"It was exciting to see how part of something I had originally written as an exegesis of Joyce's "The Dead" could now be turned sideways and used as the final, bruising insight into someone's psyche. All literary possibilities opened up for me with this story. The way my mind thinks - everything is connected to everything else - suddenly seemed transportable into my writing", (p.173)

Small press review sites

2011-09-12T08:20:00.007+01:00

If only everyone who wrote poems bought them too. But here I want to make a different plea - if only people who read small-press publications (especially poetry) reviewed them too. By "review" I include little write-ups in a blog as well as printed articles.

Even if only a few per cent of people put their reviews online, the reader/writer balance would change, and small-press publications would receive more attention. On-line magazines tend not to have a reviews section, and the paper-based literary magazines that do print reviews (Acumen, for example) don't put them online.

When I put write-ups online nowadays I try to add links to online reviews. It's disappointing how few there are, even for publications by bigger presses (e.g. Bloodaxe). And quite often the personal reviews are full of praise. Some bloggers do take this side of things seriously, writing about books they don't like as well as those they do, using "review" as a blog keyword so that the reviews can easily be found. And there are review sites where a small group of people post reviews. Here's a list of sites worth a look if you want to find reviews of UK small-press pamphlets and books - contributions welcomed

Litrefs reviews (my site)
Sphinx (poetry pamphlets)
David Hebblethwaite
Adrian Slatcher
Jim Murdoch
Frances Spurrier
Fuselit
The Short Review (short story collections)
Sabotage pamphlet reviews
Stride Magazine
Horizon Review
Poetry Matters

Charles E. May's recent blog post on why he didn't review Valerie Trueblood's book makes interesting reading.

Which competitions are worth entering nowadays?

2011-09-06T17:05:00.005+01:00

I don't think that the UK has quite the same competition culture as the USA, but we're catching up. Here's how I decide which competitions to enter

I look at the fee/prize ratio when I enter competitions, and try to see where the money's going. I take into account the prestige of the competition, the judge, and the judging process. I only bother with poem competitions where the 1st prize is more than 100 times the fee. I'm more lenient with story competitions.

We're beginning to have magazines that charge reading fees, which is essentially a competition. I think that's fair enough for prose, especially if the fee includes a copy of the magazine.

We have a few (far fewer than the USA) competitions where the winner's book is published. I'm sympathetic to the established ones - they offer one of the few routes to publication; faster and much less hassle than submitting to publishers.

For the bigger UK competitions (Bridport, National Poetry Competition) not only is the fee/prize ratio good (Bridport's poetry/story 1st prize is 5000 pounds for a 6 or 7 pound fee; the Flash prize is 1000 pounds for a 5 pound fee), but the lesser prizes are worthwhile too. Getting on the short-list is noteworthy, and there's a good chance of anthology/newspaper publication later.

After a bit of naming-and-shaming a few years ago in the UK there's been a trend towards transparency of the judging process. For example, the Bridport rules say "Experienced readers assist the named judges in selecting the shortlists, headed by Jon Wyatt for short stories and Candy Neubert for poems". In the National Poetry Competition's FAQ they say "Unlike many poetry competitions, we do not implement a sifting / elimination round. Each entry is seen by at least two of the judges."

So I end up entering a big competition every year or 2. I enter a publication-prize competition every 2 or 3 years. I enter about 8 small competitions a year - more prose than poetry. I guess I've come out about even overall, and I feel I've helped out some worthwhile magazines and organisations.

My next booklet

2011-09-01T09:03:00.005+01:00

Usually when I go on holiday I try to return with something literary. This time you'll have to make do with the shadow of me in Egypt's Western Sahara. Well before going to Egypt I'd set some of my pieces there (including "Escape" from my poetry booklet, a pivotal piece according to a reviewer). I've written no Egyptian-based pieces since returning - the experience hasn't soaked in yet.

Back home there was good news when I started catching up with the mail - "By All Means" (my booklet of short stories) should be coming out later this year, published by Nine Arches Press. I suspect about half of it will be previously unpublished material.

Marketing will be tough - pamphlets are harder to push than books, and short stories are harder to push than poems. Still, having a poetry booklet and a story booklet out together might be mutually advantageous. I think one piece was in my original submission for both of the booklets.

Music and Writers

2011-08-02T10:40:00.003+01:00

C. K. Williams said "in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it's merely verbal matter, information". Alfred Brendel's published poetry books. Some song-writers are poets. Some poets write lyrics and librettos or (like Don Paterson) are accomplished musicians. Many others like writing with music in the background. However, sensitivity to music is by no means a requirement for successful writing.

"I must confess ... my utter failure with music. I’m sorry to say it but it’s true. Maybe there’s something wrong with my ears. I can’t listen to music, especially classical music, except with pained bewilderment. I’ve never been to a concert, or even played a classical CD right through" (Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman, 25 October 2007)
"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds ... The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones." (Vladimir Nabokov)

My performance skills were limited (at the bottom of my recorder-playing certificate it wisely states "This certificate does not imply ability to teach"). Though I listened to rock/pop music in my teens and tried to widen my appreciation after that, I only went to a few concerts (Tangerine Dream, Roy Harper, Blondie, Janis Ian, Jon Martyn and the early Human League might be complete list) and went to some jazz evenings at a local pub. I've fewer than a 100 tracks in my iPod - many of those nostalgic. I like the odd bit of plainsong, Barber, and Bartok but prefer songwriter classics.

In my writing do I lack a good ear? Maybe. Has my work been described as "unmusical"? Not yet, though I think it's fair to say that my writing isn't the sort that aspires to the condition of music. It carries an argument and remains mostly referential. It can be picked apart without the parts losing their value.

Stories: how short is short?

2011-07-25T09:30:00.005+01:00

Over the years I've been writing, the UK short-story magazine market's dried up and Flash has emerged. The remaining outlets/competitions often have word-limits of about 2000. My drafts come out shorter than they used to. I've not written a 3000 word story for years - what's the point if no-one takes them and hence they're not read? If you're famous or you publish short-story collections maybe you're ok, but I'm maxing out at about 2500 words nowadays.

I know my experiences are far from universal. For example, the Missouri Review's guidelines say "While there are no length restrictions, novella-length manuscripts (i.e., 30,000 words or more) or “flash fiction” manuscripts (i.e., 2,000 words or less) must be truly exceptional to be published". Eh? 2000 word Flash?? I think even 1500 is too long for Flash. The Bridport Prize Flash limit's 250 words. Their word limit for stories is 5000. They have no minimum, but the Wells festival competition does - they want stories in the 1800-2200 range. Short story limits can be less than that though - I entered a story competition recently (not advertised as Flash) where the maximum was 1200 words.

E-magazines don't have the cost of paper to worry about, so you might think that they'd have longer stories. There used to be a feeling that online pieces have to be short to suit online reading habits. I suspect these habits are changing, but E-magazines haven't yet had the time to establish themselves as prestige sites, so the best stories whatever their length tend not to go online (or if they do, they're under-appreciated. In the US, though magazines like TriQuarterly have become online-only, online magazines aren't not considered for the O. Henry prize. They're beginning to be recognized by the Pushcart Anthology).

Of course, I'll continue to write stories without regard to word-count, but however much I claim to let my pieces reach their natural length, I have to worry about word-count when I send pieces off, and it wouldn't surprise me if market forces have affected my notion of what "natural" is.

Arranging poetry readings

2011-07-16T13:55:00.000+01:00

So you've done your launch - what's next? If you're trying to arrange a poetry reading in order to raise your profile or sell books, several options are available. There's little point going it alone. The options below try to tap into existing publicity systems, which can help a lot.

Poetry venues

If a nearby town has a venue running a series of readings, you can try open-mics to gain experience. You'll struggle to get an evening to yourself unless you've published a few books.

OutReach

You could take advantage of some skill or interest of yours other than writing - if you work in a big establishment (a hospital for example), you might try to arrange a lunchtime meeting in your workplace. Publicity shouldn't be a problem.

Writers Circles

There are Writers Groups in most cities (poetry groups are fewer). They tend to plan their programmes a year ahead and are used to having known authors, so don't expect them to welcome you in unreservedly. Unless you're famous you'll probably need to do more than just read - you could run a workshop or judge a competition. They often pay, but you might prefer to appear for free, telling them that you'll bring some books for sale. They'll handle the publicity.

Festivals

Nowadays there are many Arts festivals and Writers/Poets festivals. Unless you've published several books you're unlikely to appear in the main programme. Some festivals (e.g. Kings Lynn) have fringe events, which might be more suitable. You'll have a better chance if you team up with others. Festivals have bookstalls, which can be useful, but the biggest advantage is that they'll handle the publicity. It will help if you've previously attended the festival (or other festivals). The festivals needn't be Arts-centred - organisers of festivals about Food, Cromwell, Gardening, etc might welcome the chance to offer something a little different. Contact the organisers as early as possible.

One-offs

Publicity-wise it helps to have a reason for doing a reading - an anniversary, launch of a new group, etc. As a venue try a library or a bookshop - they'll both help with advertising (publicity will otherwise be a problem) and might offer their services free. If your town has a venue often used for poetry readings, you could try that. Again, teaming up will help improve the size of your audience. If you have a publisher you could find out if any fellow-authors live nearby. If you know a musician, you could ask them to do a half-time stint. The more performers there are, the more friends they'll bring, especially if nibbles are available.

Short-list or short straw?

2011-07-10T06:45:00.006+01:00

Two disappointments this week. I was runner-up in the purple moose poetry pamphlet competition and on the short-list (but not a prizewinner) in the Frome short story competition. Oh well. Better to have loved and lost I suppose, but sometimes I think I'd rather go unnoticed than appear on a short-list only to have hopes dashed.

The disadvantages aren't just psychological. Sometimes in competitions the short-listed pieces are published. When (as in the Bristol short story competition or the Templar poetry pamphlet competition) the result is a well produced book, that's good news, but some other competitions just produce a pamphlet or put the pieces online. I think I'd rather send a good poem somewhere else than have it appear on the web. I've already sent my Frome entry elsewhere.

For some competitions (the Bridport Prizes and the Forward Poetry awards, for example) being on the short-list is a reward in its own right, something to mention on a book cover. Publishing "long-lists" dozens of entries long has become fashionable. I suppose they increase interest generally, but they don't interest me. There are publicity merits of being on the Frank O'Connor short story book award long-list, but prospective buyers might not realise that "All eligible titles constitute the long-list, which is read by the jury".

Short stories and our modern lifestyle

2011-06-27T15:04:00.002+01:00

"The short story form is better suited to the demands of modern life than the novel" wrote Simon Prosser, Publishing Director of Hamish Hamilton.

I used to think so too, but over the years I've changed my mind. Yes, there are sites where you can download stories but printed novels are easier to dip into. As Lorrie Moore wrote "that is often how novels are read, fifteen minutes at a time. You can't read stories that way."

Rather than read before I sleep I sometimes listen to things like the New Yorker stories (that include a commentary) or PRI selected shorts but I have to concentrate on them. I don't listen to them while driving in the way I'd listen to downloaded music.

I'm told that sites like Shortfire press are becoming more popular, offering e-shortstories in various formats (mobi, epub, pdf) for 49p or 99p. Random House plan to set up something similar in autumn 2011. This is a facility I'm likely to use, but I don't think they'll catch on until the short story widens its appeal. If anything, short stories are becoming harder to read

unlike the novel, the short story is "invariably literary." (Joyce Carol Oates)
the "well-written short story is not suited to the sound bite culture: it's too dense; its effects are too complex for easy digestion." (William Boyd)
"the commercial slick story has largely died out, the stories we are left with are almost always all serious art." (Lorrie Moore)

If this is the case, what went wrong? In a recent essay, Sarah Whitehead blames the golden age of the magazine era, when "The Strand" sold over half a million copies a month.

"The unprecedented and unrepeated growth of the magazine industry, which underpinned the growth and popularity of the short story genre, was the catalyst, if not the source of twentieth-century critical dismissal of the form."
"The magazine story has imbued the short story genre as a whole with the value of the disposable, the appeal of the marginalized and the inexorable link between literature and consumer culture."

After the bubble burst, only literary and genre stories survived. Is Flash Fiction the answer? I used to think so, though in another recent essay Holly Howitt-Dring says that "Because [Flash] could be viewed as stories working solely by implication, I feel that they have been mistrusted and sidelined in literature".

Is the short story going up or down? Do you listen to MP3 story stories or Flash? Are e-books the answer?

Poem drafts

2011-06-22T09:44:00.013+01:00

"Smiths Knoll"

I recently send a poem to "Smiths Knoll". The editors replied saying that "We ... had a couple of doubts". I could have addressed those doubts by tweaking a couple of lines. Of the 18 lines I ended up leaving one line alone. One line in the re-write is new, the others have been tweaked, sometimes reversing their meaning. It was a recent poem - I felt no resistance to re-writing, it was a continuation of what I'd stopped doing only a week before.

"Making Poems"

This week I've been reading "Making Poems", edited by Todd Davis and Erin Murphy (State University of New York, 2010) in which poets have a chance to write about the development of one of their poems. I found Shara McCallum's explanation (p.89) the most interesting, bringing up several issues that occurred to me during re-writing

The first draft was entitled "The Unreliable Narrator Speaks to her Audience"
The second draft, written on the same day (May 5th 2003), had an alternative title of "Penelope Refigured" ("The uncertainty partly reflected my discomfort with the self-consciousness of the first title ... Penelope, a figure of myth I'd long been interested in ... seemed capable of the kind of utterance that comprised the first drafts opening lines ... Formally, the poem began as a single stanza but in the second draft migrated to quatrains, which were present as a unit of sound and rhetoric to my ear even in the first 'block' version"
Already there are interesting developments - the sentiments have found an embodiment that was waiting to be used. And we have an explanation for the poem's shape
"By the time I moved from my journal to the computer (draft three, on May 9), I changed the stanzaic structure again, trimming it to tercets. Playing with stanza lengths has, for the past ten years, been a revision tool to help me refine language. Determining a fixed length is not an arbitrary process but one governed by the dominant stanza length I see emerging as I revise the poem. Working with a defined stanza forces me to make difficult decisions about which images, word, and lines are best for conveying a poem's idea or feeling"
I like the idea of using stanza lengths as a revision tool - a way to focus on different words, see the poem in a new light. Because revising involves reading the same poem many times, it helps to have a device that stops you becoming over-familiar with the text. She lets the dominant stanza length force regularity on the poem. Why? I'm not sure. She write that "the couplet offers the most space for pauses and reflectivity in a poem, the tercet a bit less, and so on. Because I favor a controlled pacing and tempo, I almost always select a fixed stanza length" so perhaps this poem has an unchanging pace and tempo?

"'Penelope' was published in tercets in the Fall 2004 issue of the Antioch Review". Here are the start and the ending.

I know I am losing you now
when I need you to hear me the most,
speaking across this barrier of time.

Listen, if I am not an ocean,
I am nothing. If I am not a world
unto myself, I have to know it.

Lemon rinds in the dried brook-bed,
fireflies in the face of uncertain evil -
...
Nothing left
but me scratching out these words,
waiting for you message in return.

A poem's publication often ends its development, but not this time. "When I began putting together my third book, weaknesses in the writing became glaring to me ... [the poem] underwent another ten or so drafts over the course of the next two years. .... In November 2004, it became 'Dear Country' ... The title change, I hoped, would make it possible for the poem to 'fit' into that sequence ... By late 2005, I dropped that idea and went back to 'Penelope' ... I began to be ruthless with the poem, cutting any line or stanza that seemed weak or disconnected in the least. Stanzas one, four, five, and seven [the last] went onto the chopping block in their entirety ... I was left with a muddle of language that could not be reassembled in the old way ... The poem begins with a series of images, which I think renders it less emphatic in tone at the outset ... Three years after the poem began, on May 23, 2006, it came to rest in its final form.". Here are the start and the ending
Lemon rinds in the dried brook-bed,
Fireflies in the face of uncertain evil -
...

If I am not an ocean,
I am nothing.

If I am not a world unto myself,
I have to know it.
But the story doesn't end there. It eventually appeared as "My Mother as Penelope" in her 2011 book "This Strange Land". In an interview with Geoffrey Philp she says "In my most recent book, personal experiences with mothering and marriage are set against historical narratives and myths. Still, writing autobiography is not what I am after as a poet. The details of my life are important to my poems but must be transformed to serve the poems' ends: they must enact the struggle for self-knowledge that is at the core of poetry. ... When I write, I often find myself grappling with issues of language and identity, as well as the interconnection between the two; but when I think about what I hope most for my poems, it is that they will approach these concerns (and any others) in a manner that is translucent."

The poem's been on a long journey - from a block to couplets; from an anonymous voice through a myth (Penelope) to a particular voice (the mother). The new context has given it extra meanings. The issues of appearance and content interacted as the drafts progressed, though I remain unconvinced that the layout is as beneficial to the reader as it's been to the writer. I think the poem's best lines are mostly those that were in the first draft. In particular the first stanza of the Antioch Review version sounds like a tacked-on intro. Perhaps I should change my older poems too, even if they have been published.

"Poetry as Research"

Also this week I read "Poetry as Research" (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010) in which David Ian Hanauer reports his finding on the development of poems (which he says confirms other research). He identifies 4 stages -

Activation - real world events; generated ideas, sensory images and sound, intertextual influences, poetry writing intention
Discovery -
Permutation - replacement was preferred followed by deletion and addition which suggests that poets rework within the existing framework.
Finalization - decision to view poem as a finished object

The Discovery and Permutation phases cycle around until the poet's satisfied. Nothing very new here, though the nature of the rewrites is interesting. Armstrong ("The Poetic Dimensions of Revision", 1986) reports that expert poets delete more often than they add, and replace more than they delete. Armstrong ("A Process Perspective in Poetic Discourse", 1984) found that experts spend far more time revising than novices do. Also interesting are the decision processes involved at the end, the moment when it becomes a product.

The movie of the book

2011-06-17T10:03:00.001+01:00

These movies of poems in "Moving Parts" date back to 2005 when I first owned a digital camera. File sizes and speeds were still worth worrying about then, and I used only free software, so the results don't compare at all well with many more recent YouTube offerings.

Crows nest (800K, Quicktime/H.263).
Escape (3.5M, Quicktime/H.263).
Misreading the signs (3.1M, Quicktime/H.263).
In the soul's darkroom (1.9M, Quicktime/H.263).

For comparison, see Tony William's far classier "Video-poem of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street"

"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice"

2011-06-09T09:28:00.002+01:00

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Vol 1) has some interesting articles. I'll mention 2 that offer reasons for the devaluing of some genres

In 'Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction', Holly Howitt-Dring says that the classifications of poetry, prose poetry and Flash (which she calls microfiction) are blurred, mentioning that Forché's "The Colonel" has been in both Flash-fiction and prose-poem anthologies. But she also thinks that at the core of microfiction is a discernable genre - "Stealing poetic techniques, truncating those of prose, it seems like the offspring of some ill-fated alliance, but in fact microfiction uses the best parts of both genres and is a genre in its own right, as it functions and speaks in a new and different way to both" (p.57). She tries to identify some common features of pieces that are classified as Flash/microfiction. As well as being formatted as prose,

"Microfictions usually start in the middle of an action, or, in some cases, a thought.", p.53
"Microfiction is often only about a small idea, and the relevance of the miniscule of the major, and focusing on an image, which is, in this case simple, highlights the consequence of the small thing.". p.54
"microfictions are ... small, and subtle, epiphanies ... reached not by some narrative trick, but by a realisation that the moment depicted in the microfiction has changed everything, that there has been a shift in what the reader believed or expected, and that this has had significance.", p.54

She writes that the lack of space for prolonged character development has led to the use of the punch-line as a way to make the reader experience the large consequences of small things, but over-dependence on this may devalue the genre. Even reliance on the more subtle ways of hinting at (rather than showing) change may be detrimental to the genre - "Because microfiction could be viewed as stories working solely by implication, I feel that they have been mistrusted and sidelined in literature" (p.56)

I knew that popular magazines used to publish lots of stories (by Conan-Doyle, etc). Sarah Whitehead's 'Reader as consumer: the magazine short story' points out that even Joyce, Borges and Mansfield were published in strange places (Joyce had 3 stories published in a farmer's magazine ("The Irish Homestead"), Borges was in "Playboy", and Katherine Mansfield's stories were published alongside ads for furniture and face treatment). The article suggests that magazines influenced the development of the short story. Here are some quotes

"At a time when virtually every piece of short fiction was initially and often only published in a periodical, the short story was just one of the many texts including articles, advertising and illustrations ... tempting both impulse buyers and faithful subscribers who would be lured by fact and fiction through pages of advertisements", p.72
"by the 1890s The Strand was selling more than half a million copies a month", p.74
"The unprecedented and unrepeated growth of the magazine industry, which underpinned the growth and popularity of the short story genre, was the catalyst, if not the source of twentieth-century critical dismissal of the form.", p.79
"The growth of the magazine industry at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century maps the most important chapter in the history of the short story and has directly influenced the nature of the form as it exists today ... The magazine story has imbued the short story genre as a whole with the value of the disposable, the appeal of the marginalized and the inexorable link between literature and consumer culture.", p.82

A short history of UK literary paper magazines

2011-06-02T06:14:00.002+01:00

Here's a compendium of articles I've written over the years, reprinted here for historical reasons, and as nostalgia

December 1997

I like the world of literary magazines. I submit and subscribe to many and have access to more at the University Library and local bookshops. In this piece I'd like to cover the progress of these magazines over the last decade, not in a comprehensive way but through my dealings with them, mostly in the form of rejection slips.

My first accepted story appeared during 1986 in Momentum, a small A5 magazine run by Wrexham Writers Workshop that lasted 11 issues or so. Summit by Coventry Writers came and went at about the same time. Such magazines (that begin small but aspire to greater things) no longer exist. On a glossier scale but in the same era was Jennings. Whether they accepted a piece or not the 3 editors cluttered an A4 page with entertaining comments. It paid, as did Dream, an SF magazine that encouraged reader participation. I treasure a readers' voting table from 1987 which puts a story of mine 4th and one of Stephen Baxter (1996 Arthur C. Clarke prize winner) 14th. They've all gone, along with newer publications like Raconteur and the revived Words International, each of which appeared in newsagents/bookshops and lasted about 2 years. Looking back through early contents pages of these defunct prose magazines one sees now familiar names like Sophie Hannah. It's hard to see where budding prose writers can begin nowadays. Perhaps the genre magazines offer a stepping stone. In its time as a quarterly the SF magazine Interzone published Angela Carter as well as many newcomers. Now it's a monthly also available at newsagents with over 110 issues to its credit. It's a quality publication which has taken care to grow slowly while others have grown too quickly and burst. They sometimes sent me 2 page rejections slips.

I started subscribing to Panurge with issue 2. The editors always replied with a comments or two, even when the stories didn't deserve it. Comments like "all the best and stick at it" helped. I finally got published there not long before it folded in 1995. Jon Murray in the final issue wrote "for a 25 hour week rising to 50 hours near publication date, I pay myself a wage of 11 pounds a week." He was getting 4000 submissions a year in the end. Its departure (and that of Metropolitan which ceased publication for similar reasons in 1997 after 10 issues) leaves a gap in the market. Quartos and Acclaim merged into The New Writer. Granta's been closed to newcomers for quite a while. From them I got my most irritating rejection - "in its own right it is very good work, unfortunately it's not right for Granta right now", supporting Jon Murray's view that Bill Buford never accepted anything from the slush pile no matter how excellent his colleagues thought it. Of course, since few prose contributors can appear per issue, it's hard to hold on to subscribing writers. I think a prose magazine needs at least a letters page so that more subscribers can see their names in print. As well as satisfying readers' egos, magazines must satisfy their tastes. Whereas a poetry magazine has a good chance of having something for everyone, a magazine with half a dozen stories might satisfy too few readers. This in part explains why genre magazines like Interzone which cater for narrower audience have a better chance of survival than general fiction publications. Editors of prose magazines have said that distribution via highstreet outlets is difficult, which was why the later issues of Panurge were disguised as books, a trend that other magazines would do well to follow. In January 1998, World Wide Writers appeared, looking much like Raconteur. Its awareness of the WWW might just aid its longevity.

