My rejection spreadsheets

My spreadsheets of rejections are growing. Here are their current sizes -

	Magazines	Texts
Prose	165	95
Poetry	61	136

Conclusion: I write more poetry than prose, yet I send to many more prose magazines than poetry magazines.

Here are the stats for how easily I give up -

	Times a mag has rejected me	Most times a text has been rejected
Prose	6 (Interpreter's House)	17
Poetry	34 (Acumen)	20

Conclusion: I'm just as stubborn with prose as with poetry, though I tend to give up sending to prose magazines if they've rejected me a few times. The reason I've had so many rejections from Acumen is that they've been around a long time, and between the rejections I've had successes too.

Similes/Metaphors in prose

Read these quickly, making a note of any you like, or any you think don't work in prose.

1. "He cranes himself nearer without moving either of his feet - looks increasingly like a ski jumper leaving the slope that will take him up inside thin air: that big downward slide that looks proper mad when you see it on the telly" (A.L. Kennedy)
2. "He sailed in on a sea of excuses" (Polly Samson)
3. [The dealer] "had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man's reputation" (Nicole Flattery)
4. "black as a sleeping whale" (Polly Samson)
5. "the sun rises like yeast from the bowl of the mountains" (Polly Samson)
6. "The morning's just-visible moon pulled the sea an inch inwards as if for a waltz" (Eley Williams)
7. “[the fenicular carriages are] built at an angle, like the dipping hat of someone who doesn't want to be recognised” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
8. "He looked as if he'd been poured into his clothes and someone had forgotten to say 'stop'" (G.K. Chesterton)
9. "The road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills" (Richard Brautigan)
10. "The washing piling up like nasty thoughts" (Tobias Hill)
11. "grass sprouts from the rafters of the Big House now, like hairs from a pensioner's nose" (Caitriona O'Reilly)
12. "with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else" (Dickens)
13. "[a voice] like an English lesbian preventing some rude tribesman from maltreating a donkey" (William S. Burroughs)
14. “The big willow down by the river thrashes with outbreaks of silver, upturned leaves like startled fish that can't escape” (A.L. Kennedy)
15. "Puking like a fruit machine" (Joseph O’Connor)
16. [She sees a white carrier bag flapping] "like a happy ghost" (Nikki Gemmell)
17. "the couple next to me ... are snogging so furiously that they could have dived for pearls since they last drew breath" (Jane Costello)

Now list the factors that influenced your decisions – are they funny? True? Distracting? Puzzling? Cliché? Purple prose? If they don't work in prose, could they work in poetry?

Some people keep a list of similes that can be added to stories. I keep a list of half-similes. Here are a few of them

• like feeling for a pulse
• like the silence after a story’s read at a workshop
• like an arsonist lingering in the growing crowd of spectators
• like a password you have to change
• like phonelines across a busy road

Interpretive frames

Everything you understand is received within a context. The context may be very general, but it still has an impact on interpretation - for example in an English context if you read the word kind you're unlikely to think that it means "child" in German, even if you know both languages. The context may be social (the expected behaviour at a funeral isn't that of a wedding). It may be quite specialised, though it uses words/images from wider contexts ("sheafs" in maths, for example). To understand something it may be necessary to first identify the context - before you can understand a story it helps to know whether it's for infants or adults, for example.

With some things, their context is intrinsic - text written in English looks like English; Abstract Expressionism looks like Abstract Expressionism. At other times, the observer needs to work out the context. Artists/poets/comedians may exploit that uncertainty. For example, a realist story may turn surreal. The observer may not want to play along with the game, or may be unable to. Someone unfamiliar with Surrealism may dismiss the later part of the story as unrealistic, normalising it as a dream, or a character gone mad.

These contexts go under various names - "interpretive frames", "discourse contexts", "genres", "language games". In conversation, the context can be fluid, but there are settings where there are "rules" to follow. At an appointment between a GP and a patient for example, a patient is expected to react to the doctor's invitation to informality, seeing it perhaps as an indication that there's nothing seriously wrong. The GP on the other hand might be trying to extract a less inhibited description of perhaps significant symptoms from the patient. The patient may try to keep the conversation light, knowing that you're not supposed to spoil the mood by giving bad news.

