Litrefs Articles

England's literary magazines, 1985-2012

2012-02-10T06:25:00.027Z

I like the world of small-press literary magazines. I submit and subscribe to many and have access to more at the University Library and (sometimes) local bookshops. In this piece I'd like to cover the progress of these magazines in England over the last quarter-century - not in a comprehensive way, but biased by the extent of my dealings with them (mostly in the form of rejection slips), starting with prose magazines and ending with poetry magazines. I'll finish by identifying a few themes.

Prose

Small magazines were often started by Writers groups, Arts Centres or University English Departments. My first accepted story appeared during 1986 in Momentum, a small A5 magazine run by Wrexham Writers Workshop that lasted 11 issues or so. Summit by Coventry Writers came and went at about the same time. Also A5-stapled was Dream (later New Moon), an SF magazine that encouraged reader participation. I treasure a readers' voting table from 1987 which puts a story of mine 4th and one of Stephen Baxter (1996 Arthur C. Clarke prize winner) 14th.

I started subscribing to Panurge (1984-1996; a spined paperback of fiction) with issue 2. The editors (David Almond and Jon Murray) always replied with a comment or two, even when the stories didn't deserve it. Comments like "all the best and stick at it" helped. I finally got published there not long before it folded in 1995. Jon Murray in the final issue wrote "for a 25 hour week rising to 50 hours near publication date, I pay myself a wage of 11 pounds a week." He was getting 4000 submissions a year in the end. Editors of prose magazines have said that distribution via highstreet outlets is difficult, which was why the later issues of Panurge were disguised as books, a trend that other magazines followed. More mainstream was Raconteur (a thick paperback of fiction) and the revived Words International (A4 glossy), each of which appeared in newsagents/bookshops and lasted about 2 years. In January 1998, World Wide Writers appeared, looking much like Raconteur. It didn't last long. Their departure (and that of Metropolitan, an A4 glossy which ceased publication for similar reasons in 1997 after 10 issues) left a gap in the market. Looking back through early contents pages of these defunct prose magazines one sees now familiar names like Sophie Hannah. More recently the fiction magazines Libbon and Transmission both disappeared after a few issues.

In its time as a quarterly the SF magazine Interzone published Angela Carter as well as many newcomers. It became a monthly available at newsagents with over 110 issues to its credit. It's a quality publication which has taken care to grow slowly while others have grown too quickly and burst. They sometimes sent me 2 page rejections slips. It's smaller than it was, but survives. From Granta I got my most irritating rejection - "in its own right it is very good work, unfortunately it's not right for Granta right now", supporting Jon Murray's view that Bill Buford never accepted anything from the slush pile no matter how excellent his colleagues thought it. Of course, since few prose contributors can appear per issue, it's hard to hold on to subscribing writers. I think a prose magazine needs at least a letters page so that more subscribers can see their names in print. As well as satisfying readers' egos, magazines must satisfy their tastes. Whereas a poetry magazine has a good chance of having something for everyone, a magazine with half a dozen stories might satisfy too few readers. This in part explains why genre magazines like Interzone which cater for narrower audience have a better chance of survival than general fiction publications.

Attempts to find a sustainable format for prose continue. I think only 2 prose-only, non-genre magazines exist in England at the moment - Riptide (which increasingly has themed issues) and short Fiction (which uses competitions rather in the way that the US magazine Glimmer Train does).

Prose and Poetry

Bananas (1975-1979) was an entertaining tabloid-format magazine, that published people like Angela Carter. Iron was lively and variagated until it disapeared in l997. On a glossier scale but in the same era was Jennings (1985-1987?). Whether they accepted a piece or not the 3 editors cluttered an A4 page with entertaining comments. It paid for poetry and prose. Bottom of the World came and went. The Affectionate Punch (started in 2007) and Lamport Court (2003-2008) came and went too. Sol was last seen in 2009 as an online publication.

Stand (established in 1952) and London Magazine (dating from 1732 - it once found itself embroiled in a quarrel leading to its editor, John Scott, being killed in a duel) keep going, maintaining high standards on very different budgets. Both have been on the brink financially. I think Dreamcatcher's still going. Ambit's been going for ages, printing poetry and prose. Staple is still going and is perhaps the most under-estimated of the magazines here. I'm surprised that they don't attract bigger names. They used to pay, and for a while they produced about a book a year. The Cambridge Literature Review began in 2008 (I got a rejection from them saying "This is a great read - it's extremely entertaining and very witty. I don't think it's quite right for ..." - oh well). Areté (1999-) is an Oxford publication. New Walk is new - a mix of poetry, prose, reviews and interviews - A4 and university-based. Under the Radar is quite new too.

Iota began small and stapled in 1987, poetry only. Now it's spined with some fiction-only issues. Interpreter's House, Tears in the Fence and Brittle Star mostly print poetry, though they publish some prose. Parataxis (about modernism) started in 1991 and still comes out sometimes.

Writing Women lasted for at least 10 years.Wasafiri (African) and MsLexia (women) are less general - good reads, but I've never sent them anything.

London-based magazines seem to boom and bust. The Fred (a 250+ page A6 glossy) disappeared long ago. Smoke A London Peculiar began in 1993 then paused in 2010. Litro is a free circulation publication (100,000 copies distributed monthly).

Creative Writing degree courses are a common source of magazines. Sheffield Thursday lasted longer than most.

Poetry

My first poetry acceptance was in Folio International in the late 80's. It was one of several magazines whose demise closely followed my appearance in them. There's quite a rapid turn-around at the lower or more radical end, but even heavyweights might be short-lived. Thumbscrew disappeared. Even excluding these there are poetry magazines to suit all tastes - the market's glutted. Howard Sergeant's Outposts was populist before Roland John shifted it upmarket so that it looked like Agenda. Then it disappeared. Prop, Krax (still going), and Bogg were magazines found at small-press fairs and in cardboard boxes in Alternative bookshops. An attempt to revive Brando's Hat (1960-2002) was made in 2005. Leviathon Quarterly lasted only a few issues. Perhaps the biggest boom-and-bust was Liverpool's Poetry Voices. Issue 1 included Szirtes, Scammell, Satyamurti, Adcock, Constantine, Holloway and Patten. I don't think there was a third issue. Poetry Monthly, as the name suggests, attempted to speed up the turn-round time. It closed in 2011. New Hope International (1980-1998) continued as a reviews-only web site for a while. Numbers (1986-1990) was an up-market Cambridge magazine that lasted a few issues. I had a poem in Quartz, which lasted for at least 6 issues. Perhaps budding poets deserted to the emerging, populist Forward Press titles like Poetry Now and Rhyme Arrival, which were the largest circulation, non-funded poetry magazines in Great Britain until the company went bust in 2010.

Verse is now US-based but under Robert Crawford was open to all. His "could you send us some more please" made up for many disappointments. Along with Rialto it gave one the chance to rub shoulders with big names (I've been with Les Murray and R.S. Thomas). Other Poetry (revived after a few year's rest, currently edited in Edinburgh), Smiths Knoll and Seam (which began as an A6 publication) are well edited by established poets, showing that new magazines can emerge (though I think Seam is currently in hibernation). Orbis, Envoi (115+ issues, now a Welsh magazine), Poetry Nottingham (150+ issues - now called Assent) and Weyfarers (75+ issues) have been going for decades, as has Pennine Platform and Obsessed with Pipework . Candelabrum started in 1970. Frogmore Papers was founded in 1983. The Wolf, founded in April 2002, is still going. I think Smoke still exists - it's a few sheets stapled together. ARTEMISpoetry concentrates on women's work.

In quantity perhaps Poetry Review and PN Review lead the field. Competition at this level is intense. Poetry Review gets about 30,000 poems a year of which they print about 120. They seem to reply ever more quickly and decisively to my submissions. Influential nowadays are Poetry London (1988-) and Magma (1994?-). Shearsman remains impressive within its genre. What they say on their website shows a typical magazine lifecycle - "Shearsman magazine was founded in 1981 and ran for two years before being folded into the London-based magazine Ninth Decade (later Tenth Decade), together with Oasis and Atlantic Review. The second series of Shearsman began in 1991, in a smaller format, and ran roughly quarterly until early 2005, when the format changed again to a half-yearly paperback book". Angel_Exhaust started in the late 70s and first appeared online in 1993.

A few poetry magazines (Smiths Knoll for instance) contain nothing but poetry. Others, especially the more frequent ones, have articles, reviews and encourage reader participation through letters. Acumen is like PN Review in this respect (poetry, reviews, articles, interviews, letters) but more readable. The North is too.

Review and Writing magazines

The TLS and London Review of Books have 1 or 2 poems an issue. Sphinx and PQR (Poetry Quarterly Review) were magazines that focused on reviewing (magazines and pamphlets). Both are no longer printed, though Sphinx is alive and well online. The Writers magazines Quartos and Acclaim merged into The New Writer in 1997.

Editors, Presses and Universities

Weyfarers and Magma rotate editorship, and a few magazines (e.g Smiths Knoll) have an editorial team, but in the main magazines tend to be run by one person. The magazine may keep the same name when editorship changes, but can change character entirely. Iota, Envoi and Staple have all changed beyond recognition. Even Poetry Review can lurch dramatically when a new editor (or editors) takes over.

Nearly all the editors (Acumen's Patricia Oxley is the only exception I can think of) are writers whose work appears in other magazines. From what I've seen, they are a sincere, committed and enormously dedicated bunch. With annual turnover of subscribers sometimes as high as 40%, the struggle for survival is endless. I feel more sympathetic towards them the more I hear how strange some writers are. One of their motivations is to have a piece accepted in yearly anthologies. Both the various Best Short Stories anthologies (recently revived by Salt) and the Forward Book of Poetry perform the role that the US equivalents do, though we have no equivalent of the Pushcart Prizes especially for small press publications. Editors are so often on a hiding to nothing. Misprints are one danger - few magazines send out proofs. One of my poems contained 3 misprints, including a missed "not" in the final statement. Some editors go to the trouble of commenting on rejected poems - a well meaning but dangerous practise since the volume of submissions (there's often well over 50 times more submissions than space) means that editors sometimes miss the obvious. A few editors ask for changes. One editor suggested the removal of 2 verses. I fought him down to one. The poem's better than it was originally.

Several of the magazines (Acumen, Smiths Knoll, Rialto, Agenda, etc) developed presses or were an offset of presses. Iron Press still exists though the magazine has gone. Ragged Raven Press used to produce Iota. Now Iota has new editors and publishes poetry pamphlets. PN Review is produced by Carcanet (in Gortschacher's book (p.644) it says that in a sample of PN Reviews he'd read, 39% of the poets had been published by Carcanet press). The North is produced by The Poetry Business, best known for their pamphlet competitions. Shearsman produce books and e-books. Areté has recently published its first book. Under the Radar is the Nine Arches Press's magazine.

In contrast with the US there are few UK University-based magazines. The austere but worthy Poetry Durham wound up many years ago. Virtue Without Terror was by Cambridge University Poetry Society. Oxford Poetry started in 1910 and but for the odd haitus has been going ever since. More magazines have University affiliations (or at least addresses) nowadays - Warwick Review (Warwick), Assent (Derby), Iota (Gloucester), short Fiction (Plymouth) and Stand (Newcastle). The Cambridge Literary Review is run from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

The Challenge of Technology

Rising paper and postal costs combined with reduced grants contributed to the pressure on magazines. With the emergence of the WWW as a publishing medium I can't see the paper market expanding. I think there are enough poetry magazines on paper already. Perhaps fiction magazines will have more of a chance on the WWW, where editors won't have expense as a constraint on space, and reader's feedback can be rapidly added. Otherwise I can't see much hope for new fiction writers in any medium. That said, New Walk has bucked the trend. Stride became a WWW magazine. Many others disappeared. Many of the survivors still don't accept e-mail submissions. Magma does, and has an active blog. Some print magazines still have letters columns but with turnaround times of several months, little dialogue is generated. US submissions and submissions from Creative Writing students are becoming much more common. Now that US magazine are often easier to submit to than UK ones I wonder how many UK writers send their work straight to the States. Besides, for fiction there are hardly any UK markets anyway, and Rialto tells people to expect to wait 6 months for a reply to a submission.

The Wolf and Acumen (with QR codes) have some associated audio files. PN Review reacted differently, putting back issues online, available by subscription. Horizon Review (which "takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949") is a fine example of the new breed of WWW magazine.

Career paths

2012-01-27T11:05:00.000Z

You've reached a mid-life crisis - you've been dabbling with writing (perhaps with some success, maybe you've been published already) for years and want to go to the next level. Maybe your kids have grown and left, you've come into some money, you've a long-term illness, or you've unexpectedly become unemployed. What are the options?

It's a question that prose writers more so than poets ask. Prose needs more of a full time commitment than poetry does, and some people who already earn money writing prose (journalists, technical writers, translators, etc) can earn money writing while pursuing their dream. Also I think women more so than men follow this delayed career path, their lives disrupted more by parenthood.

You could take early retirement, buy a cottage in the South of France, Walden, or even move to Tahiti, but most of us have to compromise a little.

A Masters Degree (MFA, MLit, MA)

Creative Writing's a competitive hobby nowadays, verging on a profession. Young budding writers who want to work within academia have to be prepared to move often, and go on short-term contracts. You probably don't want to compete on that level. Look upon your age as an advantage. There's more to writing success than merely writing - you'll have to fill in forms, jump through hoops, meet deadlines, balance competing needs, thoroughly research the market, have the money to buy the right books, be self-critical, etc. Perhaps you won't have as much spare time as some of your class-mates, but you'll have more life-experiences and perhaps you'll be better able to exploit your opportunities.

If you missed the chance to do a full time Masters the first time round, don't worry - it's never too late. In "The Guardian" (8 May 2009) Professor Russell Celyn Jones said that "The MA programme I run at Birkbeck, University of London, attracts people of all ages from around the world and with a wide range of life experience. These doctors, journalists, police, actors and lawyers are clear-eyed about their expectations: they want to pursue a private passion communally for a year."

It's not so much the academic surroundings that attract late-comers -

You may appreciate the discipline, the lack of distraction, the easy availability of help.
Unless you show you're serious about writing, your family won't take you seriously and won't give you space.
A Masters is a way to validate your skills - even if it doesn't help you write better, the certificate at the end will open doors.
It will show the grandchildren that you're not over the hill yet.

You might be able to take a year off work (a BBC TV reporter did this so that he could do a Masters in creative writing) but of course, you needn't go full time - nowadays many Masters courses welcome mature students, waiving qualification requirements, and offering low-residency, 2 year part-time options with distance learning components, variable speeds, and a choice of terms when you can start. Courses nowadays include sessions on market awareness and the Publishing trade, and assessed material is likely to include a dissertation folio (aka "creative thesis") which may be in poetry or prose, so you needn't take a break from your usual writing and submitting. But do these courses work?

Venessa Gebbie was accepted to do an MPhil in Writing, but changed her mind after finding out more about the course (having already paid a deposit).
Tania Hershman spent ten years working as a science and technology journalist before enrolling on the MA at Bath Spa, UK. Her project went on to be published.
Chris Hamilton Emery started a course at UEA, then changed his mind.

So yes, it can work, but it's risky. See the Poets & Writers page for more US information. The UK is catching up fast with the USA. Suddenly it's become normal for 30% of the bios in a magazine like Rialto to mention Creative Writing degrees. England's UEA isn't quite the Iowa workshop, but it's been around since 1970 - see their Autumn syllabus. It's produced several "mature" writers.

One-off Help

Rather than commit to a long course which may include lots of material you're not interested in, you can pay for specific help

Literary Consultants - Publishers' in-house editors rarely have time nowadays to discover and nurture talent. Meanwhile, thanks to Creative Writing courses, more and more authors are producing near-publishable books. How can they be helped? Agents are more publisher-orientated, and in any case are unlikely to deal with stories and poems, which is why "literary consultants" (aka "manuscript assessment services") are on the increase. Depending on the quality of the work they may recommend it to an agent or publisher, suggest a few tweaks, or splatter the first page or 2 with comments and have a long, frank discussion with the author. Even if you find a reputable company, you won't know beforehand how useful their comments will be, but even their help with the all-important first few paragraphs may make all the difference.
Mentoring - The UK's Faber and Faber is the latest organisation to nurture individual talent. It's a growth area. The New Writing Partnership's Escalator scheme also works that way. Writers value such attention albeit briefly at residential courses and on Masters courses. Being under someone's wing for several months is what most budding writers want, especially if there's guaranteed publication at the end.

The common factor here is the 1-on-1 contact, something lost during the rise of big business and workshops. Another is the expense. Consultancy and mentoring don't come cheap - mentoring is about $40/hour, and 1,000 words cost at least $10 to be evaluated. Regional Arts Boards can sometimes help with funding or at least offer recommendations.

Roll your own

If you have the self-discipline you could plan a year-long programme tailored to your own needs. Creative writing syllabuses are online to give you ideas. Festivals, readings, short residential workshops, private study, and competition deadlines can be time-tabled into a year of activity. Holidays can be integrated into the scheme too.

In the UK, Arvon weeks are frequently mentioned as a life-changing experience. Immersion for a week in a writing environment helps people to start thinking of themselves as "writers".

Poets & Writers have a Literary Events Calendar (a nationwide calendar of readings, workshops, and other literary events) and a page about Writers Conferences, Colonies, and Workshops page showing some US options.

Online groups can help. Venessa Gebbie is one of many writers who had a middle-age surge. She said "I spent eighteen months on and off working in an online writing group ... That was akin to an apprenticeship." But you need your wits about you if you're going to benefit from such locations. Older people might have an advantage in this respect.

