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