Jellyfish Review

How can magazines prosper in the Age of the Web? Jellyfish Review, which has been going for less than 3 years, offers one model. Originally it printed only Flash Fiction (max 1000 words). Now it prints Flash Essays too. It prints 2 illustrated pieces a week, advertised on social media. Cunningly, it retrospectively bundles them into issues - well actually, jellyfissues. If these issues could easily be printed out, readers would have the best of both worlds.

Wigleaf's Top 50 very short fictions of 2018 lists 5 Jellyfish stories!

Cycling in Holland

We went to Hook of Holland, Rotterdam, Gouda, Ultrecht, Amsterdam, the Hague, then back to the ferry. Ulrecht in the rush hour was scary, especially since some of the bike-lanes were used by mopeds too. We did up to 100 km/day, using many bridges and ferries. The most interesting was this one, which we propelled ourselves.

Zanvoort had a British Festival - Highland games, Sherlock Holmes, a mini Eye, and afternoon teas.

This was in the museum park. I bet many people photograph it.

The landscape and lifestyle between the cities had a Hobbity feel to it. There were many moated houses, and more horses than I expected. In Amsterdam we passed a dressage training place.

We travelled cheaply, but stayed in comfortable places like the SS Amsterdam, living off buffet breakfasts. I watched England beat Columbia in Ultrecht, in a hotel where Messi has stayed.

The language puzzled us at times. My German wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. This sign was warning us about a cattle grid.

I read "The Pier Fall" (Mark Haddon), "Nothing to worry about" (Vanessa Gebbie) and "Subjunctive Moods" (CG Menon). No poetry. I am rethinking my prose styles.

Leicester Writes Short Story Festival

On 30th July I attended a day of sessions about getting a short story collection published, with talks by Divya Ghelani (who was tutored for a year by Venessa Gebbie - small world), Rupert Dastur (TSS), Farhana Shaikh, Rebecca Burns, CG Menon, Alison Moore, Mahsuda Snaith and Megan Taylor - all of them good. A good audience too - lots of us are trying to do what so few of us will succeed in. The points I noted were

• Think about using long, striking titles. It's the second time this summer that I've heard this advice. Such titles still feel gimmicky to me, but I'd better try.
• Publishers like to take on people with many Facebook friends and Twitter followers because each friend/follower is a potential buyer. I'm going to have trouble there too.
• People who read lots of submissions have a good idea of what topics to avoid - e.g. "weeping", dead babies, kitchen dramas with couples discussing their failing relationship.
• Enter competitions. Even long-listing is worth adding to one's record (I don't bother mentioning anything unless I won a prize).

A Birmingham visit

I hadn't realised how much Birmingham figures in Lord of the Rings. Tolkein used to play by Sarehole Mill (close to where he used to live), where now there are two metal models of Birmingham towers (Perrott's Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower) that he may have had in mind when writing his book. We went to see the actual towers - part of the Tolkein Trail. It's a good bet that aspects of the mill and the surroundings - Moseley Bog - feature too.

I popped into Waterstones and by chance found my story book there, next to Christopher Logue's poetry book. By some strange reasoning that I now can't recall, I thought it best to leave the book where it was.

Launch of Lighthouse 17

I attended the launch of Gateway Press's "Lighthouse" issue 17 in Norwich last night. It was compered by the tireless Julia Webb.

I read the issue on the way home. The theme was science - poetry, flash, short stories and essays. Many interesting pieces. My favourite ones were by Anne Bailey (poems) and Marc John (an SF story, sort of).

Anne Osbourn's article begins by discussing specialism, not only in science. She points out that there are benefits to society with having specialists, but the resulting breakdowns in communication may be dangerous. I agree with this. Scientists and artists/writers (or their representatives) need to transmit their findings, to help the public appreciate the latest Tate exhibition, atonal symphony, global warning, number theory, etc. After all, it's the public who pays them. It's the public who deserve to know why some charlatan performance poet or ivory tower pure mathematician is publicly funded while people are dying through lack of NHS funding. Outreach and Open Days are good things.

Half way through, the article turns to seeking common factors between the arts and sciences. It's here that I begin to have trouble. She writes that they both "involve a combination of creativity and technical competence", and that they "depend on the ability to define a problem ... and extract the essence of the problem in hand". Even were this so, it also applies to knitting a cardigan, preparing a cake, etc. It's how humans do things.