My first poetry acceptance was in Folio International in the late 80's. It was one of several magazines whose demise closely followed my appearance in them. There's quite a rapid turn-around at the lower or more radical end. Even excluding these there are poetry magazines to suit all tastes - the market's glutted. In contrast with the US there are few UK University-based magazines - Cambridge is especially lacking. The austere but worthy Poetry Durham wound up 3 years ago. Oxford Poetry stopped last year, leaving Thumbscrew as Oxford's only poetry magazine. Verse is now US-based but under Robert Crawford was open to all. His "could you send us some more please" made up for many disappointments. Along with the Honest Ulsterman and Rialto it gave one the chance to rub shoulders with big names (I've been with Les Murray and R.S. Thomas). Other Poetry (revived after a few year's rest), Smiths Knoll and Seam are well edited by established poets, showing that new magazines can emerge. Orbis, Envoi (115+ issues), Poetry Nottingham (150+ issues) and Weyfarers (75+ issues) have been going for decades. Weyfarers rotates editorship. The others, for periods at least, have been decisively led. Iota, with nearly 40 issues under its belt, is small but action packed and keeps arriving on time. I suspect that many of its subscribers have appeared in it. This was the approach of Outposts before Roland John took it upmarket so that it looked like Agenda but it seems to have lost its grassroots support. Perhaps that's deserted to the emerging, populist Forward Press titles like Poetry Now and Rhyme Arrival, which are the largest circulation, non-funded poetry magazines in Great Britain. In quality Poetry Review and PN Review lead the field. Competition at this level is intense. Poetry Review get 30,000 poems a year of which they print 120. They seem to reply ever more quickly and decisively to my submissions.

A few poetry magazines (Smiths Knoll for instance) contain nothing but poetry. Others, especially the more frequent ones, have articles, reviews and encourage reader participation through letters. Acumen is like PN Review in this respect but more readable. Some magazines go further still, attempting to cover both poetry and prose. Stand and London Magazine keep going, maintaining high standards on very different budgets. The recently deceased Iron was lively and variagated. The North is too. Both have publishing arms. Staple is still going strong and is perhaps the most under-estimated of the magazines here. I'm surprised that they don't attract bigger names. It prints only poetry and stories. They pay, and they're now producing about a book a year. There are dangers that a magazine becomes too much of a publicity leaflet for the press. I think Staple's free of that but I was worried to read in Gortschacher's book (p. 644) that in a sample of PN Review's he'd read, 39% of the poets had been published by the related Carcanet press.

Editors tend to be mature males - people with time and money. Sometimes their pre-occupations show through in their choices (lots of parents dying, children leaving home, etc). Most of them are poets whose work appears in other magazines. From what I've seen, they are a sincere, committed and enormously dedicated bunch. With annual turnover of subscribers sometimes as high as 40%, the struggle for survival is endless. I feel more sympathetic towards them the more I hear how strange some writers are. One of their motivations is to have a piece accepted in yearly anthologies. Both the various Best Short Stories anthologies and the Forward Book of Poetry perform the role that the US equivalents do, though we have no equivalent of the Pushcart Prizes especially for small press publications. Editors are so often on a hiding to nothing. Misprints are one danger - few magazines send out proofs. One of my poems contained 3 misprints, including a missed "not" in the final statement. Some editors go to the trouble of commenting on rejected poems - a well meaning but dangerous practise since the volume of submissions (there's often well over 50 times more submissions than space) means that editors sometimes miss the obvious. A few editors ask for changes. One editor suggested the removal of 2 verses. I fought him down to one. The poem's better than it was originally.

December 1999

This week I received the latest issue of Staple magazine. Usually it prints poetry and stories, but this was a poetry-only issue, because the editors said that they had to save money and by producing such an issue they could publish as many writers as usual in fewer pages.

Some publishers have tried to encourage short stories. In the last few years, magazines like Panurge, Metropolitan, Word International and Raconteur have come - and gone.

December 2002

Thumbscrew's going, which is a shame. Some other magazines which looked to be folding (London Magazine, Stand) seem to be on the way to recovery. There's a trend amongst the smaller magazines (Other Poetry, Staple) to include more critical material. Envoi has recently invited poets to add a few pages of prose if they want. More magazines have magazine reviews (Poetry Nottingham International, etc). PQR (Poetry Quarterly Review) has comparative studies of magazines (M/F ratios, grant status, page allocation, etc). Magazines are looking smarter - covers are more likely to be glossy and illustrated (e.g Acumen, Iota). Also more magazines are setting up pamphlet publication on the side.

There have been some notable changes of editorship. Poetry Review's longstanding editor Peter Forbes has made way for David Herd and Robert Potts whose first 2 numbers have sought to bring the avant-garde into mainstream view. Poetry Review is by far the highest circulation poetry magazine, so this is a significant move. The smaller Staple, Iota and Orbis have been run for years without a change of editorship until recently. In the case of Iota the magazine has changed beyond recognition. Roy Blackman's death in November 2002 is bound to affect Smiths Knoll.

As a genre, Short Stories is sinking ever further from view. I think London Magazine, Stand, Ambit and Staple are the only magazines with circulations over 300 who accept non-genre unsolicited contributions from anyone - that's maybe 30 published stories a year. MsLexia, QWF and Writing Women accept stories only from females. World Wide Writers is a magazine that publishes competition entries. Interzone is a monthly short-story magazine available in newsagents, but it's Science Fiction only.

March 2007

3 factors are currently affecting UK magazines

Postal charges - changes in 2006 have affected non-letter postage
Funding Policy - uncertainty continues. In 2007, Arts Council England said that "We have been open with all our regularly funded organisations that it is going to be a difficult spending review and we could be looking at a very difficult settlement", particularly for specialist literary publications like The London Magazine, Acumen, Dreamcatcher, etc. The London Magazine gets more that the others, but it's only about 30k I think, so we're not talking big money.
The WWW - competition continues. For speed and production values, paper can't compete with the WWW, and WWW magazines can include audio/video clips too. Most mags have web-pages now. A few (Iota, Magma, and most recently Acumen) are using the WWW as an interactive adjunct to the paper version. The poetry library now have some full-text back-issues of magazines.

How long will paper magazines last? Arts Council England's 2007-2011 vision statement for literature ominously says "While not disregarding the benefits of traditional production and distribution methods, we want to see these presses and magazines take a lead in developing new methods of distribution and explore new uses of technology for both publishing and distribution. We believe that our funded presses would benefit from developing creative clusters."

There's no sign yet of a general decline except with short stories.

When a small-press magazine gets a new editor, the changes are so big that it's as if a new magazine has been launched. 3 stalwarts of the small-press world have recently been revamped

Envoi - 50 years old. Poetry Now published by Cinnamon Press, it has a WWW page and allows email submissions
Staple - c.20 years old. Poetry and Prose. A new ed has just taken over but hasn't yet produced an issue.
Seam - not so old, but has a WWW page now, and has relocated to Cambridge.

Also more magazines (most recently Smiths Knoll) are setting up pamphlet publication on the side.

The Short Story (a campaign site for the genre) currently lists 67 magazines outlets but they include the "TLS", "Your Cat Magazine", "The War Cry", etc. The revived Salt magazine is taking prose though. Prospect accepts previously published authors only. I suggest you try US magazines.

December 2010

I tend to stick to the same stable of magazines, but I thought I'd take a look around this year. What's changed?

I have access to the online magazines that the University subscribes to - the full text of hundreds of literary magazines (Poetry, PN Review, etc)
My local Borders has closed. They stocked many US and UK literary magazines
WWW magazines have improved in quality and status
Some magazines have gone. Others (e.g. Iota) have changed beyond recognition.
I read that book publishers care less about slush piles nowadays. I don't know whether this means that they take more notice of magazines. Even if they do, I suspect that only a few magazines matter. More likely they're influenced by networking (of which online discussion boards - some associated with magazines - play an increasingly significant role).

What affects my choice of subscriptions?

Brand loyalty
Chance - I've tried renewing subs to 2 magazine lately but something's got lost in the post, so I might not try again. And chance encounters affect choices - what tipped the balance towards The Dark Horse was Hannah Brooks-Motl's article in the Summer 2008 issue
I try to support prose-only magazines - Riptide, short Fiction, etc.
I get magazines that supply something I can't get elsewhere
I get magazines if it improves my chances of getting acceptances

Beneath it all though lies a feeling that paper magazines are doomed. In the UK the main poetry publishers and major magazines seem less influential now (to me and my peers, I guess I mean). There's more small-press infiltration of prize-lists, and more pamphlets are being published. Perhaps the Web has helped smaller magazines more than large ones - the small mags benefit more from the networking and wider visibility that the web provides. Magazines that I've unjustly neglected in the past are Magma (whose contents I like), and Poetry London (whose poetry I'm rather less sure about). I haven't seen Tears in the Fence for years - it's changed a lot, and is a good read. And Brittle Star has done well lately. Importantly for me, these latter 2 magazines publish short fiction. At the other end of the spectrum there are 2 venerable magazines I've never been in - Poetry Review and PN Review. Though PN Review has a few interesting articles, I have trouble with most of the poetry and some of the chattier essays. I like its reputation more than its contents. But I'll keep posting to Poetry Review every two years or so.

I imagine many of these publications are under pressure. Now that US magazine are often easier to submit to than UK ones I wonder how many UK writers sent their work straight to the States. Besides, for fiction there are hardly any UK markets anyway, and Rialto tells people to expect to wait 6 months for a reply to a submission.

But all is not rosy for US magazines either. I'm told that Story and New American Review have gone, TriQuarterly has become WWW-only and Southern Review is shrinking.

As the water-hole dries up, strangers rub shoulders. On "Poetry Publishing" Amy De'ath suggests that both Carcanet and Salt cut through the mainstream/avant-garde divide, though Carcanet tends to print older, "established" avant-garders. On the more purely innovative side, Shearsman remains impressive and Barque keeps going. Magazines like Tears in the Fence are less mainstream than I'm used to, but not beyond my range. I need new challenges

In consequence of all this I think I'm going to adjust my magazine subscriptions a little, now that I can't buy off the shelf. I'll also send stories to the US rather than the UK, and take WWW magazines more seriously. But I still have trouble evaluating WWW magazines. I'm sending Flash pieces off, but I don't produce many so I don't want to waste them. I know of a few established outlets - Smokelong, etc - but keep finding other possibilities. Even London Magazine's starting to print them. Time to take a few chances I suppose.

Suspension of disbelief

2011-05-26T16:03:00.001+01:00

In What You Might Lose By Becoming a Writer Carlo Gébler wrote that "When I read, whatever I read, I examine and analyze. This is partly in order to judge the artifact and rank it, but also, and perhaps mostly, I am doing this so that I can learn from it. ... This attitude applies not just to books but to everything". Amongst the follow-ups were

Tania Hershman - "I know I read short stories with half an eye out for the how of it, how and why what works works, so I can learn from it. But then I do that with novels, with TV programs (how does that character seem so real?) and other fictional universes"
Vanessa Gebbie - "it now takes a very good book to make me fall into the fictive dream we aim to create!"

At workshops I listen that way, and that's how I often read stories too, at least in part. Sometimes when I write I cater for readers unwilling to suspend disbelief (e.g. Method of Loci). Expanding the borders of the story might keep such readers inside the text rather than them observing it from the outside. The disadvantage is that the extra authorial or metafictional voice will distract the disbelief-suspenders.

Metafiction gets a bad press, but rather than being viewed as pretentious or academic, it can be thought of as a fun way to keep the attention of anticipatory readers. I think readers are more familiar with meta-fiction techniques nowadays, because they see them used elsewhere. The stage magicians Penn and Teller sometimes discuss techniques and use transparent props (in order to spring a further surprise later). Movies often have associated soundtracks or documentaries that recount how they were made. Sometimes it's possible to slip some metafiction into a story without upsetting those readers who want to be immersed - one of the characters can be a writer for example, agonising over the writing of a story that turns out to be the current story.

Factoids

2011-05-17T10:22:00.006+01:00

Well, that's what I'll call them - facts (sometimes contextless and isolated) that are put into poems. They can be interesting in their own right - strange but true. They can be a piece of information everyone's expected to know (e.g. "London's the biggest city in England"), the reader thus expected to ponder on the implications (easiest city to be lonely in?). They can be a minor piece of knowledge shared by reader and poet, perhaps a piece of public knowledge that had a particular significance to the poet. As an example of their usage, here's the first and the final stanza from "Then in the twentieth century" which won 2nd Prize in the 2002 National Poetry Competition. It's by David Hart.

Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape,
the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move,
and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges.
...
Men quarrelled about scrolls found in pots near the Dead Sea, the library
at Norwich burned down, milk was pasteurised by law, I have four children,
all adult now, small islands became uninhabited, Harpo never spoke on film.

Most of these factoids seem to lack any special significance to the persona, nor do they seem closely inter-related. There's not really any narrative either. There's some theoretical justification for this approach. Facts help to anchor the poem to the verifiable world, and are never really isolated.

"although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second with having previously reached the first", Ruskin, "Modern Painters"
"Structuralism ... starts off from the observation that every concept in a given system is determined by all other concepts of the system and has no significance by itself alone ... there is an interrelation between the data (facts) and the philosophical assumptions, not a unilateral dependence", Garvin, "a Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style"

Supposed facts may be loaded with implicit assumptions. There's psychological justification too - after all, what we remember isn't just the personal, or the personal responses to public events, we also remember public events much as many others might.

Some poets never use this approach - it's non-lyrical; just dead facts; a collage that depends on juxtaposition; an essay. I like Hart's poem and the style. I use factoids - I like finding out that Defoe, when he was pilloried for criticising the authorities in 1703, was pelted by the public with flowers, or that Hitler and Wittgenstein went to the same school. In the poetry game, facts play a role they don't play in prose. They're perhaps further from poetic truth than beautiful imagery is, but they're useful all the same.

"beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", Keats, "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
"Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays",
"Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true", Larkin

Notes about "Iron Birds"

2011-05-11T13:55:00.001+01:00

Some audience reaction after a recent reading suggests that "Iron Birds" from my booklet needs an explanation. Unless you know about Cargo Cults, "Iron Birds" will be tricky, so here's an info-dump: when technologically advanced cultures visit more primitive, isolated ones, they often give presents. After the visitors leave, a religion might develop in the hope of getting more presents, based on rituals - building imitation landing strips and planes, or imitating the behaviour of people with walkie-talkies, etc. The title alludes to the primitives' impression of planes. Some isolated poetry writers are being compared to Cargo Culters. The poem begins

You lay out words to tempt them,
another poem about poetry.

Later they're mockingly told to "Murder the medicine men. Empty your shelves." (medicine men are the wise men, the lecturers; shelves can have both food and books). At the end the hopeful visions of vapour trails are compared to scratch marks fading on a lover's body.

Online Fiction Workshops

2011-05-02T08:10:00.018+01:00

Here's an attempted round-up of online Fiction forums. It's bound to be lacking in many respects, so feel free to add comments.

Why go online?

When online writers groups appeared I thought traditional writers groups would peter away. If local experience is anything to go by however, the opposite's the case. Nowadays, online groups and traditional groups happily co-exist and proliferate, though online groups have the advantage that they're open 24/7 and are available to people who'd have trouble getting to physical meetings.

I think that with poetry groups it's easier to keep more people happy than with fiction groups (the same difference applies to magazines). I only write a story a month, if that, and can barely provide enough material for a monthly traditional meeting. Most poets can manage at least one poem per month, and the text doesn't take 15 minutes to deliver so most of the meeting can be devoted to comment. Online fiction groups don't have these time restrictions. Even so, an online fiction group would need many members if they were all like me, to avoid long periods of silence (off-putting to prospective members). Most of these groups have hundreds of members, most of them inactive most of the time.

All of the online story forums offer the ability to post stories and comment on them. There are pros and cons of even this basic functionality. Downsides include

Risk of stories/ideas being stolen
Risk of not being published in magazines because the magazines might consider posted stories as being already "published"

Amongst the benefits are

Getting feedback and marketing help (including help with international markets)
Getting noticed by agents and editors
Getting practise at writing criticism
Socialising

How to choose a group

Like traditional groups, online groups can be dominated by a few people who post too many stories, post awful stories, or post aggressive crits. I think most online groups have rules and moderators, but you'd better check before joining in. Also look at how busy the site is.

With online groups, people will always have the text before them when they comment, and they won't have to react immediately. This should improve the quality of the criticism. Even so, sites are often lacking in Deep Crit (in the public sections anyway). Assess the quality of the comments.

Sites are becoming increasingly sophisticated, using features familiar to Facebook or Blog users, and replicating the better features of traditional groups. Options include

A rating system
"Story of the week" features
Extra information (competition news, etc) and discussion Forums
Genre-specifics forums and expert forums
Some private sections, and the ability to create private sub-groups (which helps with the pilfering problem)
Offline (real-time) chat to individuals

Some of these options might be especially useful to you, giving you a chance to use a site to do one-stop-shopping. Here are some sites that offer a wide array of forums

Fan Fiction (fan-fic and the internet go well together. This is one of a number of sites catering for fan-fic)
Litopia
Absolute Write
Writers Hub
Every Author (flash, essays, stories, prompts)
The Word Cloud (build your own sub-groups, competitions, events, publishing info)
Writing Forums
One of Us with a Forum
WriteWords (see the groups)
Eratosphere

The following sites focus more narrowly on story-writing

Critique Circle (build your own private sub-groups)
Fictionaut (rating system. Comments are short)
Scrawl
Short Fiction
Short Story Group (see their critique guidelines)
The Workhorse
Liberty Hall Writers
writing.com
Fiction Press (more a showcase)
Zoetrope Virtual Studio

Some sites focus on a particular genre. Here are a few of the Flash Fiction ones -

There's also lesbian fiction, etc.

CB1 Poetry Reading, Tuesday 26th April

2011-04-27T09:17:00.005+01:00

Andrew Philip and Rob Mackenzie, a flashy mirror, and Anne Berkeley

On 26th April after some afternoon punting Andrew Philip and Rob Mackenzie read at CB1 in Cambridge. They both published with HappenStance about 5 years ago (Andrew's book has sold out!), then published with Salt.

The evening began with an open-mike session. Peter Daniels and I (part of the new exciting Next-Gen wave of HappenStance poets) were amongst the performers. It's ages since I've read and by the time my first-minute nerves were over, so was my set. I dashed off "Iron Birds" and "Crows' Nests" to about 25 people. Nowadays I have to take off my glasses to read, which means I can't really see the audience, but I tried to look up anyway. And I sold a booklet.

The main attractions were likable (which always helps whether you're a stand-up or a poet) and delivered their pieces well (Andrew often from memory). Rob read a new sequence about his daughter.

I've read their books recently, which was useful because I'm not a good poetry listener. Andrew's work in particular benefited from being heard (he uses more repetition and presents it more dramatically). The evening made me want to read their books again.

I went with a non-native-English speaker (a non-poet) who used their first poem to get acclimatised to the accent but then found their work more accessible than mine. It helped that they read sequences of themed pieces, and told us when a poem was going to be rather episodic or tangental.

Vanessa Gebbie: an interview

2011-04-21T19:34:00.015+01:00

Introduction

In the late noughties whether I was reading the latest Riptide magazine, the Salt blog, or competition results, Vanessa Gebbie's name kept appearing. In 2007 alone she was 1st in the Daily Telegraph's Novel prize, 1st in Exeter University's Paddon Award, 2nd in the Bridport, 2nd in the Fish Short Story Prize and 2nd in FlashQuake's "Less is More" competition. Since then she's written/edited a few books. As if that wasn't enough, she's had poetry successes too (2 poems short-listed in the Bridport 2010 competition). She's keen to share what she's learnt (and still learning) via blogs and workshops - she's a busy (and I suspect excellent) teacher and judge.

Her pieces are of course good reads, but I also think they're particularly useful for aspiring writers to learn from. Though it's unlikely that our stories would be mistaken for each other's, many of her stories are what I'd like to write - she seems to try to make each word count (count double if possible), and though she has many interesting life experiences she could write about, she prefers to invent. Her short story collections are more varied than most, though a few images and themes are repeated -

Words from a glass bubble (Salt 2008) is a collection of stories that not only vary widely in word-length but authorial orientation changes too - sometimes the narrator's invisible, sometimes she's puppeteer, ring-master or quizzing, challenging storyteller. Some symbols recur - there are old virgins, wall eyes, "joined up houses", dead children, fostered/adopted children, birds ... and the sand gets everywhere. There are several churches too (while in Cambridge she popped into St Botolph's Church which dates from 1350). The church-cleaners in the stories are perhaps examples of the more general "body" cleaners that pervade the stories. Many characters are outcasts longing for old wounds to be healed, or are merely seeking a firmer identity. It's striking how early the characters introduce themselves (or another character) to the reader - many first pages have "I'm X" or "X is". At a recent Cambridge WordFest session Vanessa said that she'd had an "odd beginning" (adopted at birth, only recently meeting her genetic relatives) and sympathized with people trying to find their place.

Storm Warning (Salt 2010) is more thematic, featuring victims of military/religious conflict who have a weakened sense of the present, becoming vulnerable to sudden losses of working memory and invasion by the past. Dominant imagery involves beaches, feet/shoes, and smells, with several inter-generational relationships.

The following interview picks up on a few of these issues mentioned above, touching also on the use of autobiographical information, the compromises of a writers' life, and how to make the most of things.

Interview (April 2011, by e-mail)

If you had your time again, how might you have developed your writing faster?

I'm not sure it's a good thing to develop writing 'faster'. Could I have done that without compromising what I'm doing now? I don't think so... I'm not sure speed is a good thing, is it? Maybe for some people, but for me, I'm happy to be jogging along at whatever pace this thing goes at. I reckon we all come to writing when we are ready, and can't force things to happen before then, at least, not without damaging something. I really started this journey in October 2002, spent a year learning craft, started writing seriously a year later. Had my first publication in early 2004, my first comp success that summer. Lots more followed, I was very lucky, but it was hard hard work! I would not make comp wins or publications just 'notches on the desk' - easy to do and useless for learning. I tried to progress, to target harder and harder comps for example. It seemed to work. I got noticed by an agent and also by Salt Publishing in 2007. The first collection came out in 2008, the text book in 2009, the third book (second collection) in 2010, the novel was pitched by my agent to publishers in October 2010, found a home with Bloomsbury a month later and will be out in Nov 2011 in the UK and in Jan 2012 in the US. Could I have done it faster? I don't think so, to be honest. Not without burning out and producing poor work in the process.

Do you find that teaching helps your writing?

Yes and no. Yes in that being with other writers is a positive experience, and there is great synergy in a group of keen learners. I get swept up in it because I am a learner too. Always. The day I stop learning, I will stop.

There's no real 'us and them' for me. I just like passing on this thing I love to newer writers. I take a non-academic, very hands on approach, absolutely non-didactic. There is certainly no need to produce work for a tick and a mark out of ten from anyone other then the writers themselves. My aim is only to help open people up to their own potential, and show them some tools to sharpen things.