A feature of painting and sometimes poetry is that there are many schools/genres - overlapping, contrasting, etc. A painter may go round a gallery looking at the paintings and think that being a painter is enough to understand paintings, but until a painting's genre is identified, the meaning may be hard to interpret. A naked body needs to be interpreted differently depending on whether it's Religious Art or Impressionism.

How is someone new to Art expected to know all the genres? Dare one open one's mouth? It depends on the language game you're playing. If you're going around a gallery on a first date the rules will be different to if you're being interviewed for an Art College application. It helps to be aware of some genres/contexts but inevitably you won't know everything. And anyway, aren't some of the genres silly - Emperor's New Clothes?

In literature I think some modernist writing poses problems. Readers don't notice that there's been a shift of context, that the language game has changed, that the discourse frame is different. They think that because they're good with language in one context (writing novels, for example) they have transferable skills, but recognition of frame/context-changing may not be one of them.

How can one identify a context switch? I think in conversation we're alert (often subconsciously) to these nuances of register change - to how they're signalled and what their purpose is. In a text it's sometimes signalled by the use of italics or a paragraph break though sometimes there are sudden, unannounced context changes without there being body language or voice inflections to help. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is challenging -

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images

Suppose you didn't know that there were languages other than English. Line 2 wouldn't be identified as a language-switch, it would be nonsense - a misprint. But there are other switches here too - rapid changes of register (changes of intimacy, intensity and voice). Bakhtin suggested that poetry is marked by heteroglossia, which perhaps what this is.

I suspect that in writer's groups there's more of a variety of language games than in many other situations, and the switches are more sudden. Orwell's advice was prose style should be transparent, that you shouldn't be distracted by the language, but apparently he was in favour of The Waste Land (in principle anyway) and was obsessed for a while with Ulysses, more upset by its lack or political awareness than by its obscurity. I think that many prose pieces can still be read (by non-deconstructionists) as if language were like clear glass. However, I think much modern poetry (and especially discussion about poetry) requires an acceptance of the "play" (looseness) of language and context, of the (possibly) uncertain context affecting the meaning of words, of the context being retrospectively changed.

Magazine survival

What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers - you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils' aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.

In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.

Some paper magazines have become Web-only with mixed results. For some, the reputation that their paper issues built up over decades hasn't carried over to the web version. And whereas paper issues might be archived for posterity by libraries, web versions are less reliably archived (the British Library store a few).

Why don't more magazine editors give up? It's a labour of love (the excitement of discovering new talent), and who knows, a fairy godmother might suddenly appear. "Poetry", a Chicago magazine that started in 1912, battled on for years. They rejected several poems by a Mrs Ruth Lilly. In 2002 she gave the magazine about $100 million.

Workshop critiques and variety

An updated version of this article is on Litrefs Articles

Text versioning

When I write computer programs I use a free system (git with vscode) that with a click lets me save and recover versions. I can create branches - the diagram on the left shows how, from the bottom, a file evolved, splitting into branches then mostly merging. I can compare versions side-by-side, the differences colour-coded.

It's possible (I haven't done it, but I've seen it done) to analyse the development of a text, colour-coding the lines according to age or number-of-changes.

With a click I can back-up to the cloud (free - github). In my will I can leave the instructions to make the back-up visible to all. Nothing's lost - even my mistakes.

I could use the same system for poems/stories too. Already I have long/short versions of a few poems. Because of the various word limits for prose, I have 3 versions of a few texts. One recent short piece had so many UK/US issues (gear-sticks, supermarket trolleys) that I keep 2 versions of it. But I'd be most interested in watching how a story develops - which paragraphs changed the most? which paragraphs never changed? when were the growth spurts? (I think there's often an initial one, then I fiddle around, then I realise what the story's about and quickly add many more words).

The transparency of language

George Orwell suggested that prose/essay style should be transparent - the less we notice it the better. With poetry, the language is more like stained glass than a clear window. The stained glass can be more interesting than what's beyond.

Sometimes in Book Groups people get frustrated by the comments about language - they want to focus on the characters and their emotions, not syntax. It's a fair enough approach - though we can't know about the characters unless we read the words first, we might not miss much by "seeing through" the words in the first instance. That approach doesn't work well with novels like "Finnegans Wake". That's an extreme case, though even with more mainstream novels it may not be ideal - 'Grief is the thing with feathers' merits careful reading, and a review of an Alan Hollingsworth novel said that you could read it just for the language.

