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.

Poetry and ordinary people

The term "ordinary people" has come up in Paxman-inspired poetry discussion lately. I confess that I don't meet many ordinary people. Over 50% of Cambridge people have at least a degree (the 3rd highest percentage in the country), so it's not an ordinary place. The local paper sometimes has a poem on the letters page. Here's part of "Pylons" from the latest issue we have

When the weather is clear, no mist or rain I can see pylons stomping across the plain Arms out stretched they stride the land Or with hands on hips in cornfields stand, ... They step over motorways with ease And straddle roads and lanes where ere they please

I don't know how typical this is of the newspaper's poetry, but I imagine the editors know what goes down well. It's interesting to see how the formal features are dealt with. The rhyme is tight, the rhythm less so - there are 4 beats a line with a variable number of unstressed syllables. There seems little pressure to regularise the rhythm except for the use of "ere" (I presume "e'er" was intended).

The language has rather a "retro" feel - inversions aren't avoided, and compression isn't a priority.

Using pylons in this way as subject matter (rather than writing "Pylon poetry") is tempting - I've done it (though with much less anthropomorphising), and so, I imagine, have many other people. Often the pylons hold skipping ropes. Here they're mostly on the move. The ending's not so different to one of mine in sentiment.

Strung together for ever more until they reach some distant shore

I imagine that ordinary people read little contemporary poetry written by "poets". In a way, poems like "Pythons" take advantage of its readers' ordinariness. For that reason (and others) I'd feel rather awkward writing such poetry; exploitative. I wouldn't be writing for my peers.

And yet, I think I do sometimes write for non-poetry readers. Whether they'd be called ordinary is another matter. I have in mind people who have to read or write prose carefully, people prepared to challenge and question. But they won't know about the aims of some modern movements - Flarf, LangPo, etc - and they won't have much patience re Oulipo, minimalism, or anything that looks too much like the literary prose they usually read. So the poetry needs to allude to familiar material, and the aesthetics need to be familiar. Alternatively (and I've tried this too) it can be explained.

I went with my wife to see Luke Wright. His allusions to events and TV programs in his childhood were beyond her. He, John Cooper Clarke, rap artists, Wendy Cope, Pam Ayres and Roger McGough are amongst those who at least sometimes write poetry that ordinary people will pay attention to, though not the same "ordinary people" in each case. And John Cooper Clarke fans probably won't go for "Pylons".

The Best British Poetry 2011

I've now read The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden, (Salt, 2011) - my comments are on my reviews site. Here are some extracts -

This anthology picks solely from magazines (both paper and online), an idea I welcome - I subscribe to 7 of the magazines listed, and read several more. It's modeled on the US version, conceptually and visually, with nearly 40 pages of notes. I didn't find it an easy read. Even mainstream poets are represented by their more artistically engaged pieces, free from the distractions of unemployment fears, computer games, car accidents, mobile contracts, sleeze, comedy, and aging parents.

The most recent rejection slip I received said "I found these poems difficult to read. ... Try writing more simply and directly. Complex things _can_ be said in a simple, clear way". In what way do I find the poems in this book harder than mine? Some of the poets clearly don't like making things too obvious.

• Abigail Perry rather gives the game away when she writes "It grew out of my revisions for another poem, one cluttered with clumsy polysyllables that were, nonetheless, semantically economical: they nailed the point I'd been trying to make. It was this that sounded the warning bell. A poem, I realised, should never 'get to the point'." (p.145)
• Katharine Kilalea writes "On the surface, it seems a difficult poem, but it's only hard work when you try to make it meaningful" (p.134). It depends of course on what is meant by "meaningful".
• Eoghan Walls wrote "I stuck to half-rhymes, and hid them from the eye by splitting the rhymes with a verse-break" (p.152). Why? What would have been wrong with rhyming couplets (though "rising/sink", and "cities/sky" are barely half-rhymes)?

In the olden days, writing poetry was a 2 stage process for some people. Poets had ideas that they dumdeedumdeed into a poem, choosing a title to pre-empt "What's it about?" questions. Even famous poets would to-and-fro between poetry and prose to clarify plot or sound. The 2nd stage was sometimes clumsily done (the meaning mangled to fit the form, words inverted, strange words used to satisfy the rhyme scheme).

Times have changed. Poems needn't pander to the masses or even to the non-poet intelligensia. "What's it about?" is no longer a question to fear. Moreover, there's no point anyone shouting "He's wearing no clothes!" because the masses aren't listening, and fellow poets are faced with too many vested Creative Writing interests. Some poets, consciously or otherwise, still write in 2 stages, the 2nd stage rendering the ideas to suit the expectations of the era. The aim is no longer to be easily paraphrasable - au contraire, the 2nd stage brings in language effects to disrupt the standard prose routes from words to meaning - Giles Goodland wrote that he "let the words play around".

But what is the equivalent of the beginner Formalist's clumsiness? Some poets in this book seem more to be avoiding simplicity than confronting complexity. They rough up the surface of their poems until their poem might be given the benefit of the doubt. My problem with many of these poems is that I didn't see what this 2nd stage added to the works; it obscured rather than augmented the effects.

Stephen Burt in his "Close Calls with Nonsense" wrote that he rather misses "in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries". I rather miss those features too. And linguistic transparency. If readers can touch the bottom of a poem (rather than feeling out of their depth) it's not a disaster. If the water's clear enough for them to see their own feet, all the better. I think it's a viable form of poetry (indeed, Lumsden's written many good poems of that type in the past), but it's almost entirely absent from this selection, which after all, isn't supposed to be representative.

For those who want an update on "Identity Parade", or want to see the type of British poetry that becoming increasingly popular, this book is just the job. It's a book that looks ahead, rather than back, and ambitious and/or career UK poets would do well to read it. It's useful for non-UK readers too - they'll get a feel for the type of UK poetry that doesn't always reach foreign shores on paper.

Poem drafts

"Smiths Knoll"

I recently send a poem to "Smiths Knoll". The editors replied saying that "We ... had a couple of doubts". I could have addressed those doubts by tweaking a couple of lines. Of the 18 lines I ended up leaving one line alone. One line in the re-write is new, the others have been tweaked, sometimes reversing their meaning. It was a recent poem - I felt no resistance to re-writing, it was a continuation of what I'd stopped doing only a week before.