But - no - as well, it does not help my writing, in that it is using a different set of skills, and therefore I would never ever want to take a job as a writing teacher full time. It would stop me writing.

If money wasn't an issue would you still do teaching?

Yes. Absolutely. If you have a skill at something, no matter how slight - don't you have a duty to teach the next generation? Besides, I had some stunningly good tuition myself, and I don't see how morally I can't pass that on. If it worked for me, it will work for others... I'll keep teaching until people stop asking me, I guess.

Would you still judge?

Difficult one - I think I would still agree to be final judge - not necessarily read every single entry.

You've written stories and Flash. Now you're writing novels and poems too. Does a piece that begins as one thing ever turn into another? What's the most common transformation?

Yes, occasionally. For example, a very short flash piece about a priest assuaging his own guilt about a strange parishioner - ended up as a poem. It was a better poem than it was a flash. And you could argue that I turned about thirty stories into a novel - only that took a year's hard work, and was a very deliberate act. They didn't 'turn into' the novel without a lot of persuasion ... if not beatings!

Which writer or writing issue have you changed your mind about lately?

Interesting question. I re-read "Birdsong" [by Sebastian Faulks] recently - and certainly found it less mesmerising than I did at first. I think it could have had a better editor - put it like that.

Writing issues - hmm. The longer I am at this game, the more I realize that whereas 'there are no rules' seems to be a popular mantra for so many writers and tutors, I do not buy that. Yes, there are rules. Even 'there cannot be rules' is one, isn't it? I think it's best to know what they are. And then the best rule of all - break them. But you need to know what they are first, and know WHY you are breaking them.

Example - I was always taught never to open a piece of work with direct speech, simply because it leaves the reader hanging for a second, ungrounded. Why do that to your reader? There will usually be a better way of opening. I challenged myself, for a bit of fun, to write a novel that had only one starting line possible - a line of dialogue. Tick. Done. There is no better opening line for my book -
"My name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward."

The Acknowledgements page of Ros Barber's "Material" ends with "Finally, apologies are due to all those individuals who find themselves incorporated as 'material' when they would have chosen otherwise". Do you sympathise with this?

No, I'm afraid I don't, much as I respect Ros's work. If I haven't managed to incorporate'individuals as inspiration' in a way that makes the result totally new, unrecognisable, I have failed. I would rather assume I haven't failed, not that I have and therefore offer apologies just in case! By the way, I don't use real people as inspiration, as a rule. (Rules...) I make them up instead. Except for the ones I don't.

Which famous writers didn't write Flash but should have, because they'd have been so good at it?

I can't answer that. Probably today, we would just switch the line-breaks of a Shakespeare soliloquy and call it a flash.

Do you find retreats useful nowadays?

Absolutely. I have to get away from home to write anything new, or to be able to concentrate in depth anyway. There is too much going on at home at the moment - dealing with the rapid decline of a much-loved father, for example - having to empty and sell the house he lived in alone for twenty years, a son on a GAP year chucking himself off cliffs in New Zealand, the birth of my first grandchild, a husband who is at home now, wanting to use my study for his activities (the house computer...) I really don't have a space at home that I can call my own. I had a shed built in the garden - it gets used to store garden furniture... Therefore I am happy to go away and pay for peace and space elsewhere.

What's your ideal writer's holiday?

The best holiday for this writer is one that feeds the creative brain, follows an obsession, something ... example - I have just spent five days with a military historian following one Pal's Battalion through the battlefields of The Somme and the Ypres Salient. Perfect.

What are the best and worst aspects of writers groups? Are there situations where you wouldn't recommend someone to attend them?

Best aspects: Writing is a lonely occupation. A good writers group is a real boon, life-enhancing, work-enhancing. A chance to share information, markets, craft, networks - all so necessary today. Good feedback on one's work is rare - but if it can be found, then that's terrific.

Worse aspects: Some writers' groups tend to be run by the person with the loudest voice. Not necessarily the one who says the best things with that loud voice. Sometimes feedback can be anodyne, always positive, of the 'Oooo I like that Mavis' school. That's a bit meaningless, if you seriously want to get on. If you are just in for a social meet-up, that's different. I think writers are a vulnerable lot. I know, I am one myself. We seek approbation, want to get on and do Ok, maybe see our work out there - validation of sorts. I do think it is important not to confuse positive feedback from a writing group with the other sort, which tends to mean a bit more, if the market is well researched.

Where would I not recommend attending ... I know from bitter experience one of the big downsides of writers groups. Vulnerability - not just yourself, but your work. You just don't know if your work and your ideas shared with others will be respected - or if they will surface in a slightly different format with someone else's name on them - as happened to me and others couple of years back. I would say, having experienced the worst of it - don't share work with anyone unless you know them really well, and that means NOT writers you only know on the Internet.

The Internet is a marvellous medium but you do need to ensure you are not being too trusting. Working online, no matter how well you 'think' you know someone - you really don't. Take it from me. Do try to meet the people you commune with online, especially anyone with whom you feel you'd like to work closely. You may find the person is absolutely nothing like their pleasant online persona - nuff said.

Thanks Vanessa

From story to novel

In 2009 I based a workshop exercise around one of her stories -

Here's the start of an award winning modern story. Do a WhoWhatWhereWhyWhen reading of it. What might the themes be?

The Virgin Mary spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche half way up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the Virgin's words in her stomach more than in her ears, and she called her the VM. The VM didn't seem to mind. She was plastic, six inches high, hand painted, and appeared to be growing out of a mass of very green foliage and very pink flowers, more suited to a fish tank. She held a naked Infant Jesus who stretched his arms out to Eva and mouthed, every so often ... "Carry?"

And here's the final paragraph. It has many echoes of the first - checklist the first paragraph's items to see what happened to them.

Then, there was a sound. The cry of a buzzard as it might have been made by a small boy, a thin little cry that rose triumphant into the post woman's house, echoed round the stairs and floated out of the open windows to disappear among the whispers of wind in the night sky.

Both begin and end with a sound. The glass bubble has become an open window; the artificial foliage and flowers have become wind and night sky; the silent pleading a triumphant cry, etc. The transition isn't explicitly from sadness to happiness, more from constriction to release - from the body, the house, the bubble, the niche on the stairs; from limbo. The main character doesn't even get a name-check at the end - it's more an exorcism than a voyage of self-discovery. It's interesting to see that "post woman" figures in both - the message-deliverer who doesn't get the message, maybe. Or perhaps there's a hint of post-menopausal, the release of no longer being of child-bearing age.

Beautifully orchestrated writing? Or (to an experienced reader) an example of structural fatalism, of claustrophobic unity? I'd guess that even fans of this ouroboric style would agree that you can have too much of a good thing. At the Cambridge WordFest she said that the chapters of her novel kept turning into stories, their heads eating their tails. It's possible of course for a novel to be a loosely connected set of short stories (a recent, acclaimed example is Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad") but Vanessa decided to disconnect the chapter endings from their beginnings, with Maggie Gee as mentor. On Patricia Ann McNair's blog she charts her passage, writing "I wonder if a successful writer of short fiction may find it hard to write a novel, because they need to unlearn so much. However, when they finally do, I wonder if they might write a better novel than they would if they were not short story writers first". Let's hope so. It would be a shame if too much of Vanessa's versatility was lost in the process, but you can't keep everyone happy. Ian McEwan started as a short story writer. Even though his novels have brought him international fame, it's not uncommon to hear of people still prefering his stories.

At least her recent novel-writing activity has given the rest of us more of a chance in short story competitions, though I'm sure our window of opportunity will be short-lived - she's too natural and gifted a short-story writer to turn her back on the genre for long.

Vanessa's response

It is a marvellous thing, to have a piece of work analysed like this - and I was very grateful to Tim for firstly taking the time to do it, and secondly, posting the results. It might be interesting (or not) to learn how the writer feels when this exercise is done on their work.

I felt three things. I was really pleased. I was seriously grateful. But more than all that, I was absolutely astonished. It was the first time I had consciously taken note of those echoes in the opener and the ending of Glass Bubble, the story. It was the first time that the symbols and images in the story, images which had risen up unbidden and unplanned in the process of writing, not put there consciously at all - had been scrutinised and interpreted.

The exercise reminded me so much of those wonderful sessions in the Sixth Form, or at university - literary analysis as it was done in the dark ages, I expect ... seeking out the images in Shakespeare's Hamlet and drawing conclusions as to his 'meanings'.

'Meaning' presupposes intent. I assumed back then that Shakespeare (or indeed the group of writers who bear that name) deliberately inserted symbols and images into his work, like the coordinator of a treasure hunt, deliberately leaving clues to be uncovered and the uncovering enjoyed by the finders. Now, I am wiser than that, because I am a writer. Sure, some writers may carefully go back and insert clever symbols into their work, after the first draft is complete. I have actually seen advice from CW tutors telling students to do this. I'm telling you if you DO that, the joins will show.

So please don't. When you are writing 'in the zone', and writing from a place you care about deeply, saying something you care about deeply, every word will flow in the same direction. Every metaphor will create itself.

And lovely blokes like Tim will discover the things you didn't know were there, and make you feel awfully clever. When actually - all you are is a writer.

Cambridge Wordfest - Andre Mangeot and Vanessa Gebbie

2011-04-16T16:45:00.002+01:00

André Mangeot and Vanessa Gebbie guested in a session entitled "Transcending Borders – The Lure of the Short Story" (An exploration of the short story in its various guises: What is a story? When does a story become a poem or a novel? Are there really any boundaries when creating fiction, or are they invented by the market?)

André wrote 2 unpublished novels before having success with short stories and poetry. He said he'd not read much Flash, but that his poetry (which tended to be narrative) was rather Flashy. He's currently completing a novel. Vanessa started with Flash and short stories, but has had poems shortlisted in the Bridport and is having a novel published by Bloomsbury next year. The chapters of her novel kept turning into stories. She's spent a lot of the last year uncurling them, straightening them out.

Both read from their recent story collections. André said that his stories kept wanting to grow into novellas. Both the extracts he read had atmospheric, foreign settings. He admitted that Greene was an influence. Vanessa read a complete story. One gets the feeling that word-count is more of an issue to her. When a detail's mentioned in her work (in this story, the Librarian's name) one senses that it will be relevant later, that it's not just scene-setting.

They saw similarities in each other's work, how characters often weren't settled in their surroundings. André mentioned that he ventures into situations that are disquieting. Vanessa said that she had an "odd beginning" (adopted at birth) and sympathized with people trying to find their place. I read recently that in dreams, Water signifies "state of mind". All the pieces mentioned water. In Vanessa's piece, brown water was coming out of an immigrant's taps until an anonymous donation cured it. Water was purified by a tablet in one of André's pieces. In the other a storm had broken and rain was flooding a city.

I wrote down 2 quotes

you don't have to know your character, you wait for them to reveal themselves (Vanessa)
the real music is out there, where silence and solitude are (from a story by André quoted by Vanessa)

Audience questions dealt largely with differences between novels, stories, etc. Someone pointed out that short stories can lead to good films, which is a route that both the authors would be interested in. The hour whizzed by.

Mixed Reviews

2011-04-01T13:30:00.005+01:00

Of course, one wouldn't expect all the reviews of a work to agree. What's interesting is in what ways they differ. For example, sometimes critics may disagree over whether a work is good while agreeing what criteria are appropriate. I've already written an article about Mixed Reviews in general, and I sometimes (e.g. with Landing Light) try to compare reviews of a particular book, but now that 3 reviews of my Moving Parts pamphlet have appeared (and I've unearthed a review I wrote), it's time to re-visit the topic. What I noticed was that

No-one mentioned the blurb or acknowledgements
No phrase was multiply-quoted, though "Windmills" (perhaps the weakest poem) was quoted from twice.
"abstract[ion]" appears 6 times. The main issue seems to be whether the "abstract" is sufficiently balanced by the concrete or emotional, and whether the juxtaposed or paradoxical parts are resolved.

HappenStance have a multiple-reviewer scheme - the online description gives you the idea. I suspect that knowing they're not the only reviewer makes the reviewers more likely to say what they think.

More generally,

A.L.Kennedy on her Books & Reviews page assesses some reviews of her books.
Some general review comparison sites exist - e.g. metacritic and reviewcentre
Both Everydayfiction and Fictionaut have peer-review assessment for unpublished stories

Foreign influences

2011-03-25T10:08:00.001Z

"Unlike British verse, [US poetry's] life force derives less from European crosswinds" (Simic)
"The 'mainstream' had morphed over time into a difficult slipstream for any British poet to stay afloat in, so choppy had the cross-currents buffeting England from across the Channel become" (James Rother)

Well, maybe, but I've not noticed such a strong European influence. The French poets barely get a look-in, though our theorists mention their theorists. You can't go wrong in claiming that Rilke's one of your favourites, but the proof of influence's not very clear. We were quite keen on Holub and Milosz once. Nobel prizewinners are briefly famous.

I'd have thought that Commonwealth influences would be stronger than European. Alzi was born in Pakistan. Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London then moved to Guyana. And there are many 2nd generation writers - Daljit Nagra for example, Jackie Kay, etc. Walcott's a frequent visitor. So is Australia's Les Murray. These writers have widened the mainstream. Have they influenced others? We write more ghazals but do we read more Tagore? Maybe. I suspect however, that WASP poets are more cautious than they used to be about dealing with "exotic" topics and multiculturalism.

Translations of course are a source of influence too. Cavafy and Seferis are quite often translated, but not as much as Homer or Dante. I sometimes wonder if a UK poet's interest in decades-old European poetry is a reaction against modern US poetry trends - languages considered more important than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its aftermath.

I try to keep up with Italian poets - see my Italian focus page. There's perhaps more of a USA-Italy link than a UK-Italy one, though Jamie McKendrick lived in Italy for a while, editing an anthology. I wonder how many 20th century Italian poets could be named by UK readers? Are Montale or Ungaretti listed as influences by any UK poets?

Variety in poetry books

2011-03-22T11:57:00.006Z

Variety: the spice of life, or something to disguise the blandness?

I was surprised when I read in Iota 88 that "I found the variety of shapes that the poems make on the page refreshing; a factor in keeping my interest and attention" (Angela France). I guess I shouldn't have been, but I prefer layout to be more than eye-candy. I'd like visual variety to be "organic", a consequence of the different styles and approaches of the poet. The following distribution of stanza-lengths is a typical for the free-form poetry books I read.

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	5
3 line stanzas	14
4 line stanzas	17
5 line stanzas	7
6 line stanzas	4
7 line stanzas	1
Misc stanzas	3

There are many dimensions along which variety can exist in a collection: poem-length, line-length, the formal-freeverse spectrum or process-product spectrum to name just a few of the obvious ones. Poets are quite adept at varying stanza length from poem to poem even if within a poem the stanza lengths are all the same. I'm unconvinced however that all poets who stay in a narrow band on (for example) the "language transparency" spectrum while twiddling with stanza lengths are sufficiently aware that uniformity is more than just a visual effect.

Variation from a norm is common in poetry. Variation of rhythm in metred work isn't gratuitous though - it leads to expressive effects. The effect depends on the norm, the context, though to say that all depends on context - on what's being written against - is over-simplifying; many layers of norms/conventions exist. A line with initial Caps may break the norms of the poem it's in, or the book it's in, or habits of the poet, or the genre, or the prevailing national trend, etc. What may look like a meaning-laden variation in one context may be the transparent default in another, and a poem can be read in several contexts. And anyway, readers normalize as they go along if they see little value in the Caps (or the line-breaks) so poets might have trouble making readers treat these features as significant.

In the past few months I've read more poetry books and fewer mags than usual, and hence have contextualised at the book level more often. A poem with initial caps will stand out in a book where the other poems don't use them (in a way that it wouldn't in a magazine, where there's too much background noise). But my most abiding reaction to variations from norms in the books I've read lately is that they're not significant (or if they are, they're far less significant than word-selection, etc). They make the pages look different from each other to stop readers becoming visually bored. Before I'm far into the book I start to edit out the line-breaks and stanza-breaks in order to focus on the less visual variety. Maybe I over-estimate the importance of a poet's ability to write in various ways, but masking a lack of underlying variety visually doesn't work for me. Why not use different fonts or different colours?

Magazine updates

2011-03-11T13:10:00.005Z

The Interpreter's House has a new editor and address - Simon Curtis, 9 Glenhurst Road, Mannamead, Plymouth, PL3 5LT.
Ben Wilkinson gives "14" a favourable write-up on his blog, listing some magazines that have disappeared over the years (most recently "Pen Pusher")
Litro's deadline for "Street Fiction" is 10th April.
For their summer issue Ambit wants poetry and prose and illustration from writers under 35 years old. Deadline Monday 24 April.
The latest issue of "The Dark Horse" has arrived. The editorial (like that of the Rialto) mentions gender balance. The final page includes a letter from a poet who feels that their work was mis-reviewed in the previous issue.
Rialto 71 has arrived. The poetry as usual ranges from thin (2 words/line) poems to fat prose layouts, from trad sonnets (Neil Powell's has initial Caps, and ends with "For first love never disappears; it sets,/ A pearl one neither loses nor forgets") to multi-indented pieces (though in other ways Rosie Shepperd's piece is fairly mainstream). There are long poems, and one-idea 4-liners. Some pages have 3 poems. There are poems by Cowper and Robert Burns, by poets with many books to their names (Brownjohn, Neil Powell, Peter Bland, etc), and by at least one first-timer. My favourite poems were by Andrew Nightingale, Christina Dunhill, Katrina Naomi and Andrew Bailey ("Glass", though the layout's quirky)
The type of prose ingredients vary in each issue. In this issue Mackmin's editorial fills an A4 page. Later, 3 poets present 2 drafts of a poem, describing the effect that a workhop had on the re-writes. There are 2 pages of poetry news and 2 letters.
Most significantly, Nathan Hamilton brings his "poets under 35" selection to a close with an article that includes a couple of brief critiques. He writes: it's my feeling that, unless the primary subject of a poem remains language (directly or indirectly) ... it is likely to appear naive or drift towards unexamined cliché .... If one has a 'subject' to write about ... one might be better off writing in prose. Later he writes: Jacques Lacan, who has filtered into the literary education of all young poets now ....
I remain unconvinced that one repeatedly needs to shout about linguistic instability in one's poems. Like sound effects or many other linguistic features, it's unavoidable whether or not one foregrounds it, and the amount of foregrounding can vary considerably within and between poems. I think most poets (and many readers) know by now that it's risky to wax lyrical about rainbows or the moon. I don't think we need "touches [that] gesture within the poem text as well as, from without, in, and, from within, out ... at the same time evoking (or ironising) an older style lyric utterance of a gesturing poem". I think Andrew Nightingale's "The Pioneers" manages to be entertaining while providing fans of Lacan or semiotics all the essay material they need.
I didn't like this issue's selection of U-35 poets as much as previous selections. I didn't get what Miriam Gamble's game was, nor did I understand what Ben Borek's Wordsworth re-write was for (and why does only one line begin with a lower case?). Holly Hopkins' piece was ok but nothing new.

Litref Reviews - a rationale

2011-03-07T12:20:00.010Z

The style of the reviews on Litrefs Reviews doesn't appeal to everyone, not even to all of those who read theory, so I thought I'd better offer this rationale

On his blog Rob MacKenzie asked "What the best approach for a reviewer? Is it best to be tentative and say you're not certain about various things?". Sheenaugh Pugh replied "If I don't get what is going on, I will say so. Folk can think me incompetent if they like --- What people think of the reviewer is not in the end the point". I tend to follow the Pugh approach. I know that some people feel that poetry's under threat and that poets should stick together. I also know people who think that the world of reviews is ridden with mutual back-slapping, with inhibition, and that only 20 or so poetry books per year are worth publishing. I think I'm somewhere in between.

I used to keep these notes to myself, but a decade or so ago I decided that given it's just as easy to put the stuff online as on paper, I might as well do so. Of course I could play safe. In a few months even I might not agree with what I've written. I note that Rob's most recent blog entry begins "I've badly misjudged WS Merwin. I'd read only a few poems by him, mainly written in the last decade or so, and these hadn't done anything for me". Yep. I know the feeling. I sometimes go back and change write-ups.

For self-education and calibration I allot a proportion of my reading time to authors I've not heard of before, or whose work I haven't previously liked. There are famous, highly regarded writers whose work I just don't get. I have blindspots both known to me and unknown. I'm not the only one ("You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse" - Tolstoy to Chekhov; "Larkin had no literary talent ... Larkin never managed to write a good poem" - Andrew Duncan). It's not unusual, finishing a write-up, for me to have wanted it to come out differently, but there we are. If I read that Prynne's the most important living British Poet it doesn't make me like his work any more (though I might be encouraged to read his work again, and expose my incomprehension again).

I'm not trying to follow standard templates for reviews, or guidelines like "mention 2 things you like for each thing you don't"; "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"; "write it as if it were a Reference for someone who might be shown the Reference, encoding all adverse comment"; "end with a judgment and an incitement to buy". I'm not even trying to be balanced - I link to other reviews whenever I can. If I gain an impression that's falsifiable (say, that an anthology has more male poets than female ones) I tend to do a count rather than trust myself. Once I go to the bother of doing a count I feel I might as well add it to the write-up. I don't think authors should have anything to fear from stats.

It's not a style that I'd recommend everyone to follow (especially in paper publications - my suggestions for those who want to be published are on Writing Book Reviews). My stuff's a side-show, a marginal voice - or at least it should be. What I would like is for many more people to write up their impressions - not just of the books by friends or by their favourite authors, but all the poetry books they read.

Obscurity again

2011-03-03T12:12:00.005Z

Anyone who's read my attempts at reviewing lately will note that I'm having more trouble than usual with poetry. I'm happy to enjoy poems that I don't "understand" but when I neither enjoy or understand a poem I start asking pointed questions. Sometimes the obscurity of one poem in a book makes me distrust others. I have a fair knowledge of literary/art movements. I need to see individual poems analysed. Books that have helped me in the past include

The Poem and the Journey (Ruth Padel)
52 ways of looking at a poem (Ruth Padel)
how to write a poem (John Redmond)
Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge)

These tackle (sometimes successfully) poems by the likes of Prynne, Jorie Graham, etc. In Not so difficult poems and Obscurity I tried to explain how I deal with some common obstacles. Now it's time for me to look for more help.

Michael Snediker's review of "Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance" by Daniel Tiffany makes it sound like a valuable contribution to the obscurity debate - "The ambitiousness of Tiffany’s argument is exceeded only by the dazzling success of it.". However, the review's penultimate sentence might make one reconsider - "The delight in discovering, across the time of reading, that perceived tenuity patiently could await its being reassessed as a new and significant lucidity - that an infrastructure already had been in place without one’s registration of it - describes the good fortune of a new book so self-abiding in its convictions that we learn to trust it, such that an earlier sense of unfamiliarity alchemizes into the gratitude of learning where we least expected it." What I understand of this could surely have been said more simply.
I'm looking forward to reading Stephen Burt's "Close Calls with Nonsense" - ("If you are a new reader of poetry, Stephen Burt will help you figure out techniques for approaching difficult writers" "Burt pursues his argument in a manner which is always as rational as it is accessible")
"The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction" by Dean Young has its fans.

