"Fleeting" gone

"Fleeting" magazine is no longer online. Here's my poem from it

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

"Angle" has gone

"Angle" has gone. Here are 2 of my poems from it -

Musée des Beaux Arts From Belgium's pre-war fields he saw a boy who fell through centuries, his technique failed, not finding love while Jews, unnoticed, died. The weary ploughman's pleats, unruffled, match his measured furrows not the puffed-up sails, old masters pleased young Wystan thought to rhyme. His craft sailed far from Europe's tumbled myths, conversion in its wake. Invited back to Oxford, limestoned wrinkles deepened, touched a crazed belief that prayer, not God, would help him suffer, slipper-shuffling from the bar each night to find his cottage in Christ's grounds. He left Kirchstetten farmhouse one cold day, his life's sole purchase. We know only that he found a Gasthaus, somewhere to go. Clocks kept ticking, heaven harvesting the gold, a blinding influence that makes us fail to see young stowaways thrown overboard.

The Poetry Channel Once more we sail beyond dawn's harbour walls, pose laughing in the prow's romantic spray; our site's not shown on any chart, and yet our winking, wine-breathed pilot knows the way. Our masks prepared, we dive into the wreck, set on our course. We talk in signs, defy our age, rise heavy to our craft. They want to see us stripping off - we can't be shy. No mast-tied hero - we're all equal now, we all have lines to change, the licensed power to dream. By setting good examples we achieve our 3 cliff-hangers every hour. Of course there's no surprise - back home we'll add addresses to our lists, unload our cache which later polished up in workshops is revealed - but gently so - as last year's trash.

"The Flea" gone

The Flea (http://www.the-flea.com) has disappeared. Here are 2 of my poems from it

Lost Letters "Too staid", critics said, "too sad. Poems shouldn't mean but be". So must the work of men like me who chose Jarrell's hose or Heaney's hoe become sparse, hard to parse as it disappears up our collective arse? Must we haunt palaces, places where thought paces in ermine? Can't we swing and sing as if prose were a sin? I know just what to do now there's no Eliot daring to preach about eating a peach. We should each seek the best public forum and form for expression, slowly learn our craft, win words' trust, earn a good ear, not beg a grant to rant like a rat on a sinking readership. Their stuff's just prose in a pose. Poe's turning in his grave. While stolid, solid poets slid into obscurity they've zoomed like human cannon-balls into the canon, ousting poor anon. Mon frère, they'll explain their free verse to you for a fee, but I'll never cast pearls before swine, serving wine to win friends. Let them eat cake. I'll earn my bread, read their books, always see red. (each line has a triple of words with lost letters – e.g. staid/said/sad)

Wordbound Today I've a diction addiction, marooned in maroon, alone without interest, my celibate celebration of innocence in no sense pure, the therapist, the rapist all ready already trying together to get her to swing, sing, sin in- side me, leaving me sentenced, solitary, so literary. Today I'm a pathologist studying roads not taken, aching for rumourtologists to break the news to me, and for wellwishers to lower their buckets as a sign of respect, dyslexia my only hope of escaping from the word to the world.

Getting reviewed

Looking back, I was lucky to get so many reviews for my "Moving Parts" poetry pamphlet - see my reviews page. I wasn't so lucky with my short stories reviews but stories always struggle.

Amongst the many articles on getting reviewed are

• Emma Darwin's article (which also offers tip on more general publicity) - see her blog.
• The create penn's suggestions.
• Emma Lee's tips for getting a review

Reviews have been monetized - according to "Which?" magazine, March 2021, AMZTigers charges £620 for 50 reviews, and AMZDiscover charges $125 for contact details of 1,250 reviewers. As fast as Amazon take steps against such reviews, the reviewers evade the algorithms. Such ads might help sell gadgets and genre novels. I don't think they help with poetry.

Small press magazines that publish reviews usually say how they want to be approached by authors. Often they don't want books in the first instance. Read the magazines to find out! Emma Lee is a prolific, unmonetized reviewer who appears in several magazines. She has a reviews policy which makes for interesting reading.

But do reviews in small press magazines help sell poetry books? It's unclear. I've heard a few publishers say they don't. But authors like them. I did anyway.

Losslit gone

The LossLit site (http://losslit.com) has gone bad, so here I reprint my 2017 poem that used to be there -

A short course of treatment Six walls replace three of scenery. On the sides, slowly moving faces sucking at the glass. They put a colourful ruin in the centre so they can watch me explore in and out, questions and answers. Every so often they add more complications to avoid - a plant, a diver, a treasure chest. Each week while I'm out of the way they clean, and I forget everything.

Editing down

I sometimes turn a short story into Flash as an exercise. What I try to avoid is ending up with a piece that has lost weight but is still wearing the same old clothes. I focus on a single scene, lose a side-plot, or lose a character. If I return to the short story I'm usually able to exploit what I've learned when writing the Flash.

Sometimes I've made a page-long poem more episodic, then I've broken it into a few poems. Not all of the shorter poems succeed, but at least I've salvaged something.

Welsh writer Cynan Jones' story “The Edge of the Shoal” began as a 30,000-word short novel but he cut it to 11,500 words because “it didn’t work.”  When he sent it to The New Yorker they liked it but asked him to cut it in half. He took 4 days to cut the story to 6,000 words. In that form the New Yorker published it and it won The 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. The original version was published by Granta as a novella entitled "Cove", which then won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize.

Moral - you may want to keep more than one version of some of your pieces - short and long versions. If you chop, keep your drafts. You may never become famous enough to sell them, but they may have something valuable that gets worn away by rewrites.

Long shadows

Maybe you can't see the camels' shadows. We set out when the sun was low so that it wasn't too hot, spending a night in the Moroccan Sahara desert. Standing on the dunes, we could use our mobiles. Civilisation was never far away.

Here's me on my bicycle, with the long shadows of a bright February evening. Better to head into the shadows than cycle with the sun in my eyes - and in the eyes of the drivers behind me. Lockdown has brought my bicycle and me even closer together. I really should oil it soon.

The sun sank fast and brightly in the Canaries. The extensive dunes were full of surprises. We weren't so far from Morocco, and camel rides were on offer, but the facilities in the towns (Swingers clubs etc) stopped us confusing the two places.

Still looking north - this time from Fleam dyke (a bank 7m high, plus a ditch, not far from Cambridge). It dates back to the 5th century. There's also a bronze age barrow. You can see for miles.