Curate's Egg poems

Marking a multiple choice quiz, should you penalise wrong answers? It's a ploy that deters guessers - it keeps them honest, stops them bluffing or taking too many chances.

If a stanza of a poem doesn't do anything, do you just skip over it or do you penalize it? Perhaps it's there for other readers, not you. But suppose it affects your enjoyment of the rest of the poem? Maybe it's crass, sexist, derivative, etc. Would you ignore it then? Suppose instead of a bad or pointless stanza it's a questionable line, or word, or line-break?

Obviously, it depends. But on what? The proportion of the whole that's affected; the nature of the flaw. But also it depends on the type of work being read, the reader, and why they're reading. Some poets (Selima Hill?) tend to write uneven pieces. Others (Heaney?) don't. The perceived unevenness may be because the work is multi-style or polyphonic, the reader not equally at home with the various styles/voices. Some people (especially if they're judging) will judge a poem by its worst line. Others won't mind panning for gold, seeking rare and beautiful wonders. My impression is that

• Non-narrative, discontinuous poems are more likely to be read with a pick'n'mix approach
• If a line of a poem is much better than the rest, it's sometimes said to "be worth the admission fee alone", the rest of the poem excused

I don't see why readers should be more lenient with non-narrative pieces, and though I can understand why a good goal might justify going to an otherwise ordinary game, a poem's not a live event - it can be edited.

The reader's strategy can in time affect the poet's writing. If readers are going to ignore the bits they don't get, the poet's more likely to add more stanzas or more obscurity - after all, there's nothing to lose. I think the current fashion amongst frequent poetry readers is more indulgent than it was a decade or so ago. Perhaps the increasingly competent and voluminous output of creative writing students makes readers crave for something "a bit different".

Some poems contain a 2-D constellation of quotable fragments. What should fill the gaps between them? Dead wood or padding? Options include

• Nothing - compacted fragment and nothing else
• White space (to "let the images breath"; to provide space for fields to be generated between the poles)
• Absorbent text that attempts to magnify/refract the effect of the powerful fragments
• Text that attempts to provide continuity between the fragments (which may either amplify the fragments or mask their effect)
• Text that's part of a different thread.

Sometimes when a reader and I disagree over a poem, I've asked them about certain phrases only to find that the reader's ignored them rather than try (and fail) to incorporate them into their interpretation. I don't see any problem with a poem containing self-contradictions, but if the reader edits those contradictions away, something's surely wrong somewhere.

Sometimes a reader (for personal/professional reasons) wants to like the poetry. Obscure poetry gives such readers more scope to do this - nothing needs to be explained and anything in it might be vital to the poem as a whole, so nothing can safely be deleted. Once some time has been invested in a text, it's rather hard to dismiss it, though some readers may give up, using variations of the "there are only so many hours in the day" argument

• "If the poet's not going to bother editing their work, I don't have time to do the editing for them"
• "I don't trust the poet. If there are so many phrases that make little sense to me, maybe the effect of the other words is delusionary, luck, a mirage. Maybe the poet's trying to bluff me"

I'm not against "hopeful monsters" as such though I'm less tolerant of padding (in the form of words or space) than many other readers are. Surplus words and line-breaks can make me wary of the other words and line-breaks that at first sight seemed effective. I begin to lose trust in the poet. Before long, the implicit reader-poet contract isn't worth the paper it's written on, so I start reading another book instead.

Cornering a poetry market

There are advantages in becoming nationally (or regionally) known for writing poetry about a particular topics -

• the media will know who to contact
• commissions might come your way
• you may be asked to edit an anthology or a magazine special issue
• you might run a poetry festival session or a poetry school course
• a non-poetry conference on the topic might ask you to run a session/workshop to provide "something different"

The topic shouldn't be too general ("bereavement", for example) or too esoteric. Some topics (medicine, therapy) have enough tie-ins with poetry to keep several poets busy. Here are some examples -

• Ian McMillan has Football.
• David Morley has Romani.
• Maybe Lavinia Greenlaw and Mario Petrucci first come to mind when people want a quote about Science and Poetry.
• Simon Armitage and pop music?
• Michael Bartholomew-Biggs and Maths
• Matthew Stewart and wine?
• Jon Stone and Manga?

I work in a science setting, but Science and Poetry don't work well together for me, so when a few years ago I was asked about helping with a radio show on the topic, I suggested that they get in touch with Greenlaw. I've assembled a pamphlet on word-play (anagrams, acrostics) and poetry, though I read in the latest Rialto that Abigail Parry's finishing a Ph.D on word-play and poetry, out-trumping me.

So I'll plod as I am, comforted by the thought that there's less risk of being typecast.

Point of view workshop notes

Feel free to raid my Point of view workshop notes

Point of view workshop, 1st Oct

On Tuesday, 1st Oct, 7.30pm in Cambridge I'm doing a prose workshop about "point of view". 3 pounds for non-members. For details, see the Cambridge Writers page.