SF writer Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws are unexpectedly apt -

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I sometimes think that it's impossible for a certain text to be usefully described as poetry. I think it's necessary to go slightly beyond poetry to determine its limits. Most of all, I think that the "magic" of poetry is largely explainable in terms of technique and analysis. I think it's possible to speak simply about at least some types of obscurity. So I'll keep searching. Maybe Arduity: clarifying difficult poetry is useful

US/UK poetry again

2011-02-23T08:43:00.009Z

I like reading about US/UK poetry comparisons, mostly because I find them useful introductions to US poetry. James Rother's review-essay of "New British Poetry" (Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic, Graywolf Press, 2005) deals with many points. Here are some extracts with belated comments

in a review-article for The New York Review of Books titled "Anglo-Celtic Attitudes." ... Vendler began by blaming the decline in deference among American authors to things English on the U.S.'s having acquired superpower status after World War II and on American writers no longer feeling that they need to remain current with regard to trends emerging in the British Isles and Ireland. -
Maybe. And, as he says, the deaths of Eliot and Auden severed more links. As a consequence, people like Armitage can be unknown even to dedicated US poets. Besides, there are so many US poets and styles that it's hard for US readers to find time for UK ones.
what isn't the least in doubt is the degree of animus which Paterson feels toward the corrosive swindle known everywhere as "Postmodernism." It may have originated in the United States, but in his view it left virtually an entire generation of British poets moldering soullessly in its swath. -
I'd guess that (for different reasons) neither Paterson nor Simic explored the all nooks and crannies of UK poetry.
Simic: American poetry is by its very nature eclectic and therefore "always already" contemporary, whether its practitioners wish it to be or not. Unlike British verse, its life force derives less from European crosswinds than from what Simic traces to the "limitless faith" expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson "in the power of the individual to make a new beginning, reinventing everything from his identity to the art of poetry ..." -
I don't see many continental influences in British verse.
A majority of its inclusions seem, despite the occasional lurch into the memorable, to lack assuredness and in some cases even basic skills. Under cover of "populism" (i.e. "grammar school" ties over "public school" ones) a plethora of skivvies and ragged knickers flaunt their working class threads -
Maybe I'm too close to see how class-ridden UK poetry is, or maybe the selection is skewed. Nor do I see pervasive nostalgia for empire (or indeed, much political/global awareness at all) in UK poetry.
As far back as the early '60s, critics such as Charles Tomlinson had noted problems arising out of British poets' having too precipitously dismounted the twin high horses of '20s modernism and '30s Noël Cowardice-with-a-Marxist-slant. -
I can see this why people might note this schism.
The "mainstream" had morphed over time into a difficult slipstream for any British poet to stay afloat in, so choppy had the cross-currents buffeting England from across the Channel become. -
I don't think French poetry or literary theory has changed the course of UK poetry.
At a stroke, Carlos the Jackal married the deconstructionist muse and set up housekeeping in the flat in Paris where Louis Althusser's wife experienced terminal massage at the hands of the luftmensch responsible for, among other unstringings of the lyre, Pour Marx and Lire le Capital. -
Oh. Uh?
In the UK, the mainstream has been shaped and narrowed by the closing banks of that cheery and generally none-too-clever verse of recognition humour [sic] or undisguised moral exhortation; and by Postmoderns on the other-and how strenuously Left-bank. -
I can more or less go along with that
From this company I exempt-even where a modicum of promise is perceptible-English knock-offs of American items already mass-produced in this country (e.g., John Ash, Mark Ford, and other clones milling about the memory of Frank O'Hara); Glückische handmaids of feminist expressionism who hold the "truth" that all men are awful to be inalienable (Carol Ann Duffy and Selima Hill, to name but two); nationalist Scots whose pibroch tootlings on the pipe of Robert Burns and Hugh Mac Diarmid might engage some local imaginations but are otherwise non-exportable (W. N. Herbert and Kathleen Jamie, for example); and finally, poetic apples that didn't fall far enough from their trees (whether Dylan Thomas's, or whosever) to avoid over-close identification with their respective fruit. (In this group may be found, among others, Gwyneth Lewis, Alice Oswald, and, to further belabor the point, Andrew Motion.) That leaves some rather old and "dark familiars" (to cop a phrase from Malcolm Lowry), such as Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid, and Michael Hoffmann -
it's good to see him name names. I've not read this anthology, but I can see where he's coming from.
Similarly adept at bringing lattés of existentialist resignation to froth are John Glenday, Roddy Lumsden, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. The remainder of those represented range poetically from the tolerably and intolerably competent to the merely unaccomplished -
I'm unsure whether he's praising or condemning Glenday et al. Either way, it doesn't sound too fullsome, though I can't easily plonk Oswald and Shapcott into the same category.

Online there's also a review by John Drexel (it's also from Contemporary Poetry Review) which quotes the editors' views on the UK poets' engagement with the past:

Simic - "the poets in this anthology assume that they are part of a tradition, addressing a community that may neglect them now and then, but is there nonetheless"
Paterson - "[the poets] are engaged in an open, complex and ongoing dialogue with the whole of English tradition"

The review compares the anthology with Schmidt's and Morrison/Motion’s. It notes that this anthology includes nearly all the New Generation poets, and that the "each head note ventures a brief critical appraisal of the poet in question. Though "critical" is hardly the right word-in essence, these are little more than puff pieces, attempts to sell the poet to the reader"

In Meagrely provided, Andrea Brady mentions Tuma's more inclusive "Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry" (I'm surprised that the reviews didn't mention it), then questions Paterson's comments on post-modernism - "This is so fanatical a diagnosis that all readers might as well ignore it. We could ask why the editors of Graywolf cleared it for publication, and what Charles Simic was doing collaborating with such rabidity. But why tangle with such unsubstantiated and feckless rubbish when Paterson incriminates himself very capably? ... His essay is useful as a demonstration of how conservativism operates in the arts according to the same principles as it does in the capitals: its lynch pins are assimilation, veneration, and subordination; it is maintained by the controlled flow of resources, false proclamations of vulnerabilities, and a dark fixation with scapegoats".

Those interested in more recent UK poetry anthologies can look at my Recent UK poetry anthologies article.

The Persona and the Person

2011-02-15T09:00:00.000Z

"Readers like to assume that the 'I' in a poem is the author - and this tends to give poets less freedom than fiction writers" - Jo Shapcott, The Telegraph, Jan 29, 2011

Dear Editor,

I like reading small press magazines—all human life is there. After a while I find I've read so many contributions by some authors that they're like old friends, the kind who send letters only when there's bad news. The frequency of heart-rending incidents makes me wonder whether tragedy triggers writing or whether writers are prone to disasters.

I feel sorry for you Web magazine editors; editors of printed magazines know authors' changes of address, and from subscription cheques can see joint accounts become single ones. The biographical notes you supply say so little - concerned readers like me can piece together these broken lives only by subscribing to many magazines. I pick one author (Tim Love) but I could have chosen many others like him who have chosen to share their personal tragedies in this way, unburdening themselves gradually, trying not to upset readers too much.

In "Autumn and After" (Summit 2) his wife died when they were childless. We read how he decided not to marry again, instead going to India where, in "New Life" (Dream 13), his mother died. Eventually he does remarry, but "Taking Mark this time" (Staple) tragically describes his wife's death when their son was only 4.

A sonnet "Wither the Love" then appeared in Poetry Nottingham. Trauma can induce formalism as the only way to keep the emotions under control (see Dana Gioia). Sometimes though, mannerism is sloughed off in an attempt to reach the heart of things through understatement (Douglas Dunn). As related in the free-verse "Love at First Sight" (Smith's Knoll 11) his new wife gave birth to a daughter who died before she was an hour old. This is the kind of tragedy from which women in particular never quite recover. So it comes as little surprise that his wife deserted him and their 6 year-old son in "The Big Climb" (Staple).

It would be easy to attribute blame to the author for driving successive spouses to despair, but as with Ted Hughes, it may be that there's something in his temperament that fragile women find attractive. Again, and even more remarkably, he recovers only to be dealt another cruel blow - "Late Night Shopping" (Staple) chronicles life with an autistic child. Perhaps the genes that help a writer produce such diversity of writing also manifest themselves in a less helpful gene diversity in offspring.

To the first-time reader his follow-up, "Rejection" (Envoi), would seem to be about failed submissions (it's encouraging to see that even he gets them!), but our worst fears were confirmed when in a 2004 prizewinner ("Being Open" on the Cambridge Writers web site) we saw him sink into a private hell of alcohol and inflatable dolls.

Now, just a few months later, we read in his biographical notes that he's married with 2 sons; triumphant confirmation to all us writers that we should never give up. I wish him luck.

Mel Vito, Cambridge, UK

(first published in Folly)

Games Poets Play

2011-02-08T06:10:00.003Z

The writer, formerly mythologiser, prophet, or at least specialist on love and death has become expert in subtle and wayward intellectual sophistries. Of these, poetry games are the most advanced. Often they are acknowledged only at a subconscious level - but the reader is always the innocent victim (see Tag below.)

Piggy in the Middle - The author and text engage in teasing allusions - the reader in the middle never catching on
Snap - The poet quotes from other poets without acknowledging sources openly. Recognition by readers convinces them that they have won some of the 'cards'
Murder in the Dark - A traditional poetic form has been slaughtered: readers must discover which one, how, and (the hardest bit) why. Sonnets are frequently the victims.
Ain't it Awful - The game is borrowed from Berne, who suggests it is also played on a social level. Also known as I can make you cry.
Hunt the Thimble - The poem suggests a hard nugget of eternal truth can be found if the reader works hard enough. Text may also implant 'getting warmer' and 'getting colder' indicators.
Chase the Lady - Coined re Shakespeare's sonnets, a sequence in which some individual poems can be understood, giving readers the idea that if they work hard enough all can be understood; there are, however, deliberate decoys ('They that have the power to hurt but will do none..')
Pop goes the weasel - Here the last word of the poem appears to provide a sudden 'answer', which is, of course, not the answer.
Pin the tail on the donkey - Readers are asked to add a good final line to an otherwise hopeless poem.
What am I? - Deliberate conventions of poetry are challenged to make reader insecure.
Musical Bumps - Unexpected disruptions of rhythmic patterning when least expected. Readers tolerate this in anticipation of the 'prize'.
Charades - For some reason that is never explained the most sensible and informative mode of expression can't be used, so the poet must resort to obscure, sometimes risible, alternatives
Pass the Parcel - Each break in the poem's musicality is assumed to reveal part of the mystery
Blind Man's Bluff - Disorientated by initial obscurity, the groping reader is pleased with anything they can manage to grasp.
Tag - The reader is always 'it'.

The modern reader is no longer content with easy forays into Spot the rhyme or I spy with my little i. Instead, a range of sophisticated after-dinner-party games have emerged

Life-swapping parties - 'Keys' are thrown onto a table, and picked at random. Popular with confessionalist poets.
Karaoke - the poet supplies only the background - a template (workshop) poem
Trivial Pursuits - the ultimate in poetry games

Poets live in fear of the moment of 'Switch' which allows 'the player to move out of the game by choosing to express his authentic need directly.' This is sometimes expressed by the words: "This poem is crap." Pre-empting this ploy is so important that it has engendered a new genre - post-modernism (don't worry, I'm only joking).

References

Games People Play, Berne, E (1964), Penguin
Transactional Analysis Counselling in Action, Stewart, I (1989), Sage
Games authors play, Peter Hutchinson, (1983) Methuen

By Tim Love and Helena Nelson

Notes about "he understands but doesn't love"

2011-02-01T06:15:00.001Z

Rather than have footnotes or endnotes in my "Moving Parts" collection (on sale at the HappenStance shop) I decided to add some notes here. "he understands but doesn't love" is the only piece in which was previously unpublished (indeed, it was rejected several times). The title's a quote about Picasso (by a fellow artist, I think). The Chinese room is a thought experiment by philosopher John Searle. A person in a room receives slips of paper through a slot. The paper has squiggles on it. The person looks these squiggles up in a book which has instructions on what to scribble on a piece of paper that's pushed back through the slot.

Unbeknownst to the person the squiggles are Chinese and the notes being passed out are reasonable responses to the received messages. The people outside think that the person in the room understands Chinese. Does s/he? Does "the room" understand? If not, what does? How can you tell? How much do you understand of what you say?

The note on the fridge is William Carlos-William's, but what does it mean? Is the writer who's sending words away any different to the insecure lover interpreting signs?

Should you walk out of the Chinese room, or open the fridge door to check the plums? How can you tell if the light goes off when the door is closed? Is the light (understanding) inside really outside?

The worlds of Academia and Literature

2011-01-22T10:16:00.002Z

There are several parallels between the milieu of literature and those of specialist academic subjects.

Scale - poetry print-runs might be in the low hundreds. Some academic publications would be happy to reach even those figures.
Isolation - they both have their cliques and conferences (or festivals). They're both misunderstood by the public.
Journals - academic paper periodicals were becoming very expensive - several hundreds of pounds a year - and were failing to perform their broadcasting function. Nowadays they're available online, but still at a cost. The periodicals still have to fund publication, archiving, and peer-reviewing. One option is Pay to Publish - to have free access to the publication, but making authors (or submitters) pay. It means a change in grant applications, but dissemination of ideas will improve (poor readers not disadvantaged) without quality control being compromised.
Some literature magazines work a little like this - they're not free, but submission is at least in part by competition, subsidising printing costs (see Glimmer Train, short Fiction, etc)
Peer Review - For specialistic publications, reviewers are likely to be friends or rivals of authors. Objectivity is at risk. Poetry's not so different. Anonymity doesn't always help.
Reception - Whereas in the past reaction was slow and localised, discussion can now be global in hours, thanks to Twitter and blogs.
In academia, the importance of papers is measured by their citation impact - where (and how many times) they're cited. Funding is affected by the results. People are now trying to extend this to cope with online mentions. Poetry could have the same mechanism were there the funding to set it up. In the States I believe something like this exists, with creative writing tutors getting points for poetry or story publication in approved magazines.
I'm surprised how few poetry reviews are online (outside of Amazon). When I did a write-up of Don Paterson's Landing Light I found several reviews. For Carol Rumens' Blind spots I had trouble finding any, which makes comparisons difficult.
Money - The value of publication is that it gets you a job which can earn money (workshop tutor, lecturer).

Litrefs Articles

2011-01-18T12:35:00.002Z

I've created another blog - Litrefs Articles - to store my articles. Currently it contains about 70 articles, about 10 of them published.

More on line-breaks

2011-01-12T13:17:00.008Z

Over Xmas I read Stress Fractures (Tom Chivers (ed), Penned in the Margins) a collection of essays I'd recommend. "The Line" by Katy Evans-Bush will have the widest appeal and is amongst the longest pieces. I don't think it needed to be so long: the tight-rope sub-plot doesn't earn its keep and there are longeurs - a half-page quote by AS Byatt on pleasure belongs elsewhere. When there's a list of "pet peeves ... combined with examples of excellence" that "runs down a spectrum of enjambment" the essay's at its most useful, but by then there's too little space left to discuss why "Many poetry tutors don't like to discuss [line endings] at all; there is such a taboo on discussing this most personal aspect of poetry" (p.194). This quote raises important, unanswered questions - why is it considered personal? Is there a taboo on all other personal aspects?
I think I need more convincing before I can believe the discipline of WS Merwin, or the effectiveness of Bunting's breaks. I'm also not sure why in a book of this type we need to be told that "Used well, [end-rhyme] has an amazing galvanising effect on a poem" (p.200).
What I found most useful was how others might respond to line-break usages. E.g. Putting the important words at the start rather than end of the line in some readers "creates a sense of urgency as well as hesitancy, and disorients the reader, who then grabs for the emotional content as for a lifeline". Maybe so - it's a personal thing - but one that, I feel, isn't beyond the scope of experimental psychology. Maybe it's an acquired habit that only poetry-readers suffer from. How does putting heavy words at the start of lines produce more breathless urgency than unbroken prose?

And I'd still like to know how we've reached a situation where gratuitously tidy line-breaks producing regular, boxed stanzas is considered preferable to irregular shapes or even a prose layout.
Iota 88 arrived. George Ttoouli's review of an Elisabeth Bletsoe book discusses some line breaks.
```
hedgerows
buoyant ashstems &
quick silver-
dark hollythorn

equivocal, the
fields of plover;
```
Here the line is chopped in order to double sense in multiple ways. The breaking over "quick silver- / dark" gives both the quicksilver and the silver-dark of the hollythorn sitting in the same charged couplet. Similarly, are we to take "equivocal" as referring to the hollythorn, or the fields of plover? It is both, simultaneously, and also neither: the accumulation of lines that demand alternate readings also gives the phrase "equivocal, the", the indefinite definite article of an implied dusk, where shapes are both known yet imprecise, solids liquids, objects both shaded and shining. There is something overwhelmingly wonderful at work here

I'm unsure about some of this. "double sense" is ok, but the extra meanings need to be worth having. What is "hollythorn"? I couldn't find info online. If it's not sometimes silver then that's one imprecision solved. I suppose the 2 lines form a couplet, but is it "charged"? What's wrong with the single-line "quick-silver-dark hollythorn"? Perhaps the poet wanted to make the vowel repetitions clearer - "ant ash" and "quick sil". Do the lines demand multiple readings or is the poet hoping that if she throws in enough possibilities the reader will bother selecting those that made some sense and politely ignore those that don't? Why the line-breaks after "hedgerows" and "the"? Is it really "overwhelmingly wonderful"?
"I found the variety of shapes that the poems make on the page refreshing; a factor in keeping my interest and attention" (Angela France, Iota 88). I don't find that variety interesting, per se.
I've just heard about "The Art of the Poetic Line", (James Longenbach, Graywolf) In the light of the above points I think I should read it.

From the Dawn of computers to the Twilight of chapbooks

2011-01-08T10:01:00.017Z

A long time ago when computer games were on audio cassettes and computers had 32K of RAM, I wrote a game that got mentioned in the Guardian

It was with a small company, Peaksoft. According to the potted history of Peaksoft it got some ok reviews

Remarkable ... Fantastic Detail ... Graphics 100% ... Value 100% - "Home Computing Weekly"
Ingenious ... Brilliant - "Personal Computer Games"

That's not how I remember it (I'd taught myself how to program and was learning as I wrote). I got about half a year's pay from it (that I was going to get money for something I enjoyed came as a shock) and I had the chance to see my game at a stall in a Computer Game show. Pirated versions are online somewhere. Computer games have moved on since then, with multi-million dollar budgets (though the emergence of Apps has helped return games-writing to being a cottage industry).

Now, when computers in the form of Kindles and iPads are threatening to take over the publishing world, I've jumped ship and have a paper-based pamphlet out (with HappenStance). Again it's with a one-person company run by a likable character who understands the product from the inside, grows a customer base, and knows the manual labour involved in selling by post. Again I'm unqualified (I've an "O level" in English) and learning as I go along. It won't pay my bills for 6 months or attract teenagers to a stall saying that they played with it for hours on end. It might get 100% for Graphics, but there the resemblances end. The game was pre-web (1984, I think). The pamphlet wouldn't have existed without the marketing resources that computers and the WWW make available for small-scale sales (Amazon, Facebook, etc).

Litrefs Reviews

2011-01-04T17:49:00.003Z

I've created another blog - Litrefs Reviews - to store notes about books I'm reading. Some of the notes are one-liners, some are published reviews and some are longer articles.

Currently it contains notes on magazines (14 items), novels (75 items), other (11 items), poetry (155 items), short story collections (61 items), and theory (44 items) - most of what I've read in the last decade.

My pamphlet "Moving Parts"

2011-01-02T07:20:00.001Z

"Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the HappenStance site (and Amazon).

The average poem is 11 years old and earned 9 pounds. 31 of the 32 poems have been previously published in magazines.

The Emperor has no clothes

2010-12-28T09:33:00.003Z

A generous retelling ...

Arts progress somewhat like fashion. There are eternal verities around which variations develop. Some changes are introduced by new technology, affecting content (Science Fiction) or means (oil paints). Others are inspired by rediscoveries or by observations from other cultures. Yet others are brought about by anticipation, extrapolating from "interesting" contemporary work, fumbling ahead in the dark. A sequence of small steps may lead to a conscious break with the past, producing a trend, a school, or even an Age.

Trends come around again, lapping those slower to change. Problems can arise when the two camps can compare their works. If there's little difference what was the point of all that effort? Does the artistic journey (which is exterior to the work) matter? Clearly it does to many - people care about the authenticity of the work, and a painting made using the artist's blood will be viewed differently to one using brown paint. Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" describes another example.

If the new work resembles the old but in some way seems less good (realistic but less detailed; formalist poetry but fewer sound effects, etc), the comparisons are more awkward still. Even in evolution there's no pressure towards complexity - changes can as often simplify: features atrophying, development arrested (a sketch accepted as a finished work). Is the new art older but wiser in some way? Maybe it is more sophisticated. A work of art requires an audience which the journey can create. The sum of a sequence of tweaks and reactions to previous works might not just make a new work of art possible but may make a pre-existing item into art.

The Emperor's parade was a mistake though, forcing the premature collision of two viewpoints - a Turner Prize without a PR machine. The masses may at first respect authority, but eventually they'll resent seeing their money spent in ways they don't understand. In such situations the artists' peers may offer no support, seizing an opportunity for selfish advancement.

The fable fits most closely with Minimalism. Yury Lotman wrote that "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system". Poetry's gone through phases of selective minimalism, being shorn of various poeticisms and conspicuous craftsmanship. Random and procedural works (N+7 etc) in particular are met with responses like "I could have done that" (and if it's Found Poetry maybe they have indeed "done that"). Unless observers have been on the journey they won't understand - the Emperor should have educated his public.

The tailors who stitched the Emperor up were good at filling in grant forms; they were the performance artists of their time, creating a situationist stunt. But the Emperor wasn't merely a fashion victim - he thought he'd spent his money "quite well"; he was hoping to use the material to produce performance metrics to discern who was ignorant and incompetent. Only the failures would see him naked - he was prepared to accept that minor humiliation for a higher cause. The public were in fear of losing if not their heads then at least face, but at least they showed an interest in the arts. A child with nothing to lose, who could only see things as they are, symbolised another type of artist.

Those who come off worst out of the story are the administrators, the fawning staff who feared losing their jobs. No doubt they had wives and children to support. A more cunning advisor might have taken the Emperor to one side saying - "You and I can see the the fine cloth of course, but how will we know if others are just pretending that they can see? Let's devise a test, and try it out on those tailors first". A blind test perhaps. A contest with anonymous entries. Can real art survive such a trial? If people produce variations on a Mondrian piece (swapping colours around, say) they might be accused of lacking originality, but are the variations any more worthy of respect if Mondrian produces them? In the rarified world of high art, or Oxbridge entrance interviews, discussing marginal/charlatan works is one of the best ways to identify talent. That boy in the street deserves one of the Emperor's finest ice-creams.

The Sound of Poetry and the Poetry of Sound

2010-12-23T19:52:00.000Z

With the rise of isms (deconstructionism, eco-feminism, post-colonialism) in recent years, literary theorists have rather neglected sound effects, often quoting Saussure's view that the sounds of words are arbitrary.

But they're not. Of course we've always known that chickens cluck and cows moo, but the influence of sound goes wider and deeper than that. We 'chip little bits' but 'chop logs'. Twigs are small; trunks are big. There are exceptions (big should refer to little things, and bugs should be big) but words derive from many sources and we should expect some exceptions.