I was wondering about how other arts manage in this regard.

• If you watch Macbeth, you'd certainly comment on the acting. If you watch a new play, you're more likely to comment on the plot and characters
• Looking at a Van Gogh, you're likely to comment on the brushwork and how it contributes to the effect. A Vermeer doesn't provoke such comments.
• If you've been to film school, you might watch a film with more awareness of camera angles and background music than the general public does. One person might say "Didn't you notice how lonely Sue was?" and another reply "Didn't you notice how the Sue character was always framed alone, even in a crowd?"

In Poetic Opacity (How to Paint Things with Words - Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, 2014) the authors take the painting/writing analogy further, listing some ways that a poem might be opaque - "flowery, obscure, metaphorical, rich with allusion, ambiguous in narrative voice, and constructed in metric schemes that depart away from ordinary linguistic usage". They point out how technical writing can have a different type of obscurity, and that "Aesthetic opacity stems from our conventions for individuating artworks. As Goodman (1968) observes, every form of art comes with implicit norms for tolerable variation."

I think I tolerate more opacity in prose than most readers do. That's partly because of the "Macbeth" point above - I've read so many books that not many are "new", so I'm interested in how the familiar theme is re-interpreted. I read more "Van Gogh" style novels than Vermeer ones. And I certainly have a "film student" approach to reading a book.

Floods and trickles

Some people (I've seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I'm one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it's a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there's a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences -

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don't want to waste it. I'm likely to use it even where it doesn't quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They're likely to be overwritten.
• I'm usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it's finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I'm not going to write novels.

I think my creativity is not unconstrained - it's more like that of an engineer subject to the laws of physics than of an artist. Working within constraints has never troubled me. Indeed, pushing against contraints gives me dynamism - if you're stuck in a cell, you might as well explore all of it.

Of course my lack of ideas is a consequence of premature filtering, and there are workshops to deal with that. At a recent one I went to the tutor said don't worry about clichés because they can be edited out in a rewrite. I'll try to use that approach more often.

Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair 2025

I visited today's Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair in London. Poetry book publishing still looks healthy. The books are well produced too.

Getting short stories published (with a UK bias)

Let’s face it, short stories aren’t popular in the UK. In 2002 "fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad" (Debbie Taylor, Mslexia). Things have improved since then – mostly because of small presses. Even so, when a collection does well it’s because the author’s already famous - Jojo Moyes, Tom Hanks, etc.

Before you try to publish a story collection (or publish it yourself) it’s a good idea to get individual stories published (not least because publishers look in magazines for authors). There are several ways to find the right place for your stories -

• Each year Salt publishes “Best British Short Stories”. All the stories have been previously published, so you can find out where the stories come from. Alas, none of the 20 stories in “Best British Short Stories 2024” came from English literary magazines, largely because hardly any exist (Scotland’s “Postbox” is the only UK paper-based story magazine I know). The best-represented magazine was US-based (online) “Fictive Dream” with 3 Flashes from UK-based authors.
• If you like a short story collection, look at its Acknowledgements page to get ideas for where to send stories.
• There are several online lists of magazines that accept stories. One of the most useful ones is Brecht de Poortere's, freely downloadable from https://www.brechtdepoortere.com/rankings which tries to rank them objectively, 1st being “The New Yorker” and 1126th being “Witcraft”. It’s a spreadsheet with many columns of information so you can add your own formulae to search etc.
• “Stand”, “London Magazine”, “Granta”, “Dream Catcher”, "Confingo", “Orbis”, and “Under the Radar” are about the only UK print literary magazines that print stories between poems. In the USA and Ireland the situation is much better.
• There used to be quite a few themed anthologies – SF in particular. Nowadays they're not usually open-submission - they tend to be themed around illness, ethnicity, LGBTQ, etc
• There are Facebook groups that tell you what opportunities are available – e.g. “Submissions: Magazines and publishers”
• Many magazines use Submittable to deal with submissions. Magazines have to pay if they get too many monthly submissions. Some magazines stop accepting submissions once they reach their limit, so submit early in the month. Duosuma - is an alternative to Submittable, more focussed on writers’ needs. They have details on over 7,500 publishers/agents which can be searched using over 20 search criteria – free for a trial period.
• You often need to pay to submit nowadays - $3 is typical. Sometimes you get money if your story is published. If you’re going to pay, perhaps you might as well enter competitions. Several produce anthologies of the long-listed pieces, and publishers notice prize-winners. I wouldn’t bother entering competitions unless the 1st prize is at least 100 times the entry fee.
• Flash is the big growth area. There are many online options available, and collections are increasingly common. Flash can be as long as 1500 words - a short story!