"Making Poems"

This week I've been reading "Making Poems", edited by Todd Davis and Erin Murphy (State University of New York, 2010) in which poets have a chance to write about the development of one of their poems. I found Shara McCallum's explanation (p.89) the most interesting, bringing up several issues that occurred to me during re-writing

• The first draft was entitled "The Unreliable Narrator Speaks to her Audience"
• The second draft, written on the same day (May 5th 2003), had an alternative title of "Penelope Refigured" ("The uncertainty partly reflected my discomfort with the self-consciousness of the first title ... Penelope, a figure of myth I'd long been interested in ... seemed capable of the kind of utterance that comprised the first drafts opening lines ... Formally, the poem began as a single stanza but in the second draft migrated to quatrains, which were present as a unit of sound and rhetoric to my ear even in the first 'block' version"
  Already there are interesting developments - the sentiments have found an embodiment that was waiting to be used. And we have an explanation for the poem's shape
• "By the time I moved from my journal to the computer (draft three, on May 9), I changed the stanzaic structure again, trimming it to tercets. Playing with stanza lengths has, for the past ten years, been a revision tool to help me refine language. Determining a fixed length is not an arbitrary process but one governed by the dominant stanza length I see emerging as I revise the poem. Working with a defined stanza forces me to make difficult decisions about which images, word, and lines are best for conveying a poem's idea or feeling"
  I like the idea of using stanza lengths as a revision tool - a way to focus on different words, see the poem in a new light. Because revising involves reading the same poem many times, it helps to have a device that stops you becoming over-familiar with the text. She lets the dominant stanza length force regularity on the poem. Why? I'm not sure. She write that "the couplet offers the most space for pauses and reflectivity in a poem, the tercet a bit less, and so on. Because I favor a controlled pacing and tempo, I almost always select a fixed stanza length" so perhaps this poem has an unchanging pace and tempo?
• "'Penelope' was published in tercets in the Fall 2004 issue of the Antioch Review". Here are the start and the ending.

  I know I am losing you now when I need you to hear me the most, speaking across this barrier of time. Listen, if I am not an ocean, I am nothing. If I am not a world unto myself, I have to know it. Lemon rinds in the dried brook-bed, fireflies in the face of uncertain evil - ... Nothing left but me scratching out these words, waiting for you message in return.

• A poem's publication often ends its development, but not this time. "When I began putting together my third book, weaknesses in the writing became glaring to me ... [the poem] underwent another ten or so drafts over the course of the next two years. .... In November 2004, it became 'Dear Country' ... The title change, I hoped, would make it possible for the poem to 'fit' into that sequence ... By late 2005, I dropped that idea and went back to 'Penelope' ... I began to be ruthless with the poem, cutting any line or stanza that seemed weak or disconnected in the least. Stanzas one, four, five, and seven [the last] went onto the chopping block in their entirety ... I was left with a muddle of language that could not be reassembled in the old way ... The poem begins with a series of images, which I think renders it less emphatic in tone at the outset ... Three years after the poem began, on May 23, 2006, it came to rest in its final form.". Here are the start and the ending

  Lemon rinds in the dried brook-bed, Fireflies in the face of uncertain evil - ... If I am not an ocean, I am nothing. If I am not a world unto myself, I have to know it.

• But the story doesn't end there. It eventually appeared as "My Mother as Penelope" in her 2011 book "This Strange Land". In an interview with Geoffrey Philp she says "In my most recent book, personal experiences with mothering and marriage are set against historical narratives and myths. Still, writing autobiography is not what I am after as a poet. The details of my life are important to my poems but must be transformed to serve the poems' ends: they must enact the struggle for self-knowledge that is at the core of poetry. ... When I write, I often find myself grappling with issues of language and identity, as well as the interconnection between the two; but when I think about what I hope most for my poems, it is that they will approach these concerns (and any others) in a manner that is translucent."

The poem's been on a long journey - from a block to couplets; from an anonymous voice through a myth (Penelope) to a particular voice (the mother). The new context has given it extra meanings. The issues of appearance and content interacted as the drafts progressed, though I remain unconvinced that the layout is as beneficial to the reader as it's been to the writer. I think the poem's best lines are mostly those that were in the first draft. In particular the first stanza of the Antioch Review version sounds like a tacked-on intro. Perhaps I should change my older poems too, even if they have been published.

"Poetry as Research"

Also this week I read "Poetry as Research" (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010) in which David Ian Hanauer reports his finding on the development of poems (which he says confirms other research). He identifies 4 stages -

• Activation - real world events; generated ideas, sensory images and sound, intertextual influences, poetry writing intention
• Discovery -
• Permutation - replacement was preferred followed by deletion and addition which suggests that poets rework within the existing framework.
• Finalization - decision to view poem as a finished object

The Discovery and Permutation phases cycle around until the poet's satisfied. Nothing very new here, though the nature of the rewrites is interesting. Armstrong ("The Poetic Dimensions of Revision", 1986) reports that expert poets delete more often than they add, and replace more than they delete. Armstrong ("A Process Perspective in Poetic Discourse", 1984) found that experts spend far more time revising than novices do. Also interesting are the decision processes involved at the end, the moment when it becomes a product.

Notes about "Iron Birds"

Some audience reaction after a recent reading suggests that "Iron Birds" from my booklet needs an explanation. Unless you know about Cargo Cults, "Iron Birds" will be tricky, so here's an info-dump: when technologically advanced cultures visit more primitive, isolated ones, they often give presents. After the visitors leave, a religion might develop in the hope of getting more presents, based on rituals - building imitation landing strips and planes, or imitating the behaviour of people with walkie-talkies, etc. The title alludes to the primitives' impression of planes. Some isolated poetry writers are being compared to Cargo Culters. The poem begins

You lay out words to tempt them,
another poem about poetry.

Later they're mockingly told to "Murder the medicine men. Empty your shelves." (medicine men are the wise men, the lecturers; shelves can have both food and books). At the end the hopeful visions of vapour trails are compared to scratch marks fading on a lover's body.