The more that these trends are studied the more universal they seem - petit, piccolo and klein contrast with grand, grande and gross. And the trends go beyond simple concepts like size. With some poets it's possible to guess the theme of the work without understanding a word of it by calculating the relative proportion of sounds - the guess isn't always correct but I'm amazed that it's possible at all. People have tried to create dictionaries of sound meanings. Here's an extract about the L sound from Galt's book - Positive skews in love poems and narratives: strong positive skews in "tender" and "musical" poems. Negative skews in poems of family and home, nostalgia, and humor, with a negative skew for "non-musical" poems which is just below the level of significance. This phoneme certainly distinguishes, in Storm's verse, between "musicality" and its opposite, and its presence can evidently also contribute to a feeling of "tenderness"

If isolated sounds aren't arbitrary, still less are the sounds of sentences and poetry whose patterns produce effects that isolated words can't. In Violi's book Haj Ross spends 40 pages on the sounds in "The Tyger" pointing out dozens of features such as

The sound F only occurs on even-numbered lines, and gangs with R.
while all the words in the Tyger line except one are bisyllables, this line being the most polysyllabic of the whole poem, all of the words in the Lamb line are monosyllabic

These effects are in addition to the regular patterns of stress, rhyme, etc. However, with free verse these dispersive patterns are beginning to dominate. We lack the vocabulary to describe them well, and I suspect they often go unnoticed (at least consciously) by readers. Here's an extract by Ruth Padel where she describes an easily missed pattern in Michael Longley's Ceasefire

Achilles, the key name, appears in every stanza. Its central syllable is repeated in the first stanza ("until", "filled", "building", with a sideways echo in "curled" ...), reappears in the second, resonates in the third with "built" and "still" (plus an echo in "full"). and reaches a climax in "killer": bringing out the fact that "Achilles" has the sound of that word "kill" in his name

Interest in sound effects has revived because 1) computers can now analyse a lifetime's work in minutes; 2) brain-scanning has enhanced our understanding of music's effects; 3) the study of pragmatics has attracted attention to the non-semantic effects of words. If music can be profound, why not the sound of words? It too uses repetition combined with variation. It too has incantatory power. The semantics can modulate sound's meaning much as the choice of instrument can affect music's meaning. A violin's C isn't the same as a trumpet's, just as oo is recognisable but differently received in moon and spoon.

Though we may never return to the clogged tongue-twisting of William Barnes'
       With fruit for me
       The apple tree
       Do lean down low in Linden lea.
we might hope for more tolerance of poets like Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. When they stop making sense perhaps they're not lapsing into non-sense but instead bringing out the tonality of words, an alternative mode of meaning making sense an echo to the sound.

Books

"Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm", Alan B. Galt, Herbert Lang, 1973
"52 Ways of Looking at a Poem", Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus, 2002
"The Sounds of Poetry", Robert Pinsky, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998
"Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Patrizia Violi (ed), Brepols Publishers, 2000

(published in Acumen)

poetry pamphlet publication in the UK

2010-12-13T07:07:00.020Z

Pamphlets are becoming increasingly popular, for several reasons

As objects they can afford to be more innovative than books.
Some of the traditional book publishers are fading away.
More people nowadays make a career from teaching writing and need publications for their CV. It can take years to assemble enough poems for a book. Pamphlets can be produced more frequently.
A pamphlet needn't be padded with fillers like so many books are.
Some "poetry books" are little more than expensive pamphlets - books by Picador etc can cost 9 pounds and contain 39 pages.
The book world is dominated by Heaney and co. Pamphlets inhabit an alternative world of prizes and outlets, where commercialism doesn't dominate.
Prizes now exist for published pamphlets. The PBS promote them too
The WWW offers a way to sell pamphlets. Spineless pamphlets were never popular with bookshops.

Don't think of pamphlets as an easy option, a way to publish sub-standard poems. To take just one example, "Skylight" by Carole Bromley (Smith/Doorstep 2009) has 1st prize winners from the Bridport and Yorkshire Open competitions as well as many other acknowledgements.

So how can you get your pamphlet published? Options include

Mentoring - Fairly recently some mentoring schemes have started up (supported by Arts Council England) that scout for talent, provide help for a period and then offer the chance of publication. Smiths Knoll seek candidates from people who submit to their magazine. Faber have a network of talent scouts. tall-lighthouse have their pilot project
Competitions - Templar (deadline May), Iota (Ishots, deadline November), The Poetry Business (Smith/Doorstep, deadline November), and Poetry Wales (Purple Moose, deadline April) are amongst the organisations that run competitions.
Publishers - Some publishers print pamphlets as well as books. There are some specialist pamphlet publishers. HappenStance's submissions 'window' has just opened. You can read their checklist of what factors they take into account. Some publishers print pamphlets as well as books. HappenStance have links to some poetry presses on their site.

If you live near Cambridge and you like pamphlets, drop into the Amnesty International bookshop on Mill Road. They have a wide selection of pamphlets in a drawer for you to rummage through.

What's clear from all this is that participating in the poetry scene and getting published in magazines helps significantly when you want a pamphlet published. In that respect, like many others, pamphlets are like books.

"The Method" by Tom Vowler

2010-12-04T10:50:00.004Z

Sometimes I read more as a budding writer than a reader, seeing (or imagining) the churning mechanisms - Chekhov's guns and nails hanging from every wall. My writerly reaction to this book might have been because

The author and I try for the same outlets - he's winner of Salt's Scott competition (which I entered); there are stories from Brand, Riptide, etc (which I've never been in, though I've tried).
I use the same rather scientific analogies that he uses, and I often write about raids on the past.
Though I empathize with the downbeat mood, it's hard for me to continually empathize with the relentlessly embittered characters
Once I realised that hints of terror in an initial paragraph were never in anticipation of a visit to the dentist or being dragged by mum around clothes shops but were more likely to involve murder, I was less immersed in guessing the ending.

PoV is 1st or 3rd person. Both male or female voices are represented, usually aged 25-40 and street-wise, WASP, in a generic England during the noughties. A few non-linear forms keep readers on their toes. The language is lively and entertaining. The mood is sustained using a catalog of woes. Halfway through the book (after stories about death of parents, child abduction, wife-swapping, visiting an ex) I tried to guess what further common themes would be used (a partner leaving with a same-sex lover; upstanding parents embarrassed by relatives; waiting for results of (partner's?) medical tests; how to cope with a young daughter's pregnancy and unsuitable boyfriend; pretending that you've not lost your job; a relationship crisis on a family holiday). In the end there were none of those, though we had an e-mail epistolary piece.

In the title story an author lives out his draft character's life. A nice idea, well executed. The 2nd piece, "Seeing Anyone", stays just about on the approved side of the contrived/controlled border. A man's visiting his re-partnered ex. Here are the images and turning points that struck me as I read

p.11 It starts with "The day stretched out before him like some vast desert he didn't want to cross"
p.12 The long initial build-up of tension continues after he's arrived, then suddenly she says "She's in the garden, under the tree". Who? Ah, their dying dog - apparently the reason for the couple communicating after a gap of months. What does it symbolise - their love hanging on for dear life? (the woman says "I have to decide when enough's enough for her, really. Not be selfish about it") Or the child they never had? (the bitch's stomach - ironically? - is bloated) Or her image of him?
p.12 We learn that her current partner's away on a golf weekend. Aha.
p.13 "'I didn't know whether to tell you [about the dog]. I thought about it for days'. A warm breeze weaved between them carrying a small flower from the cherry blossom in the far corner. It caught in the strands of her hair". More objects fill the gap left by their silence about their feelings for each other
p.13 "He remembered looking hard at her that day, trying to see if all her love for him had left, like a distant star that's seen but is no longer there". Neat though not original
p.14 "the Doppler effect of love, where sound and language differ so much depending on whether it's arriving or departing". Neat. New to me.
p.14 At the start we're told that he'd bought some photographs. Now they appear - "She took the envelope and started to look through photographs of the first four years of the dog's life. 'I don't remember any of these'". There's ambivalence in her eyes, then she recovers. He offers to copy any that she wants.
p.15 "The homemade soup was like visiting his childhood home" - his memories are being pushed further back, looking for roots to re-grow from.
p.16 "He pictured himself in an upstairs window, watching as she tended the garden" - his imagination is building a new life based around domesticity
p.16 "They didn't wave. He looked at her in the mirror watching to see if his brake lights came on". Up to now, the story's all from his PoV, so how are we to interpret this final phrase of the story? Apart from a timely glance and prolonged goodbye hug (both of which are given alternative explanations in the story), the only come-on is the timing of the weekend, but that's accounted for by the dog having only days to live. One imagines the dog might be taken to the vet on Monday.

In "Busy. Come. Wait" a son meets his sister at the house where they grew up. Despite the initial hints I was doubting at first whether their father was dead. He was though. She blames her unfaithful mother for their unhappy childhood and her unhappy life. He doesn't tell her that their father was no angel either.

"They may not mean to but they do" intersplices narratives from 2 eras. Dating turns to the real thing. Then there's a plot turn that's not new, but it caught me by surprize in the context - he finds a soul-mate, she wants to find her natural parents, and there's a clash. The story does a lot in a short space.

"Staring at the Sun" is nearly in real-time, the protagonist waiting 10 minutes in a pub for a blind-date to appear. His previous partner had died of lung cancer. He runs through various metaphors of time and grief. "My father would have understood. 'Just look at the stars,' he once told me. I'd opened the telescope that was a badly-kept secret one birthday. 'That's looking back in time.'". It ends with "I observe the moment as if from above, for the first time glimpsing a time ahead of this one. I once read that if you forced yourself to stare at the sun for eight seconds, you'd go blind. I stand, wave to the woman and smile"

Welcomingly McEwanesque is "The Last Supper" where the death of a child leads to the parents' suicide pact, dying by starvation. But before they board themselves in they cook themselves a final meal. "Hare's Running" concerns skullduggery in betting shops, "Breathe" is only a page - macabre. "Offline" is set in the future, satire coming thick and fast - "As he lay dying in the transition ward". "One Story" is about writers block where a drunk, separated writer chats to his idealistic son - 'The icecaps safe tonight, then, Jack?' I ask.
'Can't stop. Got to be somewhere.'
'Let me guess: knitting bongos outside some landfill?'
'I see you're drunk for a change.'
'When you've lived with your mother a few more years, you'll see it's a perfectly desirable state. Care to join me for one?'

Several of the pieces involve private/secret missions to re-live, commemorate (or avenge for) a significant event. Retribution can easily go as far as murder. The indirection of these stories' first paragraphs (mysteries about the age, gender, status, motivation, etc of main character) could have been extended to generate tension, but issues are usually resolved on the first page. As an example of how info-dumps are avoided, take "Homecoming" which begins with

Shop façades offered different wares but it was the buildings themselves, the roads and trees, that resonated so profusely with a childhood echoing through the decades. And the bridge, of course. He'd crossed it that day, just ahead of the others - breathless, still convinced that some game had gone wrong.

It's a teasing start. We know that the character is decades from childhood, that he probably hasn't been to his hometown for years, that something momentous (and bad?) had happened. In paragraph 2 we learn that the event erased his previous childhood. By paragraph 3 we're pretty sure that he's alone. In paragraph 4 we're told that he's called Michael. After the initial inevitable bridge a gate leads towards the place; a gap in a hedge leads him further. Paragraph 8 mentions that he's been in "a unit" for a few years. In paragraph 10 there's

Didn't cells constantly die, being replaced by new ones? Aren't we, literally speaking, recycled every couple of years or so? And without a soul, wasn't it the case that he was no more connected to the boy he was that day than to the ground he now stood on? Only history linked him. Just a narrative, that's all.

The location helps him recall the event, even some new details as he traces his steps. By the end of the story we know with forensic precision what happened.

"The Arrival" and "Team Building" were the only disappointments, though by the time I'd reached "The Little Man" I'd met enough bitter murderers. That, I suppose, is my main criticism - en masse the stories dilute each other. In "Reload" the main character says "I wonder if I'll be regarded a serial killer and how they decide. I think it's something to do with the gap between the first and the last" (the gap's about a 100 pages in this book). I've tried writing about happy people (most successfully I think in an unpublished piece called "Good Losers"). Life's not a bowl of cherries, but well, you have to try. The author/narrator/language/reality constellation remains pretty stable too.

Diction tottered in places - "parochial denizens" (p.88) and "aired reluctance" (p.143) for example seem misplaced. I noticed 2 typos: "ringing water from a sponge" (p.106 - or is that deliberate?) and "she call my a" (p.136).

Other reviews include

Melissa Lee-Houghton (Short Review)
Lisa Glass (Vulpes Libris)

Time and Narration

2010-12-01T09:36:00.000Z

A 10 minute story rarely covers 10 minutes of events from beginning to end - some parts are compressed and others expanded. Not only that, but flashbacks and other effects are used to jump backwards and forwards in time. I think some short-story writers under-use these effects, so I'd like to talk about them now

Speed

Changes of speed are so common in all forms of storytelling that we hardly notice them. Here are some examples

compression: "So we lived in Texas for five years, and then we moved to California."
expansion: "All of the sudden it occurred to me in a flash of insight that she never really loved me and had only been using me to make her husband jealous and to ensure that one way or another she could get her green card. How could I have been so stupid, how could I have courted such a disaster?"

Thriller writer Lee Child said "write the fast slow and the slow fast" (i.e. write the fast-action scenes in slow motion and gloss over the long, boring journeys, etc). Passages of dialogue bring us back to real time.

Direction

Our thoughts are rarely satisfied to stay settled in the present moment; instead, they tend to wander nostalgically into replays of past scenes, or to fantasize about the future. So it's natural that authors go back and forwards in time. The flashback [analepsis] is quite common. Flashbacks

help give short stories the illusion of depth
help to "show, not tell" - rather than mention that someone used to be a soldier, flash them back to a battlefield
can be used at the start of a story to capture the reader's interest.

but they have disadvantages too

they interrupt the momentum of the story
overused, they can disorganise the story, especially if there's no "present" to contrast them with. It helps to use them right at the start or to fully establish the characters first
the choice of tense to use can be tricky. Authors usually begin a flashback in the past (or pluperfect) tense then drop it once the flashback is established

Flashbacks are typically provoked by

going through an old photo-album or diary - see "Krapp's Last Tape" (Beckett)
finding an object you haven't seen for years
revisiting a place where you used to live
a taste or smell - Proust's madelaine

and ended by an interruption from the present. Flashbacks can be extensive. Sometimes the first chapter of a novel is a flashback, but you don't find that out until later. Sometimes most of a story is a flashback framed by the words of the narrator or author. Sometimes the flashbacks and the present alternate through the piece.

A special case of the flashback is the story-within-a-story [or intercalated story]. Detective stories use this idea quite a lot - each witness giving their version of the events.

Less common than flashbacks are glimpses into the future. These might seem to spoil the surprise, but often it increases anticipation

foreshadowing [or premonition, prefiguration]: short hints about the future - "grey shadows portending deeper shadows to come.", "little did they know, as they kissed on the platform, that they'd never meet again". These are sometimes used at the ends of sections to encourage the reader to continue. Sometimes however, it takes a second reading to discover them.
flashforward [or prolepsis]: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (opening line of Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude)
adumbration - in older works, chapters often had titles or summaries. For example Galsworthy uses chapter titles like "Soames Breaks the News".

Finally there's repetition - a word, gesture or memory used as a leitmotif having the effect of making time cyclical.

The Short Story

Opinions differ on whether flashbacks work in short stories

"Flashback is almost always necessary at some stage in the writing of a short story" - "Practical Short Story Writing", John Paxton Sheriff, p.83
"In writing a short story, the flashback should probably not be used", "Guide to Fiction Writing", Phyllis Whitney, p.113
"Confession stories nearly always need a flashback", "How to Write Stories for Magazines", Donna Baker, p.45

It's easier to use direction-changing in novels where there's more room to explain what's going on and chapters provide handy dividing lines. In the short story rapid jumps might confuse the reader. On the page, italics and roman text could be used to show the transitions, but it's not common. Breaking the story into short sections with subtitles can help too.

One tip from Sol Stein ("Stein on Writing", p.144) is that the first sentence of a flashback needs to be arresting to jolt the reader from what went before.

Foreshadowing is sometimes added (especially in later drafts) to give the work more unity (see the Old Testament rewrites, for example). In "The Great Gatsby" the foreshadowing is unlikely to be noticed on a first reading but they add to the sense of inevitability.

Examples

I've already quoted a few examples. Here are some more

"Time's Arrow" - Martin Amis. In this book time goes backwards. Food is taken out of the mouth, put on the plate and eventually taken to the shops in return for money. In Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" and Dick's "Counterclock World" the device is used to a lesser extent.
In Alexander Masters' "Stuart: A life backwards" the chapters are in reverse chronological order - an idea by the biography's main character
- "'Do it the other way round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.'" (p.6)
- "Stuart's backwards inspiration has turned out to be excellent. At a swoop, it has solved the major problem of writing biography of a man who is not famous ... introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away" (p.11)
Steven Maxwell's short story "The Fade" in "Staple" (issue 73) begins "At seven in the morning, as the sun was setting, his wife's expansions began". Later in the Departure Room something is pushed into the wife - "'The placenta', said the midwife, ... 'Just making the bed, so to speak.'". They go home, dashing through red lights. The story ends with "But for now they are content just to be doing their best for the baby, whoever it was, and making its fade as painless as possible. And in nine months time, when his wife has ejaculated her seed into him, all will be forgotten, the fade will be complete."
"Otto Grows Down" by Michael Sussman is a children's picture book where the child, Otto, experiences time in reverse after his baby sister is born
"A Rational Man" (Teresa Benison) uses various tricks.
"Wuthering Heights" (Emily Bronte) uses flashback.
"Beloved" (Toni Morrison) uses flashback.
"Nostromo" (Conrad) and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (Spark) uses flashforward.
"Turn of the Screw" (Henry James) is a framed story.
"The Sound and the Fury" uses various narrators describing the same events.
"The Time Traveler's Wife" has a man who travels backwards and forwards in time. The reader's given chronological information - a sample section heading is Friday, June 5, 1987 (Clare is 16, Henry is 32)

Next time you read a story, look out for the changes in narrative speed and direction. It's quite common for narration speed to match chronological speed at the climax of the story.

Also look at how films use the same tricks. Several films I've recently seen ("Saving Private Ryan", "Cinema Paradiso", "La Vita e Bella", "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind") use flashbacks extensively. "Memento" intersplices 2 story-lines, one going backwards and the other forwards. Directors can switch between colour and monochrome to show the transitions. Compression is harder though, requiring voice-overs or a caption saying something like "5 years later".

The Poetry Circus

2010-11-19T06:56:00.004Z

In a secondhand bookshop I found "The Poetry Circus", by Stanton A. Coblentz, (Hawthorn: New York, 1967). It is "a frontal attack on the sloppiness, pretence, and just plain sensationalism that prevails in much of contemporary poetry". In one section ("How to write a Modern Poem") he shows how an embarrassingly bland text (e.g. "Every nation, isolated in its own house, seeks to wall out all other nations") might be modernised by substitutions leading to something that "may be a little vague and somewhat hard to figure out, perhaps even contradictory, but no one will say it is trite" (e.g. "Every nation/in the isolation of its own libido/seeks to cro-Magnonize all others with the psychology of the alter ego"). Of course no-one consciously proceeds through these stages, but poem explanations sometimes perform the reverse process. Are they attempts to normalize, to remove from the work all that's odd to us, all that's novel? Do they dumb down? Whatever the explanations do, they don't always explain what's lost in this process. The paraphrase may even be an improvement on a confusing draft.

Coblenz's battle against the Emperors' New Clothes failed to change the course of US poetry, but I share some of his doubts about the purposes of difficulty. There are several reasons why a vague or difficult poem might be more effective than a direct one -

In "Nature", 17th Mar 2005 they reported that blurry images can have more emotional impact than clear ones - the emotion-modules in the brain don't need detail; the detail activates other activity that might distract.
A "Rorschach" poem can give a reader more scope for imagination.
Exploring a difficult poem can be a reward in itself.

- but vagueness and difficulty can of course be evasion, bluffing, or a sign of more general communication difficulties.

I read the "Tears in the Fence" magazine to encounter types of work I don't often read, work that challenges and stretches me. Both poets and critics are given space to make their case. Even so, I sometimes feel that I'm encountering crop circles rather than new life-forms. Here's the start of "Love Poem 2" by Lisa Mansell

slick in the lactic stale of sextet
                                        they crabform in their calculus
        and listen to the music that kilts and sucks their scarab-wracked skin
               tantric and crystal                a tryst
                                               rustic and cusp

oceans slip by denizens of noose
       and coil unctuous          vultured in love-letter-scrawl
                       as laval scions the deserting vulva
         aztec and volatile                        liquid

It's rich in sound effects - "slick in the lactic stale of sextet" has many 'S' and 'K' sounds that are repeated through the piece. Later, 'L' and 'V' sounds begin to dominate. Sound has its own meaning-making mechanisms. The dadaists wrote "sound poetry". Less extremely, Mallarmé and Basil Bunting foregrounded sound. I side with Eliot when he said "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from its meaning". The balance between sound and "sense" can vary in poetry. In this piece several word-choices look strange if one merely considers their sense. Why "slick in the lactic stale of sextet" rather than "slick in the lactic staleness of sex"? What does line 2 mean? "calculus" might be something to do with bones or with calculation. What sort of "music" is being referred to? What is "kilts ... their skin?" (by the way, "unctuous" means oily or smarmy; "scions" means offspring). What does "deserting vulva" mean - that it's going dry? that it's making something else dry? that it's leaving? How do any of those interpretations connect with the rest of the line (presumably they do in some way, otherwise there'd be a line-break). The poem's grammatically parsable, but commas have been replaced by line-breaks. That doesn't fully explain the splattered layout though - why the inline spaces?

I like the sound of it - I can imagine people being seduced by the sonic constellations alone - but it might as well be in a foreign language for all the "sense" I can make of it. When writing a Rorschach poem it helps to retain some referential clues - partly to tantalize. But readers aren't to know whether there's a riddle to be solved, or how much work is expected. Here for instance "kilts" could suggest the swaying of seaweed, or maybe it's something to do with "kilter" (as in "out of kilter"). The lovers could be whales, "slick" could allude to "oil-slick". Perhaps vultures and scarabs are Aztec symbols (there must be some reason why "aztec" is there). There are other symbolic links too - crab, ocean, liquid; sex(tet), tantric, vulva; desert and ocean. The rest of the poem doesn't help me, though there is "their unbelief in binary rubs at the solent-soft of her love" which reminds me of the concocted examples of modernized poetry that Coblentz developed from a simple statement.

Formalist poems are sometimes accused of being rhyme-driven, with artificial inversions introduced merely to regularise the rhythm. Mainstream poems often have mundane settings into which some mystery is embedded (a "lift" in the final line, for example) with sound having a minor role. There are sonic forces driving this poem like an ambulance siren pushing mainstream meaning aside. Or alternatively one could say that the setting is sonic, generating effects (a field, if you wish) that isolated referential meanings expand into and modulate.

Rather than send in the clowns perhaps it's time to start dismantling the Big Top. Whose fun would it spoil? Would it throw the baby out with the bathwater? Does it risk the accusation of being right-wing, reactionary, nostalgic for "The Movement"? Even suggesting that one create a table of pros and cons for the special effects displayed in such poems risks being accused of over-rationalism, of workshoppery taken over by accountancy. The poet has a Ph.D and lectures in Creative Writing so I presume all my points have been taken into account. In the end all one can say is that the proportions of the ingredients don't suit me. Maybe there are also some ingredients that I'm oblivious to. It takes all sort to make a world and I'm sure this poem has its share of fans.