Warning – for any decent magazine, acceptance rates are likely to be below 1%.

Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I've already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I've not read Laurie Bolger's book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger's anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I'm looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father's death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn't respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn't a space. This all makes sense to me - some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be "stage" versions of "page" poems.

Spain

I stayed a week in Spain, mainly based in Sevilla, which I've not seen before. Beer's cheap, drivers are very well behaved, and OAPs get 50% discounts on many of the attractions. We walked over 15km/day, seeing most of the attractions and chancing upon other things - covered markets, the Hungarian pavilion of the Seville Expo '92, a multi-venue craft fair in courtyards/studios etc. We tried a tapas bar, a vegan restaurant, a roof-top bar, a Michelin-listed restaurant (I tried calamares) and the same "family restaurant" twice.

We didn't hire bikes - cycling up to Toledo would have been a struggle. Once there, I saw chess sets, swords and marzipan. Jews, Muslims and Christians sometimes lived together, sometimes fought.

In Cordoba, the Mezqita (Mosque) incorporates a 16th century cathedral. The river's wide enough to have had 4 watermills. A big Arabic waterwheel had been copied.

Culture wars continue to this day. Here someone (a purist Italian maybe) has defaced a menu, crossing out the Hawaii option.

In a church shop they were selling this nativity scene accessory - a version of the "Jesus saves" joke.

The Alcázar was impressive. The peacocks performed for the tourists. The place appeared in Game of Thrones. We also went into the smaller but still impressive Casa de Pilatos - a private house

The Arabs in Sevilla had a notable poet long ago.

The later Cervantes' name and characters appear in several places

This bookstall was part of the big flea market in Madrid.

I hardly saw any charity shops. This, I think, is a charity bookshop.

And here's an English language bookshop.

Madrid has a cemetery of 5 million graves (we saw it from the train), and much else besides.

States of Independence, 2025

Today I visited Leicester's "States of Independence" event - crowded as usual with small press publishers and writers (Roy Marshall, Emma Lee, etc). I bought the 2020 and 2021 "Leicester Writes Short Story Prize" Anthologies (a bargain), and "Flash Fusion" (by South Asian Writers) - the pieces I've heard from it so far sounded good.

Sleepy heads

When Italian artists began to imitate classical statues, they copied the blank eyes. On rare occasions a statue’s eyes were closed, not blank. If the figure was in action we had to imagine that their pose showed us their dream. More commonly such statues were lying, or at least their head was sideways, like this sculpture in a village outside Cambridge.

Sophie Cave's "The Floating Heads" (Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) uses another trope - floating, which is more to do with dreaming, I'd guess.

In painting, the "sleeping lover" is a genre, but that's not what Dali's depicting in "Sleep" - the head looks more like a dirigible that's lost all hope, precariously propped up. In paintings, closed eyes can mean death, but except for crucifixions statues of the dead are rare. I suppose using stone to represent death is too literal.

But couldn’t these figure with eyes closed be blinking? We spend about 2% of our waking life with our eyes closed. Perhaps Venus de Milo was caught in the moment of blinking so we can see her but she can’t see us. Nowadays kids sometimes paint eyes on their eyelids. Eyes, after all, are the windows of the soul. If Michelangelo had known that old statues had painted eyes, would he still have given David sculpted irises?

Vona Groake and Karen Solie

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room - a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristram Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I've read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening's poetry - "fog makes surprising what it does not conceal", etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance to read one's poems out is worth paying for. I didn't read but at least half the attendees did.

Character-based stories - trad vs frag

Traditional character-based stories often depend on traditional notions of self and psychology - religious ideas of Soul having morphed into Freudian concepts. Stories reach a climax when the protagonist learns/accepts something of their "true self" after removing repression or discovering/remembering some key event in their past.

Trad writers who write for/about themselves tend to measure success by how well they think they've expressed in words what's inside themselves.