Fanning out

Rather than focus on your writing, you may want to diversify, or focus on marketing. The traditional career path (publication in reputable magazines leading to pamphlet then book publication, then inclusion in anthologies) is still viable but it's so slow that you'll have competition not only from your contemporaries, but from those who started later and took faster routes - performances, festivals, interning, reviewing, letters to editors, blogging, videos, teaching, scholarships, fellowship, cornering the market on a particular topic, consultancy, conferencing, niche-anthologies, local radio, residencies etc. Arts administrators seem to do well. Flexibility and risk-taking are required to exploit these options. Such an approach is hard to combine with a conventional 9-5 job or parenthood. Describing the US situation, Sam Hamill wrote that "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. ... The typical poet teaches".

As an example of how even a reputable poet has to survive, consider Lavania Greenlaw. Her CV reads like a career guidance manual - 1990: Eric Gregory Award; 1995: Science Museum residency. Arts Council Writers Award, and British Council Fellow; 1997: Wingate Scholarship; 2000: three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also reader-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall; 2003: Cholmondeley Award. Jobs include arts administrator, freelance writer, reviewer and radio broadcaster, teaching on a Creative Writing MA Programme and working on the Tate and Hayward Gallery education programmes.

Alternative Approaches

At the age of 92 Toyo Shibatashe gave up dancing because of a bad back, and started writing poetry. Now 98, her latest poetry book has sold 40,000 copies in Japan.
Become a celeb first, then publish later - see Viggo Mortenson
Become a writer of any kind first - see Prue Leith (first novel at 55)
Make explicit use of your profession - either for content or as a PR opportunity
Some competitions have a lower-age limit of 50 or so. Make the most of them. Grey Hen is one of a number of organisations for older writers.
See Career in poetry (from TextEtc)

Fancy and Imagination

2012-01-03T10:52:00.008Z

This is an old topic, one that's popular for essays. Coleridge introduced the distinction to help explain why he thought Milton was better than Cowley, and why Wordsworth was good. My interest in it has been revived by reading "The Further Reach", an article by Maitreyabandhu in Poetry Review, 101:3, Autumn 2011. He says that imagination

"is a faculty that unites and transcends reason and emotion and points us toward a deeper understanding of life beyond the limitations of the rational", p.59
"spontaneously selects sights, sounds, thoughts, images and so forth, and organises them into pleasurable formal relations that draw their deeper significance, expressing fundamental truths beyond the machinery of conceptual thought", p.61
"unifies the contents of experience by discovering something within them, some underlying meaning or significance, inaccessible to ordinary consciousness", p.64
"unifies the poet - better still imagination is the unified consciousness of the poem", p.64
"is the mind functioning at its most integrated and penetrating. It is the entirety of the person - reason, emotion, volition and sensation - blended into complete action", p.65

In contrast, Fancy is "novelty for novelty's sake", p.61. He offers Hughes' "The Thought Fox" as an example of Imagination, something that absorbs the "strange yet familiar". He doesn't name any Fanciers. More examples would help. Here's one: A winged horse introduces a new concept into our minds, a new entity that we might almost believe could exist somewhere. That's Imagination - it puts 2 and 2 together to make 5. Contrastingly, in labs they've grafted a human ear onto the back of a rat. That's Fancy. I'd guess that the Martian and Metaphysical poets get accused of being Fancy too.

When one wants to separate two similar terms, it's tempting to associate some features you like with one of the terms. Here the ideas of non-rationality, unity, and deep/fundamental truths are aspects of Imagination. Not everyone considers these features positive ones, and there's even less agreement when people have to decide whether any particular piece exhibits Fancy or Imagination. These features seem commonly bunched though, and not just under the banner of Romanticism. For example, in ARTEMISpoetry, Issue 7 (Nov 2011) M.R.Peacocke writes (p.22) that

"my poems ... come from myself: I mean my true and inward self. The question at any moment is to what extent the self is true or how far it is behaving according to modifications or manipulations."
"I believe that my rather formal upbringing and a rigid kind of academic education modified and manipulated me to a considerable extent; but that I am gradually finding the voice of the original creature. She preserved herself when young by spending a lot of time on her own, and in interacting without instruction with other creatures - animals and plants"
"I do not understand very much about this process of discovering meaning, but I know it is not achieved by means of the intellect"
"The imagination, which I take to recognise similarities and connections and therefore to create metaphor, plays a major part in the making of a poem"

Imagination, poetry and selfhood become interrelated.

The Self and the Poem

In "Biographia Literaria", Coleridge wrote that "The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM". He also wrote that a poem must be a cohesive unit, with every part working together to build into a whole. As Sana Shahid points out, "The significance of the Imagination for Coleridge was that it represented the sole faculty within man that was able to achieve the romantic ambition of reuniting the subject and the object; the world of the self and the world of nature". Imagination is the faculty that incorporates alien matter and experiences into new wholes.

This terminology is tied up with self-discovery and the notion of the self as a unified whole (or at least a unified core, a soul, surrounded by socially-conditioned contingencies). The Romantic preoccupation with individualism and the Self (against or with Nature) coupled with the demotion of language helps enforce the idea of the integrity of the Self, outcomes being the lyric and poets' striving to find their "voice". The two beliefs (in self-integrity and aesthetic wholeness) might be related.

Transcendence

Transcendence is the means of escape, of growth. Surrealist juxtaposition seems a useful tool of the Imagination, bypassing Reason - "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", ("Statutes of Liberty", Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74). Surrealism is also an easily used generator of Fancy. Is Comte de Lautréamont's "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" Fancy or Imagination? Like beauty, I suppose it's in the eye of the beholder.

Symbolists also strived to bypass habitual thought patterns, to "purify language of base, commercial, and everyday meanings, an alchemical principle of the transubstantiation of matter designed to elevate poetry to the condition of music", Anthony Mellors, "Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.3-4

Maitreyabandhu writes about something grander that transcends more than reason and language. It "completely transcends our usual self-consciousness ... We cannot but experience it as coming from beyond the self".

Now

Maitreyabandhu writes "Modern western culture has mostly lost touch with the depth and importance of imagination; it's just another part of the entertainment industry. At the same time 'imagination' can also be used to glorify the irrational or as another weapon in the war against reasoned thought" (p.59). I don't think we've lost touch. It's more that the goal posts have moved. In Romanticism the Self comes face to face with the world. In this relationship

Language is an impediment. The more transparent it is the better
Society is a hindrance. The true self becomes obscured by accretions of habit and social conditioning

Fancy is mechanical, non-transcendental, industrial. Imagination shows that there is a world beyond, bypassing language and reason. By unpeeling layers, the true self can be revealed, tempted by the exotic, the beyond.

We still care about the concepts involved with the discussion of Fancy and Imagination even if we don't use those terms. What's changed are the values we associate with the concepts, and the reader/writer relationship that the appreciation of these values engender. Hype, commercialisation and the sheer volume of juxtapositions have made us wary of mere novelty. Google can churn out connections to order. Improved communications makes the search fast and easy. In an age where Ultimate Truths are few, we still seek out the Radically New, the latest discovery. Increasingly, "new" means "new combinations of old material/genres" or an emergent phenomenon resulting from a "more is different" philosophy. Has Imagination moved with the times?

We moved from "Language is an impediment" to "Language is a tool", then to distrust language, treating language as a subject. Stephen Burt suggested that if you're like Armantrout you come to "realize (emotionally) what you might have known (intellectually) all along: these see-through dialects of fraud and bad faith, these corruptible, companionable, always-already-commercial phraseologies, are all these is ... there is no authentic alternative, no uncorrupted language reserved for true sentiment"
The notion of a true self sullied by society has been weakened by the realisation that even basics like vision require timely stimulation during one's developmental phase otherwise they're permanently impaired. Personality is fragmented, a toolbox of coping mechanisms that are combined to suit the situation. Peeling away "layers" merely impoverishes one's resources, restricting one's range of behaviours. One claimant to the role of true-self is the behaviour informed by long-term-memory - if that region of the brain is damaged, you're "not yourself" any more. But many other types of brain damage change a person. Unity is another layer of socialisation to be peeled away.
The need for unity in a work of art has come under scrutiny - see Literary order and chaos for more about literary wholeness, the Aristotlean notion that in a masterpiece everything contributes to the whole. Unity is no longer an artistic necessity, nor is it in some way a reflection of persona integrity - it's not considered psychologically realistic.

When the poet's worldview is language or at least deeply mediated by language, the poems that the poets write might reflect this viewpoint and will no longer be a whole. We've moved from Eliot's fragments held together by a single spiritual vision of the age to Auden's varieties of quotable wisdom and then to Berryman ("When he found his voice [Berryman] found his voices" wrote Louise Gluck). Whereas in the past poets came to understand themselves by their relationship to Nature, now the focus has changed to concentrate on living in language.

We still like believable characters and self-sustaining worlds even if we know they're not "real" (Harry Potter and "Lord of the Rings" are considered sustained feats of imagination), though we're less likely nowadays to suggest that "time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea" transcends anything. Some examples of Fancy works better than others, but the distinction between Fancy and Imagination has become untenable. The reality of the quantum world described in mathematical equations "transcends" appearances, showing us a "deeper reality", making possible MRI scanning which in turn gives us insights into how brains work and how minds operate. It doesn't bypass rationalism, but that seems a small price to pay for learning more about the Self and Nature. Language (other than the language of mathematics) doesn't get much of a look-in so neither does poetry.

Difficulty and obscurity in poetry

2011-12-08T11:35:00.002Z

In their day Browning and Dylan Thomas were considered notoriously obscure. Poets more recently associated with obscurity include Geoffrey Hill and Prynne. Except for their supposed obscurity these poets have little in common, and according to their proponents, their poetry may merely be difficult rather than obscure. This article covers some issues arising from the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity", looking at how the terms are used by theorists and readers.

In documentation the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity" are often conflated even if initially distinctions are drawn. Let's first consider some common usages of the concept of "obscurity" because they influence the meaning of the literary term.

If the moon is obscured by clouds, both the cause of the obscurity and the solution to it (i.e. waiting) are known
An obscure fact, or mentions of someone who "fades into obscurity", are hard to find

These usages suggest an obstruction between the object and the observer. There might not be difficulty, complexity or anything unknown. The obscurity isn't considered intrinsic to the work. In general, "obscure" is more derogatory than "difficult". "obscure", unlike "difficult" is a verb as well as an adjective, it's something you can do to a work (and hence potentially undo). It's more likely to be the author's "fault". Problems of perception and communication are more likely to provoke cries of "obscurity" than "difficulty". As William Empson said, "with obscurity ... lack of clarity occurs at the semantic level itself. ... Obscurity is, therefore, different from ambiguity [where there are distinct, disparate but clear meanings], but it can provide the latitude for ambiguity to occur in."

Obscurity is often thought of as unnecessary difficulty, the opposite of "clarity".

"All obscure poetry is difficult, but ... not all difficult poetry is obscure. Obscurity is a lack of clarity; it is a flaw....[it] is always a defect" (Shepherd)
"Difficulty can be either positive or negative depending on the context in, and the circumstances under which it finds articulation. Obscurity, on the contrary, is almost always negative signifying a failure on the part of the poet due to a complex of variables ranging from incompetence to showiness" (Prof Wimal Dissanayake)
"An author is obscure when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, inappropriate, or involved" (Coleridge)

A work is difficult when when the reader/viewer feels they don't understand it. This may be because it's obscure. There's often an assumption that a difficult text won't be immediately understood. If it is, the work is more likely to be considered deep or multilayered. The opposite of "difficult" is "accessible", though a difficult piece may be initially accessible if it makes sense a sentence at a time. Such pieces are often described as "deceptively simple" (i.e. not as simple as they look). In contrast, an obscure poem might only be superficially difficult.

The reader's tolerance to difficulty depends on the theory of understanding they adopt. A maths proof, an essay by Heidegger or a Stockhausen symphony assume different modes of comprehension. A single poem can require the use of all of these modes and each mode has its associated brand of difficulty. In some texts (maths, for example), obscurity is unacceptable and difficulty is tolerated - even expected. In contrast, when listening to a melody, obscurity is not an issue. Some poetry readers think that obscurity is unacceptable. Others don't see it as a property to assess the success of a poem by.

The procedures used to impart understanding also affect the reception of "difficult" texts. Should one throw readers (learners) in the deep end, hoping for sudden insight, or should one teach stage by stage? The "sudden insight" approach may exploit obscurity to add an element of surprise.

Defining Difficulty

On Poets Org it says "The taxonomy of difficulty is as vast as the available poetic instances ... There is the difficulty of syntax, reference, image, idea, and metaphysical reach and of course the difficulty inherent in that which is to be expressed."

In "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner identified 4 categories of difficulty

Contingent - solvable by work.
Modal - blindspots, category difficulties ("it's not poetry"), reader limitations.
Tactical - "source in the writer's will or in the failure of adequacy between his intention and his performative means". "We are not meant to understand easily and quickly". "'Contingently' and 'modally' Wallace Stevens's 'Anecdote of the Jar' is transparent [it has a clear message - ] however simple, the work of art sets ordinance upon the surrounding chaos of the organic [but]" It is the last two lines that obstruct and unsettle ... This rich undecidability is exactly what the poet aims at. It can be made a hollow trick (as it often is with the syntactic instabilities in Dylan Thomas)"
Ontological - breaks the poet/reader contract. "At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all"

In Obscurity and Dylan Thomas's early poetry there's a more thorough attempt at defining difficulty - "A poem is considered difficult if the representation constructed by the reader is defective. Such defective representation is produced when part or all of the potential obstacles in the text, intentional or unintentional, become effective obstacles in the domains of language and/or coherence and/or the world referred to. This means that they disrupt construction of the representation."

The norms being disrupted can be of various types

Standard methods of comprehension - "Models of comprehension by van-Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, Kintsch and van-Dijk, 1978, Sanford and Garrod, 1981, Johnson-Laird, 1983) as well as on Miller and Kintsch's study on readability, (1980)"
Plain language - "The studies of Steiner (1978) , Nowottny ((1962)1984) and Press (1963) do attempt to come to terms with poetic difficulty as such. The same holds true for Fois-Kaschel (2002) ... These scholars proposed, each in their own way, accounts of textual factors capable of producing difficulty: neologisms, allusions, figures etc."
Plain concepts - "Another approach to difficulty is provided by Riffaterre; his description of difficulty is founded on the notion of the matrix, a minimal unity which constitutes the essence of the poem and which is a generator of senses. The poem's significance is produced by the detour the text makes as it runs the gauntlet of mimesis (1984, 19). Difficulties are produced when the matrix is repressed (ibid). The more it is repressed (i.e., implicit) the greater will be the deviation from literal sense."
Relevance -"An obscure poem departs from the dynamic that is established between the three components of the act of communication - originator, message and recipient. In a normal act of communication, the originator, aiming at rapid transmission of the message, constructs it in such a way that the recipient needs to make the minimum effort (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). The obscure poem will make radical changes to this relationship."

People have tried to distiguish obscurity from difficulty

In After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America Shetley distinguishes difficulty from "obscurity," which he defines as those "elements of language that resist easy semantic processing. ... he uses "difficulty" to refer to both the obscurity of a text and an audience's grappling with it. Shetley expands his theoretical basis to include a discussion of "lucidity," and "lyricism." He borrows these terms from Charles Altieri and uses them to define the split between English and Creative Writing departments. English departments practice lucidity, an enterprise in which theorists draw upon reason to examine (skeptically) or to "demystify" the "subjective, emotive value-laden discourse" of poetry".
On Arduity it says "J H Prynne ... has recently made the following distinction between difficulty and obscurity: When poetry is obscure this is chiefly because information necessary for comprehension is not part of the reader's knowledge. ... finding out this information may dispel much of the obscurity. When poetry is difficult this is more likely because the language and structure of its presentation are unusually cross-linked or fragmented, or dense with ideas and response-patterns that challenge the reader's powers of recognition. In such cases extra information may not give much help.
Both Geoffrey Hill and Prynne combine obscurity and difficulty but they do so in different ways, Hill refers to obscure things (which can be looked up) but his use of language and sturcture are fairly straightforward. Prynne gives much more emphasis to cross-linking and fragmentation but also makes use of obscure references, he also makes this doubly difficult by not marking quotations as quotations so the reader is led further astray."

The Purpose of Difficulty and Obscurity

Poetry seems especially partial to difficulty and obscurity

"In poetry, unlike in other forms of discourse, obscurity might be an aesthetic principle; indeed, poetic discourse enjoys a special privilege: it may run counter to the fundamental requirement of language, namely communicability, and may infringe some of the basic rules of language. ... It is able to depart from the requirements of coherence, cohesion and consistency with ideas expressed in the text, or indeed with external knowledge. It does not establish any information known both to the originator and to the recipient that would ensure a grasp of the information that follows (see Clark and Clark, 1977). It will frequently depart from the literal sense of the words that it uses and endow them with new meanings. And despite all this, simply because it is a poem, it will be perceived as a significant text." (Iris Yaron-Leconte)
"For the person who reads a poem, obscurity is one of the elements that create 'magic'. Unlike in the case of non-poetic obscure texts, the fact that understanding is deferred is part of the aesthetics of obscurity and this in itself is thus linked to the experience that the poet seeks to create for the reader." (Iris Yaron-Leconte)
On "The Meaning of Obscurity" it says "it is quite obvious that if the good poems of our times are stripped of their difficulty - if they are made reader friendly - they would simply lose their relevance as poems at all. To communicate clearly, they need to sustain their obscurity. Obviously we aren't talking about the obscurity born out of lack of knowledge, craft, experience or sensibility but about an obscurity that is painstakingly interwoven with meaning to create a tapestry of overwhelming intricacy."
"At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton
Difficulty can be used as a change of texture, to control reading speed
Difficulty may be the result of Mimesis, a consequence of difficult content ("One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?" - Geoffrey Hill)
Difficulty may be the result of characters having complex thought or wanting to hide something.