Free verse book festival 2013

It was good to meet up again with Acumen's Oxley's, Nine Arches Press and HappenStance, amongst others. I finally met Alison Brackenbury too. I bought more than I'd intended

• "Shaler's Fish (Helen Macdonald)
• "The Elephant Tests" (Matt Merritt)
• "Of Science" (Morley and Brown, eds)
• "The Longing machine" (Marcia Mentor)
• "The Colour of Love" (Jonathan Steffen)
• "Venetian Red" (Sue Hubbard)
• "Sandcastles at Evening" (Martin Lyon)
• "Uneasy Relations" (Michael Bartholomew-Biggs)
• "Nearly the Happy Hour" (D.A. Prince)

A steady stream of visitors passed through, though they often seemed as interested in getting a book published as in buying books. Discussion topics included: how public funding might best assist poetry; the relative merits of being published in pamphlets, books, magazines, online; plagiarism; why HappenStance stalls always have food on offer; who's going to give up publishing poetry; whether poems or poets are a book's selling point.

Upcoming UK story competitions

A few UK story competitions are coming up. The Fee:Prize ratio's not always good, but that's how most story competitions are.

Competition	1st prize	Fee	Deadline	Words	Info
Prole	£140	£4	Sep 30	2500	online
Southport	£150	£3	Oct 31	2000	online
Tom-Gallon	£1000	Free	Oct 31	5000	online
London Magazine	£500	£10	Oct 31	4000	online
H E Bates	£150	£4	Nov 4	2000	online
Commonwealth	£5000	Free	Nov 30	5000	online

Poetry and Maps

In the past I've tried to compare map-making to writing poetry. In my poem The King it says

trying to preserve the angles, the shortest distances, the areas, but he can't have them all or even any 2

alluding to the idea that map-makers have tried several ways to represent the globe on a flat surface much as poets try to flatten experiences. In Obscurity (published in Sol) and especially New Pastorals - A Streetmap I went into more detail, pointing out that "Sometimes (as in maps of the Metro) connections may matter more than accurate distances and directions - they are spacialisations of time rather than depictions of space ... In tourist maps as in poems there's a balance between mimesis, knowledge and the formal requirements of the medium. Clarity of purpose doesn't imply stylistic monotony. Symbolism and Realism can be mixed, viewpoints can change (from plan to elevation, from absolute to personal), keys can be set up or recommended narratives and connections highlighted.". I ended the maps section rather grandly by writing "A poem is a map to assist in locating oneself in one's evolving world of language, as one slowly discovers a voice. Our poems increasingly have the gaudy colouring and po-mo stylistic variety of city maps."

My interest in this topic was rekindled on reading "Tears in the fence" (No 57 Summer 2013) where the ever-readable Andrew Duncan makes some worthwhile points about Fiona Sampson's Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry

• The idea of a map involves shared space. It places poets in relation to each other and must select technical features to be the dimensions of the map - its north and south. This must be very provocative to poets - who like to see themselves as autonomous and perfect, even if they habitually place everyone else in a shared space. Location at one, any, single point must irritate people who see themselves as present over whole areas where that spot is not. Poets like to think of the world as something that fits inside their poems, rather than vice versa (p.112)
• Sampson's faithfulness to individual texts is like travelling by candlelight, a terrain of handkerchief-sized plots, snug in low visibility. This is the opposite of a map that puts local patches together in one set of uniform relations. (p.114-5)

Today I found "Language is not a vague province": Mapping and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, a fine dissertation by Alba Rebecca Newmann which goes much further than I ever could. She points out that

• Within literary criticism, the seductions of the terms associated with cartography — map, mapping, itinerary, travelogue, guide, discovery, exploration, power, representation — are palpable. ... Unfortunately, well-versed as we are with simile, analogy, and metaphor, it is almost too easy for literary critics and scholars to say "This maps X onto Y," or "This text is a map of that culture or that experience." The limitation of much of this literary scholarship is its failure to investigate how maps themselves operate — not only what they describe, but how they establish relationships and organize knowledge
• there are three cartographic ways of asserting authority or structuring knowledge that are particularly significant to the interdisciplinary study of maps and poems. These are: (1) maps articulate boundaries; (2) they delineate paths; and (3) they establish relationships.
• it is poetry’s ability to reveal unexpected proximities, (or distances) —conceptual, etymological, visual, aural — that is most significant to our conversation about poetic condensation as a cartographic practice. In the relatively small space of the page, the juxtaposition of words, lines, and images creates a field of associations.
• Understanding maps as artifacts, as rhetorical objects embedded in culture, does not allow our analysis of them to stop with a reading of their details or declarations. So, too, with poems. Once we have concentrated on what is on the page, we then must turn to talking about what is not on the page, and why: what circumstances, cultural or otherwise, may have contributed to the production of this utterance.

In her poetry classes she sometimes hands out maps for evaluation before giving the class poems. I hadn't thought of doing that. Sounds like fun.