Busy September

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

Making prose into poetry - words, ideas, forms

How can you make prose look more like poetry?

Words

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

Images

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

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

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

Forms

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

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

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

Line-breaks

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

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

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

My book and magazine collection

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

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

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

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

Magazine news

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

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

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

Submissions

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

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

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

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

Flash Fiction Festival 2024

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

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

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

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

I came back with

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

Berkeley, Bugan and Yoseloff

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

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