Examples

It might help to have some examples to refer to

"beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", Comte de Lautréamont
"When once the twilight locks no longer/Locked in the long worm of my finger/Nor dammed the sea that sped about my fist,/ The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,/ The milky acid on each hinge", Dylan Thomas
Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII
"The sole was amazing"
Hearing "sun" you might think "son" was said. Reading a poorly scribbled "sun" you might read it as "son". If it was written as son you might have trouble reading it at all.

Are these examples difficult or obscure? If you think them obscure it's worth asking WHAT is being obscured? Some readers, when they can't say what the poem's about, say that the meaning they're looking for is obscured. By "meaning" they often mean "moral" or "paraphrase", or even the real-world situation that's supposedly being represented. How might one respond to these examples?

Would this be less obscure were it known that the author's mother was a seamstress and his father was a surgeon? To celebrate his father's first job, his father's mother gave him an umbrella which he used all his life.
None of this is true as far as I know, but a back-story like this would comfort many readers.
Are the locks made of hair, do they need a key, or are they locks on a canal? There's ambiguity but is there difficulty? In Obscurity and Dylan Thomas's early poetry there's more discussion about this example
This is a minimalist work (a 2 by 6 by 10 pile of 120 bricks) that attracted media attention when it was exhibited in the Tate at London. 'The sensation of these pieces was that they come above your ankles, as if you were wading in bricks', Andre has commented. 'It was like stepping from water of one depth to water of another depth.' Can a minimalist work be obscure or difficult? Can it be complex? Maybe - "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.vi
Suppose the author of this replied "I was in holiday in Italy recently, and it was really hot so I thought I'd use the Italian word for sun in this line." If you then replied "But there's no clue that you're talking about the sun. You didn't even put the word in italics. I thought you were writing about a restaurant meal." has the author any defence?
These examples (handwriting that's "difficult to read", etc) illustrate when signal noise causing a communication problem. Difficulty for which the reader sees no purpose tends to be described as obscurity.

Resolving Difficulty

Not so long ago it was considered inappropriate to assume knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible. Nowadays we're more tolerant of difficulty - the onus is again on the reader to work harder because

It's assumed that Google can resolve allusions
Language Poetry (and post-avant/elliptical poetry) has made readers more familiar with radical disruption
Reverence for the canon has been replaced by a new hierarchy of institutionalised respect (as much for the living as the dead) within the Creative Writing discipline

Once you know how you extract meaning from a text you're in a position to deduce what you might find "difficult" and whether the term "obscure" has a distinct meaning. Your method of extraction depends on the type of text and the social situation, as does the need to attribute blame and decide how much effort to expend. You may admit ignorance or accuse the Emperor of wearing new clothes. You may need to give yourself an excuse for not spending time analysing the piece.

A difficult piece may be presented as a challenge. A riddle asks the reader to guess the subject. A puzzle may require a further key to unlock the piece (and perhaps reveal further secrets). With both the riddle and the puzzle the reader is likely to know when they've "got it".

A work may require the reader to pass through various stages before reaching the destination. In a whodunit for example, readers follow the plot. This trajectory can be thwarted by

making the journey circular - Finnegans Wake's "riverrun"; Harry Potter's new generation meeting at the station in the final pages; a framed story which in turn frames the first story. "And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" (Little Gidding. Eliot)
making the journey hard - Gaps can be left. There may be no intermediate confirmation of hypotheses. "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
having nothing at the end. In this case the end-orientated journey produces no result, no product. The journey was about process. Pilgrimage has become exile. "And what you thought you came for/Is only a shell, a husk of meaning/From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled/If at all" (Little Gidding. Eliot)

Even if the journey (the unwrapping, the analysis) leads to a conclusion, one never knows for sure whether one's arrived. Whether the work is difficult or obscure, the end of the journey may be a single event or moral, or at its centre there may be an unresolvable juxtaposition of 2 or more items. Perhaps every piece of art must eventually be mysterious or irreducable, so rather than bury this mystery, it might as well be placed on the surface. A typical Magritte painting is an example of the mystery being easy to see. Everything is presented. It cannot be further reduced. "We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other", Wittgenstein, (Philosophical Investigations, No.531). If you're prepared to understand Magritte you might accept the Comte de Lautréamont quote too, and may in time become sympathetic to Dylan Thomas's offering.

References

"The Chequered Shade: Reflections on Obscurity in Poetry", John Press, London: Oxford University Press, 1963
"What Is a Difficult Poem?: Towards a Definition", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 37(2) (2008): 129-150.
"The Processing of Obscure Poetic Texts: Mechanisms of Selection", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 31 (2002): 133-170.
"Mechanisms of Combination in the Processing of Obscure Poems", Iris Yaron-Leconte, Journal of Literary Semantics 32 (2003): 151-166.
"The Uses of Obscurity", Allon White, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

People who need people (character workshop)

2011-11-04T09:55:00.006Z

In some types of prose, the author needs to know their characters well, so well that the author might recognise them if they saw them in the street. Today we'll try some workshop exercises on character development. We won't have time to produce any finished work, but maybe one or two of the characters created today will walk into your next story. We'll first look at a simple way to create viable characters, then look at character development in more detail.

First impressions, habits and surprises

Exercise 1 - Hi!

When new characters appear in some novels they're immediately described. Here are a few shortened examples from "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" by P.D. James

Leaming - "wearing a grey suit with a small stand-away collar which showed a narrow band of white cotton at the throat ... She was tall and her hair, prematurely white, was cut short and moulded to her head like a cap. Her face was pale and long" (p.17)
Lunn - "stockily built young man dressed in an open-necked white shirt, dark breeches and tall boots ... large mud-brown eyes ... beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world. But their beauty emphasized rather than redeemed the unattractiveness of the rest of him" (p.22)
Marklands - "All three reminded her of horses. They had long. bony faces, narrow mouths about strong, square chins, eyes set unattractively close, and grey, coarse-looking hair" (p.40)
the Tillings - "strong dark heads held high on usually short necks, and their straight noses above curved, foreshortened upper lips" (p.72)
de Lasterie - "an oval face with a neat slender nose, a small but beautifully formed mouth, and slanted eyes of a striking deep blue which gave her whole face an oriental appearance at variance with the fairness of her skin and her long blonde hair." (p.72)
Stevens - "a stocky, bearded young man with russet curly hair and a spade-shaped face" (p.72)
police surgeon - "a fat, dishevelled little man, his face crumpled and petulant as a child when forcibly woken from sleep" (p.182)
Dalgliesh - "tall, austere ... over forty at least ... dark, very tall and loose-limbed ... His face was sensitive without being weak" (p.208)

How would P.D.James describe you?

Get people to do this on sheets of paper. Collect in results. Read a few out and see if people can guess who the person is.

Are all the senses used? Is it a good literary style? It's realistic in the sense that when you meet someone you might first recognise a face, a name, and a voice. But what then? How can you make your characters believable so that readers care about them? One answer is "make them like real people". But what are real people like? I decided to find out by going to the library. In the Cambridge central library there's a book called "Creating Fictional Characters" by Jean Saunders. Who is this Jean Saunders person? When I read that she's "written well over 100 novels ... She is also a frequent enthusiastic lecturer on cruise ships" my heart sunk, but actually the book's ok. She points out that for characters to be convincing they may need to be consistent (for example, their name shouldn't change during the story!). But she also has a section called "Unstereotyping the stereotype". People are a mix of the predictable and the surprising. The predictable features aid identification and empathy, making surprises possible. E.M. Forster wrote that "the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way."

The next 2 exercises will focus on these issues

Exercise 2 - Habits aren't boring

P.D. James focused on faces - long, oval, spade-shaped, etc. Many of us do, sometimes at the expense of other features. A colleague at work has slight face-blindness. He says he's "very good at recognising people from a distance (from their posture / how they walk / etc)". They say that the blind have a more acute sense of hearing. He's probably got a more acute sense of mannerism. Writers need to develop a similarly acute sense. People's mannerisms help define them and can be used to develop a leit-motif - the way they keep fluffing their hair up, how they play with a pen. What to do they do with their other hand while brushing their teeth? When they talk on the phone do they doodle? What to they do while waiting in a supermarket queue? Who would never put their hands on their hips? Who often does it? These habits are often hard to notice and shouldn't be underestimated. You may only realise them when they're broken - an early signs of mental problems perhaps, those little things that can be so revealing to those who know.

Write down some gestural habits of people you know (you might be so used to them that you don't notice them?) or have seen on TV. What features might impressionists pick up on? They might be things that others do as well, or they might be unique. I'm interested with what sort of actions you come up with.

Exercise 3 - Quirks, Secrets and Surprises

You can try to make characters "interesting" by making them eccentric, but little quirks and secrets are more useful. A character's guilty secrets can bring a character to life. If you know a character well, you'll know these things about them.

What's in the zipped compartment of a character's handbag or wallet? What TV programs do they guiltily stay in for? What do they eat when alone that they don't eat with others? Which member of their family have they actually never really liked? What are your secrets? How do you give yourself a treat? List the answers (or those of a "friend"). Alternatively, write a paragraph or 2 (or a plot idea) about what happens when a person's secret is suddenly discovered.

Character construction and development

We'll take a break from workshopping for a moment to look at character development. What is a "memorable character"? When someone has "bags of personality" what does that mean? Jimmy Savile was described as a "larger than life character" - why? Who has charisma? Mandela? Hitler?

Here's one way to build characters up

Create a scrapstore of bodyparts and behaviours - habits, quirks and facial features. This is something that actors do. Where can you go to pick up ideas?
- Magazines - "Hello!" magazine
- TV - Reality TV; fly-on-the-wall TV; The Fast Show; YouTube. Forget about plot. It might help to turn the sound off.
- People-watching - remember, it's parts of behaviour you're interested in, not complete people.
- Lifestyle consultants - they're the experts. Books like Edward de Bono's "How to be more interesting" offer tips
Us writers are lucky - if we're attending a tedious business meeting or social event we can start people-watching, collecting material. If your spouse accuses you of ogling, reply that you're just doing research. If a workmate wonders why you're reading, "How to be more interesting" say it's not for you, it's for a character in your novel.
Construct a character from the bits and behaviours. Avoid the temptation to make everything symbolic, to make everything fit neatly together. Barthes suggested that by adding details that are non-literary and arbitrary, with no symbolic value you can create a "ring of truth" - "The Reality Effect".
The result might initially be a Frankenstein's Monster. Don't worry. Wait for a bolt of lightning to bring the character to life. Once the character moves, the useless bits will drop off as you re-write

You might feel that the resulting character's contrived but it works well enough for me! Some rough edges don't do any harm - they add to the realism. In my poetry book I've got deathbed scenes, etc. One reviewer said my stuff had the "unmistakeable authority of experience"; "The strength of the personae in the pamphlet is the thing that attracts attention" which is embarrassing because my stuff's all lies.

A character needs something that sparks them into life. An experience can be character-building, and they say "cometh the hour, cometh the man". The next bunch of exercises looks at situations, language and settings that can give birth to characters or enhance them. Remember, any advice you might give to a friend might also be applied to your characters, and vice versa.

Exercise 4 - Show not tell

Where do characters come from? Sometimes, especially in a first novel, they come from inside the author. Such characters can end up looking and sounding all the same. Characters are often copied from relatives or friends. This can be risky, even if traits are combined and genders changed (it's been claimed that "The Godfather" was based on the author's mother). Let's try an exercise on that theme

Think about your mother or father. Make a list of 3 qualities that describe him or her. Write a paragraph that captures some or all of those characteristics through significant detail. No word on your list should appear in the paragraph

Get people to do this on sheets of paper and swap papers afterwards. Get people to guess the qualities.

Exercise 5 - Tales of the Unexpected

You can find out a lot about people by how they react to unusual situations. Write a paragraph (a scenario plus plot) about a family member meeting a famous person unexpectedly.

Alternatively, at customs they find something strange (not illegal or rude) in your character's luggage. Your character has to explain how it got there. Invent a scenario.

Exercise 6 - On the spot

Once you've created your characters you can develop them by interviewing them as if they were real. You can find some questionnaires online. Gotham Writers' Workshop offers a questionnaire with questions like

What makes your character laugh out loud?
What is her biggest fear? Who has she told this to? Who would she never tell this to? Why?
Your character is doing intense spring cleaning. What is easy for her to throw out? What is difficult for her to part with? Why?

Suggest some questions that might provoke interesting responses.

Exercise 7 - What's in a name?

JK Rowling has revived interest in character names. Non-fantasy writers also need to be careful when naming characters. Invent a few names, or write your first reaction to one or more of these names. Which ones would you hesitate to go on a blind date with? Lavinia Blackmun, Wladziu Valentino, Sharon Smith, John Thomas, Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong.

Think up a character type and a genre. Now think up a name.

(Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong is Dido; Wladziu Lee Valentino was Liberace).

Exercise 8 - Scene, then heard

If you create sufficiently vivid locations, characters will emerge

Close your eyes. Try to imagine yourself in the kitchen where you grew up as it was then. Look around. How many chairs are there? Where's the tea-pot kept? (on the fridge on a knitted tea cosy). Where's the litter bin (by the back-door; it's a pedal-bin with a broken pedal). What's on the top shelves at the back? (spare keys).

Now have your mother walking in as she was then. She thinks you're the home help. She asks what you're looking for. What would you say?

Conclusions

Once you've got a character, what next? Jean Saunders writes - "I sincerely believe that you must be prepared to love all the characters you create" but I think that's going a bit far. Alternatively you can

treat them "like galley slaves" (Nabokov)
put them in a room and wait to see what happens (Beryl Bainbridge).
Fitzgerald, somewhere between the 2, said that "Character is plot, plot is character".

One tip though - don't do all the character development beforehand; leave some to happen during the story. The characters at the end shouldn't be the same as the characters at the start.

I hope you too have been changed a little by this evening.

Sherlock Holmes and the Cambridge Mystery

2011-10-30T09:09:00.002Z

Little is known about the education of Sherlock Holmes. It's assumed from references to "the university" in "The Gloria Scott", "The Musgrave Ritual", and to some extent "The Adventure of the Three Students", that Holmes attended Oxford or Cambridge, although the question of which one remains a topic of eternal debate. Baring-Gould [1] believed textual evidence indicated that Holmes attended both, though Dorothy L. Sayers [2] thought he was a chemistry student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, which would fit in with his evident knowledge of forensics.

He was born on January 6, 1854, which would put his student years in the 1870s, but there's no evidence of a Sherlock Holmes at the college then, though a photograph from 1878 (one of the earliest college photos ever taken) has several blanks amongst the captions, and several faces smeared by the long exposure, one of them suspiciously Holmesian.

During his detective career he visited Cambridge several times, taking the train from King's Cross. He betrays neither familiarity or ignorance of Cambridge in these episodes, though there are clues that he knew something of the surrounding area.

In "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" he uses a tracker dog in Cambridge.

"In half an hour, we were clear of the town and hastening down a country road. ... The dog had suddenly turned out of the main road into a grass-grown lane. Half a mile farther this opened into another broad road, and the trail turned hard to the right in the direction of the town, which we had just quitted. The road took a sweep to the south of the town, and continued in the opposite direction to that in which we started. ... This should be the village of Trumpington to the right of us."

From this one might deduce that Holmes' knowledge of the centre of Cambridge seems rather vague, though Trumpington seems familiar to him. In "The Hanover Square mystery" his older brother Mycroft says

"Assuming that she comes into the town via the London road -Trumpington Street - she could cycle to Bridge Street and then to the Huntingdon road. That will get her to Girton. Alternatively, she could turn left at Silver Street which will bring her through the Backs, a more sheltered route."

Mycroft's clearly well acquainted with Cambridge. Perhaps Sherlock never was an under-graduate but visited his older brother Mycroft while Mycroft was a student. If so, it's far from unlikely that when he did so, Holmes explored Trumpington. After all, he was well-versed in the greats of literature so he may have been interested in tracking down the location of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale" - "At Trumpingtoun, not fer fro Cantebrigge"

If we could recognise existing buildings in the description of Holmes' travels then perhaps this connection with Trumpington would be confirmed. After finding Trumpington to his right, Holmes "sprang through a gate into a field" where "A footpath led across to the lonely cottage". There's really only one cottage that this could be. Coming off the M11 at junction 11 and heading towards Cambridge, Trumpington will be on your right. On your left obscured by foliage in the middle of a field was the dwelling where Godfrey Staunton's beautiful wife breathed her last. Alas, the cottage has recently been knocked down to make room for a new estate. The photo shows all that's left.

References

"Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street", William S. Baring-Gould, (1962)
"Unpopular Opinions", Dorothy L. Sayers (1946)

Getting Poetry published in the UK

2011-10-21T17:30:00.002+01:00

Books are harder to publish nowadays, and paper magazines are struggling to survive. Competition for publication is fiercer, thanks to all the budding poets produced by creative writing courses. If you're going to be published you'll need be professional and stubborn. Here are some suggestions.

New Possibilities

Perhaps there was a time when budding poets got published in ever better magazines until they were finally ready to send a book manuscript to a publisher. You can still pursue that route (details at the end) but the times they are achangin'.

There's a world beyond paper. It can replace paper for some people. For others it's a way to make progress towards book publication

Performance - Venues continue to open
Festivals - In summer there's a string of festivals - a chance to see and be seen.
Creative Writing - Opportunities have emerged around Creative Writing courses and education in general - residencies, schools, etc. Once you're on a Creative Writing course you'll be able to develop a network of contacts.
Interning - Various organisations (especially magazines) offer foot-in-the-door chances
Grants and Fellowships - A few exist for developing writers. Contact your regional arts board
The WWW - Some web publications are very respectable, or you could start your own. You could put recordings online. At least you could become part of the scene by contributing to discussion boards and blogs. If you want to quickly find out what's going on in the small-press world, try these blogs
- Baroque in Hackney (Katy Evans-Bush)
- George Szirtes
Web magazines are already appearing on the Acknowledgements pages of books. Here are just a few of the UK ones

If you're young there are special opportunities

The "Foyle's Young Poet of the Year" prize is for under-18s
The "Eric Gregory Awards" are for under-30s. These have been going for a long time.
Mentoring - a number of organisations (not least of which Faber!) have been given money to foster young talent, often leading to pamphlet publication. Smiths Knoll's mentoring scheme has led to several successful publications.
Age-limited anthologies pop up every-so-often too

Traditional Routes

First decide on what your aims are and why you have them. Poetry is a tiny world - the amount of fame (or even respect) available is limited.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, not one of the shortlisted collections in the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry had sold more than 1000 copies by 2008. The winner ("The Drowned Book" by Sean O'Brien) sold 785. "Hawks to Doves" by Alan Gill had sold 39 copies.