Book Launches

2010-11-13T13:26:00.004Z

I've been reading some articles about book launches - How to have a book launch in London when you don't even live there by Elizabeth Baines in particular but also how to throw awesome book launch, what I learned from my first book launch, etc. Here are some points

Venue - Consider a big city (e.g. London) rather than your home town. Decide whether to use a bookshop.
Tone - Treat it as a party/celebration, but don't forget to circulate.
Selling - Make it someone's job to take the money. Don't just sign copies, ask people what they want you to write on their copies.
Sharing - Invite other poets with books to launch? Have a musical interlude?
Expectations - Don't expect to cover costs. Invite everyone you can (family, friends, maybe a few more famous people) - invitations double as advertisements for the book. Use Facebook (maybe set up a Facebook event), writers groups, etc. Don't expect many people to turn up.
Review copies - Many publishers think that review copies don't even lead to reviews let alone extra sales, but a poetry collection that has poems from many magazines might be dealt with more generously?

You can have more than one "launch" of course. You can also arrange a virtual book tour, use open-mike sessions, etc.

From Dickens to Chaucer

2010-11-02T08:26:00.018Z

Few Dickens scholars know that he was born just round the corner from my birthplace in Portsmouth. Here's the room where he was born. It's not the original bed but a similar style (I was born in a bedsit in a terrace house). I didn't visit his house for over 40 years. He visited Cambridge a few times, staying at The Eagle in 1859. He visited Italy in 1844.

Now I live in Trumpington, allegedly named after a tribe called the Trumps. Chaucer's The Reeve's Tale is set there.

At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge,
Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge,
Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle;

The location of the mill is in doubt. It's unlikely to be at Byron's Pool. In 1380-2 Chaucer's wife and Lady Blanche de Trumpington were in the service of the Duchess of Lancaster, so maybe Chaucer visited Trumpington even if he didn't visit Cambridge. He visited Lombardy on business.

With Italian relatives we went to Stratford. Here's Shakespeare's house. Shakespeare may have performed at The Eagle as part of a group of actors but there's no proof. His use of Cambridge jargon has led some people to suggest that he was a student there. There's no proof that he visited Italy either, though his plays contain so many references to Italy that some strange theories have been suggested.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived for quite a while in Portsmouth. However, little is known about the education of Sherlock Holmes. It's assumed from references to "the university" in "The Gloria Scott", "The Musgrave Ritual", and to some extent "The Adventure of the Three Students", that he attended Oxford or Cambridge. Baring-Gould believed textual evidence indicated that Holmes attended both, though Dorothy L. Sayers thought he was a chemistry student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, which would fit in with his evident knowledge of forensics. He was born on January 6, 1854, which would put his student years in the 1870s, but there's no evidence of a Sherlock Holmes at the college then, though a photograph from 1878 (one of the earliest college photos ever taken) has several blanks amongst the captions, and several faces smeared by the long exposure, one of them suspiciously Holmesian. Mycroft's clearly well acquainted with Cambridge, so perhaps Sherlock just visited his older brother. During his detective career he visited Cambridge several times, taking the train from King's Cross. In "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" he uses a tracker dog in Cambridge "In half an hour, we were clear of the town and hastening down a country road. The road took a sweep to the south of the town, and continued in the opposite direction to that in which we started. ... This should be the village of Trumpington to the right of us."

Florence is the only Italian city definitely visited by Holmes, though he may have visited Milan

Last weekend we stumbled upon Bunyan's Chimney during a walk. It's all that's left of a cottage where Bunyan preached and maybe stayed. "Pilgrim's Progress" isn't my favourite book, but it was popular I suppose, and may indeed have helped the novel genre develop. It was started in Bedford which I've visited several times without realising its significance. John Bunyan used Stourbridge Fair (near Cambridge) as the inspiration for the Vanity Fair in Pilgrim's Progress. He probably passed through Cambridge. I don't think he could have visited Lombardy.

A Theory of Line-breaks

2010-10-25T16:17:00.005+01:00

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	7
3 line stanzas	14
4 line stanzas	4
5 line stanzas	5
6 line stanzas	2
7 line stanzas	2
8 line stanzas	1
Misc stanzas	8

Deviations from norms will be noticed. In most prose, line-breaks are deviations. The norms for poetry seem to be changing. Here are the statistics of Jane Holland's "The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman" (Bloodaxe 1997). Note the high percentage of poems with regular 2 or 3 lined stanzas. For regularity, the "Brighton Pilgrimage" poem takes the prize - 18 7-lined stanzas where the longest line is about 1cm longer than the shortest.

In the last decade or so, line-breaks seem often used to produce equally shaped stanzas in this way. Like any pattern it offers the writer chances to thwart expectation - units can be end-stopped or enjambed, for example. The requirements of form also give the writer an answer to people asking why the poet broke a line. Stanza lengths can (indeed, should) be varied from poem to poem. The important thing is not to let any line stick out more than 2cm from a neighbour. Once the poem's been shaped, minor tweaks can be made to exploit a line- or stanza-break, but these shouldn't be too obvious - such effects are often pretty cheap, and they might draw attention to the other, form-driven line-breaks. For added variety regular indenting can be used too. The final stanza is allowed to be a line shorter or longer than all the rest. It can even be a single-line.

Why do poets use the form? After all, the line-break's potential in this context is limited. I guess the form's purpose is partly to please the eye and partly to get people in the poetry mood, to get them to "read into" the work. As Culler wrote in "Structuralist Poetics", this will make readers see extra meanings (the word "red" will burst with connotations), and affect their interpretation of style (reportage will become "restrained writing"). There'll also be a tendency to read a fragment as the tip-of-an-iceberg.

Note the key-role played by line-breaks. Not only do they indicate that the text is a poem (giving it a charge, an aura), but by encouraging minor closures they help readers to focus on (and magnify) particular phrases as well as generating extra interpretations - e.g. "I am good/for nothing".

Given the charitable status granted to poetry by readers, any text is likely to seem more significant when read as a poem, so I think that it's only fair to raise the bar for text with poetic pretensions. In "A Lope of Time" Ruth O'Callaghan writes "smoking at an open window, the man notes the abandoned boat. Come spring he will replace it". I misquote; actually she wrote

smoking at an open window
                      the man
        notes
                the abandoned boat

come spring 
        he will replace it

I don't think this earns the right to be read too generously.

Rather than use the shape of the text to indicate that the work should be read poetically, writers can use the context. It's common nowadays for poetry books to include at least one poem that has no line-breaks. Lachlan Mackinnon's "Small Hours" takes this approach further. On the flap it says that the book ends with "a long poem ... written mostly in prose". The piece in question ("The Book of Emma") takes up 63 pages. Here are some extracts

"The only television I watched as an undergraduate was the separate inaugural speech President Carter had recorded for Europe on the subject of nuclear weapons. We just didn't. Nowadays people have sets in their rooms. And mobiles. They stay in touch with home friends in a way impossible and unimaginable for us. They text and email. This may be an epistemic shift but they feel terror loneliness and grief no less than we did" (from section XL).
"Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience" (from section XLVIII)

It's interesting to note the reception to this piece

Boyd Tonkin (The Independent) - It is a poet's prose: thrifty, rhythmic, specific, given to darting shifts in pace and focus.
Carrie Etter (The Guardian) - "The Book of Emma" creates much of its poetry through command of sentence rhythms, repetitions of sound, and epic movement between individual experience and historical perspective.
David Morley (blog) - "The Book of Emma", which is neither prose poetry nor poetic prose but a vivid series of elliptical, connected flash-backs that have the quality of flash fiction - except we are clearly hearing a poem... - it is a highly successful experiment in form.

I'd call it prose written in prose. Yes, it has shifts of time and subject, but thankfully so does prose. It has a consistent voice. Its imagery and analogies are developed at a leisurely pace. There are leit-motifs and unspoken interconnections. It doesn't exploit sound effects. But if it doesn't need line-breaks why does an earlier poem, "Midlands", need so many? It has these passages:

"TB and rickets/ are back in cities, but these towns/ are too small to support/ such destitution"
"Canals hidden/ like avenues by trees// until the bank-holiday/holiday-makers come/ in narrow-boats dolled up/ like gypsy caravans/ with new gloss/ blue, orange, red"

It's commonly said that some poems are "just prose chopped up", but even if a text is "poetry chopped up" it's faulty. In Ruth O'Callaghan's piece what are line-breaks for? I'm not the only person puzzled by latterday line-breaks

"the free verse, now dominant not only in the US but around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line-lengths", Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor", Jacket 23
"The poetic line seems highly problematic nowadays and it sometimes seems better to avoid it altogether", Frances Presley, "Poetry Review", V98.4, 2008
"Not only hapless adolescents, but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line", Denise Levertov", On the Function of the Line", 1979

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	4
3 line stanzas	3
14 line stanzas	1
Prose	3
Misc	13
Sonnet	1
Triangular	1

Nathan Hamilton's selection of recent poetry in Rialto 70 (2010) has these statistics. It's unfair to compare this multi-author sample with single-author books, but maybe it's a sign that line-breaks are regaining their power. In Mackinnon's "Midlands" the line-breaks are for making each stanza 9 lines long, which is currently considered a worthwhile aim, but perhaps "The Book of Emma" signals a further drift of norms. There's no need to add line-breaks to a text if Faber label it as poetry. If Faber accept this piece as poetry, what prose would they turn down? Anything with sections longer than 2 pages?

Giving up the day job

2010-10-08T10:14:00.004+01:00

You've reached a mid-life crisis - you've been dabbling with writing (perhaps with some success) for years and want to go to the next level. Maybe your kids have grown and left, you've come into some money, you've a long-term illness, or you've unexpectedly become unemployed. What are the options?

It's a question that prose writers more so than poets ask. Prose needs more of a full time commitment than poetry does, and some people who already earn money writing prose (journalists, technical writers, translators, etc) can carry on doing part-time work. Also I think women more so than men follow this delayed career path, their lives disrupted more by parenthood.

You could take early retirement, buy a cottage in the South of France, Walden, or even move to Tahiti, but most of us have to compromise a little.

A Masters Degree (MFA, MLit, MA)

Creative Writing's a competitive hobby nowadays, verging on a profession. Young budding writers who want to work within academia have to be prepared to move often, and go on short-term contracts. You probably don't want to compete on that level. Look upon your age as an advantage. There's more to writing success than merely writing - you'll have to fill in forms, jump through hoops, meet deadlines, balance competing needs, thoroughly research the market, have the money to buy the right books, be self-critical, etc. Perhaps you won't have as much spare time as some of your class-mates, but you'll have more life-experiences and perhaps you'll be better able to exploit your opportunities.

If you missed the chance to do a full time Masters the first time round, don't worry - it's never too late. In "The Guardian" (8 May 2009) Professor Russell Celyn Jones said that "The MA programme I run at Birkbeck, University of London, attracts people of all ages from around the world and with a wide range of life experience. These doctors, journalists, police, actors and lawyers are clear-eyed about their expectations: they want to pursue a private passion communally for a year."

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

You may appreciate the discipline, 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.

You might be able to take a year off work (a BBC TV reporter did this so that he could do a Masters in creative writing) but of course, you needn't go full time - nowadays many Masters courses welcome mature students, waiving qualification requirements, and offering low-residency, 2 year part-time options with distance learning components, variable speeds, and a choice of terms when you can start. Courses nowadays include sessions on market awareness and the Publishing trade, and assessed material is likely to include a dissertation folio (aka "creative thesis") which may be in poetry or prose, so you needn't take a break from your usual writing and submitting. But do these courses work?

Venessa Gebbie was accepted to do an MPhil in Writing, but changed her mind after finding out more about the course (having already paid a deposit).
Tania Hershman spent ten years working as a science and technology journalist before enrolling on the MA at Bath Spa, UK. Her project went on to be published.

So yes, it can work, but it's risky. See the Poets & Writers page for more US information. The UK is catching up fast with the USA. Suddenly it's become normal for 30% of the bios in a magazine like Rialto to mention Creative Writing degrees. England's UEA isn't quite the Iowa workshop, but it's been around since 1970 - see their Autumn syllabus. It's produced several "mature" writers.

One-off Help

Rather than commit to a long course which may include lots of material you're not interested in, you can pay for specific help

Literary Consultants - Publishers' in-house editors rarely have time nowadays to discover and nurture talent. Meanwhile, thanks to Creative Writing courses, more and more authors are producing near-publishable books. How can they be helped? Agents are more publisher-orientated, and in any case won't deal with stories and poems, which is why "literary consultants" (aka "manuscript assessment services") are on the increase. Depending on the quality of the work they may recommend it to an agent or publisher, suggest a few tweaks, or splatter the first page or 2 with comments and have a long, frank discussion with the author. 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.
Mentoring - The UK's Faber and Faber is the latest organisation to nurture individual talent. It's a growth area. The New Writing Partnership's Escalator scheme also works that way. Writers value such attention albeit briefly at residential courses and on Masters courses. Being under someone's wing for several months is what most budding writers want, especially if there's guaranteed publication at the end.

The common factor here is the 1-on-1 contact, something lost during the rise of big business and workshops. Another is the expense. Consultancy and mentoring don't come cheap - mentoring is about $40/hour, and 1,000 words cost at least $10 to be evaluated. Regional Arts Boards can sometimes help with funding or at least offer recommendations.

Roll your own

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. Holidays can be integrated into the scheme too.

In the UK, Arvon weeks are frequently mentioned as a life-changing experience. Immersion for a week in a writing environment helps people to start thinking of themselves as "writers".

Poets & Writers have a Literary Events Calendar (a nationwide calendar of readings, workshops, and other literary events) and a page about Writers Conferences, Colonies, and Workshops page showing some US options.

Online groups can help. Venessa Gebbie is one of many writers who had a post-50 surge. She said "I spent eighteen months on and off working in an online writing group ... That was akin to an apprenticeship." But you need your wits about you if you're going to benefit from such locations. Older people might have an advantage in this respect.

Alternative Approaches

At the age of 92 Toyo Shibatashe gave up dancing because of a bad back, and started writing poetry. Now 98, her latest poetry book has sold 40,000 copies in Japan.
Become a celeb first, then publish later - see Viggo Mortenson
Become a writer of any kind first - see Prue Leith (first novel at 55)
Make explicit use of your profession - either for content or as a PR opportunity
Some competitions have a lower-age limit of 50 or so. Make the most of them. Grey Hen is one of a number of organisations for older writers.
See Career in poetry (from TextEtc)

Tim Cumming

2010-09-30T10:40:00.001+01:00

Going through my shelves I found "the miniature estate" (Smith/Doorstep, 1991) and "Apocalypso" (Scratch, 1992), both by Tim Cumming. I like them. I realise I'm trying to write more like that nowadays. Shades of Luke Kennard but more gritty, more overtly political, less meta-poetic. Here are a few quotes.

A black girl gave out pamphlets in the library,
you could win a free pizza.
Two girls in a phone box made random calls
from a diary found outside The Admiral Nelson

(from "Living by numbers")
The housemaid's dead and I've got to run.
There's a factory fire, tailback
from Cheyne Walk to Rotherhithe, a number
of casualties and still no ambulance.
I'm reading the Ladybird History of Thatcherism,
it's well illustrated with fine river views
and commercial breaks everywhere in Tuscany.

(from "UK Roadmap")
Coming quietly through two way mirrors
with blackmail angles and fingerprint dust.
Do not move without a punchline
that is not an ad lib
and where were you last night?

(from "Official Secrets")

Sometimes a striking start isn't sustained. Usually though he manages to develop the original premise, or braid the multiple themes he introduces early on. "UK Roadmap" is my favorite poem ("The empire's shrunk to a charity ball,/ to a welder's spark, to the presence/ of royalty and now I'm getting emotional") and "Speed Chess in Zero Gravity" is my favorite title.

Poesia 253 - Don Paterson, Indian poetry

2010-09-26T09:24:00.006+01:00

Some poets travel better than others, but quite a few of them have made the journey to Italy this month. Issue 153 of the Italian periodical Poesia has 14 pages about Don Paterson and 15 pages of poems in English by Indian writers (Dom Moraes, A.K.Ramanujan, Ezekiel). In the introduction to Paterson, Massimiliano Morini emphasises that Paterson is hard to categorise - MacNiece or Muldoon? In his variety he's compared to Edwin Morgan, who gets a half-page obituary later in the magazine.

Literature and boredom

2010-09-23T09:31:00.008+01:00

If I think a swimming pool's going to be cold I sometimes splash cold water on myself first, trying to induce shivering. After that the water feels ok.

In his "Structuralist Poetics" book, Culler mentions that "Criticism usually ignores boredom". It's potentially a useful device - if you bore the reader before giving them a flash of lyricism it'll have a greater effect. You have to hope that they'll not give up reading the book during the boring passage. Having a reputation helps (maybe Beckett knew that).

I remember years ago hearing a review on the radio of a Beuys performance - he was picking little bits of jelly off a ceiling. One critic said she was bored at first but then she became fascinated by the details of the action. Another said that after the fascination phase there's a final phase when you realise that actually it's just boring. I think it's short-sighted to give up when faced with superficial boredom, but there are limits beyond which the artist risks accusations of pretension at the very least.

One option is to use selective deprivation rather than blanket boredom - e.g. keep the narrative going while withdrawing the lyrical descriptions (or dialog, or short paragraphs) for a while.

Aging poets

2010-09-15T12:07:00.008+01:00

Some reviews of Heaney's recent book have revisited the theme of poets and aging - e.g. "[Heaney] has for some time been recycling the same tropes ... It isn't just mainstream poets who do this; John Ashbery has been writing the same book for years now. I guess there comes a point when a poet runs out of things to write about, or simply no longer has the need to try anything new", Alan Baker, 2010

Of course, many poets do change. In "Identity Parade" Roddy Lumsden wrote "like many poets, [Gwyneth Lewis'] work has loosened and opened into a less implicit and more self-aware, narrative-driven style". I think that trend is fairly common - Lowell and Rich opened up, I guess, though perhaps they were only following the zeitgeist that prevailed as they reached maturity. The output of some poets (Geoffrey Hill for example) changes thanks to a new drug regime. But I think poets often keep to the styles that first gained them a readership. New experiences will come along - new places, people, technology, arts - but the reaction to these can end up as obituaries or nostalgia.

I suspect that some types of writers cope better than others with aging. Rather than write less or write worse, some try to adapt, finding new sources of inspiration, or less wasteful techniques. But it's not all good news

"After working on one's poetry for several years, it is normal for the primitive autobiographical drive to come to an end. At this point, you have the time to devise new ways of working; a new generator of the unpredictable is needed, and this is supplied by chance or indeterminate procedures, combined with rules chosen to generate new decisions. Of course, if you believe only in autobiographical poetry, this temporary pause is not liberation, but a source of depression, neurosis, and eclipse", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.39
"It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous", Donald Hall, APR, Mar/Apr 2005
"The aging process almost always brings to the poet the secret conviction that he has settled for far too little ... All his lifelong struggle with 'craft' seems a tragic and ludicrous waste of time", Dickey, "The Young American Poets" (ed Carroll), 1968.

When a new generation emerges (maybe it's happening now in the UK), older poets may need to re-position themselves or even stand aside. Andrew Duncan wrote that "With the exception of Eric Mottran, I have not found a single [UK post 1950] critic who has a distinguished record of writing about the poets younger than them".

Many of the factors that encourage the creation of a generation are present currently

Mass - UK creative writing courses are now producing that
Means of communication - the younger generations have the WWW (used in a "web 2" way it's a YoungGen thing)
Critical Support - People like Ben Wilkinson write about contemporaries and older poets. Roddy Lumsden supports younger poets via various initiatives.
Separation - an exaggeration of the difference between the old and the new helps initially
Crisis - Even established poets are finding it harder to get published nowadays. Young poets are finding new ways (performance, new tech, etc)

I'm not very autobiographical and have never depended on intense inspiration or imagination. I think I've become more efficient at finding and exploiting material. Who knows, I might even be improving with age ...

The poetry mainstream

2010-09-03T10:17:00.011+01:00

This note was triggered by some recent comments (noted below) about the alleged mainstream/non-mainstream rift and how to deal with such perceptions. It's an issue that frequently arises in discussions. Even if one doesn't believe that there's a rift, it's advantageous to appreciate the viewpoint of people who do, especially if you're running workshops.

Definitions

Using the term "mainstream" is asking for trouble. Some people think it's not useful, challenging with borderline cases - "Is X mainstream? Is Y mainstream?". Others think that the term's used by people who like pigeon-holing, marginalising or labelling in an anal-retentive, simplistic way.

I think it's a convenient short-hand that even the detractors end up using. It may be less helpful in the USA than the UK because in the USA mainstream poetry is a smaller proportion of serious poetry than it is in the UK. It doesn't have a firm definition (nor does "raw/cooked", "hard-edged/soft-edged", "poetry/prose", etc). Some poems are clearly mainstream, some are clearly non-mainstream, and few people argue when extreme examples are categorised.

Mainstream poems tend to have certain characteristics, some of which non-mainstream poems lack, and vice versa. An alternative formulation is that a mainstream poem is one that benefits from a set of skills similar to that used with non-literary texts.

Understanding

Words summon contexts which in turn affect interpretation of the words. Hearing "bishop" I might load in the context of Chess or of Religion. But also I load in a set of interpretative tools appropriate to the task. We become used to employing different sets of skills for different types of text. Poetry and prose typically use different (though overlapping) skill sets. So do different types of poetry.

Carrie Etter wrote
Describing and classifying poetry I've noticed that a couple commentators on "The Tethers", knowing of my "experimental work," seem to struggle with TT's "mainstream" qualities, but where they see a vast difference between the two areas, I see continuities, a spectrum. As far as the arrangement of skills is concerned I think a spectrum isn't the best analogy. Mainstream and non-mainstream works share some effects (alliteration, for example) more than others (e.g. fragmentation). The effects tend to cluster, so meter is likely to be associated with rhyme and paraphrasable meaning (because these features are often found together in people's experience of poems). I think the struggle that Etter's readers mention might be because the skills required don't all come from a standard skill set.

On Etter's blog Christodoulos Makris wrote
"There's comfort in labelling. It's also easier to "sell" or "understand" a writer or artist if s/he can be bundled into a category". I agree, but I don't see a problem with that; it's how perception works. If one needs to use a collection of reading strategies that you've not used together before it's like tackling a multi-disciplinary work.

Steve Waling wrote
"I wonder what it is, though, that sees some people reading nonmainstream poetry and seeing only confusion, while others 'get it' (whatever 'it' is) almost immediately". Some factors are

Innate predispositions - Numerous perception and processing problems that are masked during normal reading may become exposed when reading poetry. As analogies, consider some visual disorders - "Simultanagnosia" (Seeing only one object at a time); "Integrative agnosia" (Inability to recognise whole objects, tending to focus instead on individual features of an object); "Pure alexia" (Inability to identify individual characters or read text); "Colour agnosia" (Ability to perceive colours without being able to identify, name or group them according to similarity).
Beliefs and Interests - How much can an atheist appreciate religious poetry? Survivor poetry, Gay poetry, Football poetry, etc are not to everybody's taste, especially if the reader seeks identification with the persona.
Education and expectation - Readers might have expectations regarding "understanding" that aren't appropriate to all poems. If they expect poems to communicate a message strongly and clearly, they might well be disappointed, especially if the message isn't spelt out for them in the final line or couplet.

The rest of this note suggests ways to reduce the differences between the two types of readers.

How the two sides view each other

When meeting those from other arts are you ever embarrassed by poetry's mainstream - its readers and writers? Do these quotes sound fair?

"The fact is that the British poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a conviction", Gregory Woods, Magma, Autumn 2003
"Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves", George Oppen, "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook", ed Davidson, IR 26:5-31, p.29.
"Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry", A.E. Housman, "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (lecture), 1933.
"The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true", Harold Monro, "The Future of Poetry", Poetry Review, January 1912
Steve Waling suggested that "[the non-mainstreamer] says ... "I'm better than you," at the unsophisticated reader of mainstream poetry, who is presumed to be less intelligent, lazy or, even worse, terribly bourgeois and accepting of the comfortable status quo. Instead of being made to think viz a viz language and meaning creation, instead of seeing how meaning is a social product etc etc... they prefer a slice of 'social realism lite', the comforting feeling of being given an insight into the human condition that isn't too different from other very similar insights, an over-described slice of life etc etc..."