Various 20th century developments have confused the situation -

• Modernism - Kafka, etc
• The trend towards interpersonal methods of growth
• Socialisation (including the effects of social media, role-play, compartmentalisation, etc)
• A distrust of unification and tidiness, and a greater tolerance for neurodivergent PoVs

- all contributing to a more fragmentary concept of self/selves and a consequent change in the character-based story template. Linear plots with epiphanies and happy endings no longer seem to model typical characters. Frag writers who write for/about themselves might measure success by how many Likes and hits one of their online personas get.

I write trad stories, but not very well. When I write frag stories, I'm conscious of omitting the very features that people would like in a trad story. I don't know if my frag stories are any better than the trad ones, but there are more outlets for them in this fragmentary publishing world.

See also

• Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation
• People who need people (a workshop about character)
• Empathy and literature

Punctuating poetry

There is

• text that uses full punctuation and no line-breaks - this is how prose is usually rendered. Some poems use this style too.
• text that uses full punctuation and line-breaks - this is how much poetry is rendered. Punctuation has various uses - "there was a movement away from rhythmical-oratorical punctuation to grammatical-logical usage between about 1580 and 1680 ... It was only in the decade of the 1840's that the grammatical-logical theories finally triumphed." (Mindele Triep). Line-breaks have several uses too. Poets often break lines at the end of clauses, which is where punctuation usually appears. This leads one to wonder if both line-breaks and punctuation are needed.
• text that uses line-breaks and no punctuation - some poetry is written like this. The amount of punctuation perhaps "reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language" (Baron). Or maybe the poets feels that the little black marks make the page more messy. In general, readers have little difficulty adapting to the style. All the same, I have a few objections to it
  • If the poetry does need to be parsed into phrases, the structures need to be simple, otherwise readers will need to backtrack in order to work out whether ";", ":" or "," is missing, or whether the sentence is a question. But why risk the reader needing to backtrack? Why simplify the sentence structure?
  • Line-breaks already have several uses. Burdening them with further duties risks overloading them, making the reading process harder
  • Line-breaks seem in some poems rather a blunt instrument, used in poetry like they are in tele-prompts and adverts as an alternative to underlining.
  If line-breaks and punctuation seem to be doing much the same job, why not jettison line-breaks rather than punctuation? Perhaps because the writer, like Tony Curtis, thinks that "writing in lines ... is all that distinguishes it from all other forms of writing".
• text that uses line-breaks and few punctuation marks - Some poets use varying amounts of indentation and between-word spacing, partly to compensate for the loss of punctuation. Commas can be replaced by between-word spaces. Full-stops can be replaced by line-breaks or paragraph breaks. Other punctuation marks (e.g. apostrophes) can be used. To me, the big white spaces can make the page look messy.

For more on punctuation see poetry punctuation

The Friday Poem and The North - poetic language

In "The Friday Poem" (31st January 2025) Stephen Payne articulates a feeling I've not been able to put into words - how the language of some poets is slightly, persistently, non-standard. Reviewing 'The Island in the Sound' by Niall Campbell he writes that "This is immediately interesting writing. The syntax is ... reduced or disrupted ... There are a few part-rhymes ... There's the playfulness ... the verb-choices are novel: I'm sure I've never seen 'comb' as an intransitive verb meaning "to become a honeycomb" or something similar."

It's not a style I can do. I wish I could. In my self-doubting moods I feel that poets who write like this are "thinking in poetry" rather than translating into poetry. The review points out that "All these aspects of the surface language – syntax, sound effects and phrase-making – ... combine to achieve a dense and intense lyricism. ". There are radical ways for poets to make readers distrust words/language. I think this gentler style stops language being transparent (the way it tends to be in prose) without making it opaque.

"The North" (issue 68, August 2022) is subtitled "the Caring issue". It's guest-edited by Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia. Many of the 150+ poems baffle me, not least because of the surface language. It's probably unhelpful to quote extracts of poems out of context but I'll do it anyway -

• "First I died to my feet. Then I died to my pride"
• "I'm neither dreaming nor/ running release me slow the/ attic skylight floods so much/ rain glass grey the day ahead/ blurred a chrysanthemum/ paperweight in the palm a/ flaming porcupine" (the poem justified like prose to form a rectangle)
• "So let's asphalt cognition behind, grandly dandled by on cloud rests we lay.// One bicycle wheel is left to signal to the intermitting friendship of a butterfly:"

Lucy Allsopp has 2 side-by-side poems each entitled "Collateral". The poems are the same except that one uses "/" instead of line-breaks.