And "who-you-know" still matters. Here's part of an article from "The Wolf", issue 15, (Summer 2007) by its editor

Recently I visited a sifter for a leading poetry mag in the UK. She asked me to cast an eye over a stack-pile of submissions with a clear preference on ordering all poems (and prose) into 'Friends' and 'unknowns' piles. All 'Friends' would be placed in the provisional PUBLISH folder, often before the intention to read a line of their work. Apparently this is 'how the magazine has operated for years.'

Several publishers (including many of the bigger ones) don't read their slush pile. They depend on recommendations, so you'll need to get yourself noticed. Paper magazines are a rather slow way of doing this.

Paper Magazines

Send all round the year. UK mags often don't like multiple submissions. Magazines increasingly accept e-mail submissions. I've not noticed a bias against rhyming poetry

A poem published in a poetry group newsletter probably gets read more than a poem in some of the magazines mentioned below. In the poetry world I think these are the big hitters

PN Review
Stand (prose too)
Poetry Review (which receives over 30,000 poems a year)
London Magazine (prose too)
Rialto
Poetry London

The following are smaller or less established than the magazines in the previous section, but in other respects just as serious. Some even pay.

The North
Interpreter's House
Other Poetry
Smiths Knoll
Magma
Acumen (pays)
Agenda
Assent
Weyfarers
Orbis
The Dark Horse
Envoi
Iota
Seam
Shearsman
Staple (prose too)
Ambit (prose too)
Tears in the Fence
Under the Radar
The Wolf

The easiest way to research these is to visit the National Poetry Library on the South Bank, or see

The poetry library's magazine list - http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/magazines/
poetry magazine (full-text) archive - http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/
My UK magazines list - http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/ukmags.html

A few of these accept online submissions. See http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pbonline.html for a list of 700+ poetry magazines publishers worldwide who accept electronic submissions.

Competitions

Many competitions offer few bragging rights and not that much money. Even success in the big ones doesn't lead to book publication The bigger ones are

Arvon (every 2 years)
The Bridport Prize
National Poetry Competition (over 6000 entries)

A longer list of competitions is maintained by the poetry library.

Pamphlets

Also known as chapbooks. More publishers are producing them now. A few competitions offer pamphlet publication as the prize. They're one of the most promising ways to be published if the competition's respectable - no networking necessary, and you won't need to wait years for a verdict. The ones below are worthwhile, but the entry fees are about 20 quid.

A list of UK small press poetry publishers is online.

Books

Not easy nowadays. Read "101 Ways to Make Poems Sell: The Salt Guide to Getting and Staying Published" by Chris Hamilton-Emery. There's a sample chapter at the Salt site. Salt's How do I get published is useful too. There's a lot more to getting a book published than just sending the manuscript away.

Tania Hershman: an interview

2011-10-05T13:00:00.000+01:00

I've been a follower of Tania Hershman for a while, partly because she and I both have science-related degrees. For years was a science journalist, publishing in magazines like WIRED and "New Scientist". Now she's had stories in "Nature" too. She's interested in the interaction of Science and Fiction. I was impressed when she appeared last year on a BBC Radio 4 discussion program called "Blinded by Science". I wouldn't be surprised if she does more media work.She's currently writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University and has just received a grant from Arts Council England to write a collection of biology-inspired short stories.

I've kept tracks on her also because she writes Flash as well as short stories. With her Flash Fiction Tania's managed to reach parts that I thought Flash could never reach - pieces in "London Magazine", and a week of her stories on BBC radio 4! Her first collection The White Road and other stories (commended in the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers, and included on a list of "10 collections to celebrate the strength of British short story writers" compiled by booktrust) contained many Flash pieces (some as short as 50 words) and also short stories (3000 words or so). To me, she seems equally at home with any length. She's also been involved with adaptions of her work to video and the stage. She continues to appear in magazines big and small, paper and online.

When she's not writing she seems busy being on festival panels, workshopping, judging, and spreading information to other writers via her blog. Writers have further cause to be grateful to her - her (Non-Complete) List of UK and Ireland Lit Mags Which Publish Short Stories is invaluable, and she founded The Short Review, a review of short story collections - stories need all the publicity and critical attention they can get.

As an old cynic I find her enthusiasm refreshing and her willingness to explore new subjects and genres exemplary. This interview was conducted via e-mail in Autumn 2011.

What came first - Science or Fiction?
Definitely fiction! I started reading at a very early age, apparently, according to my mother (yes, she does say I was a prodigy, she is my mother) and stories were a big part of my childhood. Science came later, I have vague memories of reading some children's book about Famous Scientists but have no idea when that was. It was at school that I fell for maths (gosh now that sounds odd). I just loved solving equations, loved the right-or-wrongness, the lack of greyness, although now I understand far better that science and the scientific endeavour are full of grey areas. I didn't get on with English at school, I didn't like deconstructing stories, didn't agree with my teachers' assertions about what Dickens, for example, must have been thinking when he named Estella in Great Expectations. Perhaps it was a nascent rebellious streak, or some foreshadowing of my own path, but I couldn't help thinking, Well, maybe he just liked the name? I just loved stories, but found that I wasn't really allowed to write what I wanted to write or read for pure pleasure. Science at school was the fun part. I got to university and it got rather more serious - and difficult. That's when I discovered I wasn't the scientist type!
If you were 18 now, would you be thinking of doing a Creative Writing degree?
At 18 I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, I think I had vague thoughts about a career in science (see above) but didn't imagine that, although it was a childhood dream, I could be a Writer, that that was a career option. I suspect my parents, both very academically minded, would have shoved hard away from a Creative Writing degree, but I can't be sure. I'm not sure either that that's the way to do it. I took a circuitous path to fiction-writing - via degrees in Maths & Physics, Philosophy of Science and journalism and a career as a science journalist - and I am glad for it. I got to a point where I found I couldn't not write fiction, that the voice in my head wouldn't stop nagging. I think it's valuable to find that out, and had I gone so young into a CW degree, I might not have left the space to know that.
I notice that The White Road is available on the Kindle. Has it changed your life? Will it change all our lives?
I am assuming you mean the Kindle and not my book! I am of two - or perhaps more - minds. Everywhere I go now, someone whips one out and declares that they read more, they buy more books, which has to be a good thing, right? But I despair that you can't share books through the Kindle - and, as someone pointed out the other day, you can no longer see what someone's reading on the train, for example. It seems another step in the move towards only reading/buying what you think you want and an end to browsing and stumbling upon things you didn't know you wanted. But it is definitely opening up markets for short story writers who, I see, are beginning to publish single stories or sets of stories straight to the Kindle. I don't have one but have the app on my iPod (can't believe I use these terms sometimes... ) and have purchased a few stories. That's got to be a good thing, right? Not necessarily a changing-lives thing, but an enrichment, I hope.
You don't seem to be an SF addict. Have you ever been? Do you have any favorite SF authors or stories?
I was brought up on Star Trek from a very young age, and Doctor Who, and loved them both, the sense of adventure, of limitless worlds and possibilities. But I never read SF until founding "The Short Review". I asked for some review copies of short story collections for myself, the kinds of things I wouldn't normally read - the Logorrhea anthology edited by John Klima, Kelley Eskridge's "Dangerous Space" - both described as SF, and I found new writing worlds opening up to me. I really felt, "Who has been hiding this wonderful writing from me for so long?" That simply by not visiting those shelves in the bookshop or in the library, I'd been missing out on all these incredible, imaginative, magical stories. More recently, being introduced to Carol Emshwiller's work was one of those experiences, where you feel that your writing will never be the same as before you read a particular work. I love her writing, am terrified to think I might never have read her books, what an enormous tragedy. What else am I missing??
I would rather not say whether any of my own work is SF, I don't feel qualified for that. I call some stories "science-inspired" and for me that is purely a description of the process not the end product. I prefer to stay away from labels. I've now had a short story published in Nature's Futures section, which I believe is called SF, so who knows? All I know is that I will never dismiss an entire section of a bookshop again. I've recently been turned on to crime, too (ahh, Fred Vargas!). It's all about great writing, great stories, great imaginations, isn't it?
So when are you going to start writing novels?
Nice one. You should be a stand-up comedian!
Stories like "Hands" (from "The White Road") are more poetic than many a poem I've read. Do you have any plans to focus more in that area? Maybe it's just a matter of sending the same work to different magazines?
First, thanks so much for saying that. Funnily enough, yes I do have plans in that area. I recently went on an Arvon Foundation course in Writing for Radio and one of the tutors was Simon Armitage. I deliberately chose this course in order to meet him after hearing him read at the TS Eliot Poetry Prize readings and being struck by how close his newest collection is to flash fiction. I am really interesting in writing radio plays too, so it seemed a great opportunity to explore both. Simon was very encouraging about some of my work actually being poems and recommend some reading material including James Tate, the Pullitzer-prize-winning American poet. His work was a revelation - surreal, funny, wonderful! That has made me take a look at a number of what I thought were flash stories and rethink them. And I have sent a few out as poems - just had a very short poem and a prose poem published. We will see what happens in that direction but I am very excited. I was nervous of poetry, felt I wasn't "qualified" to talk about it, to claim I might be writing it. I am feeling a bit bolder now.
Sorry, but I have to ask - who's your favorite scientist?
It's a little clichéd, but it's a toss-up between Einstein - a large picture of him with the caption "Imagination is more important than knowledge", hangs here in my writing shed, just by my side - and Richard Feynman, what a character. And also all the researchers in Paul Martin and Kate Nobes' lab at Bristol University where I have been writer-in-residence, they are all wonderful, and were very patient with me!
The story of how you got published is already online. Are things getting harder or easier for budding prose writers?
Hmm, well, if you are talking about within the short story world, I think things are easier in that there are more and more publications calling for prose submissions. There seem to be more and more lit mags, each with their own specific likes and dislikes, which has really helped me find places that like my particular brand of oddness, and I am sure it's helpful for others too. And there are loads of new print magazines too. But when it comes to short story collections, things are definitely not easier, from what I can see. Even some of the small presses who championed short stories are finding it so hard to sell them that they are pulling back. It makes me deeply sad, since to me short stories are purely sources of joy, and I am talking about the dark depressing ones as well. I love to read them, they make me feel better, they make me better able to cope with life, I think. Ali Smith said at Small Wonder recently that she believes the short story is intimately tied up with mortality, because it is so much about its ending, and perhaps that explains its appeal, to a certain sector of the reading public - and maybe its lack of appeal to the majority! I would encourage budding writers to read magazines and send their work out to places whose writing they love and where they feel they might fit. And to understand that rejection is an essential part of the process.
The recent Forward poetry prize all-male shortlist raised again the issue of gender bias in the literature world, and science is supposed to be a male-oriented profession. That said, this year's Hugo awards shortlist had 4 women and one man. Have you noticed any particular problems?
This doesn't really come up in the short story world at all, and the lab I was writer-in-residence in, a biochemistry lab, had an every-changing population, sometimes with more women than men and sometimes the reverse. But it seems that things haven't changed much in the UK in Maths and Physics since I studied those subjects, 20 years ago, when there were 20% women. I have heard that the majority of the Italian physicists working at the CERN particle accelerator are female, which is thrilling! Re writing and gender, I haven't run into problems myself, that I know of, but I do wish that these prizes were judged anonymously. I know it's hard with book prizes - but surely it should be about the writing?
Job interviews sometimes end with "Where do you see yourself being in 5 years' time?". Well?
Ha! Urgh. Still writing, I hope. If it's what I am supposed to be doing. I can't plan ahead. I have a booking to teach an Arvon course in Nov 2012 and that freaks me out. I'd like to just think about today, this moment. I'm not writing as much as I want to be, I am not very good at carving out the time, I feel so lucky to get wonderful invitations to do short-story-related things, and many of them pay well, but it's hard to reconcile that with writing. And if I don't write, well... the invitations will dry up, won't they? Was this a job interview? Oh, oops, not sure I got the job then...

Thanks Tania!

My system

2011-08-25T13:06:00.004+01:00

I've been wondering whether there's much coherence between the articles on this site, whether there are discernable general features. I think my usual approach is psychology-oriented, with sympathies towards I. A. Richards, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, reader-response theories, and experimental confirmation. I don't mean to suggest that the purpose of all texts is for the author to communicate intentions to the reader, but when authors want the text to be read in this way, they'd better understand the psychology of reading and knowledge acquisition.

Much of what I write about is do to with the lack of transparency of a work (even a mimetic one) - how the representation has features that the represented thing lacks, and how operations can be performed on a representation that can't be performed on what's being represented. Obscurity and difficulty often feature. Here are some assumptions I commonly make

When someone reads a text they will try to make sense of it using explicit or implicit instructions about how to combine the text's components. Readers will bring their knowledge to the text, but the context within which they meet the text matters too.
Sometimes the method of extracting meaning from a literary text will be similar to methods used when reading reference material. Some texts require more specialised methods. The form or genre may be sufficient to provide instructions.
The reader will not only need to proceed linearly from the start to the end of the text, they'll also need to zoom out (to plot, character, etc) and zoom in (to sounds, to the spelling (for acrostics), etc). As they read, they'll develop provisional hypotheses (about the genre, plot, characters, appropriateness of their reading strategy, etc) that may later be consolidated, discarded, or juxtaposed, or may cause a re-interpretation of previous material.
In a text book, a fact wouldn't be introduced before any necessary definitions and facts have been introduced. In literature, facts are often presented out of order. The key to the meaning of a fact may be provided long after the raw material of the fact is. If facts or instructions are deferred, the reader expects the lack of disclosure to be fair. There are conventions to this. For example: in a 1st person PoV piece you're allowed to hide what's going on inside other heads; in narrative, the author's allowed to hide things that are yet to happen.
Awareness of the readers' task may help authors produce more effective work. The variation between readers can be attenuated by writers. For example, a writer can hint at something in a way that few people might notice. Later the writer can be more explicit for the readers who didn't get it the first time.
The reader experience takes priority over the author's. If the author decides to give 2 characters the same name because they had the same name in real life, that's not helpful. If a poem came into being as an exercise in syllabics, but the reader gets nothing from the syllabics except puzzlement re the line-breaks, that's not helpful.

Much of this approach is exemplified in Attention, agility and poetic effects. Shorter, more specialised treatments are

Epiphanies

2011-07-31T10:11:00.011+01:00

Epiphanies go in and out of fashion. Joyce used them extensively in "The Dubliners" but in an age where closure is distrusted and deep truths ironised, the tidy epiphany has been sidelined. As pointed out in Epiphanies on film, it doesn't help that they're "overused in television series, where they are usually a cumbersome attempt to add depth". An epiphany that's supposed to make all the pieces of the jigsaw suddenly fall into place can end up looking as contrived as the final scene of an old whodunnit.

Dickens' Scrooge is often mentioned as an example of a character transformed by epiphany. Another example (without a self-realisation component) is the end of the first "Planet of the Apes" film. Gambling the effect of your story on a final epiphany is a bit like gambling on a punchline - if the epiphany of a short piece fails, the whole story does. Epiphanies needn't be near the end of a story though. Instead they can signal a significant change in the plot direction - a new start.

It's partly a show-not-tell issue - the reader rather a character should experience the epiphany. It may be hard to make readers experience the described epiphany, but they might be encouraged to empathize with the epiphaniser, or at least understand the character development. Jordan E. Rosenfeld in "Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time" lists five types of epiphanies (removing blinders, realizing a suppressed desire, accepting the limitations of oneself or others, experiencing identity epiphanies, undergoing a rude awakening) and suggests ways to pressurize characters into epiphanising. These processes should interest even epiphany-weary readers - you may be able to satisfy them without spoiling the story for others.

Your own epiphanies

You see a beautiful sunset. You're moved, drowned in thoughts of your mortality. You photograph it. At home you show it to someone. They're not impressed. When you look at the photo again even you're not impressed.

Judging your own writing's never easy, but judging the literary impact of your epiphanies on others is harder still. Psychological epiphanies add further complications. When a divorced woman realises that a suitor is only after her money, the force of the revelation may be overwhelming because of the internal resistance that the revelation had to overcome. To her friends and family the situation might have been obvious from the start - it's not a startling insight to anyone except the woman.

Authorial Tactics

You can avoid writing about epiphanies altogether if you feel your judgement is too clouded by private experiences, or at least avoid using your own epiphanies. Alternatively, you can hedge your bets by offering routes through your stories for epiphany-phobes

The epiphaniser can express their awareness that the reader might not empathise with the epiphany.
Someone else in the story can express doubts about the epiphany, either to the epiphaniser or just to the reader (dramatic irony). Maybe the sunset was the result of an up-wind pollution event. Maybe the woman felt so lonely that her friends let the friendship develop. Maybe the epiphaniser gushes several epiphanies a week.

Fractals and Poetry

2011-07-18T13:50:00.003+01:00

"Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap" (M. Birken and A.C.Coon, "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry", Rodopi, 2008, p.167).