Mixed Reviews

Of course, one wouldn't expect all the reviews of a work to agree. What's interesting is in what ways they differ. For example, sometimes critics may disagree over whether a work is good while agreeing what criteria are appropriate. I've already written an article about Mixed Reviews in general, and I sometimes (e.g. with Landing Light) try to compare reviews of a particular book, but now that 3 reviews of my Moving Parts pamphlet have appeared (and I've unearthed a review I wrote), it's time to re-visit the topic. What I noticed was that

• No-one mentioned the blurb or acknowledgements
• No phrase was multiply-quoted, though "Windmills" (perhaps the weakest poem) was quoted from twice.
• "abstract[ion]" appears 6 times. The main issue seems to be whether the "abstract" is sufficiently balanced by the concrete or emotional, and whether the juxtaposed or paradoxical parts are resolved.

HappenStance have a multiple-reviewer scheme - the online description gives you the idea. I suspect that knowing they're not the only reviewer makes the reviewers more likely to say what they think.

More generally,

• A.L.Kennedy on her Books & Reviews page assesses some reviews of her books.
• Some general review comparison sites exist - e.g. metacritic and reviewcentre
• Both Everydayfiction and Fictionaut have peer-review assessment for unpublished stories

Foreign influences

• "Unlike British verse, [US poetry's] life force derives less from European crosswinds" (Simic)
• "The 'mainstream' had morphed over time into a difficult slipstream for any British poet to stay afloat in, so choppy had the cross-currents buffeting England from across the Channel become" (James Rother)

Well, maybe, but I've not noticed such a strong European influence. The French poets barely get a look-in, though our theorists mention their theorists. You can't go wrong in claiming that Rilke's one of your favourites, but the proof of influence's not very clear. We were quite keen on Holub and Milosz once. Nobel prizewinners are briefly famous.

I'd have thought that Commonwealth influences would be stronger than European. Alzi was born in Pakistan. Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London then moved to Guyana. And there are many 2nd generation writers - Daljit Nagra for example, Jackie Kay, etc. Walcott's a frequent visitor. So is Australia's Les Murray. These writers have widened the mainstream. Have they influenced others? We write more ghazals but do we read more Tagore? Maybe. I suspect however, that WASP poets are more cautious than they used to be about dealing with "exotic" topics and multiculturalism.

Translations of course are a source of influence too. Cavafy and Seferis are quite often translated, but not as much as Homer or Dante. I sometimes wonder if a UK poet's interest in decades-old European poetry is a reaction against modern US poetry trends - languages considered more important than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its aftermath.

There's perhaps more of a USA-Italy link than a UK-Italy one, though Jamie McKendrick lived in Italy for a while, editing an anthology. I wonder how many 20th century Italian poets could be named by UK readers? Are Montale or Ungaretti listed as influences by any UK poets?

Games Poets Play

The writer, formerly mythologiser, prophet, or at least specialist on love and death has become expert in subtle and wayward intellectual sophistries. Of these, poetry games are the most advanced. Often they are acknowledged only at a subconscious level - but the reader is always the innocent victim (see Tag below.)

• Piggy in the Middle - The author and text engage in teasing allusions - the reader in the middle never catching on
• Snap - The poet quotes from other poets without acknowledging sources openly. Recognition by readers convinces them that they have won some of the 'cards'
• Murder in the Dark - A traditional poetic form has been slaughtered: readers must discover which one, how, and (the hardest bit) why. Sonnets are frequently the victims.
• Ain't it Awful - The game is borrowed from Berne, who suggests it is also played on a social level. Also known as I can make you cry.
• Hunt the Thimble - The poem suggests a hard nugget of eternal truth can be found if the reader works hard enough. Text may also implant 'getting warmer' and 'getting colder' indicators.
• Chase the Lady - Coined re Shakespeare's sonnets, a sequence in which some individual poems can be understood, giving readers the idea that if they work hard enough all can be understood; there are, however, deliberate decoys ('They that have the power to hurt but will do none..')
• Pop goes the weasel - Here the last word of the poem appears to provide a sudden 'answer', which is, of course, not the answer.
• Pin the tail on the donkey - Readers are asked to add a good final line to an otherwise hopeless poem.
• What am I? - Deliberate conventions of poetry are challenged to make reader insecure.
• Musical Bumps - Unexpected disruptions of rhythmic patterning when least expected. Readers tolerate this in anticipation of the 'prize'.
• Charades - For some reason that is never explained the most sensible and informative mode of expression can't be used, so the poet must resort to obscure, sometimes risible, alternatives
• Pass the Parcel - Each break in the poem's musicality is assumed to reveal part of the mystery
• Blind Man's Bluff - Disorientated by initial obscurity, the groping reader is pleased with anything they can manage to grasp.
• Tag - The reader is always 'it'.

The modern reader is no longer content with easy forays into Spot the rhyme or I spy with my little i. Instead, a range of sophisticated after-dinner-party games have emerged

• Life-swapping parties - 'Keys' are thrown onto a table, and picked at random. Popular with confessionalist poets.
• Karaoke - the poet supplies only the background - a template (workshop) poem
• Trivial Pursuits - the ultimate in poetry games

Poets live in fear of the moment of 'Switch' which allows 'the player to move out of the game by choosing to express his authentic need directly.' This is sometimes expressed by the words: "This poem is crap." Pre-empting this ploy is so important that it has engendered a new genre - post-modernism (don't worry, I'm only joking).

References

• Games People Play, Berne, E (1964), Penguin
• Transactional Analysis Counselling in Action, Stewart, I (1989), Sage
• Games authors play, Peter Hutchinson, (1983) Methuen

By Tim Love and Helena Nelson

Notes about "he understands but doesn't love"

Rather than have footnotes or endnotes in my "Moving Parts" collection (on sale at the HappenStance shop) I decided to add some notes here. "he understands but doesn't love" is the only piece in which was previously unpublished (indeed, it was rejected several times). The title's a quote about Picasso (by a fellow artist, I think). The Chinese room is a thought experiment by philosopher John Searle. A person in a room receives slips of paper through a slot. The paper has squiggles on it. The person looks these squiggles up in a book which has instructions on what to scribble on a piece of paper that's pushed back through the slot.