I liked "Predation" by Caitlin Young (maybe because it's micro-fiction). I think there's only one poem that used a standard form - Sarah Tait's "Brack" rigourously uses iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme being roughly xaxa xbxb ccccdd.

Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review

A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid.The've all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I've not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.

• The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags' reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
• Magma's issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn't one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
• The North has so much in it that there's bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They've rejected me the last few times I've tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck - have they changed or have I?
• Poetry Review is the Poetry Society's magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit'n'miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn't like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews - too much waffle and mutual praise. What's wrong with good old-fashioned essays?

In the mags I read there were 2 multi-page sequences that included illustrations - I didn't like them.

There were 3 poems that used graphics in other ways (a flowchart in Poetry Review, a boardgame in Magma, and Bingo in The North - click on the images to see clearer versions). I always want such experiments to succeed. In these examples I didn't see how the words had much to do with the form. Why does the flowchart just use rectangles? Why aren't there snakes in the game? Do the items in each row/column of the bingo card have anything in common?

Adding variety to poetry books

A poetry book by a single author can contain many types of variety, some more welcome than others.

• Voice/Subject - books that have the variety of a general anthology risk failing to engage readers/reviewers who want to find unifying themes or hope to pigeonhole the poet. Books can be split into sections to give them more "structure".
• Style - Can readers cope with a book that only has villanelles? It's a struggle. What if it's full of free-form poems that all start with a first-person anecdote and end with an insight? That too can be tiresome after a while, though the uniformity is less easily noticed.
• Quality - Most commonly, the best pieces are at the start and the end. To lessen the sag in the middle, a good poem or two can be put in the middle like tent-poles. If there are too many weak poems, readers might wonder why the poet didn't wait another few years, or produce a pamphlet instead of a book. Rather than pad with weak poems, some poets have quirky "high-risk" poems which some readers might love and others hate - a more worthy justification of the book-length.
• Layout - Some poets only write poems whose stanzas are similarly sized rectangles even though the poems aren't metrical. The eye might be bored by this, so some poets add variety - a mix of long and short lines, indentation, right-aligned lines, redaction, extra spaces between words, landscape mode, using no punctuation, using no line-breaks, using "&" instead of "and", using "/" and "//" instead of line-breaks and stanzas, etc.
• Fonts/color - Variation of these features seems unpopular. Text is nearly always black (cheaper if printed, but online there's no need for restraint). There's no variation of font family or size within a poem, or even in a book.

More on AI and poetry

In addition to my earlier post about AI here are some further thoughts and pieces of information

• The latest Acumen magazine has an article by Robert Griffiths. He suggests that programs like Bard may encourage us to think more about how poems get written. For example, can computers produce lines that are unexpected and effective?
• I think AI is best at "Well written, competent" mainstream poetry, hermit-crab forms, and some styles of avant-garde poems (e.g. N+7). Will poets shy away from writing in these styles? How did artists react to the advent of photography? They didn't flee from Realism - photographic accuracy had rarely been their intention. Indeed, the idea of Hyperrealism only appeared decades later.
  Chessplayers have been affected by chess programs. Advancing rook's pawns has become more popular, and knowing that their opponents have prepared using the same computers, they deliberately play sub-optimal moves to thwart the preparations. I can imagine more poets veering toward daring imagery/styles rather than trying to emulate the Masters.
• I sometimes write on autopilot, using much the same techniques as AI. For example, I try to write tidy final lines that allude to more than one earlier detail.
• The UK's ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) surveyed their members about AI. See A Brave New World
• In December the UK government launched a consultation on generative AI and copyright – see Copyright and artificial intelligence
• Several articles last year used a paper from Nature - AI-generated poetry ... - to suggest that people preferred AI-generated poetry to human-generated poetry.

Line-breaks in prose

In Seam 27 many 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. Only now can we acknowledge this development as part of the mainstream, having witnessed this interest in narrative structures filter through to the work of Andrew Motion and beyond.