So what are fractals? I only have a rough idea. Symmetry is when you can do something to a shape so that it matches itself - with rotational symmetry you rotate the shape; with reflection symmetry you reflect the shape. You can look upon fractals as another type of symmetry where instead of rotating or reflecting, you magnify. In real life you can get a rough idea of how this works by looking at a tree (the pattern of the boughs is like the pattern of twigs when you zoom in) or a coastline (the jaggedness of a coastline is similar whether you're looking at a satellite image or through a microscope) but pure fractals only exist in maths - it doesn't matter at what scale you look at certain mathematical objects, they'll always look the same.

It's unclear how this idea can apply to poetry, and in fact people seem to merge the fractal concept with ideas from complexity theory - "strange attractors", etc. The resulting poetry has been described using other, non-mathematical theories too, so the whole area's fraught with potential confusion. Whatever terms they use ("fractal" - Alice Fulton; "radical artifice" - Perloff) there seems to be fair agreement about the sort of poetry under discussion. Fulton's written extensively about it. Here are some quotes from Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions (Alice Fulton, Thumbscrew No 12 - Winter 1998/9

"During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure."
"Just as fractal science analysed the ground between chaos and Euclidean order, fractal poetics could explore the field between gibberish and traditional forms. "
"Over the past decade, scientists have come to view fractals as particular instances within the larger field of complexity theory. While retaining the term "fractal poetry", I hope to suggest ways in which complexity theory might amplify the possibilities of such a poetics. (A poem is not a complex adaptive system: the comparison is analogical, not literal.)"
"My tentative 1986 prospectus for post modern fractal poetry suggested that digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity be regarded as formal functions rather than lapses into formlessness and that all shifts of rhythm be equally probable."
"On the ground between set forms and aimlessness a poem can be spontaneous and adaptive – free to think on its feet rather than fulfil a predetermined scheme. In a departure from Romantic ideals, fractal aesthetics suppose that "spontaneous" effects can be achieved through calculated as well as ad libitum means. Thus "spontaneity" does not refer to a method of composition but to linguistic gestures that feel improvisatory to the reader. Rifting and jamming, rough edge and raw silk – such wet-paint effects take the form of long asides, discursive meanderings, and sudden shifts in diction or tone. "
"Complex adaptive systems do not seek equilibrium or try to establish balance; they exist in unfolding and "never get there". As Holland says, "the space of possibilities is too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum." Like complex systems, fractal poetry exists within a vast array of potentialities: it is a maximalist aesthetic."
"Diction, surface textures, irregular metres, shifts of genre, and tonal variations take centre stage as defining formal elements. Function words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions) assume schematic importance."
" The poem plane is analogous to the picture plane in painting: a two-dimensional surface that can convey the illusion of spatial depth. Painters use perspective, colours, texture, and modelling to suggest three dimensions on the flat canvas. If objects are painted progressively smaller and closer together they will seem to recede. Space also can be suggested by juxtaposing oncoming warm colours with introverted cool ones. By alternating thickly-textured impasto with turpentine-thinned washes, the artist can create opaque areas of positive space and radiant glazes of negative space. Objects of the same scale can be modelled differently to create depth: a hard-edged rendering will appear nearer than a hazy one."
"Just as paint fosters illusions of proximity and distance on canvas, words can suggest spatial depth on paper. A fractal poem can do this by shifting its linguistic densities: the poem’s transparent, easy passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning when read rather than calling attention to their linguistic presence. More textured language, on the other hand, refuses to yield its mass immediately. The eye rests on top of the words, trying to gain access but is continually rebuffed. Such (relatively) opaque sections assume the solidity of positive space. By juxtaposing transparent with textured passages, fractal poetry constructs a linguistic screen that alternately dissolves and clouds."
"Rather than excise stale portmanteaus, fractal poetry might use empty rhetoric sardonically, as a means of splintering the "sincere" voice that was a modernist value. Abstractions are arguably the most rarified words because they have no relation to a specific physical object. In fractal poetics, abstractions are not forsworn as redundant explications of self-sufficient concrete symbols; rather the abstract becomes a valuable realm in itself"
"Fractal poetry likewise makes use of recurring cluster words, limbic lines, or canopy stanzas as a means of creating depth. (Cluster being an aggregation of stars with common properties; limbic connoting emotion and motivation; canopy casting a shade overall.) Unlike the villanelle or sestina’s recycling, fractal repetition does not appear at a predetermined place within a set scheme. The poem is more dynamic and turbulent because its repetitions have an element of ambush"
"As free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse breaks the poem plane"

Many of these effects have been studied without recourse to complexity theory - they're what 20th century poetry (especially any erstwhile avant-garde works) use. Does this treatment offer any advantages over a more literary one? As Fulton says, it's only an analogy. The work of Jackson Pollock has been analysed to derive its fractal dimension, and experiments suggest that humans prefer fractal images with a dimensionality in the 1.3-1.5 range irrespective of whether the images are from maths, art or nature. I don't think similar work's been done with poetry, though I suspect "The Wasteland" is susceptible to such treatment.

For the moment I think I'll stick with the more literary descriptions, though the idea of measuring the different types of order appeals to me, as does the idea that some effects needn't be used as regularly or uniformly as they often are.

Factoids

2011-07-17T11:33:00.001+01:00

Well, that's what I'll call them - facts (sometimes contextless and isolated) that are put into poems. They can be interesting in their own right - strange but true. They can be a piece of information everyone's expected to know (e.g. "London's the biggest city in England"), the reader thus expected to ponder on the implications (easiest city to be lonely in?). They can be a minor piece of knowledge shared by reader and poet, perhaps a piece of public knowledge that had a particular significance to the poet. As an example of their usage, here's the first and the final stanza from "Then in the twentieth century" which won 2nd Prize in the 2002 National Poetry Competition. It's by David Hart.

Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape,
the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move,
and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges.
...
Men quarrelled about scrolls found in pots near the Dead Sea, the library
at Norwich burned down, milk was pasteurised by law, I have four children,
all adult now, small islands became uninhabited, Harpo never spoke on film.

Most of these factoids seem to lack any special significance to the persona, nor do they seem closely inter-related. There's not really any narrative either. There's some theoretical justification for this approach. Facts help to anchor the poem to the verifiable world, and are never really isolated.

"although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second with having previously reached the first", Ruskin, "Modern Painters"
"Structuralism ... starts off from the observation that every concept in a given system is determined by all other concepts of the system and has no significance by itself alone ... there is an interrelation between the data (facts) and the philosophical assumptions, not a unilateral dependence", Garvin, "a Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style"

Supposed facts may be loaded with implicit assumptions. There's psychological justification too - after all, what we remember isn't just the personal, or the personal responses to public events, we also remember public events much as many others might.

Some poets never use this approach - it's non-lyrical; just dead facts; a collage that depends on juxtaposition; an essay. I like Hart's poem and the style. I use factoids - I like finding out that Defoe, when he was pilloried for criticising the authorities in 1703, was pelted by the public with flowers, or that Hitler and Wittgenstein went to the same school. In the poetry game, facts play a role they don't play in prose. They're perhaps further from poetic truth than beautiful imagery is, but they're useful all the same.

"beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", Keats, "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
"Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays",
"Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true", Larkin

Paper Tiger, Burning Bright

2011-07-03T09:45:00.002+01:00

Do you worry about writer's block? When Camus had it he rushed to his then mentor, Andre Gide, who said "you mean you can stop writing yet you still complain? What's up with you Albert?"

Camus' problem was that he had decided to be a writer. He was, after all, an existentialist. Why do you write? Did you jump or were you pushed? Who do you write for? Thomas Love Peacock said that poets are wasters of their own time and robbers of that of others. Is writing by its very nature a selfish activity, a solitary sin? With the need for voluntary tutors to help illiterates, with Africa starving, with the Samaritans understaffed handling all the young poets that phone in, can locking yourself away ever be justified?

Some justify their selfishness by emphasising that their sacrifice is for the benefit of all, because they are society's antennae, the nearest to prophets and telepaths that this nihilistic age has. These starving artists in their uniforms from Oxfam charge over the top in a daring raid on reality and return with their wounds which they invite us to lick. Do they write to express, confess or merely impress us with their Angst threshold when they tell us that "lonely clouds make shadows on the wind", that "roses reek of mortality" and that "life's a sexually transmitted disease"? Others use philosophy to back themselves up. Wittgenstein thought that language and reality shared a logical form and that by exploring one mode, the other was enriched, and that man's instinct was to explore. Chant his name repeatedly next time the spouse wants to drag you away from your garret.

But let's not dismiss this latterday pretension until we've heard from the Greats. Plato, in The Republic, said that "Poetry is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth". Goethe thought that words were 'foppish' and he would have preferred to "speak like nature, altogether in drawings". Despite these warnings, so many wordsmiths carry on thinking that they will find something. Tolstoi knew a bit about finding things but he thought that the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. Is this where the path of discovery leads? Wherever it goes, Shakespeare must have got there first. We know very little about the man but we do know that at the age 46 he decided to pack it all in. Where does that leave us?

It leaves many of us sitting at writers' workshops. Hemingway in his Nobel acceptance speech said that "writing is at its best a lonely life. Organisations for writers palliate his lonliness but I doubt if they improve his writing." But we try, don't we? I wonder why. There's no hope for most of us. One friend told me that writing was her life and she didn't want to talk about it. Another pointed out that art in general makes us more observant about the world; that, for instance, people only fully appreciated sunsets after Turner had painted them. There's something in this, I think. The observation and analysis necessary for writing can bring details to our notice and add new perspective. And what holds for sunsets holds for self- portraits too, I guess.

Writing can also be a refuge from the hurly-burly, a way to distance ourselves from some unwanted episode, analyse it, make it bearable. In the jungle we would scream in terror from a tiger. With it behind bars we can admire its sleek fur, its powerful musculature. Writing provides the cage but for whom? Us or the tiger?

A survey of famous twentieth century people has shown that writers resemble each other more so than artists, politicians or any other group do. They tend to be only children who disliked school, often had a chronic childhood illness, came from unhappy homes, entered insecure marriages and were prone to suicide, drink and crashing their cars into trees. Writers, perhaps through the isolation of their working conditions are frequently misanthropic, the best of them especially so. Henry James died a virgin. Tolstoi died wishing he could become one and Marcel Proust... well we all know about him.

My friends have had less troubled lives but well over half have suggested that writing is a substitute, the imaginary playmates of childhood rationalised beyond the fantasy lovers of adolescence into almost believable characters. As Mauriac said, "A writer is essentially an inadequate man who doesn't quite resign himself to lonliness". And since so many inadequate people are attracted to writing it's no surprise that literature destroys so many of them. If you want to know why there's so much sick literature around, just look at who writes it.

But don't despair. You can of course become a critic. You lose the thrill of doing an emotional striptease but if writing is your life you can still contribute indirectly to upholding the standards of literature. Writers need all the help they can get. However, a critic has to ensure that he is more than just a back seat writer, he must at least be widely read. Only a writer can afford to have a narrow range. I talked to a critic once whose mouth broke the speed limit while his brain was stuck in reverse and soon realised that the only way to broaden his mind would be to put his head through a mangle. The casual critic can indeed palliate loneliness and if that's what you want them fair enough but if you take writing seriously then perhaps you should go the whole hog and take heed of Jean Cocteau's words. "Literature is impossible. We must get out of it. No use trying to get out of it through more literature; only love and faith allow us to get out of ourselves."

A society called EXLIT, soon to open a branch near you, exists to help you through the difficult period of withdrawal. It is too painful to endure alone. I wish you luck.

(Published in Jennings, issue 7)

What's wrong with SF?

2011-06-20T09:20:00.007+01:00

"sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you”.

This was written by Virginia Woolf to SF writer Olaf Stapledon. But SF has had some public relations problem since then, not least amongst writers. SF went through a growth spurt in the pulp zine era, then another in the UK during the 1960s. Andy Hedgecock in "From New Wave to SciFi Strange: thematic shifts in the SF short story" (from "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice" 1: 1) covers the genre's history from then to now

"The new wave in British science fiction (SF) was a literary movement championed and guided by the London-based magazine New Worlds in the mid- to late 1960s". He quotes Colin Greenland: "One of the strongest imperatives of Moorcock's editorial policy, ... was to bring sf back into the arena of contemporary fiction, first by incorporating into sf the characteristic themes and techniques of fictional innovators from Joyce and Beckett to Burroughs and Borges, and then by investing the sf writer’s inheritance of images and approaches into a fiction whose primary and most urgent concern was not remote space or the distant future, but the condition of the present"
According to Kelly and Kessel (in their introduction to "The Secret History of Science Fiction") "'after the mid-1970s, SF went back into the playroom, never to be taken seriously again'. As the same authors point out, however, forms of literary SF ignored by the mainstream media continued to flourish both with and without the ‘science fiction’ label"
"In recent years writers and critics have endeavoured to define a form of SF that offers accessible storytelling but returns to the literary and human-centred values of the new wave. The term 'slipstream', originally coined by SF author Bruce Sterling, was used to refer to fiction that blended SF, fantasy and literary fiction, and which focused on feelings of strangeness and dislocation; while the 'New Weird' combined urban fantasy, literary experiment, SF and horror. It is suggested the most useful term for recent developments in SF storytelling is 'SciFi Strange'"
He concludes by writing "There is a rejection of ‘disguised nostalgia’ in SF stories and a hunger for new approaches, often based on the blurring of genre boundaries. Contemporary SF writers tend to believe, like their predecessors in the 1960s, that mainstream fiction ignores significant aspects of human experience such as politics and the abuse of power, ecological disaster and the fragility of identity. ... The development of a new approach to SF storytelling, SciFi Strange, seems to be inspired, in part, by a wish to use the tools, techniques and tropes of the genre to discuss the diverse themes set out above with an audience unfamiliar with traditional SF. There is little compelling evidence of a resurgence of the formal experimentation of the 1960s new wave"

The early Star Wars films didn't help establish SF's high-art credentials - SF got dragged back to what the SF people call Sci-Fi (pronounced 'skiffy', I'm told) where too many loner scientists (i.e. authors) save the world and get the girl.

One problem is that the definition of SF is slippery - if you want to buy "The Handmaid's Tale", "Cosmopolis", "The Time Traveler's Wife", "Never let you go" or "Frankenstein" in a bookshop you wouldn't head for the SF section (which seems the place where SF authors' books - rather than SF books - are kept). China Mieville's books challenge classifications. Borges, Vonnegut, Calvino, etc edge toward Fantasy or Science Fiction too, but the rule seems to be that SF with literary value isn't "Science Fiction" - it's just "Fiction". Whenever an SF overlaps another genre or mode, the odds are that SF will lose its claim in a resulting tug-of-war if the work is good or topical

Some writers/agents encourage the SF/non-SF division - Margaret Atwood didn't want her books on SF shelves; Iain Banks writes as Iain M. Banks when he writes SF. The goalposts have moved over the years though

When Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels he could use distant lands, but nowadays it would be set on different planets or in the future - like "1984", "Planet of the Apes", "Clockwork Orange", etc. These Allegories/Satires are no more scientific than "Animal Farm" is horticultural.
SF settings are used to explore alternative lifestyles and sexualities. or used as a source of comedy - e.g. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". During the cold war there were several post-apocalypse novels - "A Canticle for Leibowitz", "Planet of the Apes", "Riddley Walker", etc - which because they dealt with mainstream pre-occupations were accepted by the mainstream.
The PostModern mix of high and low cultures offers a route for SF to fraternize with literature. William Burroughs and Vonnegut live happily enough on the edge. Vonnegut said (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that "the science-fiction passages in SlaughterHouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare".

Whether or not the author wants it, the science element in these could be considered incidental. In Paul March-Russell's "The Short Story" it's suggested that SF is less a sub-genre than a mode of writing - i.e. a vocabulary of images than can be applied to various genres. Perhaps so. Science might be there only as a source of new metaphors for old problems. E.g., William Gibson (Neuromancer) said that "computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the way it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision"

SF can appear escapist in a derogatory sense, but I think the situation's more nuanced than that. SF and Romanticism have been associated for decades - Frankenstein's associated with the English Romantic poets, and Wells described his SF works as "scientific romances". The re-evaluation of (or search for) Self in times of Technological Revolution goes on. Man's place in nature is re-assessed. Loners and explorers venture out across dales and galaxies. Sometimes Humanity wins, sometimes Technology does. More often nowadays some fusion is reached - most explicitly with cyborgs.

Rather than being escapist, SF has been used as a way to avoid censorship. According to "Anatomy of Science Fiction", ed Donald E. Morse, Cambridge scholars press, 2006

"In Central Europe in the twenty-first century there is now little in the way of home-grown science fiction", p.190
"After reunification, many GDR authors stopped writing science fiction or ceased writing altogether", p.180

Another barrier to literary acceptance is that SF stories often adopt a traditional 'Realism' attitude to language. There's competition from other genres too - as bloggers have point out, imaginative reconstructions of historical (or even alternative history) scenarios aren't subject to the same linguistic constraints. According to George R.R. Martin in a recent interview SF is even losing ground to the Fantasy genre.

Yet another factor affecting the reputation of SF is that it's sometimes said to suit the currently unfavoured short-story genre - novels like "2001" and "Fahrenheit 451" began life as short stories - but SF isn't well represented in general short story magazines and anthologies.

Is the situation any better now? In a Sept 2009 Guardian blog written by SF writer Prof Adam Roberts, his professorial colleague (and Booker prize judge) John Mullan said that SF is "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other" although according to Roberts, "British SF really is going through a golden age". The New Scientist Sept 2009 issue had some Flash SF pieces, and the UK's £5000 Edge Hill short story collection prize was won by Chris Beckett in 2009 for his SF collection "The Turing Test", ahead of some well-known mainstreamers. Maybe that will help change the attitude of people who say of an SF text that "It's not real SF. It's just exploiting SF to write about Satire/Politics/Love/Life". It's SF Jim, but not as we know it.