Unbeknownst to the person the squiggles are Chinese and the notes being passed out are reasonable responses to the received messages. The people outside think that the person in the room understands Chinese. Does s/he? Does "the room" understand? If not, what does? How can you tell? How much do you understand of what you say?

The note on the fridge is William Carlos-William's, but what does it mean? Is the writer who's sending words away any different to the insecure lover interpreting signs?

Should you walk out of the Chinese room, or open the fridge door to check the plums? How can you tell if the light goes off when the door is closed? Is the light (understanding) inside really outside?

From the Dawn of computers to the Twilight of chapbooks

A long time ago when computer games were on audio cassettes and computers had 32K of RAM, I wrote a game that got mentioned in the Guardian

It was with a small company, Peaksoft. According to the potted history of Peaksoft it got some ok reviews

• Remarkable ... Fantastic Detail ... Graphics 100% ... Value 100% - "Home Computing Weekly"
• Ingenious ... Brilliant - "Personal Computer Games"

That's not how I remember it (I'd taught myself how to program and was learning as I wrote). I got about half a year's pay from it (that I was going to get money for something I enjoyed came as a shock) and I had the chance to see my game at a stall in a Computer Game show. Pirated versions are online somewhere. Computer games have moved on since then, with multi-million dollar budgets (though the emergence of Apps has helped return games-writing to being a cottage industry).

Now, when computers in the form of Kindles and iPads are threatening to take over the publishing world, I've jumped ship and have a paper-based pamphlet out (with HappenStance). Again it's with a one-person company run by a likable character who understands the product from the inside, grows a customer base, and knows the manual labour involved in selling by post. Again I'm unqualified (I've an "O level" in English) and learning as I go along. It won't pay my bills for 6 months or attract teenagers to a stall saying that they played with it for hours on end. It might get 100% for Graphics, but there the resemblances end. The game was pre-web (1984, I think). The pamphlet wouldn't have existed without the marketing resources that computers and the WWW make available for small-scale sales (Amazon, Facebook, etc).

Litrefs Reviews

I've created another blog - Litrefs Reviews - to store notes about books I'm reading. Some of the notes are one-liners, some are published reviews and some are longer articles.

Currently it contains notes on magazines (14 items), novels (75 items), other (11 items), poetry (155 items), short story collections (61 items), and theory (44 items) - most of what I've read in the last decade.

My pamphlet "Moving Parts"

"Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the HappenStance site (and Amazon).

The average poem is 11 years old and earned 9 pounds. 27 of the 28 poems have been previously published in magazines.

The Sound of Poetry and the Poetry of Sound

With the rise of isms (deconstructionism, eco-feminism, post-colonialism) in recent years, literary theorists have rather neglected sound effects, often quoting Saussure's view that the sounds of words are arbitrary.

But they're not. Of course we've always known that chickens cluck and cows moo, but the influence of sound goes wider and deeper than that. We 'chip little bits' but 'chop logs'. Twigs are small; trunks are big. There are exceptions (big should refer to little things, and bugs should be big) but words derive from many sources and we should expect some exceptions.

The more that these trends are studied the more universal they seem - petit, piccolo and klein contrast with grand, grande and gross. And the trends go beyond simple concepts like size. With some poets it's possible to guess the theme of the work without understanding a word of it by calculating the relative proportion of sounds - the guess isn't always correct but I'm amazed that it's possible at all. People have tried to create dictionaries of sound meanings. Here's an extract about the L sound from Galt's book - Positive skews in love poems and narratives: strong positive skews in "tender" and "musical" poems. Negative skews in poems of family and home, nostalgia, and humor, with a negative skew for "non-musical" poems which is just below the level of significance. This phoneme certainly distinguishes, in Storm's verse, between "musicality" and its opposite, and its presence can evidently also contribute to a feeling of "tenderness"

If isolated sounds aren't arbitrary, still less are the sounds of sentences and poetry whose patterns produce effects that isolated words can't. In Violi's book Haj Ross spends 40 pages on the sounds in "The Tyger" pointing out dozens of features such as

• The sound F only occurs on even-numbered lines, and gangs with R.
• while all the words in the Tyger line except one are bisyllables, this line being the most polysyllabic of the whole poem, all of the words in the Lamb line are monosyllabic

These effects are in addition to the regular patterns of stress, rhyme, etc. However, with free verse these dispersive patterns are beginning to dominate. We lack the vocabulary to describe them well, and I suspect they often go unnoticed (at least consciously) by readers. Here's an extract by Ruth Padel where she describes an easily missed pattern in Michael Longley's Ceasefire

Achilles, the key name, appears in every stanza. Its central syllable is repeated in the first stanza ("until", "filled", "building", with a sideways echo in "curled" ...), reappears in the second, resonates in the third with "built" and "still" (plus an echo in "full"). and reaches a climax in "killer": bringing out the fact that "Achilles" has the sound of that word "kill" in his name

Interest in sound effects has revived because 1) computers can now analyse a lifetime's work in minutes; 2) brain-scanning has enhanced our understanding of music's effects; 3) the study of pragmatics has attracted attention to the non-semantic effects of words. If music can be profound, why not the sound of words? It too uses repetition combined with variation. It too has incantatory power. The semantics can modulate sound's meaning much as the choice of instrument can affect music's meaning. A violin's C isn't the same as a trumpet's, just as oo is recognisable but differently received in moon and spoon.

Though we may never return to the clogged tongue-twisting of William Barnes'
       With fruit for me
       The apple tree
       Do lean down low in Linden lea.
we might hope for more tolerance of poets like Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. When they stop making sense perhaps they're not lapsing into non-sense but instead bringing out the tonality of words, an alternative mode of meaning making sense an echo to the sound.

Books

• "Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm", Alan B. Galt, Herbert Lang, 1973
• "52 Ways of Looking at a Poem", Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus, 2002
• "The Sounds of Poetry", Robert Pinsky, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998
• "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Patrizia Violi (ed), Brepols Publishers, 2000

(published in Acumen)

poetry pamphlet publication in the UK

Moved to http://litrefsarticles.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/pamphlet-publication-in-uk.html

A Theory of Line-breaks

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	7
3 line stanzas	14
4 line stanzas	4
5 line stanzas	5
6 line stanzas	2
7 line stanzas	2
8 line stanzas	1
Misc stanzas	8

Deviations from norms will be noticed. In most prose, line-breaks are deviations. The norms for poetry seem to be changing. Here are the statistics of Jane Holland's "The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman" (Bloodaxe 1997). Note the high percentage of poems with regular 2 or 3 lined stanzas. For regularity, the "Brighton Pilgrimage" poem takes the prize - 18 7-lined stanzas where the longest line is about 1cm longer than the shortest.