Mainstreamers criticise non-mainstreamers.

In Staple 63, C.J.Allen points out that when mainstream readers read Ashbery, they find that "everything they're used to in a poem is left out - the meaning, the music, the sense of resolution and so on. But, for [Ashbery's] admirers, what he'd left out were the tired poetic conventions, the dull patter, the stale, confessional voice full of highfalutin metaphor".
Mainstream readers when faced with non-mainstream work often mention the emporer's new clothes. Look long enough at anything and you'll eventually see something of interest (after all, it's hard to admit to yourself that you've wasted so much time). The poets are autistic, over-intellectual, lacking in empathy.
Steve Waling suggested that "the non-mainstreamer tells us things about language that we already know, doesn't he/she? Don't we all know about the way language is manipulated by adevertising/capitalism/etc etc and isn't it just a bit boring? And why don't they make some concession to ordinary readers, instead of using all these jump-cuts and juxtapositions etc etc?"

Widening the mainstream

How does one offer new directions to mainstream reader? Giving them theory (even in watered down forms) is unlikely to get them moving. Is there a gentle path to enlightenment or is shock therapy the only way? Whatever the pros/cons of non-mainstream poetry I think mainstream readers can benefit from questioning their tastes, which may initially require a devaluing of what they like before they can acquire new tastes. So I'd say start with the stick - it's more likely to provoke action - then thump them with some carrots.

Sticks for mainstreamers

If they like rhyme, or confessional poetry, encourage them to say why, then challenge them, using quotes from famous (preferably ancient) people. Or one can query more generally the source of their tastes, and how conditioned they are. Non-victimising ways of doing this involve

Relativism - if we're not conditioned then how come tastes in other times/places are often different?
Analysis of environment - "There's no such thing as society" said Thatcher, but what about the Poetry World? What's it made of? Who decides what "Poetry" and "Good Poetry" are? What influences our tastes?
Other arts - The changes in visual arts over the years might provide useful analogies. If fidelity is the reader's touchstone then presumably they dislike Constable and prefer the hyper-realists. If they say they like van Gogh, try to transfer that aesthetic approach into literature.

If people can handle a discussion about "What is Beauty" so much the better. Is beauty "Eternal"? What are the differences between Beauty Competitions and Poetry Competitions?

Common conceptual stumbling blocks include

Subject Matter - Avant-garde poems are less likely to be anecdotal, about people, or about one thing. They may try to shock or borrow material from non-art contexts.
Unity/Completion - Avant-garde poems have more gaps, and changes in style. They may have several "centres". The beginning or the end might be missing. The piece might not be held together by a voice. It might look more like a draft/sketch than the finished article
Language - One's more likely to notice the words in avant-garde poems, and they won't necessarily be in sentences
Narrative - With Avant-garde poems readers may not be able to accumulate meaning sequentially, clause by clause. "modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity", J. Frank,"Spatial Form in Narrative"

You need to have at your disposal some arguments (devil's advocate or otherwise) against some traditional poetry assumptions

Beautiful art needn't depict beautiful people, happy events or even possible events
Beautiful things needn't have beautiful components - medieval religious art used gold-leaf, some poems use "rainbow" and "gossamer"
Poetry doesn't have to rhyme - see "this poem doesn't rhyme", G. Benson (ed), Viking, 1990. (a collection for children)
Poetry can be about things and ideas, not just about people falling in love and dying.
Beautiful things need not be hard to produce

If they're still resisting, look at corruption or back-scratching within the Poetry Establishment. Look at who puts anthologies together and who's left out. Look at the work of those who claim to write Real Poetry. Somehow try to unsettle them.

Carrots for mainstreamers

Once you've chipped away at preconceptions it would be useful to be able to suggest transitional poets; poets whose work has widened out from the mainstream. In the UK, candidates are hard to come by. Perhaps Don Patterson's work will appeal to them. He's not avant-garde, but he strays far enough from the mainstream to offer a challenge. Perhaps with some people it's easier to refer to Picasso.

It's worth pointing out that non-mainstream poetry may have the same features as mainstream poetry, but the proportions are different. In extreme cases some prided features of mainstream poems may be absent altogether. Sometimes one feature (e.g. sound effects, fragmentation, repetition) is taken to the extreme, no longer masked by meaning or narrative - nothing's in the way. When mainstream poetry uses these features, readers (even avant-garde readers) might not see them, being blinded by the glare of other, more obvious features.

Then offer them a non-mainstream poem. The chances are that if you succeed in getting them to like it, they'll say it's not really avant-garde at all. I'm not sure what to offer though! "The Wasteland" is old, but it's probably avant-garde enough and it's widely available - see Exploring The Wasteland.

You could introduce them to Hybrid poetry, which supposedly combines the best of both worlds. I'm not convinced, but it might be worth a try. A description sounds promising -
"Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first-person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villanelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions. Considering the traits associated with "conventional" work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of "experimental" work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools".
So what does the resulting poetry look like? There's much variety. Here's part of a sonnet by Karen Volkman (from "American Poets in the 21st Century")

    Lifting whither, cycle of the sift
    annuls the future, zero that you zoom
    beautiful suitor of the lucent room
    evacuating auras, stratal shift

    leaping in its alabaster rift.
    Lend the daylight crescent, circle, spume,
    ether from your eye, appalled perfume,
    ash incense to boundary when you drift

There are many books explaining A level and GCSE poems line by line, but fewer that tackle modern poetry in the same way. 3 options are

"Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne" by N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge attempts to help readers appreciate some notoriously difficult poems. It's helpful, but for me it too often fails to identify what I find difficult, nor does it try to justify why the poetry is preferable to a more comprehensible paraphrase.
"The Poem and the Journey", by Ruth Padel, tries to explain some poems, including one by Prynne. I'd recommend the book to most people who are interested in poetry. Her explanations of impenetrable poems usually helps me understand what the poet's trying to do, though doesn't explain why the poet had chosen to be unhelpful.
"how to write a poem", John Redmond, Blackwell, 2006 is an introductory text that aims to train readers for Jori Graham poems rather than the old poems that most introductory books tackle.

Mainstreamer ab-reactions

Even after all this, mainstreamers may remain unconvinced. Typical responses include

It doesn't mean anything - if you've done your groundwork and have picked the sample poem carefully, you should be able to cope with this. Challenge their notions of meaning. If they appreciate music or abstract art, exploit that information. And do they really understand the meaning of poems they've long cherished?
It's too intellectual. It doesn't relate to real people. Why should I need an English degree to understand a poem? - people who depend on old-fashioned aesthetic theories often think that they are theory-free, that they use innate, instinctive sensibility, that meaning should be paraphrasable. Challenging their assumptions can bring their theories into the open, but you may have to articulate their theories on their behalf. Of course it's also worth pointing out that there are many types of poem (just as there are many types of music, maths, etc) some of which are aimed at those who know their subject inside-out and enjoy theory.
Why does it have to be so obscure? - there isn't always a good answer to this. I don't think that avant-garde poetry is any more allusive than mainstream, but I think it's fair to admit that nowadays allusions are harder to detect than they used to be
If it's so good why isn't it popular? Does anyone actually read Finnegan's Wake? - I agree with Keston Sutherland that textual experiments seem cut off from language in general - they're not usually precursors even if written by famous people. They don't "take" in the way that new Art fads do. I think "The Wasteland" and "Ulysses" are enjoyable, important works, but I don't like "Finnegan's Wake". Though even if experimental works don't open up further possibilities they at least give the mainstream some elbow room.

Widening the non-mainstream

Sticks for non-mainstreamers

This isn't easy. One could point out that many of their tricks aren't new, but they know that already. Some brain-scan research is coming up with interesting findings about pre-disposition to appreciation of types of art, but it's early days.

Carrots for non-mainstreamers

One could encourage them to assist readers who aren't familiar with non-mainstream poetry. Options include

Adding notes (I think mainstream poets do this more often that non-mainstreamers)
Ordering the poems in a collection so that the less aesthetically challenging pieces come first
Explaining their writing processes. When Carrie Etter wrote that "Just as a poet may choose among such forms as the sestina, the sonnet, etc. in composing a poem, I think about modes of expression, degrees of tension or fragmentation, lines versus prose, etc" I suggested that she might take a poem of hers and list the tensions she's thought about (what's being withheld, why the reader should be motivated to feel, or even resolve, the tension). Do the details of the fragmentation matter, or could the piece be fragmented in many other ways to the same effect? Why is each line-break and indent positioned the way it is? What mind-states might an idealized reader pass through?
Adding narrational or conceptual sugar, the type of meaning Eliot had in mind when he wrote "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him."

The Dark Horse, issue 25

2010-08-28T10:14:00.006+01:00

I look forward to the arrival of "The Dark Horse". The recent issue has some articles on poetry marketing that try to answer questions like: Why do people agree to write blurbs? Why are anthologies like "Identity Parade" published?

"Blurbonic Plague" by Dennis O'Driscoll - As the pseudonymous Harvey Porlock noted, 'Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it's all absolutely marvellous', p.11
"The Anthology Business" by John Lucas - Lumsden appears to have no love for language or the possibilities of prose rhythms. Nor ... does he show much ability to get beyond cliche ... I don't want to damn Lumsden's enterprise by such means. For all I know, he undertook to write these head notes with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to the stocks. Who in his right mind would want to produce what amounts to 85 blurbs, where the adjectives are selected much as buttons are from the button box ... And, to repeat, there are good poems aplenty in the anthology, p.25

To provide some balance there's an 8 page review by Rory Waterman of William Logan's "Our Savage Art: poetry and the Civil Tongue" - too often he roots out the bad whilst neglecting the good ... Logan thinks that the majority of writers are praised too highly and expect too much, p.76

Reviews, poems and other articles complete this tasteful offering. I was glad to see that Craig Arnold's "Uncouplings" uses anagrams -

the I in relationship
is the heart I slip on
a lithe prison ...

our listening skills
are silent killings

Comments about poetry publishing

2010-08-10T09:21:00.000+01:00

I've recently been commenting in other blogs and on discussion boards. I thought I'd bundle my comments here in no particular order

The market for serious poetry may always have been vanishingly small. Perhaps poetry-reading has reached its natural level, increasing only as the number of poetry-studiers do. The role of much poetry may have been taken over by prose, pop and cinema. Why buy a 9 pound poetry book with 45 sparse pages when you could watch Inception?
Things aren't just bad in the UK. In Italy recently, Luigi Manzi suggested a moratorium on publishing modern poetry books. Fabrizio Dall'Aglio replied "frankly I think many publishers (me included) would be in favour"
the poetry book market is in recession and institutional publishers are retreating to their heartland - the stuff that only poetry can do. Comedy? Leave that to stand-ups - they do it better. Narrative? Flash writers do it better. You may not like "pure poetry", "specialist poetry" (call it what you will) but I can understand why funds concentrate on it. It's meant that the gap between "high" and "low" poetry has been emptied, so that there's less flow and intermixing between the extremes (to the detriment of both, perhaps).
Many publishers don't read slush piles. A row of poetry books is a slush pile one level up. Most people don't have the time to pan for gold-dust, they want help. Buying a poetry book is high-risk. At least with a ropey novel you might learn something about Tudor times, or life in Japan, or you might escape from the stresses of life for a while. A duff slim volume by a touted has-been on auto-pilot is over with in a hour. I know of prose-writers who give poetry another chance every couple of years. I know of non-poets who've tried to get their spouse a present. Choosing a book is hard for them - blurbs need de-ciphering (even those used to novel blurbs have trouble), browsing isn't easy (it's all opaque to them anyway) and reviews are too glowing. Once bitten, twice shy - for a few years anyway.
Poetry books seem to have become more expensive and thinner while novels have become cheaper and fatter. I can imagine a first time poetry buyer getting "Gift Horses" by Simon Rae (National Poetry Competition winner in 1999, 2nd in 1996; poems in the TLS, Poetry Review) and feeling terribly ripped-off. Too few good poems (indeed - too few poems: 45 pages for 8.95). Someone who buys Prynne because the Guardian says he's England's greatest living poet might well end up thinking this modern poetry stuff's not for them.
"What else can you get for 8 quid nowadays?" The poet's usual answer's a pint and a burger. But in fact you can get a few symphonies, a decent DVD or even a novel - White Noise. Possession, etc.
Who defines "publishable standard"? The Academics or the Public? If the public don't want the book, maybe it's not good enough for today's more exacting standards. Suppose poetry books joined in the "cuts of 25%" craze, cutting book-lengths by 25%? I'd claim it would improve many books. If authors feel that the rest merits publication they can send to Magma, Other Poetry etc. If (as I suspect) the mags don't want it, nuff said.
If expert poetry readers can survive without High Street bookshops or public libraries, perhaps those resources can be aimed more towards the literate poetry first-timer - the wider public "whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s" (Neil Astley)
Loads of "modern poetry" means nothing to prose readers (there are people at the local writers group who apologize for not understanding it. My wife prefers to get angry - though in her defense she only has my stuff to go on). I see too few poetry books that offer choice (or paths from the familiar) for the uninitated. I think a Don Paterson book does. Maybe a Simon Barraclough too. I think the balance is too far towards single-author (single-aesthetic) books.
Perhaps the poetry market needs to go the computer programs way, sharing its expectations (both from a producer and consumer perspective). There are enough free games and operating systems to keep some people happy for life. That something's free doesn't mean that it's rubbish or that it didn't take years to write, or that the author doesn't become famous. Or maybe the market (as has been suggested here before) should go more the iTunes way, a single at a time.
More bottom-up evaluation mechanisms need to emerge. I use Rotten Tomatoes for films. If more of us put reviews (not just praise - though in times of shrinking sales, that's tempting) online, something similar could be done for poetry. The tendency to commit to print only positive reviews might de-value their currency and result in unbalanced coverage. Again, it's outsiders who'll have the most trouble sussing the resulting scene.
Every National Poetry Day we're told that poetry's never been more popular - which is probably true - "Forward Press is the largest publisher of new poetry in the world; we've published in excess of a million original poems since 1989 earning us the moniker: 'The People's Publisher'". In "The Forward book of poetry" intro for 2008 (not to be confused with Forward Press) William Sieghart wrote "The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes". The person who runs the poetry pf site said their hit count trebles in February, on the run up to Valentine's Day. As usual it depends what you mean by poetry.
I think "voice" is just a more cuddly version of "style", more likely to include personality features than a style is. The word "voice" sounds more natural, more an extension of something within; it's further from technique than "style" is. You'd expect it to be used more in Confessionalism times than Mannerist eras. I'm reading an Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner at the moment. Wilbur's foreward plays safe - he almost alternates style and voice: "sharp intelligence"; "good heart"; "great technical gift"; "strongly personal, in the sense that its tone and vision are distinctive and recognizable"; "a first book in which the poet's voice has been fully found".
A new style/genre/technique can be a way to take your voice away from familiar setting and habits, into a new climate or maze. You might write something new there, you might never return, or you might bring a keepsake back to ornament your comfort zone. Or maybe nothing happens. But that's common - when scientists do blue-sky research, or songwriters dabble at a keyboard they don't know beforehand how much of their time will be "wasted"
When US academics came to be assessed by the number of papers they published, the idea of a "minimally publishable idea" emerged - if an idea's just about good enough to justify a paper, why put more ideas in? By spreading the ideas out, more papers can be authored, and the ideas aren't wasted. I sometimes feel (especially with themed or commissioned collections) that poets have paced themselves, making the maximum number of poems from the ideas they have. The results can look like a calmer voice, "quietly assured".
A book's a cumbersome unit, like 100 pound notes. Some books I've recently read ("Blind Spots", Carol Rumens; "A Fold in the Map", Isobel Dixon) are organised as 2 generous pamphlets. Several other books are in sections that could be separated. Maybe Bookshops are more baised towards books than readers and poets are. Now that Bookshops and visible spines matter less, perhaps collections will find their natural page-length. Magazines could publish work-in-progress.

Writing Book Reviews

2010-08-01T07:26:00.006+01:00

Why review?

It's not easy being a critic - you might be the first person ever to read a work which might be a masterpiece or a mess. But someone has to do it for the sake of literary standards. The signs are that criticism isn't all it used to be.

In an April 2005 Guardian piece, Paul Farley said that his generation (those born in the sixties) got 'marketing not criticism'.
Amanda Craig (MsLexia) feels that "the popularity of weblogs and reading groups springs in part from the distrust many readers feel for literary critics".
Robert Fogarty in The New York Sun (June 29th 2007) wrote "The collapse of the book reviewing structure is emblematic of the technological and cultural changes that have occurred in America over the last couple of decades. These changes have led the National Book Critics Circle to launch an initiative to save book reviewing as a genre".
Bruce Bawer wrote "On the American poetry scene these days, the only thing rarer than a fine poem is a negative review."
In "Columbia Journalism Review" (Sept / Oct 2007 issue) Steve Wasserman (ex L.A. Times book review editor) wrote "Over the past year, and with alarming speed, newspapers across the country have been cutting back their book coverage and, in some instances, abandoning the beat entirely."
In 1999, Jay Parini in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" wrote about the state of contemporary newspaper book reviewing - "Evaluating books has fallen to ordinary, usually obscure, reviewers ... Too often, the apparent slightness of the review leads inexperienced reviewers into swamps of self-indulgence from which they rarely emerge with glory."

In this age of hype and puffs we need more quality reviews, and more people reading reviews. We also need more reviewers. Perhaps you've never thought of writing reviews, or don't know how, or don't know the markets. I think review writing is good for you. Why?

free books!
makes you read more carefully
helps you assess your own work more critically
helps you get friendly with editors so that they're more likely to accept your stories and poems.

I think reviews are an important and neglected literary genre - an art in its own right. In the States this is recognised in the form of the annual Randall Jarrell Award which gives $10,000 for poetry criticism that is "intelligent and learned, as well as lively and enjoyable to read".

But there are minus points too

"Burdensome artistically, exhausting over time ... poetry reviewing is an enterprise only a few people ever do credibly or well, and then rarely for long periods", Mary Kinzie, "Poetry", January 2004.
There's a view that if you can't write, you become a critic - "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." - Ken Tynan. "The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write." - JB Priestley (quotes collected by stas wnukowski)
Authors are liable to seek revenge. Lord Archer sends reviewers letters via his lawyers. Anthony Burgess put a reviewer into his next novel on a "Wanted" poster. Chrichton in "State of Fear" put a reviewer in as a character with small genetals. Jeanette Winterson has been known phone reviewers and to turn up late at night to berate them.
Reviews can kill! Well, Byron thought so. He became obsessed by the idea that Keats died from a burst blood vessel after receiving a savage review in "The Quarterly". Would you want to live with Keats' death on your conscience? Even if reviews don't kill, they can hurt. Writers are sensitive people. In The Anglo-Welsh Review, Winter 1967, Roland Mathias wrote "apart from a tendency to look back in pretty general terms, and to muse on the night or the wind or lost friends, he has nothing very much to say - all is grandiose, vague and over-spoken". He says some kinder things later on, but what he said was enough to stop the poet in question (a friend of mine) writing for decades.
Not everyone likes reviewers.
- Artists don't like them: "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs." - Christopher Hampton. "If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter." - Chekhov. "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me." - Max Reger
- Some Publishers don't rate them. Some publishers say they only push hardbacks for review because they want quotes to print on the paperback cover. Steve Wasserman says that "their own marketing surveys consistently show that most people who buy books do so not on the basis of any review they read, nor ad they've seen, but upon word of mouth. What's worse is that most people who buy books, like most people who watch movies, don't read reviews at all."
- Some Booksellers don't like them. Scott Pack (Waterstone's buying supremo) writing in "The Bookseller" thought that broadsheet book pages were dull, out of date, lacking diversity and not much good for selling books.
- Not all Reviewers like them! Amanda Craig in a recent MsLexia wrote "When I first became a published novelist in 1990, I did not realized [sic] just how mired with politics and corruption the reviewing business was". She pointed out that peer pressure's strong - "There are only about 100 regular reviewers for the national press, and sooner or later we all meet" - and that "Men review, and are reviewed, differently ... Women only get to review books by other women - or, once in a while, gay men".

Writing reviews

But let's not dwell on the downside. Reviews can be good to write, good to read, and good for culture in general. Before we look at writing reviews, I think we should consider the readers. Do you read reviews? Why? What are reviews for?

so people can decide if the book's worth reading
to help the writer
to advertise books
to explain the book to the reader
to encourage people to buy books
to be a good read - after all, most of the audience will never read/see the reviewed item, they'll only read the review.

What should a review contain? Well, reviews can be short announcements or long analyses. Usually they contain the following information

publishing details
extracts
description of the plot (Some people will buy any novel set in ancient Rome, or anything involving orphans, etc)
description of style/genre
a judgement
description of target audience
background about the author and their previous works?
cultural context - if the book comes from Greece (say) perhaps the review should say something about the Greek literary scene?

I'd claim that a lot of this isn't difficult. Judgement may be, and it's difficult to be selective about what to say while remaining readable. What shouldn't a review do?

merely advertise - if a magazine is going to review a book they might contact the publisher asking if they'd like to advertise. Sometimes it's the publisher who makes first contact - "we'll give you a good review if you advertise".
give a false representation
be aimed at the wrong audience.
let the reviewer show off - though reviews shouldn't be boring, I don't think they should have too much fun at an author's expense.

Nasty Reviews

Savage reviews sell newspapers and make the critic (usually male) a feared - hence powerful - person. Rousseau wrote a poem called "Ode to Posterity". Voltaire said "I do not think this poem will reach its destination". Maybe Voltaire was right, but posterity sometimes has the last laugh

the book "appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine" (The Sporting Times, 1922 - of Ulysses)
"the work of a drunken savage" (Voltaire - of Hamlet)
"crazy, mystical metaphysics... the endless wilderness of dull, flat prosaic twaddle" (Macaulay - of Wordsworth)
"The phrenzy of the Poems was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion. We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable." (Lockhart - of Keats (from Blackwood's))

Writing about the living takes some courage. Would you write these?

"The execution would embarrass a conscientious GCSE student: XXX teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia" (Acumen May 2006, p.93)
"nothing could prepare us for the tendentiousness, the unjustified formlessness, the ghastliness, of Haddon's verse" (The Guardian, Nov 2005)

John Updike's first rule of reviewing was "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt". It's not a rule that should always be followed, but ignoring it can lead to unfair criticism - a book for children should be judged as such.

Practical Problems

Given enough space, time and security, it's not so hard to write an informative, readable review. Many of the difficulties when review-writing are less to do with what to write than with personal and commercial pressures.