So don't be too put off by the SF label - yes, it may be just "cowboys and indians in spacesuits" but it may also be the speculative literature of our age. More SF is slipstreaming into the mainstream - David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" is partly SF, as is "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan. If it's good enough for Virginia ...

Gestalt effects and poetry

2011-06-09T11:43:00.008+01:00

I'm interested in Part vs Whole effects and emergent phenomena: how poetry can be made from mundane parts; how a sad story can be created from comic episodes. There often isn't a simple one-way journey from the parts to the whole - understanding the whole makes you re-process the parts in context. The issue is mentioned in Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts by Reuven Tsur - " Figure-ground relationship is a very important notion of gestalt theory. Theorists of the psychology of music and the visual arts made most significant use of it. The significance of this notion in literary theory is rather limited. ... I will consider three literary texts that exploit this readiness of human perceivers to switch back and forth between figure and ground. All three texts achieve their effect by inducing readers to reverse figure-ground relationships relative to their habitual modes of thought or perception"

The effects are clearer visually. Here are 2 examples

The rabbit and the duck

(Source: Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind's eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312.).

I suspect when people see this untitled they'll notice a detail that will lead them to identifying either the duck or the rabbit. The 2 interpretations are supposed to have equal status - it's not "really a rabbit". People told that the picture's a rabbit may not think to see it as anything else. The context and expectations can suppress interpretations even if (as in this case) one interpretation is as natural as another.

Writing analogous texts isn't easy. Getting the balance and contextual cues right is harder still. The nearest I've got to it is writing pieces that are long puns, displaying the 2 versions. Here's the end of "Doubled up in pain"

... a lover gone. No mistake.

... all over, gone. No missed ache.

The Margaret Thatcher Effect

Face rotation isn't a commonly required facility, and we're not very good at it. The individual features are interpreted using one process (perhaps quite a primitive one). A different process recognises that there is a face, and tries to identify which face it is.

Reading poetry you may have an emotional reaction to individual features, reactions that are shown to be "wrong" when you analyse more carefully. However, once you interpret anger (for example) through the ironic voice of the poem, sometimes the anger still shows through - you react viscerally to it - even though you know it's meant humorously

Misdirection

2011-05-11T09:36:00.002+01:00

Discussion of misdirection and distraction has turned up in several contexts during my recent reading, in several contexts

Magic - "One of the most important things to remember when thinking about misdirection and magic is this: a larger movement conceals a smaller movement" (from Wikipedia)
Literature - "Misdirection is also a literary device most commonly employed in detective fiction, where the attention of the reader is deliberately focused on a red herring in order to conceal the identity of the murderer" (from Wikipedia). Of course, many other genres use the device too - e.g. a title has an extra meaning that's only revealed at the end.
Writing Poetry - "It is difficult to select just a couple moments in Larkin's work where he employs this strategy of misdirection because it is so often the case. Nevertheless, I will begin with a poem from The Whitsun Weddings called "Water" where the strategy is hard to miss. In it the speaker creates a hypothetical scenario that is initially presented in kind of a jocular vein, but by the end we sense how fully invested, emotionally and intellectually, the speaker is in this thought experiment and it transforms into something other than humorous" (from Misdirection and excess in Ginsberg and Larkin)
Reading Poetry - "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." T.S. Eliot, "The Use of Poetry", 1933

In these situations the true purpose of the action is being disguised in order to surprise the audience later - to set a time-bomb under-cover. In the following example (and perhaps the Eliot example too) the enemy is logic, reason, narrative, or the self-critic, and the distraction lets other (perhaps more delicate) faculties have a chance.

Poetry Workshop Exercises - "This exercise is the old distraction gambit of the card sharp or shell-game artist. Worry about one hand while the other pulls off the trick" (Thomas Rabbitt, from "The Practise of Poetry" by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (eds), CollinsReference, 1992)

These enemy faculties need to be sated otherwise their needs will dominate. If these more mundane needs can be satisfied while performing other tasks, so much the better. The trick is not to let the fulfillment of these needs interfere with the other more delicate faculties. In poetry for example, the reader's desire for tidiness and order might be satisfied visually, freeing grammar from its obligations.

Distraction depends on there being more than one feature or viewpoint. Poetry's good at offering features for diversion - sound versus sense, line versus sentence, form vs content, etc. Distraction's useful because it makes surprise more effective - suddenness matters if twists, punchlines and juxtaposition are going to work. People don't want to see a scene constructed piece by piece before their eyes. Better that the lights go out between acts so that the new scene can suddenly appear. The distraction's like an egg-shell, protecting as well as hiding the growing entity within.

The risks are that distraction can look like showmanship or mannerism, or it can seem to be unintentional flitting, a lack of focus. Also its effects can be hard for the writer to predict: they'll depend on the experience of the reader - a writer's supposedly subtle clue may look clumsily obvious to some readers. The reader might be supposed to see the distraction for what it is - part of a double bluff perhaps, or maybe the writer's going to focus the source of interest in something other than tension.

In all these cases, the reader's ultimate enjoyment is what matters - all is revealed at the end. Contrast that with the psychology tests where the subjects often aren't told the true purpose of the experiment beforehand because self-awareness will affect the outcomes - the joke's on them. Some literature might be like that too - the author or critics having the last laugh: "The Name of the Rose" perhaps - a medieval whodunnit or wicked, pretentious satire? "Finnegan's Wake" - comic masterpiece or flop?

Vanessa Gebbie: an interview

2011-04-21T09:18:00.001+01:00

Introduction

In the late noughties whether I was reading the latest Riptide magazine, the Salt blog, or competition results, Vanessa Gebbie's name kept appearing. In 2007 alone she was 1st in the Daily Telegraph's Novel prize, 1st in Exeter University's Paddon Award, 2nd in the Bridport, 2nd in the Fish Short Story Prize and 2nd in FlashQuake's "Less is More" competition. Since then she's written/edited a few books. As if that wasn't enough, she's had poetry successes too (2 poems short-listed in the Bridport 2010 competition). She's keen to share what she's learnt (and still learning) via blogs and workshops - she's a busy (and I suspect excellent) teacher and judge.

Her pieces are of course good reads, but I also think they're particularly useful for aspiring writers to learn from. Though it's unlikely that our stories would be mistaken for each other's, many of her stories are what I'd like to write - she seems to try to make each word count (count double if possible), and though she has many interesting life experiences she could write about, she prefers to invent. Her short story collections are more varied than most, though a few images and themes are repeated -

Words from a glass bubble (Salt 2008) is a collection of stories that not only vary widely in word-length but authorial orientation changes too - sometimes the narrator's invisible, sometimes she's puppeteer, ring-master or quizzing, challenging storyteller. Some symbols recur - there are old virgins, wall eyes, "joined up houses", dead children, fostered/adopted children, birds ... and the sand gets everywhere. There are several churches too (while in Cambridge she popped into St Botolph's Church which dates from 1350). The church-cleaners in the stories are perhaps examples of the more general "body" cleaners that pervade the stories. Many characters are outcasts longing for old wounds to be healed, or are merely seeking a firmer identity. It's striking how early the characters introduce themselves (or another character) to the reader - many first pages have "I'm X" or "X is". At a recent Cambridge WordFest session Vanessa said that she'd had an "odd beginning" (adopted at birth, only recently meeting her genetic relatives) and sympathized with people trying to find their place.

Storm Warning (Salt 2010) is more thematic, featuring victims of military/religious conflict who have a weakened sense of the present, becoming vulnerable to sudden losses of working memory and invasion by the past. Dominant imagery involves beaches, feet/shoes, and smells, with several inter-generational relationships.

The following interview picks up on a few of these issues mentioned above, touching also on the use of autobiographical information, the compromises of a writers' life, and how to make the most of things.

Interview (April 2011, by e-mail)

If you had your time again, how might you have developed your writing faster?

I'm not sure it's a good thing to develop writing 'faster'. Could I have done that without compromising what I'm doing now? I don't think so... I'm not sure speed is a good thing, is it? Maybe for some people, but for me, I'm happy to be jogging along at whatever pace this thing goes at. I reckon we all come to writing when we are ready, and can't force things to happen before then, at least, not without damaging something. I really started this journey in October 2002, spent a year learning craft, started writing seriously a year later. Had my first publication in early 2004, my first comp success that summer. Lots more followed, I was very lucky, but it was hard hard work! I would not make comp wins or publications just 'notches on the desk' - easy to do and useless for learning. I tried to progress, to target harder and harder comps for example. It seemed to work. I got noticed by an agent and also by Salt Publishing in 2007. The first collection came out in 2008, the text book in 2009, the third book (second collection) in 2010, the novel was pitched by my agent to publishers in October 2010, found a home with Bloomsbury a month later and will be out in Nov 2011 in the UK and in Jan 2012 in the US. Could I have done it faster? I don't think so, to be honest. Not without burning out and producing poor work in the process.

Do you find that teaching helps your writing?

Yes and no. Yes in that being with other writers is a positive experience, and there is great synergy in a group of keen learners. I get swept up in it because I am a learner too. Always. The day I stop learning, I will stop.

There's no real 'us and them' for me. I just like passing on this thing I love to newer writers. I take a non-academic, very hands on approach, absolutely non-didactic. There is certainly no need to produce work for a tick and a mark out of ten from anyone other then the writers themselves. My aim is only to help open people up to their own potential, and show them some tools to sharpen things.

But - no - as well, it does not help my writing, in that it is using a different set of skills, and therefore I would never ever want to take a job as a writing teacher full time. It would stop me writing.

If money wasn't an issue would you still do teaching?

Yes. Absolutely. If you have a skill at something, no matter how slight - don't you have a duty to teach the next generation? Besides, I had some stunningly good tuition myself, and I don't see how morally I can't pass that on. If it worked for me, it will work for others... I'll keep teaching until people stop asking me, I guess.

Would you still judge?

Difficult one - I think I would still agree to be final judge - not necessarily read every single entry.

You've written stories and Flash. Now you're writing novels and poems too. Does a piece that begins as one thing ever turn into another? What's the most common transformation?

Yes, occasionally. For example, a very short flash piece about a priest assuaging his own guilt about a strange parishioner - ended up as a poem. It was a better poem than it was a flash. And you could argue that I turned about thirty stories into a novel - only that took a year's hard work, and was a very deliberate act. They didn't 'turn into' the novel without a lot of persuasion ... if not beatings!

Which writer or writing issue have you changed your mind about lately?

Interesting question. I re-read "Birdsong" [by Sebastian Faulks] recently - and certainly found it less mesmerising than I did at first. I think it could have had a better editor - put it like that.

Writing issues - hmm. The longer I am at this game, the more I realize that whereas 'there are no rules' seems to be a popular mantra for so many writers and tutors, I do not buy that. Yes, there are rules. Even 'there cannot be rules' is one, isn't it? I think it's best to know what they are. And then the best rule of all - break them. But you need to know what they are first, and know WHY you are breaking them.

Example - I was always taught never to open a piece of work with direct speech, simply because it leaves the reader hanging for a second, ungrounded. Why do that to your reader? There will usually be a better way of opening. I challenged myself, for a bit of fun, to write a novel that had only one starting line possible - a line of dialogue. Tick. Done. There is no better opening line for my book -
"My name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward."

The Acknowledgements page of Ros Barber's "Material" ends with "Finally, apologies are due to all those individuals who find themselves incorporated as 'material' when they would have chosen otherwise". Do you sympathise with this?

No, I'm afraid I don't, much as I respect Ros's work. If I haven't managed to incorporate'individuals as inspiration' in a way that makes the result totally new, unrecognisable, I have failed. I would rather assume I haven't failed, not that I have and therefore offer apologies just in case! By the way, I don't use real people as inspiration, as a rule. (Rules...) I make them up instead. Except for the ones I don't.

Which famous writers didn't write Flash but should have, because they'd have been so good at it?

I can't answer that. Probably today, we would just switch the line-breaks of a Shakespeare soliloquy and call it a flash.

Do you find retreats useful nowadays?

Absolutely. I have to get away from home to write anything new, or to be able to concentrate in depth anyway. There is too much going on at home at the moment - dealing with the rapid decline of a much-loved father, for example - having to empty and sell the house he lived in alone for twenty years, a son on a GAP year chucking himself off cliffs in New Zealand, the birth of my first grandchild, a husband who is at home now, wanting to use my study for his activities (the house computer...) I really don't have a space at home that I can call my own. I had a shed built in the garden - it gets used to store garden furniture... Therefore I am happy to go away and pay for peace and space elsewhere.

What's your ideal writer's holiday?

The best holiday for this writer is one that feeds the creative brain, follows an obsession, something ... example - I have just spent five days with a military historian following one Pal's Battalion through the battlefields of The Somme and the Ypres Salient. Perfect.

What are the best and worst aspects of writers groups? Are there situations where you wouldn't recommend someone to attend them?

Best aspects: Writing is a lonely occupation. A good writers group is a real boon, life-enhancing, work-enhancing. A chance to share information, markets, craft, networks - all so necessary today. Good feedback on one's work is rare - but if it can be found, then that's terrific.

Worse aspects: Some writers' groups tend to be run by the person with the loudest voice. Not necessarily the one who says the best things with that loud voice. Sometimes feedback can be anodyne, always positive, of the 'Oooo I like that Mavis' school. That's a bit meaningless, if you seriously want to get on. If you are just in for a social meet-up, that's different. I think writers are a vulnerable lot. I know, I am one myself. We seek approbation, want to get on and do Ok, maybe see our work out there - validation of sorts. I do think it is important not to confuse positive feedback from a writing group with the other sort, which tends to mean a bit more, if the market is well researched.

Where would I not recommend attending ... I know from bitter experience one of the big downsides of writers groups. Vulnerability - not just yourself, but your work. You just don't know if your work and your ideas shared with others will be respected - or if they will surface in a slightly different format with someone else's name on them - as happened to me and others couple of years back. I would say, having experienced the worst of it - don't share work with anyone unless you know them really well, and that means NOT writers you only know on the Internet.

The Internet is a marvellous medium but you do need to ensure you are not being too trusting. Working online, no matter how well you 'think' you know someone - you really don't. Take it from me. Do try to meet the people you commune with online, especially anyone with whom you feel you'd like to work closely. You may find the person is absolutely nothing like their pleasant online persona - nuff said.

Thanks Vanessa

From story to novel

In 2009 I based a workshop exercise around one of her stories -

Here's the start of an award winning modern story. Do a WhoWhatWhereWhyWhen reading of it. What might the themes be?

The Virgin Mary spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche half way up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the Virgin's words in her stomach more than in her ears, and she called her the VM. The VM didn't seem to mind. She was plastic, six inches high, hand painted, and appeared to be growing out of a mass of very green foliage and very pink flowers, more suited to a fish tank. She held a naked Infant Jesus who stretched his arms out to Eva and mouthed, every so often ... "Carry?"

And here's the final paragraph. It has many echoes of the first - checklist the first paragraph's items to see what happened to them.

Then, there was a sound. The cry of a buzzard as it might have been made by a small boy, a thin little cry that rose triumphant into the post woman's house, echoed round the stairs and floated out of the open windows to disappear among the whispers of wind in the night sky.

Both begin and end with a sound. The glass bubble has become an open window; the artificial foliage and flowers have become wind and night sky; the silent pleading a triumphant cry, etc. The transition isn't explicitly from sadness to happiness, more from constriction to release - from the body, the house, the bubble, the niche on the stairs; from limbo. The main character doesn't even get a name-check at the end - it's more an exorcism than a voyage of self-discovery. It's interesting to see that "post woman" figures in both - the message-deliverer who doesn't get the message, maybe. Or perhaps there's a hint of post-menopausal, the release of no longer being of child-bearing age.

Beautifully orchestrated writing? Or (to an experienced reader) an example of structural fatalism, of claustrophobic unity? I'd guess that even fans of this ouroboric style would agree that you can have too much of a good thing. At the Cambridge WordFest she said that the chapters of her novel kept turning into stories, their heads eating their tails. It's possible of course for a novel to be a loosely connected set of short stories (a recent, acclaimed example is Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad") but Vanessa decided to disconnect the chapter endings from their beginnings, with Maggie Gee as mentor. On Patricia Ann McNair's blog she charts her passage, writing "I wonder if a successful writer of short fiction may find it hard to write a novel, because they need to unlearn so much. However, when they finally do, I wonder if they might write a better novel than they would if they were not short story writers first". Let's hope so. It would be a shame if too much of Vanessa's versatility was lost in the process, but you can't keep everyone happy. Ian McEwan started as a short story writer. Even though his novels have brought him international fame, it's not uncommon to hear of people still prefering his stories.

At least her recent novel-writing activity has given the rest of us more of a chance in short story competitions, though I'm sure our window of opportunity will be short-lived - she's too natural and gifted a short-story writer to turn her back on the genre for long.

Vanessa's response

It is a marvellous thing, to have a piece of work analysed like this - and I was very grateful to Tim for firstly taking the time to do it, and secondly, posting the results. It might be interesting (or not) to learn how the writer feels when this exercise is done on their work.

I felt three things. I was really pleased. I was seriously grateful. But more than all that, I was absolutely astonished. It was the first time I had consciously taken note of those echoes in the opener and the ending of Glass Bubble, the story. It was the first time that the symbols and images in the story, images which had risen up unbidden and unplanned in the process of writing, not put there consciously at all - had been scrutinised and interpreted.

The exercise reminded me so much of those wonderful sessions in the Sixth Form, or at university - literary analysis as it was done in the dark ages, I expect ... seeking out the images in Shakespeare's Hamlet and drawing conclusions as to his 'meanings'.

'Meaning' presupposes intent. I assumed back then that Shakespeare (or indeed the group of writers who bear that name) deliberately inserted symbols and images into his work, like the coordinator of a treasure hunt, deliberately leaving clues to be uncovered and the uncovering enjoyed by the finders. Now, I am wiser than that, because I am a writer. Sure, some writers may carefully go back and insert clever symbols into their work, after the first draft is complete. I have actually seen advice from CW tutors telling students to do this. I'm telling you if you DO that, the joins will show.