In the last decade or so, line-breaks seem often used to produce equally shaped stanzas in this way. Like any pattern it offers the writer chances to thwart expectation - units can be end-stopped or enjambed, for example. The requirements of form also give the writer an answer to people asking why the poet broke a line. Stanza lengths can (indeed, should) be varied from poem to poem. The important thing is not to let any line stick out more than 2cm from a neighbour. Once the poem's been shaped, minor tweaks can be made to exploit a line- or stanza-break, but these shouldn't be too obvious - such effects are often pretty cheap, and they might draw attention to the other, form-driven line-breaks. For added variety regular indenting can be used too. The final stanza is allowed to be a line shorter or longer than all the rest. It can even be a single-line.

Why do poets use the form? After all, the line-break's potential in this context is limited. I guess the form's purpose is partly to please the eye and partly to get people in the poetry mood, to get them to "read into" the work. As Culler wrote in "Structuralist Poetics", this will make readers see extra meanings (the word "red" will burst with connotations), and affect their interpretation of style (reportage will become "restrained writing"). There'll also be a tendency to read a fragment as the tip-of-an-iceberg.

Note the key-role played by line-breaks. Not only do they indicate that the text is a poem (giving it a charge, an aura), but by encouraging minor closures they help readers to focus on (and magnify) particular phrases as well as generating extra interpretations - e.g. "I am good/for nothing".

Given the charitable status granted to poetry by readers, any text is likely to seem more significant when read as a poem, so I think that it's only fair to raise the bar for text with poetic pretensions. In "A Lope of Time" Ruth O'Callaghan writes "smoking at an open window, the man notes the abandoned boat. Come spring he will replace it". I misquote; actually she wrote

smoking at an open window
                      the man
        notes
                the abandoned boat

come spring 
        he will replace it

I don't think this earns the right to be read too generously.

Rather than use the shape of the text to indicate that the work should be read poetically, writers can use the context. It's common nowadays for poetry books to include at least one poem that has no line-breaks. Lachlan Mackinnon's "Small Hours" takes this approach further. On the flap it says that the book ends with "a long poem ... written mostly in prose". The piece in question ("The Book of Emma") takes up 63 pages. Here are some extracts

• "The only television I watched as an undergraduate was the separate inaugural speech President Carter had recorded for Europe on the subject of nuclear weapons. We just didn't. Nowadays people have sets in their rooms. And mobiles. They stay in touch with home friends in a way impossible and unimaginable for us. They text and email. This may be an epistemic shift but they feel terror loneliness and grief no less than we did" (from section XL).
• "Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience" (from section XLVIII)

It's interesting to note the reception to this piece

• Boyd Tonkin (The Independent) - It is a poet's prose: thrifty, rhythmic, specific, given to darting shifts in pace and focus.
• Carrie Etter (The Guardian) - "The Book of Emma" creates much of its poetry through command of sentence rhythms, repetitions of sound, and epic movement between individual experience and historical perspective.
• David Morley (blog) - "The Book of Emma", which is neither prose poetry nor poetic prose but a vivid series of elliptical, connected flash-backs that have the quality of flash fiction - except we are clearly hearing a poem... - it is a highly successful experiment in form.

I'd call it prose written in prose. Yes, it has shifts of time and subject, but thankfully so does prose. It has a consistent voice. Its imagery and analogies are developed at a leisurely pace. There are leit-motifs and unspoken interconnections. It doesn't exploit sound effects. But if it doesn't need line-breaks why does an earlier poem, "Midlands", need so many? It has these passages:

• "TB and rickets/ are back in cities, but these towns/ are too small to support/ such destitution"
• "Canals hidden/ like avenues by trees// until the bank-holiday/holiday-makers come/ in narrow-boats dolled up/ like gypsy caravans/ with new gloss/ blue, orange, red"

It's commonly said that some poems are "just prose chopped up", but even if a text is "poetry chopped up" it's faulty. In Ruth O'Callaghan's piece what are line-breaks for? I'm not the only person puzzled by latterday line-breaks

• "the free verse, now dominant not only in the US but around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line-lengths", Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor", Jacket 23
• "The poetic line seems highly problematic nowadays and it sometimes seems better to avoid it altogether", Frances Presley, "Poetry Review", V98.4, 2008
• "Not only hapless adolescents, but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line", Denise Levertov", On the Function of the Line", 1979

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	4
3 line stanzas	3
14 line stanzas	1
Prose	3
Misc	13
Sonnet	1
Triangular	1

Nathan Hamilton's selection of recent poetry in Rialto 70 (2010) has these statistics. It's unfair to compare this multi-author sample with single-author books, but maybe it's a sign that line-breaks are regaining their power. In Mackinnon's "Midlands" the line-breaks are for making each stanza 9 lines long, which is currently considered a worthwhile aim, but perhaps "The Book of Emma" signals a further drift of norms. There's no need to add line-breaks to a text if Faber label it as poetry. If Faber accept this piece as poetry, what prose would they turn down? Anything with sections longer than 2 pages?

Tim Cumming

Going through my shelves I found "the miniature estate" (Smith/Doorstep, 1991) and "Apocalypso" (Scratch, 1992), both by Tim Cumming. I like them. I realise I'm trying to write more like that nowadays. Shades of Luke Kennard but more gritty, more overtly political, less meta-poetic. Here are a few quotes.

• A black girl gave out pamphlets in the library,
  you could win a free pizza.
  Two girls in a phone box made random calls
  from a diary found outside The Admiral Nelson
  
  (from "Living by numbers")
  
  
• The housemaid's dead and I've got to run.
  There's a factory fire, tailback
  from Cheyne Walk to Rotherhithe, a number
  of casualties and still no ambulance.
  I'm reading the Ladybird History of Thatcherism,
  it's well illustrated with fine river views
  and commercial breaks everywhere in Tuscany.
  
