Sunday 1 May 2016

2 archived publications, 2 current concerns

Thanks to virgin media I've needed to move some web material around. I've decided to preserve 2 old, themed publications that I edited. Both were trying to make a point.

4 issues of PaP: Poetry about Poetry appeared 15 years ago. As I've written elsewhere, if tutors tell pupils that they should feel free to write about anything, poetry should be an allowable topic, and if paintings and painters are written about, why not poems and poets?
I still write poems about the nature of poetry, and still sometimes write "Pompidou Centre" poems that show you how they work. I think there's too much "transparent language" poetry out there.

A Form of Words, also about 15 years old, contains Formalist prose. In poetry there's Formalist and free-form writing. If a text has patterning (if it's an abecedarian, for example) there's a tendency to categorize it as a Formalist poem. This might partly be because there were few markets for short prose, but there are more now. In my Short fiction article I tried to reclaim a place for Formalist prose in the fiction spectrum.
I write fewer such pieces than I used to, but just as the definition of "sonnet" is loose nowadays, the formalist prose category is baggier than it was, so maybe I write more Formalist prose than I think. Certainly the trend for shorter pieces encourages more formalism.

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