So please don't. When you are writing 'in the zone', and writing from a place you care about deeply, saying something you care about deeply, every word will flow in the same direction. Every metaphor will create itself.

And lovely blokes like Tim will discover the things you didn't know were there, and make you feel awfully clever. When actually - all you are is a writer.

Physical Explanations of Form and Beauty in Poetry

2011-04-11T08:17:00.001+01:00

I wrote this a decade ago. I've updated the references section and have added one 2011 medical quote. I know I should add more, but I'm still thinking about it ...

Three strands of scientific research are rapidly encroaching on aesthetics

Evolutionary psychology is being used to explain some of our aesthetic tastes. Typical of such arguments is the assertion that the interest in certain curves is explained by noting that a man looking for a mate would be programmed to notice such things.
Alongside such discussion are observations of universals in aesthetic tastes. Proportions like the "Golden Mean" have been shown to crop up in many circumstances - for instance as the ratio between the octet and sestet of a sonnet. Work in complexity theory is beginning to explain these apparent coincidences.
A third factor relates to advances in physiology; the ability to study brain activity in real time using MRI.

Such discussion is not without its critics - the conclusions are often untestable, and do not deal with very specific features. Besides, the fact that one can make someone see an apple by applying an electrode to a certain part of the brain doesn't mean that apples are "just" in the brain, and similarly for beauty or God. However, it's worth pursuing the idea that cognitive processes that had initially evolved for non-aesthetic reasons are now being use for a different end - it avoids having to justify the creation of new brain functionality. Some tentative observations might be made about the implications for poetry.

The brain's thought areas grew from the visual cortex, so it's tempting to surmise that some thought processing might structurally resemble vision processing (indeed, recent research suggests that "people with autism concentrate more brain resources in the areas associated with visual detection and identification. In doing this, they have less activity in the areas used to plan and control thoughts and actions" - 2011). The mechanisms of perception are being slowly untangled by physiologists. Vision works by low-level detection of features - edges, movement, color. Recent work has highlighted the independence of these features. A brain-damaged patient described her inability to see individual colors as a part of objects; she saw the colors floating in separate planes before her eyes. Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause the loss of color constancy and with it a separation of the sense of color and form.

Functional specialization seems to be more widespread phenomenon than hitherto assumed. These separate experiences are combined into objects using various techniques - perhaps using some basic rules analogous to Chomsky's deep grammar for languages (see Donald Hoffman) coupled with acquired rules of thumb. There seems to be a requirement for early exposure to experiences. Cases of people who are born blind and later acquire sight seem to show that our visual recognition of distance, size, and the three dimensions are acquired early in life when visual stimuli are integrated with our sense of touch, a sense that generally depends on movement. Also the processing isn't one-way - the higher levels affect the lower levels too. This is partly dependent on the cultural and sociological context - whether we interpret a bright light in the sky as an angel, a UFO or a plane will affect the sense-data we register. We don't hear engines if we want to see an angel. The significance of what we see will likewise depend partly on our state of mind. Brain events can also play a part - in the oldest part of the brain are parts which trigger significance. These can be activated by electrodes or mild epileptic fits but also by rhythm and chanting used in combination with reduced higher brain function.

Our higher levels also stabilise objects - as we move around an object the image changes but we know the object doesn't. Just as we rely on implicit knowledge in our perception of objects and faces, so too, the brain creates a sense of "color constancy": no matter what the lighting conditions - bright sunlight, filtered sunlight, or artificial lighting - colors remain more or less the same.

Image processing uses multiple strategies to interpret and stabilise the world - some innate, some dormant until triggered by experience, some learnt. The higher levels are more flexible, able to adapt to rapid cultural charge, though there's still a wish to interpret and stabilise, to separate the constants from the incidental. Also politics and fashion play a part in the relative attention paid to different art-forms, and different forms within each art.

Forms are a higher-level attempt to stabilize. As an example of a form let's take the sonnet, which has weathered the storms of fashions. Such forms are criticised as being artificial and arbitrary, but they illustrate another way that low-level details may act in combination to create unity

Bottom-up rules - It's possible that a form may grow from simple localised rules based around iambs. A form needn't imply a hierarchical controlling agency - simple, low-level, short-sighted rules can be sufficient (birds in formation, a tree's branch structure). Complexity theory offers examples.
Phase-locking - things that oscillate tend towards harmonising (people walking across bridges, groups of menstruating women). There's a tendency to standardise nearly-matching objects, so iambic lines could tend towards pentameters.
Randomness - Room for low-level, constrained randomness is built into the design of natural objects - e.g. leaves. This is partly a consequence of nature's laziness but it also a useful survival mechanism. "the capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection (Miller). In sonnets an element of constrained randomness can be introduced using rhyming dictionaries.

It's common for natural processes to share a basic design and build variants upon it - changing the scale, the parameters, or the low-level details. These mechanisms are implicated in the development of the sonnet, which can be considered as an organic form that slowly developed by natural selection. It's flexible enough to be used by ee cummings, enduring because its flexible, bending rather than breaking as fashions change. In this sense it's a more "natural" form than the Acrostic, for instance.

Forms emerge and categories develop as short-cuts towards comprehension. The clearer the separation between categories the more efficient they are. Species tend to separate - there's not a smooth spectrum between reptiles and mammals. Art abounds in genres which people try to keep distinct, and now there's an experimental way to measure the closeness of genres. Experiments on artists have shown that abstract and representational art cause very different patterns of brain activity; different schools of art each seem to have their own neurological basis. It may be that different types of poetry are neurologically diverse too - some types of poetry may be closer to music than to other types of poetry - in an objective sense more musical. Genres may transcend media boundaries.

When critics analyse a poem, perhaps their approach shouldn't be considered artificial. They categorise as an initial stage of recognition, in the way humans do. They may be breaking a poem into its constituents the way the brain naturally does (though we don't have the self-awareness to realise this). When these individual insights are combined into a "reading", critics are doing what readers naturally do. Readers will be differently sensitive to factors and will have different strategies for combining them, strategies shaped by what they were exposed to when young. Cultural forces or random discharges in the brain affect interpretations.

The units of poetry perception are as yet unclear. In visual processing brain injury and MRI scanning were helpful. In poetry, the critical methods may indicate the basics, and there are styles of poetry (Vispo?) which may focus strongly on one unit - sound, typography, etc.

Our increasing knowledge of language processing and memory makes possible a better understanding of terms used in poetry aesthetics. For example, Tsur explains "metrical tension" as an effect of our limited STM ability that causes recoding of the line to use memory space better. Certain poetry evokes non-linear emotion by establishing a "definite spatial setting" thereby channeling through the right-hemisphere.

Some of the methods of integration and categorisation are better known, and are exploited. Evolution never does any more than necessary. As sight evolved, there was no survival advantage in being able to deal with situations that didn't happen in real life - our eyes might be able to help us distinguish friend from foe at a hundred yards, but they're easily tricked. Thought and language processing is even more complex than visual processing, so perhaps it's not surprising that poetry can create an illusion of depth and meaning by short-circuiting the normal routes (much as stereograms give the effect of depth though they have none), exploiting a loop-hole that evolution has left open. As with stereograms, surface obscurity may be necessary to produce the effect, and there's a lot of skill involved in producing an effective illusion. Indeed, I'd say that not merely skill is involved; it's an art.

Illusion, paradox and compression can overload and confuse our powers of comprehension. Jokes and obscurity can disrupted processing. The mixing of different levels of processing disrupts too.

On the basis of the above we might hazard a guess at how to design a successful piece of writing. Ideally it needs to

be attached to a cultural force (Pop music, Academia)
be different enough to attract attention, but be familiar enough so that current interpretative strategies can be used
stimulate parts of the brain traditionally associated with poetry and significance
de-stimulate other parts of the brain - the brain's tuned to useful things, so it helps if the poetry serves no purpose. Bland presentation (no colour, no background music) helps
initiatiate a positive feedback loop - be memorable. Most easily done with sound, though triggered emotions can help.
be hard to exhaust - it needs to be unresolvable, in order to remain satisfying. Paradox, something unfinished or non-linear so the reader never reaches the end.
Non-linear - to invite processing from non-linear processing regions of the brain

References

Gigerenzer, G. & Goldstein, D. G. (1996). "Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality", Psychological Review, 103, 650-669.
"The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of consciousness" - Antonio Damasio
"The Mating Mind", G.Miller, 2000
"Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics", R.Tsur, 1992
"Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain" - Semir Zeki
"Visual Intelligence: How we create what we see" - Donald Hoffman
Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form by William L. Benzon ("My starting point, rather, is with the newer psychologies and how they can help us analyze the formal aspect of literary works. ... the larger point is simply that literary behavior is learned behavior with roots in early interactions between the infant and others. The brain is trained in the ways of stories and rhymes")
Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language by Julie Kane
Aspects of Cognitive Poetics by Reuven Tsur
The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time (Frederick Turner, Ernst Poppel)
The Lyric Principle (by Don Paterson)

The Lammas Hireling (the poem)

2011-04-04T14:38:00.003+01:00

The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig was described in Poetry Ireland Review as differing from many other poems in the book of the same name because of its "sustained ambiguity and sense of (strange) reality". Poems are sometimes rather like jokes in that if you don't get them the first time then no amount of explanation will convince you that they're any good. So all I'll do here is to point out some of the poem's features and provide some background information for those who found the poem too strange.

Features

Form - 4 stanzas of 6 lines, each line about 10cm long! Syllable count 9/9/10/9/10/9 and 9/11/10/12/12/12 for the 1st 2 stanzas - no fixed pattern. Counting beats is no more rewarding. Stanza breaks don't quite match paragraph breaks.
Genre - Dark Hardy-esque fable? Certainly it's in a mode where we need to think more in terms of narrative than of sound effects.
Diction - Except perhaps for "Yields doubled" the style of language and choice of words is consistent. Some of the phrases are not current

"Lammas" - 1st August harvest festival
"elf-shot" - ill due to the agency of elves
"leather horns" - fake horns? perhaps a cow pretending to be a bull? In the singular the horn would more likely be an instrument. "a wee brown cow with two leather horns" is an Irish riddle, meaning "hare".
"To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, the wisdom runs, muckle care". muckle (or mickle) means "much", the commonest usage being "many a little makes a mickle". Dictionaries mention "go with the hare", etc, but I've no idea what "go into the hare" means. A poetry book by Jocelyn Brooke has a poem called 'The Song of Isobell Gowdie' which has the lines 'I shall go into a hare,/With sorrow and sighing and mickle care/And I shall go in the Devil's name/ Til I come home again'. In a folklore dictionary it says that eating hare makes one melancholy, and that hares have a reputation for being sexless or for changing their gender annually or for being transformed witches.

"struck so cheap" means "struck so cheap a bargain"
"casting ball" meaning "casting shot for shotguns"? - maybe "silver bullets" to ward off evil spirits. "casting ball from ... my days here" sounds odd. Where is "here"? Farm? Church? Earth?
"I knew him a warlock" means "I realised he was a warlock" (assuming his wife's form?)
"His top lip gathered" (hare lip?)
"I levelled and blew the small hour through his heart". The small hour is the darkest time of night? So he levelled his gun and shot darkness into the hireling's heart? Could the 'small hour' be something to do with rifle sights looking like a small clock?
"The moon came out" - of the big hole in the body?

Imagery - There's some heightened language to synchronise with emotional peaks. The images are drawn from a simpl(ish) rural existence.
Allusions - I read that 'the poem was inspired by a tale of witchcraft and magic heard on a walk in Northern Ireland, and is brimming with Duhig's fantastic range of sources, from Ben Jonson's "Sad Shepherd" to "The Allensford Pursuit of Witches", a seventeenth century chant from the North of England.'
I skimmed through descriptions of 'Sad Shepherd' but found little of use. It was probably Jonson's last play and it wasn't published in his lifetime. In it Jonson "boldly strikes out to produce a truly English pastoral play, suppressing satire and symbolism, and for Arcadia with its shadowy shepherds as main characters he substitutes Sherwood Forest with Maid Marian and Robin Hood and his merry men; instead of the satyr of conventional pastoral tradition he introduces Maudlin the Witch and Puck-Hairy."
I think in this poem the allusions don't need to be identified and followed-up. The author got ideas from other works but the poem is self- contained.
Plot -
- Paragraph 1 - A farmer hires a farmhand at a fair. It turns out to be a bargain
- Paragraph 2 - The farmer's a widower. Woken in the night he thinks the farmhand is a warlock
- Paragraph 3 - When the farmer shoots the warlock it changes into something else - a hare? a fox?
- Paragraph 4 - He disposes of the body. He melts down his money. His herd falls ill. He goes to confession often. The reader/listener is in fact a priest.
This is the most obvious reading, but it does leave some details unexplained.
- What is the "company" mentioned in the 1st stanza?
- Why does he become so guilt-ridden? Wasn't it right to kill the warlock?
Perhaps, as with a whodunit, the explanation that first comes to mind may not be the right one. Perhaps the narrator's gone a bit potty. A widower isolated in his farmyard succumbed to the young flesh (the company that knows when not to talk), hallucinating either during the attack, or retrospectively. The transformation of the corpse (the moulding over, etc) wasn't sudden and magical but took weeks. In his guilt he neglects his herd and goes to confession each hour.
Or perhaps the hireling was having an affair with the wife, her "torn voice" being her cries of joy.

The conspiracy theory and the Old Boys' Network

Some background may help to dispel notions that it's all a conspiracy by academics. Ian Duhig's "The Lammas Hireling" won the

2000 Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition (3000 pounds, I think). Many thousands of anonymous entries. It took judges Lavinia Greenlaw, Ian McMillan, Don Paterson and Chair Germaine Greer less than three hours to select the winner. He won the National Poetry Competition in 1987 too!
2001 Tolman Cunard Prize for best single poem (1000 pounds, judges included Michael Donaghy and the Poetry Society's Christina Patterson). Entries were not anonymous.

Duhig was described by Carol Ann Duffy as "the most original poet of his generation". Born in 1954 in London of Irish Catholic parents, he now lives in Leeds. He isn't an academic (he used to work in housing) though he's been teaching creative writing lately.

In "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry" (Salt, 2003) Andrew Duncan suggested that he's better than (though following in the footsteps of) Muldoon. He says that "The linguistic register behind all of them is that of the hedge-school [using] ... traces of Gaelic idiom ... flowers of bardic rhetoric, traces of Catholic, pre-literate features such as stress on argument, feats of memory, quick exchanges and readiness of wit" (p.274)

Why did it win?

I can see how it could easily survive the first phase of judging - the title makes one curious. The subject matter's a change - a period piece. Across the four stanzas, the changes of mood and tone are dramatic. And the narrative is carefully controlled. There's a clever hinge in the middle of the poem ("To go into the hare...") - the proverb is poetic in sound, which contrasts with the prose rhythms elsewhere.

Why is it difficult?

I.A. Richards in "Practical Criticism" (London, 1929) identified some reasons why readers misunderstand poems. Amongst them are

Lack of Knowledge - This is a dialect poem; perhaps the dialect is old too. Some meanings aren't even in multi-volume dictionaries, so I think a glossary would have been appropriate.
Stock responses and doctrinal adhesions - The line-breaks tempt the reader to find meaning in them. Also the layout of the piece as a poem encourages the reader to adopt poetic criteria where perhaps prose ones might be more appropriate.

The poet however might be forgiven for presenting the piece as he did - glossaries are frowned upon, and prose competitions are few and far between.

Poetic Expertise

2011-03-19T10:14:00.001Z

How does Google choose which items to display at the top of their lists? It depends on many factors (80 or so, I've heard) amongst them factors which don't depend on the contents of the page itself

whether the item is on a popular site
whether there are many links to the item
whether the item appears as a link on a popular page

Ranking items is useful, but some programs (trueknowledge for example) try to do more, attempting to construct new knowledge. The process is not dissimilar to what humans do when they perform literature searches - pulling at loose threads, following leads, making connections, and building an "internal map". It's similar to what people do when familiarising themselves with an area of knowledge, giving structure (or even meaning) to amorphous data. Chase and Simon in an article mainly about chess (1973) surmised that to become an expert required about 10 years of experience - the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information. What this process of acquiring expertise entails, and the implications for poetry readers, is what I'm going to write about here.

I'll start with some vocabulary and ideas from Artificial Intelligence. Some of these terms have already leaked into common parlance.

Crowdsourcing - getting answers using a large (mixed) group of people rather than an expert
Swarm intelligence - the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. A swarm of bees is cleverer than a bee.
Unsupervised learning - a class of problems in which one seeks to determine how the data are organized, looking for categories (using Clustering), pattern and structure (using pattern recognition). Adaptive resonance theory (ART) allows the number of clusters to vary with problem size and lets the user control the degree of similarity between members of the same clusters.
Data mining - extracting patterns from large data sets by combining methods from statistics and artificial intelligence with database management.
Chunking - collecting data into bigger units (for easier recall and manipulation)

Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice (by Ericsson) contains many references which I won't repeat here. S/he says that

there are, at least, some domains where "experts" perform no better than less trained individuals
In those domains where performance consistently increases, aspiring experts seek out particular kinds of experience ... the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians..., chessplayers... and athletes
the difference between experts and less skilled subjects ... reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation ... Less skilled subjects' knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable. The same acquired representations appear to be essential for experts' ability to monitor and evaluate their own performance ... so they can keep improving their own performance by designing their own training and assimilating new knowledge."

The resulting knowledge acquired is perhaps akin to the results of epidemiological studies in medicine - individual cases aren't studied deeply, nor are explanations necessarily sought. Instead, clusters, patterns and common features are identified. Another name for this type of knowledge might be "experience". Acquiring it's a skill (perhaps even a type of intelligence) that deserves a name.