  (from "UK Roadmap")
  
  
• Coming quietly through two way mirrors
  with blackmail angles and fingerprint dust.
  Do not move without a punchline
  that is not an ad lib
  and where were you last night?
  
  (from "Official Secrets")
  
  

Sometimes a striking start isn't sustained. Usually though he manages to develop the original premise, or braid the multiple themes he introduces early on. "UK Roadmap" is my favorite poem ("The empire's shrunk to a charity ball,/ to a welder's spark, to the presence/ of royalty and now I'm getting emotional") and "Speed Chess in Zero Gravity" is my favorite title.

Poesia 253 - Don Paterson, Indian poetry

Some poets travel better than others, but quite a few of them have made the journey to Italy this month. Issue 153 of the Italian periodical Poesia has 14 pages about Don Paterson and 15 pages of poems in English by Indian writers (Dom Moraes, A.K.Ramanujan, Ezekiel). In the introduction to Paterson, Massimiliano Morini emphasises that Paterson is hard to categorise - MacNiece or Muldoon? In his variety he's compared to Edwin Morgan, who gets a half-page obituary later in the magazine.

Aging poets

Some reviews of Heaney's recent book have revisited the theme of poets and aging - e.g. "[Heaney] has for some time been recycling the same tropes ... It isn't just mainstream poets who do this; John Ashbery has been writing the same book for years now. I guess there comes a point when a poet runs out of things to write about, or simply no longer has the need to try anything new", Alan Baker, 2010

Of course, many poets do change. In "Identity Parade" Roddy Lumsden wrote "like many poets, [Gwyneth Lewis'] work has loosened and opened into a less implicit and more self-aware, narrative-driven style". I think that trend is fairly common - Lowell and Rich opened up, I guess, though perhaps they were only following the zeitgeist that prevailed as they reached maturity. The output of some poets (Geoffrey Hill for example) changes thanks to a new drug regime. But I think poets often keep to the styles that first gained them a readership. New experiences will come along - new places, people, technology, arts - but the reaction to these can end up as obituaries or nostalgia.

I suspect that some types of writers cope better than others with aging. Rather than write less or write worse, some try to adapt, finding new sources of inspiration, or less wasteful techniques. But it's not all good news

• "After working on one's poetry for several years, it is normal for the primitive autobiographical drive to come to an end. At this point, you have the time to devise new ways of working; a new generator of the unpredictable is needed, and this is supplied by chance or indeterminate procedures, combined with rules chosen to generate new decisions. Of course, if you believe only in autobiographical poetry, this temporary pause is not liberation, but a source of depression, neurosis, and eclipse", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.39
• "It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous", Donald Hall, APR, Mar/Apr 2005
• "The aging process almost always brings to the poet the secret conviction that he has settled for far too little ... All his lifelong struggle with 'craft' seems a tragic and ludicrous waste of time", Dickey, "The Young American Poets" (ed Carroll), 1968.

When a new generation emerges (maybe it's happening now in the UK), older poets may need to re-position themselves or even stand aside. Andrew Duncan wrote that "With the exception of Eric Mottran, I have not found a single [UK post 1950] critic who has a distinguished record of writing about the poets younger than them".

Many of the factors that encourage the creation of a generation are present currently

• Mass - UK creative writing courses are now producing that
• Means of communication - the younger generations have the WWW (used in a "web 2" way it's a YoungGen thing)
• Critical Support - People like Ben Wilkinson write about contemporaries and older poets. Roddy Lumsden supports younger poets via various initiatives.
• Separation - an exaggeration of the difference between the old and the new helps initially
• Crisis - Even established poets are finding it harder to get published nowadays. Young poets are finding new ways (performance, new tech, etc)

I'm not very autobiographical and have never depended on intense inspiration or imagination. I think I've become more efficient at finding and exploiting material. Who knows, I might even be improving with age ...

The poetry mainstream

This note was triggered by some recent comments (noted below) about the alleged mainstream/non-mainstream rift and how to deal with such perceptions. It's an issue that frequently arises in discussions. Even if one doesn't believe that there's a rift, it's advantageous to appreciate the viewpoint of people who do, especially if you're running workshops.

Definitions

Using the term "mainstream" is asking for trouble. Some people think it's not useful, challenging with borderline cases - "Is X mainstream? Is Y mainstream?". Others think that the term's used by people who like pigeon-holing, marginalising or labelling in an anal-retentive, simplistic way.

I think it's a convenient short-hand that even the detractors end up using. It may be less helpful in the USA than the UK because in the USA mainstream poetry is a smaller proportion of serious poetry than it is in the UK. It doesn't have a firm definition (nor does "raw/cooked", "hard-edged/soft-edged", "poetry/prose", etc). Some poems are clearly mainstream, some are clearly non-mainstream, and few people argue when extreme examples are categorised.

Mainstream poems tend to have certain characteristics, some of which non-mainstream poems lack, and vice versa. An alternative formulation is that a mainstream poem is one that benefits from a set of skills similar to that used with non-literary texts.

Understanding

Words summon contexts which in turn affect interpretation of the words. Hearing "bishop" I might load in the context of Chess or of Religion. But also I load in a set of interpretative tools appropriate to the task. We become used to employing different sets of skills for different types of text. Poetry and prose typically use different (though overlapping) skill sets. So do different types of poetry.

Carrie Etter wrote
Describing and classifying poetry I've noticed that a couple commentators on "The Tethers", knowing of my "experimental work," seem to struggle with TT's "mainstream" qualities, but where they see a vast difference between the two areas, I see continuities, a spectrum. As far as the arrangement of skills is concerned I think a spectrum isn't the best analogy. Mainstream and non-mainstream works share some effects (alliteration, for example) more than others (e.g. fragmentation). The effects tend to cluster, so meter is likely to be associated with rhyme and paraphrasable meaning (because these features are often found together in people's experience of poems). I think the struggle that Etter's readers mention might be because the skills required don't all come from a standard skill set.