I don't know how true it is, even if only UK poetry is considered, but I have read quite a lot of poetry for which this applies. What has changed over the fifty years - poets? the world? readers? the market? Poetry has expanded to accommodate more demotic language. And in the UK, the market for short stories has shrunk while the Flash scene has matured.

Nowadays if a short story writer started writing shorter stories, I don't think that the addition of line-breaks would be an obvious step to take, let alone an inevitable one. Micro prose is viable - Flash exists.

I can see why a narrative poet might cling to line-breaks so that they can continue sending their work to the usual places. Perhaps these writers feel that only by presenting their short pieces as "poetry" will readers approach the text with the appropriate diligence.

But the market is changing. More poetry magazines now accept "poetry/micros". Just as poets discovered that end-rhyme/form wasn't a defining feature, so nowadays we're freed of the obligation to use line-breaks, which doesn't mean we have to write "prose poetry".

But old habits die hard. In the most recent "Under the Radar" magazine, the first piece in the poetry section begins with "The world's population of violinists/ has decreased recently/ and the remaining musicians gather in Vienna./ They decide to create an archive of/ violin tunes.", ending with "The computer has been switched off/ and the bow has stopped moving./ Raindrops stroke the strings/ and the violin makes his own voice.". I like it. I think it would fit comfortably into most Flash magazines nowadays were the line-breaks removed. I can't see what purpose they serve.

Poets writing about their poems

In "Don't ask me what I mean" (Picador, 2003), a collection of articles by poets about their books, Billy Collins wrote "Performing an act of literary criticism on your own work is a little like do-it-yourself dentistry: a sloppy affair at best, not to mention the pain involved for writer and reader alike".

This feeling seems common. Poets, even (especially?) confessional ones, aren't often open about the craft of their poems. Ask them why a poem's stanzas have 6 short lines (rather than 3 longer ones), or ask them which poems wouldn't be in their book were it 10 pages shorter, and see what happens. More daringly, ask them if that middle stanza is really earning its keep, or whether the obscurity is necessary, or whether the self-imposed requirement to make the poem a sonnet really justifies all that padding.

I can understand why poets are defensive - there's little to gain, and some questions of that ilk don't have useful answers - maybe on another day the stanzas might have been 3-lined, maybe the poem wasn't written for people like the questioner. On the other hand, there might be aspects that the poet wants to advertise - perhaps devices are used that aren't obvious on a first reading.

I've seen some poets open up -

• At the end of Best American Poetry (BAP) and Best British Poetry anthologies, poets sometimes write usefully about how their poem ended up the way it did. Often though, they cloud the issue, describing what they've done without convincingly explaining why -
  • 'Shattered Sonnets' that sort of simultaneously distort, discard, and highlight formal, thematic, and rhetorical sonnet conventions (Olena Kalytiak Davis, BAP 2000)
  • I deliberately ended the first four stanzas with '-ing', which is a kind of cheater's rhyme, and the last two with the imperfect rhyme of 'combat' and 'scratch.' I threw in 'protest' and 'trust' near the end, for fun. Between the cheating, the imperfection, and the distance between rhymes, I hope that the poem reads as free verse, yet looks formal because of the tercets. The combination of the free and constrained, of modern and traditional, seemed suited to the subject, writing to and from the canon (Adrienne Su, BAP 2000)
  • The poem was a liberation to write, technically speaking; though it rhymes, the rhyme scheme changes every stanza, and the meter is deliberately clunky (Mary Jo Salter, BAP 2000)
  • Of course, what I intended is irrelevant. I had hoped to play with metaphors for the artist's relationship to a life of service in places of political or natural power. The couplet form seemed intimate ... I had given myself an assignment to count numbers of words per lines, and to make rapid shifts in types of reality (Brenda Hillan, BAP 2000)
  • Once I chose that first line of the poem, the mystery, magic, and music of poetic language took over, and I rode it like a musician rides a melody, or a surfer rides a wave. It was a wonderful experience (Quincy Troupe, BAP 2000)
• Jonathan Edwards often writes informatively about his poems, most interestingly in his article about How to renovate a Morris Minor, taking us through earlier drafts (it's easier to be objective about drafts than about final versions).
• Kona MacPhee wrote an excellent "Companion" booklet for her "Perfect Blue" poetry book, which was online for a while.
• I added a web site for my poetry booklet at litrefsmovingparts.blogspot.com