Then she writes that "The ultimate objective for both is to pinpoint the truth, and to communicate this clearly and succinctly to others for appraisal". I don't think it is. Her conclusion is that "We all look at things in different ways. Together we can draw on our strengths and differences to build up a patchwork of understanding, a better approximation of the truth". I try not to use the word "truth" in such circumstances - it means too many different things. Truth in logic is so far from the Truth in religion that it's misleading to use the same word. Besides, it seems to me that poets have backed away from claiming to be Seers, to be seeking great Truths.

I have abiding doubts about Valerie Laws but at least her article "Poetry and Science, Beauty and Truth" ends with "if there is more than one kind of truth or beauty, that is all the more cause for celebration".

See -

• Science and the arts
• Poetry, mathematics and computing

etc

Recent publications

I've a poem in London Grip - Dark Matter - deliberately packed with similes, and today a story in Spelk - The Park - which rather depends on readers seeing the implicit comparisons: tortoise and old man; decision-making and blind wanderers.

Entanglement

The transparency of language - its ability let us see the world through it - is a joyous make-believe, a spell that shouldn't be broken carelessly. It's often thought that this transparency is at odds with art -

• "If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary", Bergson
• "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", Valéry
• "The non-mimetic character of language is thus, in a certain way, the opportunity and the condition for poetry to exist. Poetry exists only to 'renumerate' in other words, to repair and compensate for the 'defect of languages'", Gerard Genette

Language nowadays has two foundation layers - that of sounds and that of typography. Both these layers can show through when we experience a poem. I suspect a text will seem more poetic if they do - i.e. if the text has many sonic effects or uses visual effects.

The effects of the underlying layers can synchronize with the meaning or be largely independent of it - "The remarkable result of Valéry's treatment of sound and sense as consciously separated variables is that it allows the semantic components of the poem to take on structural value and the structural values of the poem to take part in a semantic or signifying action in turn" (C. Crow). Interaction can happen in many ways -

• Sound and meaning interacting - Perhaps key words are emphasised by being rhymed, but the effects may be more pervasive and subtle. Sound can begin to take over in Dada Sound Poetry, or even in some Dylan Thomas poems. Poets like Bunting thought that the sounds could convey an important meaning.
• Typography and meaning interacting - In Abcedereans and Anagrams words are decomposed into letters rather than sounds. Line-breaks can have various effects, and with Concrete poetry appearance can be a dominating factor.

The sculptor, Brancusi, believed that his art might "coax an image from within the material rather than forcing an image onto the materials". Similarly, poetry might help bring to light something implicit within language, especially if conventional "meaning" doesn't get in the way.

Gérard Genette used the term 'metalepsis' for when boundaries between layers are crossed by characters or other textual elements. I think the term "Entanglement" is useful to describe when, more generally, meaning and the underlying layers can't easily be separated.

I think I try to write entangled poetry - it's as likely to reach down into language as it is to allude to nature or states of mind. Here are some examples -

A poet's double life He went gray; too guilty to stray he longed to graze on beauty without needing to pray; ...

At the end of this poem there's a note saying that it should be re-read omitting the rs. The next poem begins with puns and anagrams involving "surreal" and "freud dada"

Movements Surrealism is Symbolism without footnotes, nonsensequitur offspring of Freud and Dada, a dead fraud, fad, a dud era. It's a real serial artist called Sir Real - Cyril for short - ...

The next poem has more anagrams.

Sound sense Lines; truths by committee, tones buried in words like a sword in stone. Stock quotations tumble. Culture’s very core is shaken; recovery is slow until a rag man risks an anagram. ...

In poetry books and magazines nowadays poems using wordplay aren't so uncommon, though I suspect they divide opinion. Language (its sound and spelling) is rarely a transparent medium in Paul Stephenson's "Selfie with Waterlillies". Sometimes it seeps into the foreground as in

Appeasement I want to know swathe, want to bathe in swathe, I'd scythe swathes of grasses, no, better still, swathes of heather. Lithe, I'd scythe longest swathes loose

My Truth to Materials and Heather McHugh article has more information.