On Etter's blog Christodoulos Makris wrote
"There's comfort in labelling. It's also easier to "sell" or "understand" a writer or artist if s/he can be bundled into a category". I agree, but I don't see a problem with that; it's how perception works. If one needs to use a collection of reading strategies that you've not used together before it's like tackling a multi-disciplinary work.

Steve Waling wrote
"I wonder what it is, though, that sees some people reading nonmainstream poetry and seeing only confusion, while others 'get it' (whatever 'it' is) almost immediately". Some factors are

• Innate predispositions - Numerous perception and processing problems that are masked during normal reading may become exposed when reading poetry. As analogies, consider some visual disorders - "Simultanagnosia" (Seeing only one object at a time); "Integrative agnosia" (Inability to recognise whole objects, tending to focus instead on individual features of an object); "Pure alexia" (Inability to identify individual characters or read text); "Colour agnosia" (Ability to perceive colours without being able to identify, name or group them according to similarity).
• Beliefs and Interests - How much can an atheist appreciate religious poetry? Survivor poetry, Gay poetry, Football poetry, etc are not to everybody's taste, especially if the reader seeks identification with the persona.
• Education and expectation - Readers might have expectations regarding "understanding" that aren't appropriate to all poems. If they expect poems to communicate a message strongly and clearly, they might well be disappointed, especially if the message isn't spelt out for them in the final line or couplet.

The rest of this note suggests ways to reduce the differences between the two types of readers.

How the two sides view each other

When meeting those from other arts are you ever embarrassed by poetry's mainstream - its readers and writers? Do these quotes sound fair?

• "The fact is that the British poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a conviction", Gregory Woods, Magma, Autumn 2003
• "Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves", George Oppen, "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook", ed Davidson, IR 26:5-31, p.29.
• "Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry", A.E. Housman, "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (lecture), 1933.
• "The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true", Harold Monro, "The Future of Poetry", Poetry Review, January 1912
• Steve Waling suggested that "[the non-mainstreamer] says ... "I'm better than you," at the unsophisticated reader of mainstream poetry, who is presumed to be less intelligent, lazy or, even worse, terribly bourgeois and accepting of the comfortable status quo. Instead of being made to think viz a viz language and meaning creation, instead of seeing how meaning is a social product etc etc... they prefer a slice of 'social realism lite', the comforting feeling of being given an insight into the human condition that isn't too different from other very similar insights, an over-described slice of life etc etc..."

Mainstreamers criticise non-mainstreamers.

• In Staple 63, C.J.Allen points out that when mainstream readers read Ashbery, they find that "everything they're used to in a poem is left out - the meaning, the music, the sense of resolution and so on. But, for [Ashbery's] admirers, what he'd left out were the tired poetic conventions, the dull patter, the stale, confessional voice full of highfalutin metaphor".
• Mainstream readers when faced with non-mainstream work often mention the emporer's new clothes. Look long enough at anything and you'll eventually see something of interest (after all, it's hard to admit to yourself that you've wasted so much time). The poets are autistic, over-intellectual, lacking in empathy.
• Steve Waling suggested that "the non-mainstreamer tells us things about language that we already know, doesn't he/she? Don't we all know about the way language is manipulated by adevertising/capitalism/etc etc and isn't it just a bit boring? And why don't they make some concession to ordinary readers, instead of using all these jump-cuts and juxtapositions etc etc?"

Widening the mainstream

How does one offer new directions to mainstream reader? Giving them theory (even in watered down forms) is unlikely to get them moving. Is there a gentle path to enlightenment or is shock therapy the only way? Whatever the pros/cons of non-mainstream poetry I think mainstream readers can benefit from questioning their tastes, which may initially require a devaluing of what they like before they can acquire new tastes. So I'd say start with the stick - it's more likely to provoke action - then thump them with some carrots.

Sticks for mainstreamers

If they like rhyme, or confessional poetry, encourage them to say why, then challenge them, using quotes from famous (preferably ancient) people. Or one can query more generally the source of their tastes, and how conditioned they are. Non-victimising ways of doing this involve

• Relativism - if we're not conditioned then how come tastes in other times/places are often different?
• Analysis of environment - "There's no such thing as society" said Thatcher, but what about the Poetry World? What's it made of? Who decides what "Poetry" and "Good Poetry" are? What influences our tastes?
• Other arts - The changes in visual arts over the years might provide useful analogies. If fidelity is the reader's touchstone then presumably they dislike Constable and prefer the hyper-realists. If they say they like van Gogh, try to transfer that aesthetic approach into literature.

If people can handle a discussion about "What is Beauty" so much the better. Is beauty "Eternal"? What are the differences between Beauty Competitions and Poetry Competitions?

Common conceptual stumbling blocks include

• Subject Matter - Avant-garde poems are less likely to be anecdotal, about people, or about one thing. They may try to shock or borrow material from non-art contexts.
• Unity/Completion - Avant-garde poems have more gaps, and changes in style. They may have several "centres". The beginning or the end might be missing. The piece might not be held together by a voice. It might look more like a draft/sketch than the finished article
• Language - One's more likely to notice the words in avant-garde poems, and they won't necessarily be in sentences
• Narrative - With Avant-garde poems readers may not be able to accumulate meaning sequentially, clause by clause. "modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity", J. Frank,"Spatial Form in Narrative"

You need to have at your disposal some arguments (devil's advocate or otherwise) against some traditional poetry assumptions

• Beautiful art needn't depict beautiful people, happy events or even possible events
• Beautiful things needn't have beautiful components - medieval religious art used gold-leaf, some poems use "rainbow" and "gossamer"
• Poetry doesn't have to rhyme - see "this poem doesn't rhyme", G. Benson (ed), Viking, 1990. (a collection for children)
• Poetry can be about things and ideas, not just about people falling in love and dying.
• Beautiful things need not be hard to produce

If they're still resisting, look at corruption or back-scratching within the Poetry Establishment. Look at who puts anthologies together and who's left out. Look at the work of those who claim to write Real Poetry. Somehow try to unsettle them.

Carrots for mainstreamers

Once you've chipped away at preconceptions it would be useful to be able to suggest transitional poets; poets whose work has widened out from the mainstream. In the UK, candidates are hard to come by. Perhaps Don Patterson's work will appeal to them. He's not avant-garde, but he strays far enough from the mainstream to offer a challenge. Perhaps with some people it's easier to refer to Picasso.