Space - Reviews must compete with other material for column inches. Often reviewers have to use shorthand ("Chandleresque", etc). It's a particular problem with poetry or short-story collections. In practise, the reviews editor is sent dozens of books. Often they'll send a bunch to a reviewer asking them to write about 3 of them in 300 words. This gives them the chance to pick a mixture of good and bad pieces, or pieces on a theme. The ability to find themes and similarities helps when trying to make a multi-work review flow. It's especially important when reviewing poetry/story collections.
Audience - Coupled with the space issue is that of your intended audience. As the space devoted to reviews in mainstream publications shrinks, the temptation to dumb-down and compete for attention strengthens, though can be resisted. Steve Wasserman wrote that he "wanted the Book Review to cover books the way the paper's excellent sports section covered the Dodgers and the Lakers: with a consummate respect for ordinary readers' deep knowledge and obvious passion for the games and characters who played them. ... Its editors neither condescended nor pandered to those of the paper's readers who didn't happen to love sports"
Balancing a personal response with an impersonal opinion
Spoilers - it can be hard to review whodunit plots
Having to review books you don't like (some major magazines don't give reviewers a choice). The writers can't defend themselves, so should you show restraint? Damn with faint praise?
Fear of being taken too seriously - You may think you're only giving your opinion. Others may think your views are more significant than that: "what right have you to say whether the book is good or bad?", they say. The question should be addressed to the Editor.
Fear of making enemies. Editors won't always check your work or back you up - they may enjoy a lively letters column. In the "London Review of Books", 22nd September 2005, Eric Griffiths (Trinity College, Cambridge) had a letter about Helen Vendler's review of his book on Dante. "Helen Vendler (LRB, 1 September) does not like the way I write; I can't blame her, there are days I don't like it myself. But there it is, we can't all have her style. I in my turn deplore the way she reads - Vendler fears that I will think her 'humourless and pedantic'. Let me assure her that nobody could accuse her of pedantry."

Opportunities

Who should write reviews? Usually only published poets write poetry reviews, but I don't think one needs to be a novelist to review novels - certainly one doesn't have to be a famous (or even good) novelist. Though children write reviews of children's books, parents usually do. Non-writers have some advantages when reviewing

They're not constrained by the genre they write in (SF authors aren't taken seriously when they review non-SF)
They needn't fear revenge from writer-reviewers. Herbert Leibowitz - editor of Parnassus for nearly thirty years - wrote "what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers".

But it's an understandable reaction. W.G. Sebald said "I think it is totally wrong if writers review each other's books. I find that idiotic, Truly idiotic", (Pretext 7, 2003 p.22). So I think there's hope for us all. Remember, you needn't be beautiful to judge beauty competitions. Some US publications insist (contractually) that the reviewer has no strong connection with the author, but in specialist areas (and UK poetry) that distancing is hard to obtain.

But where are the outlets? Even a little literary magazine like Ambit gets over 1000 books a year to review, but very few of them get a mention. Newspapers give ever less space to poetry reviews. The situation's not so bad with novels. Options open to us include

Amazon (online bookseller)
Small magazines - editors say that good reviewers are rare, and that they burn out. "Acumen" even ran a regular reviews competition for a while (with free entry!) to find new talent. Reviews are mostly about poetry and genred prose. Note that most small mags want to encourage, so they tend not to publish slating reviews. "Staple" for example wants reviews that "focus on the work rather than an overt display of the reviewer's erudition and opinion" and are "generally positive, though absolutely not anodyne and ultimately will engage the reader enough to interest them in reading the whole book."
BBC Radio 5's book reviews on Monday afternoon let you give reviews live over the phone!
Rattle poetry magazine is prepared to send you a book if you send back a review. See their list of books available. Tarpaulin Sky do likewise

You might start with local, free publications. Note that many people offer their services as Film Reviewers. If you have a specialist subject, exploit it. As ever, one needs to study the market. Julie Eccleshare in "A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels" notes that "Reviews of children's books in the UK are rarely other than positive". Other markets may be different!

I'm told that it's common for would-be reviewers to offer their services, sending in examples of their work. Strangely, men do this much more than women do. I think editors want critics who are well read and have sound judgement. They want reviews that readers want to read even if they're not interested in buying books. And I suspect they prefer controversy to sitting on the fence. If you get poems/stories (and especially letters/articles) printed in magazines, there's a chance you'll be asked to review by the editor. If you put some reviews online you'll sometimes be offered books to review.

Note that magazines usually receive just one review copy, which the reviewer keeps, so the editor doesn't have a chance to check the reviews (in particular the accuracy of the quotes). So take care.

Gender might be an issue. David Wheatley pointed out that the Summer 2008 issue of Poetry Review contained reviews of 20 men's books and 21 by women. All 20 of the men's books were reviewed by men, and all 21 of the women's books were reviewed by women.

Responsibility and the Law

Some magazines (the TLS at times) publish anonymous reviews. This side-steps some of the problems faced by reviewers, but can also lead to irresponsible reviewing. One needs to be aware of the legal situation (e.g. the 1996 Defamation Act). Libel is the publication of a statement which exposes a person to:

Hatred, ridicule or contempt
or which causes him to be shunned or avoided
or which has a tendency to injure him in his office, trade or profession

in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally. If you start writing about the author rather than their work, you may be straying into dangerous territory. Writing something that might damage the author's sales could be risky too. Authors tend not to take legal action (they know what happened to Whistler and Wilde) but there are exceptions. For example, Dan Moldea sued the New York Times for $10 million, claiming that a review damaged his reputation. He won, but the NYT successfully appealed.

Online Reviews

complete review
Contemporary Poetry Review
The Critical Flame
Echo from the Canyon
Happenstance Reviews
Jacket
Rattle reviews
Reviews of Books
The English Assocation Poetry Reviews
Tower poetry reviews
Tim Love's reviews - a review of "How do you spell Bl...gh?" was published in Staple, and reviews of Bonnefoy and Etter appeared in Poetry Nottingham
Reviews of short story collections (from "story")
the short review
WritingForums.Org - forums about how to review, etc

Books and Articles

"Writing Reviews", Carole Baldock, How To Books Ltd, 1996
"Are we being served?", Amanda Craig, Mslexia, Jul-Sep, 2005
"Critics, Ratings and Society : The Sociology of Reviews", Grant Blank, 2007 ("the first full-length study of reviews" - THES)
"Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (George Orwell) - "The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews - 1,000 words is a bare minimum - to the few that seem to matter."
A.L. Kennedy's responses to reviews of her books
"Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America", Gail Pool, University of Missouri Press, 2007
"'Terrible Things': The In-Clubs of Poetry Criticism" - in Wolf 15, 2007
National Book Critics Circle (see their tips, their Blog and their )
"The Death of the Critic", Ronan McDonald, Continuum, 2008 (a plea for more expert, evaluative (academic?) critics)
The Future of Book Coverage (from The Millions)

Rewriting

2010-07-16T12:53:00.004+01:00

On his blog Jim Murdoch tells us how he spent 3.5 hours getting a sentence right (via Heinz beans, Gillian Anderson, etc). He ended up with "From now on, whenever I pick up or think about Gerald Murnane’s book, Barley Patch, I’ll think of a girl with red hair on a bus" but didn't think that would be the final version.

Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending to "A Farewell to Arms" 39 times and used to brag about it, but Gustave Flaubert's perhaps the most famous re-writer. His manuscripts have been scanned in. Have a look at the University of Rouen's collection

Nancy Rawlinson thinks of drafting as follows - first Write it out in order to know it, to understand it (whatever “it” is here: story, idea, feeling). Then write it again, with this new knowledge having been dredged up and placed, to some degree, at the front of the mind. These two documents might have very little in common. The first enables the second, and the second isn’t so much a rewrite as a re-imagining.

I recently read "The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else" (Michelene Wandor). It's about Creative Writing courses. She thinks that the traditional workshop must go, because it emphasises re-writing rather than writing. But I need to re-write. I try to keep earlier drafts because sometimes rewriting smooths away interesting quirks. In general though, if I write quickly I revert to self-parody - samey characters, plots, details, sentence-length - so my re-writes can be extensive. I individualise the characters, sneak in twists and hints, change the phrase order in sentences, go through checklists (the 5 senses; the start and end; etc). Sometimes I add or delete a character or scene, or change the PoV. I've been known to delete all but a paragraph, or join 2 pieces together. My financially most successful piece went through 19 years of re-writes. By the end of that it looked bruised and battered to me, a war veteran with an artificial leg, sewn-on arm and a dangerously damaged soul. I have a different, more benevolent attitude to a piece written in a fortnight and accepted by the first mag I sent it to. But do readers see any difference between the 2 pieces? I doubt it. There are many ways to end up with a good story. If you try a route you've not tried before there are bound to be more dead-ends and longeurs.

I tend to start with a handwritten draft. Once I have a few hundred words I type it in. There's sometimes a phase when I juggle things around (the example below is taken from that phase) and I frequently re-print drafts.

Sometimes (especially with poetry) I cut a draft up and re-order the pieces on a table. I rarely write at the keyboard. Gradually the piece takes shape, but not before changes small and large. Here's a later snapshot with multi-colour edits

George Watson in the Times Higher Education (July 2010) made these points

In a 1979 talk entitled "A Neglected Responsibility" [Larkin] called on British libraries to acquire and preserve poetic manuscripts, hopeful that a corrected draft might persuade the young that a poem is the end of a deliberative process rather than a spontaneous act.
Revision can disimprove, and a poet can bother to the point of being bothersome. Auden's publisher used to tell how hard it was to choke a new edition out of him when he was endlessly intent on revising; Wordsworth spent half a lifetime rewriting The Prelude without improving it

Italian Poetry

2010-07-03T11:31:00.007+01:00

The rest of my family's bilingual, and I really should be better than I am at Italian. I have some Italian poetry books, and sometimes have magazine subscriptions. I've now created a Letteratura Italiana page to give me more practise. Here are some random observations about the Italian poety scene

Italians are more into dialect poetry
Whereas we have Larkin, they have people like Montale
Their scene isn't so different from ours, of course, though I don't think they have anything corresponding to our "Poetry Society"
Some publisher or other often publishes a poetry annual with essays, poems, trends, etc. It's useful.
Some of their singer-songwriters are decent poets

Sometimes my familiarity with poetry means that I can cope with an Italian poem better than many Italians can, but much of the time I miss a lot even if I understand the vocabulary - allusions to Dante (there are many) are the least of my problems.

"La nuova poesia modernista italiana", just out, by Giorgio Linguaglossa looks at the last 30 years of Italian poetry, looking for trends and developments, finding only styles of stagnation. I've not read the book, but it's provoked online discussion, much of which sounds familiar. Here are some quotes by various people (my defective translations)

The new poetry retreads the unsolved contradictions of the late 1900s
The new poetry tries to problematize that which was unproblematized by the imitative, acritical culture of post-experimentism and minimalism. But it's a problematization that doesn't take account of the defeat of poetic language by the narrative/declarative language of global media
In poetry nowadays, objects remain mute. Accumulating or minimalising them won't help
There should be a poetry moratorium so that poetry, currently in a state of liquifaction, has time to condense into a truer objective correlative. I'd like all poets to abstain from indiscriminate use of the generic metaphorical language that's invaded our methods of communication - newspapers especially
I know poets who offer me favours in exchange for favours, the favour in my case being that I publish them. I don't feel scandalised by this because there doesn't exist a world of poetry separate from the poetry community. But what does irritate me is when the same poets lecture me on poetry morals ... Regarding Luigi Manzi's suggested moratorium on publishing modern poetry books, frankly I think many publishers (me included) would be in favour

Flash Fiction in the news this week

2010-06-28T10:58:00.003+01:00

Two happenings this week illustrate the rise of Flash Fiction

Tania Hershman's Flash Fiction is going to be on BBC's Radio 4 this week. See the Afternoon Reading: Flash! page for details.
The deadline for the Bridport Prize for Flash (£1,000 1st prize, max 250 words) is 30th June.

Chess, Beauty and Literature

2010-06-21T08:38:00.005+01:00

Chess and literature are related in many ways, as several books - e.g. The Poetry of Chess (ed Andrew Waterman) and Masters of Technique will attest. I don't know of any top poets who are top chess-players, but I think (I might be wrong) that Carol Rumens was married to David Rumens (a good tournament player in my day) and Fiona Pitt-Kethley's married to James Plaskett, who was international standard - a grand master. I played a lot of chess when young - Hampshire U-16 champ; 3rd in the UK U-18 tournament (where I played Plaskett). Our school was the best on the country. In my class was Glenn Lambert who was much stronger than me. He started hearing voices in 1980 and was later diagnosed with Huntingdon's Chorea. His madness appears in several of my stories. Chess has continued to permeate my work and writing - my "8x8" (published in Horizon Review) is an example - see the video!

But I don't play nowadays, and I'm able to judge it without the distraction of hormones. Chess and literature both involve aesthetic considerations. On his blog George Szirtes writes that Form might be regarded in various ways, include game: "on the one hand, entertainment, and on the other the symbolic acting through of structured energies that might otherwise be employed in real conflict. Game depends on rule and surprise, pitting the fixed against an element of chance that may amuse or frustrate... on the symbolic level, the demands of form, serve as recognised sublimations of energy, much as in sport the beauty of the disciplined body in action enacts a desire". Chess is an ideal mental game in this respect, with few rules and a range of modes ranging from tournament play to the creation of interesting artificial positions ("chess problems") and the invention of new rules and pieces ("fairy chess").

To Nabokov, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar to that in any other art. He published Poems and problems which contains poems and chess problems. I was never into problems, but I'm beginning to appreciate "chess studies" now - contrived but natural-looking positions.

It's perhaps easier to theorize about beauty in chess than beauty in literature. It may be instructive too. "Secrets of Spectacular Chess (2nd Edition)" by Levitt and Friedgood (Gloucester publishers, 2008) tries to categorize beauty in chess. It looks at chess games, studies and problems. These are compared to "Real Life", Stories and Poetry respectively. The authors use 4 main criteria, which suit poetry pretty well too

Paradox (surprize)
Depth (difficulty; a way to hide a surprise)
Geometry (optical effects)
Flow (narrative)

Economy and "tightness" also figure. For Chess Studies the artificiality of the problem matters. Some problem-creators strive for unity (maximising the shared elements amongst possible variations (aka interpretations?)). Truth matters too. In a section called "Beauty, Truth and the Computer" the book addresses the issue of whether refutation devalues the artistic merit, whether you can have Art for Art's Sake.

Acceptances

2010-06-15T10:07:00.009+01:00

I've had a disappointing dribble of acceptances recently, though to some extent quality compensates for quantity.

"Weyfarers" has taken a four-liner
"Interpreter's House" took a poem that I like but 6 other magazines had rejected.
In the Ver Poets competition my poem didn't win a prize, nor was it "Highly Commended", or even "Commended", but it's been "Selected" for the anthology.
I've 2 poems in the Templar anthology

I've been sending away Flash Fiction (creating a spreadsheet dedicated to it) - 1 acceptance and 25 rejections so far. Meanwhile I've 24 things in the post, some going back to last year.

On the plus side, the news about my poetry pamphlet has firmed up. The scanned image is from "The HappenStance story, Chapter 4".

I suspect that nearly all the poems will be re-prints from magazines. In its first year, Joyce's "Dubliners" sold 379 copies, 120 bought by Joyce. I don't think I'll do any better but we'll see. At least I'm in good hands - Happenstance has won the 2010 Michael Marks award.

Recent UK poetry anthologies: tradition and the individual

2010-05-27T19:29:00.015+01:00

I'm feeling more mainstream than I used to. Of course, I don't think I've changed, but as magazines come and go, and new editors and judges appear, the centre-of-gravity in UK poetry seems to have shifted and the traditional mainstream has less of a hold, a change signposted by a burst of anthologies with much overlap of poets selected. Can that overlap be considered the emergence of a new tradition?

Identity Parade (ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe)

384 pages. 85 poets, all of whom have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Todd Swift wrote

Lumsden notes in his Introduction the interesting idea that this period's period style is "individualism" - and that this may be connected to the new digital mediascape, which has at once fragmented and multiplied options. This may be so, but reading the poets and poems in Identity Parade, one is not so much struck by lack of uniformity, as by certain moods, modes, tones, and rhythms that do reoccur. Far from being an entirely heterogeneous and strange period ... most of the poems selected are relatively coherent.
Most tell stories, express emotions, are witty or engagingly imaginative, and use the forms and manner made famous by Heaney, Muldoon, Duffy, or Paterson - clearly the four presiding spirits.
What is odd is how this compression of talent ... manages to diminish even the larger figures in the midst of the pack, who feel a bit crushed in the crowd. ... Also missing are the show-stoppers - the lightning-strike poems - that mark a poet or generation as great.

No shining individuals then, according to Swift. Instead a new tradition's taking over.

Voice Recognition (ed Clare Pollard and James Byrne, Bloodaxe)

168 pages. 21 poets, none of whom yet published a first book of poems. David Kennedy wrote

the emphasis on 'voice' might tell us something about the poetry and there is a lot of work here that probably sounds great in a reading or on a podcast ... This also means that there is a lot of largely formless free verse that lacks any inevitability on the page. But what's most surprising in the context of a generation-defining anthology is the number of voices here that seem to lack confidence or to revel in an inability to communicate.
And, as we have seen, anthologies with a relatively small number of poets tend to reflect exhaustion, a coming conservatism, or a combination of both.
The poetry collected in Voice Recognition seems largely unaware of and unconcerned with what has dominated British mainstream poetry since about 1950: anxieties about class, region, gender and race ... The editors and their poets have removed one of poetry's principle claims for recognition: its ability to offer unique insights into the relationships between private and public and between self and nation that define us all.

Andy Croft writes

In many ways it is a fascinating selection ... But it is a pretty depressing read too. At best it's a collection of confessional poetry, filmic sensibilities and "a multiplicity of styles" - poetry for the Facebook generation. So there are lots of ampersands, lowercase titles and references to high art and trash-culture. But there is not a single rhyme in the book, not enough anger and hardly any laughs ... And if these poets share "a deep fascination with the world as it is today," you would hardly know it from this book

So, suspicions about "a coming conservatism", a lack of concern with society, and quality. Maybe too a yearning for form or rhyme.

Infinite Difference (ed Carrie Etter, Shearsman)

211 pages. 25 poets - women only. No age/publication limits but the writing's experimental. Steve Spense writes of a chosen Denise Riley poem that

This is a little like Prynne yet it's lighter and its questioning mode has a more breezy lyric touch, mixing abstraction with lyric imagery. It's not as 'over-the-top' or quite as 'tongue-in-cheek' as John Ashbery can be yet neither is it as clotted or as full of resistance as John Wilkinson often is!

Spense's review (unlike the TLS's) is largely favorable and informed. He writes that

the sheer pleasure in reading Elizabeth Bletsoe's work comes from its mix of registers, its variety of diction and the exceptional way in which she fuses experience with learning and makes it all appear so easy and as natural as breathing. Her work is rich and highly-textured and although complex never obscure or unrewarding

Here's an extract of Elisabeth Bletsoe's work

Roddok, Robin (Erithacus rubecula)
Becoming secretive & depressed in the later months, before the vigorous reassertion of autumn territory. Stakes & ties. Paths of observance newly laid through contusions of aster, sedum & verbena bonariensis, helmeted with bees; offertories yielding a roman tessera, three pebbles from Chesil Bank & a tennis ball. A smell of burning moxa. Sulphur being ground with mercury to form vermilion; glazed with madder, sealed. Red as a releaser (your fat cherry lips), the impossible fury of it all. Oscillograph of the throat, that bob bob bobbing thing. Boundaries constructed from scribbles of sound. Marginals encompass the crossing at North Road, where fifteen burials "very shallow & without coffins" marked the putative site of Swithun's chapel.

I find it hard to judge how this selection fares regarding conformity though clearly it's not mainstream - even George Ttoouli in his anthology overview, Ineffable Compendia, writes that the poems "are mindblowingly unconventional in places".

Women's Work (eds Eva Salman and Amy Wack, Seren)

300 pages. 250 poets. Steve Spense writes

The material is mainly from a wide mainstream section ... This is a feast of a book which includes the big names such as Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson while tipping its hat towards the more experimental end of the 20th century - Lyn Hejinian and Lorine Neidecker

This aims to be more representative than the other selections here, chronicling a tradition rather than forging one

Rialto Spring 2010 (ed Michael Mackmin)

This issue has a section by 20 under-35s (Keston Sutherland, James Byrne (ed of "Voice recognition"), etc) chosen by Nathan Hamilton. He writes

there is this tendency ... to look for individual 'poets' on which to pin hopes of the 'next big thing'

Perhaps he's read Todd Swift's opinions. He thinks other recent anthologies have

vague points about vibrancy and optimism ... Most of these selections have paid a certain overstated lip service to the bouncy pluralist nature of the current poetic milieu ... But, rather crucially, this is generally without ever actually including much of anything that could reasonably be described as 'experimental', or even 'new' "poets who are actually more 'experimental' alongside examples of younger poets who might be deemed more representative of the accessibly 'mainstream'

So again, a plea for more variety, this time towards the experimental. Note how the word mainstream is not only in quotes but is wrapped in protective qualification. In the next issue there'll be more poets and an article. For now, here's a sample from a piece by Richard Parker

And here's the start of a horse poem by Jonty Tiplady

Chose your own horse
So let them choose their own horses.
Last night I dreamt this colour etymology

of 'you'. Everything was 'clear' -
'you' came from 'Hugh', for example,

Smith's Knoll 46 (eds Joanna Cutts and Michael Laskey)

By chance 2 of the first 3 poems in this issue mention horses too. For comparison purposes I'll sample from them. The first is by Maitreyabandhu

Horse
    Take this day:
a horse standing by the fence
    of a small enclosure;
muddy eyes and coat

    Take the air around him,
barely moving. He promises
    to flick a hock-length tail,
but won't
...

and the second by Chris Beckett

Boast of a Fly-whisk
Tail without a horse! hair of the horse called
Smoke-with-a-Tail
fierce flayer of wasps and fleas

I salute you, Gashay! relaxing on this cushy knee
in sunny slug-warm garden.
...

It's perhaps more mainstream than Rialto (where Michael Laskey has a poem in the maybe-not-under-35s section). It ends with a note entitled "Following the Poem" by Kate Bingham (of "Identity Parade"), who mentions that Roddy Lumsden thinks that her generation 'does seem more harmonious' adding

does this mean that the poems we write, though open-minded and sensitive at all times to the worlds they arise from, are less passionately convincing?

and wondering whether

it's time to sign up to a new aesthetic principle. One that not everyone will like, that gives poets more of a say in what their poems say

rather than waiting to follow the poem wherever it goes. Again, I detect a wish for more individuality. Luke Kennard (who's in "Identity Parade" and the Rialto issue) in a Review of Kate Bingham writes

if there is any such thing as a poetic mainstream, "Quicksand Beach" fits it like a favourite shoe - personal, anecdotal, accessible
There is a voice and a personality here - and it is the voice and personality of a person rather than a voice a person thinks sounds like a poet. ... If there is something wrong with many poets of the 'My dog died' school, it is exactly the same thing that is wrong with many poets of the 'Subversion of language' school: it is their mimsy affectation of the poetic, their obsession with their role as A Poet.

And finally ...

Kennard and Bingham seem to share concerns about the individual and tradition whereas Kennedy and Croft see an issue with the individual and society. Nearly all of the poets featured in Rialto teach or study literature (perhaps the first UK generation for which that has been possible). This is a consequence of the way the poems were collected but I suspect most of the anthologised poets are in groups too, which might make them tend to coalesce with peers at the expense of contacting the outside world. Workshops are good at raising the general standard and smoothing off rough edges.

What about the rest of us, the wrinklies and muggles? I recently read "Beneath the Apple Bough" by Isabella Strachan. In her foreword she writes that she's been in magazines for 30 years and won the Wells competition. At the end of the book in a note entitled "The Poetry Scene Today" she mentions the difficulty she'd have being accepted by publishers like Shoestring or Tall Lighthouse and writes that "After 15 years of intensive writing" she has "decided to bow out of the poetry world". Sometimes I feel like that too. From the extracts I've seen, I think I'd find "Infinite Difference" the hardest collection. I found Rialto's selection the most interesting and look forward to seeing how Nathan Hamilton concludes.

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