It's worth pointing out that non-mainstream poetry may have the same features as mainstream poetry, but the proportions are different. In extreme cases some prided features of mainstream poems may be absent altogether. Sometimes one feature (e.g. sound effects, fragmentation, repetition) is taken to the extreme, no longer masked by meaning or narrative - nothing's in the way. When mainstream poetry uses these features, readers (even avant-garde readers) might not see them, being blinded by the glare of other, more obvious features.

Then offer them a non-mainstream poem. The chances are that if you succeed in getting them to like it, they'll say it's not really avant-garde at all. I'm not sure what to offer though! "The Wasteland" is old, but it's probably avant-garde enough and it's widely available - see Exploring The Wasteland.

You could introduce them to Hybrid poetry, which supposedly combines the best of both worlds. I'm not convinced, but it might be worth a try. A description sounds promising -
"Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first-person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villanelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions. Considering the traits associated with "conventional" work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of "experimental" work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools".
So what does the resulting poetry look like? There's much variety. Here's part of a sonnet by Karen Volkman (from "American Poets in the 21st Century")

    Lifting whither, cycle of the sift
    annuls the future, zero that you zoom
    beautiful suitor of the lucent room
    evacuating auras, stratal shift

    leaping in its alabaster rift.
    Lend the daylight crescent, circle, spume,
    ether from your eye, appalled perfume,
    ash incense to boundary when you drift

There are many books explaining A level and GCSE poems line by line, but fewer that tackle modern poetry in the same way. 3 options are

• "Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne" by N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge attempts to help readers appreciate some notoriously difficult poems. It's helpful, but for me it too often fails to identify what I find difficult, nor does it try to justify why the poetry is preferable to a more comprehensible paraphrase.
• "The Poem and the Journey", by Ruth Padel, tries to explain some poems, including one by Prynne. I'd recommend the book to most people who are interested in poetry. Her explanations of impenetrable poems usually helps me understand what the poet's trying to do, though doesn't explain why the poet had chosen to be unhelpful.
• "how to write a poem", John Redmond, Blackwell, 2006 is an introductory text that aims to train readers for Jori Graham poems rather than the old poems that most introductory books tackle.

Mainstreamer ab-reactions

Even after all this, mainstreamers may remain unconvinced. Typical responses include

• It doesn't mean anything - if you've done your groundwork and have picked the sample poem carefully, you should be able to cope with this. Challenge their notions of meaning. If they appreciate music or abstract art, exploit that information. And do they really understand the meaning of poems they've long cherished?
• It's too intellectual. It doesn't relate to real people. Why should I need an English degree to understand a poem? - people who depend on old-fashioned aesthetic theories often think that they are theory-free, that they use innate, instinctive sensibility, that meaning should be paraphrasable. Challenging their assumptions can bring their theories into the open, but you may have to articulate their theories on their behalf. Of course it's also worth pointing out that there are many types of poem (just as there are many types of music, maths, etc) some of which are aimed at those who know their subject inside-out and enjoy theory.
• Why does it have to be so obscure? - there isn't always a good answer to this. I don't think that avant-garde poetry is any more allusive than mainstream, but I think it's fair to admit that nowadays allusions are harder to detect than they used to be
• If it's so good why isn't it popular? Does anyone actually read Finnegan's Wake? - I agree with Keston Sutherland that textual experiments seem cut off from language in general - they're not usually precursors even if written by famous people. They don't "take" in the way that new Art fads do. I think "The Wasteland" and "Ulysses" are enjoyable, important works, but I don't like "Finnegan's Wake". Though even if experimental works don't open up further possibilities they at least give the mainstream some elbow room.

Widening the non-mainstream

Sticks for non-mainstreamers

This isn't easy. One could point out that many of their tricks aren't new, but they know that already. Some brain-scan research is coming up with interesting findings about pre-disposition to appreciation of types of art, but it's early days.

Carrots for non-mainstreamers

One could encourage them to assist readers who aren't familiar with non-mainstream poetry. Options include

• Adding notes (I think mainstream poets do this more often that non-mainstreamers)
• Ordering the poems in a collection so that the less aesthetically challenging pieces come first
• Explaining their writing processes. When Carrie Etter wrote that "Just as a poet may choose among such forms as the sestina, the sonnet, etc. in composing a poem, I think about modes of expression, degrees of tension or fragmentation, lines versus prose, etc" I suggested that she might take a poem of hers and list the tensions she's thought about (what's being withheld, why the reader should be motivated to feel, or even resolve, the tension). Do the details of the fragmentation matter, or could the piece be fragmented in many other ways to the same effect? Why is each line-break and indent positioned the way it is? What mind-states might an idealized reader pass through?
• Adding narrational or conceptual sugar, the type of meaning Eliot had in mind when he wrote "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him."

The Dark Horse, issue 25

I look forward to the arrival of "The Dark Horse". The recent issue has some articles on poetry marketing that try to answer questions like: Why do people agree to write blurbs? Why are anthologies like "Identity Parade" published?

• "Blurbonic Plague" by Dennis O'Driscoll - As the pseudonymous Harvey Porlock noted, 'Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it's all absolutely marvellous', p.11
• "The Anthology Business" by John Lucas - Lumsden appears to have no love for language or the possibilities of prose rhythms. Nor ... does he show much ability to get beyond cliche ... I don't want to damn Lumsden's enterprise by such means. For all I know, he undertook to write these head notes with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to the stocks. Who in his right mind would want to produce what amounts to 85 blurbs, where the adjectives are selected much as buttons are from the button box ... And, to repeat, there are good poems aplenty in the anthology, p.25

To provide some balance there's an 8 page review by Rory Waterman of William Logan's "Our Savage Art: poetry and the Civil Tongue" - too often he roots out the bad whilst neglecting the good ... Logan thinks that the majority of writers are praised too highly and expect too much, p.76

Reviews, poems and other articles complete this tasteful offering. I was glad to see that Craig Arnold's "Uncouplings" uses anagrams -

the I in relationship
is the heart I slip on
a lithe prison ...

our listening skills
are silent killings