In poetry the mined data is already chunked and inter-linked (a feature that prospective experts can exploit or ignore). Perhaps experienced poet would be expected to have read 50,000 poems. It doesn't seem hard to reach a certain level of publishable competence. Plateauing is common, and might be defeated by subsequent supervised learning.

Suppose (as is likely) some people are better than others at this type of learning. What characteristics might these people have?

A multi-displinary approach (the general technique can successfully be applied to several fields)
An openness to crowdsourcing - canvassing opinion from many sources (at a workshop, for example), not necessarily just experts
A sympathy for the notion that you can be whatever you choose to be
Analogical rather than analytical tendencies - not depending on detailed analysis, and not always able to explain their opinions from within the text
They may have accurate expectations of how a poem will develop based on the first few lines
They may not have a good memory for detail

In fact even without "understanding" a text, it's sometimes possible to assess it with surprising accuracy. Automated essay assessment is scarily successful. In practise critiquers will employ other methods too (close-reading, etc), though I suspect some critiquers lean more heavily on experience than others do (older people may depend more on experience not because they have more of it than young poets, but because their detailed memory is fading) . Poetry experience (like experience in chess) can provide an initial short-list of relevant features to consider at the analytical phase. And analysis can help guide the reader towards new regimes of self-training, enriching experience.

What remains unclear are examples of the chunks/categorisations that poetry experts employ and the domain-specific memory skills that let them keep in working memory relevant information. In chess the "chunks" are common formations (e.g. a fianchetto'd phalanx) but also collections of pieces that are somehow cooperating even if they're not close. Poets may may develop idiosyncratic categories ("allotment poems", "first person pieces where the punchline reveals that the persona's not the poet", "contradictory voices that resolve", etc). They may be able to remember blocks of words as a unit because they can feel how the words interact.

How transferable is this experience? Knowing the nature of the chunks might help with transfer, but it's not easy for experts to introspect. Employing experts as mentors is the most common method.

Is poetry inside language or beyond?

2011-03-11T13:41:00.001Z

You might consider this a theorist's question, of no consequence to practising poets, but it raises issues which divide poets. What's at stake is whether poetry should gravitate towards that which makes language unique, or whether poetry should strive to escape language - whether it's beautiful or sublime.

Poetry has been used for many purposes, and competes with other genres, each having its strengths. A musical major-to-minor key change can do what words might take pages to achieve. A few images from 9/11 have an impact that no poem can match (and besides, the readers will already have seen the images). We no longer use verse as Dante or Erasmus Darwin did to expound facts because illustrated prose has taken over. In an increasingly visual age, when sound and moving images are becoming as easy to transmit as the written word, language faces even greater challenges than hitherto. Nowadays, poetry goes down well at funerals but that's about it. Poetry has to cede territory, but on whose terms?

Some poetry has retreated to the citadel, to what poetry alone can do. It draws attention to its medium - the appearance or the sound of the words - or emphasises the difference between words and the world - how a small difference in a word can have a big difference in meaning. The engagement with language is part of the poetic effect, or even the main part. In Rialto 71 Nathan Hamilton writes: "it's my feeling that, unless the primary subject of a poem remains language (directly or indirectly) ... it is likely to appear naive or drift towards unexamined cliché" In so doing it risks gives up the ground where poetry can compete on equal terms with other genres.

There's also poetry that tries to make language transparent - Holub's perhaps, or some of Hughes' Birthday Letters. Sometimes the transparency is so that a voice or events can show through clearly. Sometimes (as in Pauline Stainer perhaps) the hope is that something other than the visible shows through. The poetry tries to leap the frontier, strives to express the inexpressible. Like prayers, spells and mantras, they propel readers beyond words.

Richard Jackson in "The Cortland Review" (Winter 2006) described these tendencies more generally. As Earl Wasserman writes in "The Subtler Language", what I have called an idea-driven poem "directs us as modestly as possible to something outside itself," while language-driven poetry is real poetry "in which reference values are assimilated into the constitutive act of language; its primary purpose is to trap us in itself as an independent reality."

Ostensibly these 2 options betray radically different degrees of trust in language, but there's some common ground. The roots of language are unclear, but ritual has involved the use of words from the earliest times. And however language emerged, it evolved from grunts, roars and hisses. So both these approaches could be said to point back into language's past. The difference is that ritual-based poetry not only tries to transcend language but also the material world.

When poets discuss future trends, their own future is never far from their thoughts. Many poets don't have a range of styles in their arsenal. In particular, wordplay poets and mystics tend not to interchange styles. Fortunately there's a third way of interpreting the situation - viewing the mystics as attempting to expand the resources of language. Arguably Wordsworth did so, creating a readership for his brand of poetry. By expanding the realms of poetry the Romantics also expanded the scope of language. Richard Jackson goes on to say the experience of poetry is the very process of poetry, the struggle of language to discover what is buried within itself rather than to simply report what happened to the poet or what he or she thought or felt. Poetry is a language of discovery and transformation, not simply of "witness." One of poetry's abiding preoccupations is where to draw the line between the word and world.

As an answer to the title's question this may look like moving the goalposts, but in this case readers are both the referee and the crowd, and after all, poetry's only a game.

Nothing to hide

2011-02-23T08:47:00.000Z

"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" - Paul Valery

With a pack of cards you can play bridge or patience, you can foretell futures, gamble, perform tricks, or build towers. Like card-playing, poetry is an overlapping range of pursuits but you never know when one turns into another. Asking for the wrong card you get the king of hearts. Well, in crosswords you do, the answer's 3 words - (4, 2, 6). "card" is the literal clue, and "wrong" is an indication that there's an anagram - in this case "Asking for the" mutates into "king of hearts".

Poetry also lets you take apart something that has meaning and re-assemble it into something new - a life into verse perhaps. It both transforms and projects so that others can see, like an item gran arranged family slides into. Here the whole phrase is the literal clue, and the answer's (5,7). "item gran" arranged is "magi tern", into which you slide "clan" (family) to get "magic lantern".

Some people take things apart without immediately recreating. They store the dissected pieces for easy retrieval - in dictionaries, in encyclopedias, or chronologically, or by theme - the sad episodes clumped together. Some people remember their lives as these fragments, shuffling and dealing them out so that no-one knows the whole truth. Their words are like the dummy hands of bridge - only part of the story.

But it takes more than that to be a writer. It's said that the blind have acute hearing, that Autistics observe people more thoroughly. What handicap do poets compensate for? Perhaps it's shyness, not wanting to reveal all, hiding behind words and disguises, depending upon the curiosity of others, being expert at flight rather than fight - flight from appearances, from self. Or perhaps they want to believe that things never die, they merely change. Transformation is a form of hiding more radical than disguise, a Willow Pattern of reversable changes where nothing's lost.

People with secretive personalities defer responses and seek matching environments to feel comfortable in. Literature provides an ideal setting, where there's profit to be had in delay: when several things are left in pieces you can mix them up - taking a nose from one person, a smile from another. Writers have perfected techniques of hiding and disguise, and where there are secrets there are discoveries. The moment of revelation is especially important in whodunnits, but sequences of lesser revelations drive many texts along. The writer needs a good excuse to hide the information otherwise readers will feel cheated or manipulated. The standard shared conventions of storytelling can be viewed as excuses for secrecy -

Point of View - once this is established, readers understand why they don't know what's happening elsewhere, or why they can't see inside other characters' heads
Narrative - If events can only be told in chronological order, there' s an excuse for not telling all straight away
Show/Tell - If only "showing" is allowed, explanation may have to be delayed.

Take for example a situation where a man's going to the kitchen. These conventions all might explain why we're not allowed to know his motivation until we're told that he raids the biscuit tin.

The trick as ever is to know which game you're playing and let others know too. Just as in some card games the dealer choose trumps, so the writer chooses the genre and the reader has to play along. The genre determines when it's acceptable to hide and when to seek, when to challenge and when to bluff, when to twist, and when to stick. At the end you may be amazed, penniless, or defeated but at the very least you'll be different. Must everything change? Grand works result (6,8).

Reality and Symbols

2011-02-13T09:06:00.009Z

Symbolism is seen as a reaction to Realism, attempting to capture more absolute truths which can only be accessed by indirect methods. Here I'd like to look at how readers and poet position themselves along this Realism-Symbolism dimension.

How do Symbols acquire meaning?

Symbolic thought is of course not restricted to poetry. When someone says "Let x=2", x is a symbol. When someone says "Let x=Pain and y=Tears. Then y/x is a measure of cry-babyism" they are beginning to think symbolically. Here the symbols are introduced explicitly and what they "stand for" is clearly presented. Language uses words as symbols ("candle" to represent a candle for example), but in poetry we're used to reading more into words. In the charged atmosphere of reading a poem, a lit candle represents the fragility of life. These conventional meanings are common in non-poetry, and occasional readers of poetry are good at detecting them (indeed, they might expect a poem to exploit them) but they have trouble with other symbols. Some poems develop their own definition of a symbol - Coleridge's Albatross, for example, or Larkin's Toad - and other poet can allude to these symbols.

When do Readers read symbolically?

Readers are more likely to read symbolically if Realism cues are reduced. A Forest is a place of testing, of challenge, but if the forest is named and described, the urge to symbolise is attenuated. A poem that's bland or obscure or that repeats a word may tempt readers to look beyond literal meanings. It's usually fairly clear to the reader when a poem's trying to develop its own symbol definition, but the meaning of the symbol may not be clear. Blake's mass of symbols may be bewildering, but they're not mistaken for Realism.

Substitution or Augmentation?

Once readers have seen a symbolic interpretation they might need to decide how ornamental the symbolism is. When a symbol is introduced by a simile (e.g. "her eyes were like stars") the first item is real; the rest is "just words". In some more extreme types of symbolism, the real part is suppressed entirely. Elsewhen it's mentioned then discarded, the symbolic meaning taking over.

In the charged atmosphere of a poem, words like "star" and "ladder" are going to be given symbolic meanings even if the poet meant them literally. This readerly urge towards symbolification is exploitable by poets. One of the more common ploys when writing poetry (I use it myself) is to use a title with more than one meaning ("Going Down", say, or "Still Life"), then start the poem with an anecdote where a literal interpretation of the title is followed (going down in a lift, for example, or looking round an art gallery). Then in a punchline the more symbolic interpretations are invoked (depression, etc). The punchline doesn't deny the reality of the anecdote, it adds depth. Similarly in Pound's

   The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
   Petals on a wet, black bough

both images are real enough; the implied symbolism not destroying them. Pound wrote "Go in fear of Abstractions", and "I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk". Following this principle, one's allowed to use an hour-glass instead of "Time". One can smash the hour-glass instead of "annihilating Time", or even become "Time's assassin", but I suspect one can't end a poem (like Yves Bonnefoy does) with "The trampled snow is the only rose".

Gertrude Stein wrote that "A rose is a rose is a rose". Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. William Carlos-William's red wheelbarrow doesn't dissolve into symbol. Neither is it eclipsed. But the reality of the image can be compromised, the poet using reality like Wittgenstein's ladder - to be thrown away after use. A Raven who symbolises Death might start talking. When Wallace Stevens begins "Anecdote of the Jar" with "I placed a jar in Tennessee/ And round it was, upon a hill" we soon realise it's no ordinary jar, it's a "Jar". Another poem of his begins "The lion roars at the enraging desert,/ Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise." where Realism doesn't last long at all.

Once symbolic interpretation isn't ballasted by reality, anything - even even vowels and perfumes - can become pregnant with potential symbolic value, everyday objects becoming invested with the power of Symbol. At that stage, I suspect the common reader gives up, or at least, treats the text as a Rorschach blotch.

Decisions, decisions

Where does all this leave the reader? Inexperienced poetry readers might have trouble with poems that develop their own symbolism. Some readers want to know what's Real and what's Imaginary and don't like boundaries being blurred. Some readers are unable to leave Reality for long, especially if the poem begins as a Realist piece - when the symbolism takes over, these readers don't release their grip on Reality and are likely to describe the text as confused. Coping with something being simultaneously Real and Symbolic shouldn't be difficult (after all, millions of Christians cope with the Trinity) but in practise it requires more flexibility and re-contextualising than many readers can afford. Pound might have a point - poets who follow his dictum might risk readers only seeing the literal meaning, but at least they'll see something.

The final stage in applied maths calculations is to de-symbolize. Symbols may be compact and easy to manipulate. In the midst of calculation it may be impossible to identify what aspect of the Real World is represented by a particular expression, but the conclusion should feed back into reality, even if one needs to extend one's reality to do so. Anti-matter exists, as you can see if you hold your breath long enough under the surface of reality. So do Emperors of Ice-cream.

Games poets play

2011-02-08T21:19:00.000Z

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

Popularising poetry in the UK

2011-02-06T07:45:00.000Z

"The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes", wrote William Sieghart in 2008. But despite the hype, poetry sales are low. Though sales aren't the only metric of success, they indicate something about the nature of the "interest" that poetry attracts. It seems that neither the public or other poets rush to read the latest work of established experts. In a recent Telegraph article, Philip Hensher points out that Sean O'Brien's "The Drowned Book" has (according to Nielsen BookScan) sold 2,715 copies in Britain to date. How can this type of poetry be made more popular? Before this can be answered it's worth asking why we should try to popularise it, and whether reading or writing should be prioritized. Possible responses include

Greater booksales and more workshops will lead to poets becoming richer. Workshops and university courses are far more profitable than writing books.
If the base of the pyramid of writers is widened, the height will be increased - we'll get better poetry.
It's a "good thing" for culture that poetry become more popular, and good for the individuals too.

I'll look first at readership trends, then writing trends, then at various initiatives.

More writers

There are more visible writers than ever. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses. It's been suggested (by Gioia et al) that in the US the loss of poetry book sales to the public has been partially compensated for by the increase in the number of set books that creative writing students buy. Writers buy each other's books. Ron Silliman in his Blog points out that "The rise from 30 post-avant poets to 3,000 has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of readers of poetry, but not, however, in the number of readers per book". Perhaps this too can be taken as evidence that poetry-reading has reached its natural level, increasing only as the number of poetry-studiers do.

Perhaps too much poetry is being published

Hugo Williams, judging the 147 entries for the Forward Prize, wrote in the Guardian (July 2010) that "an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really. That's too big a number of books in one year in one country to put out."
"There's too much bad poetry being published, polluting the pool." - Robin Robertson (Jonathan Cape editor)
There are only 30 poetry books worth publishing each year - Don Paterson (Picador editor)

Elitist? My (perhaps overly generous) take on what they mean is that given the parlous state of "serious" poetry it's even more important that the bad doesn't drive out the the good. Performance poetry - Slams and otherwise - is on the up in the UK. So is online poetry and the use of poetry in literacy courses and therapy schemes. But just as Modern Opera goers won't be consoled by the success of Beyonce, so I doubt whether those quoted above are pleased by poetry's popularity.

Initiatives

Let's for now take for granted that extra poetic activity is a good thing. How can it be achieved? There's no shortage of material describing how cults, political parties, charities, etc can increase their activities. Groups can make current members do more evangelising to attract new members. In these isles, several efforts have been made to widen poetry's appeal. Targets have been identified and poets have been funded to help expand poetry into these markets. Targets include

Radio 3 and 4 listeners
Newspaper supplement readers - There may not be many poetry reviews in UK newpapers, but some of them are trying to widen poetry's appeal without dumbing down much.
- For 3 years the Independent on Sunday had a column where a modern poem (sometimes just a year or so old) was "explained" by Ruth Padel. She made a book out of these columns ("52 Ways of Looking at a Poem" - extracts are online).
- The Guardian ran monthly online workshops.
Women over 45
The professions - Doctors, Lawyers, Scientists, etc - Poets in Residence have made inroads
The mentally ill
Music lovers - especially Dylan and rap fans. We even had a member from Radiohead on the Next Generation Poetry panel.
Book readers - in particular library-goers
Celebrity groupies
Teachers of literature
Anyone who's interested in anything! - people who like sport or religion, for example. I read that Poetry (Chicago) are thinking of providing a service to help poets place work in non-poetry mags. If you have a poem that mentions yachts they'd tell you which Yachting mags might take it.

More generally we have poetry in subway trains, National Poetry Day, and active US-style laureates.

Arts Council England has produced Thrive! poetry project: strategic development report. Here are a few extracts

Fragmentation and points of connection - Changes within the poetry sector are such that many question the traditional primacy of publishing and the significance attached to becoming a 'published' poet and the critical and popular success of ensuing publications. At present, a poet's significance might be judged by one or more of: publication in collections, publication of individual books or CDs, invitations to perform, size of live audiences, and prizes received. Linkages across and between the different strands and niches of the sector are poorly understood and documented.
The established order - Many believe that at present there is an 'establishment' comprising a small number of poets and organisations with close personal connections to each other, which tends to dominate funding, publishing, media coverage and prizes.
Reaching out to audiences - The sector is quick to point out that poetry, for all its potentially wide appeal, is a relatively 'difficult' art form that rewards sustained engagement. As a consequence the sector is keen that new audiences are exposed to poetry and encouraged to build their relationship with it, in an appropriate manner. Most feel that an appropriate manner means not denying or diluting poetry's complexity, and yet not giving the impression that poetry is only suitable for highly educated and dedicated enthusiasts.

Genres

What type of poetry will attract the masses? Does it have to be dumbed down or is it just a matter of selecting just the more accessible work of the greats?

I suspect that poetry has of late become more polarised. Nowadays much of the poetry that people read doesn't get counted in the official statistics as poetry. In the UK John Hegley and John Cooper Clarke appear with non-poets. And Performance poetry is more popular than it used to be. I suspect that Forms still have a special (though perhaps no longer privileged) place in the hearts of the common reader.

Genres may adapt to suit new media. People wanting a taster in poetry are quite likely nowadays to start on the WWW. It's been suggested that there could be poetry download sites (like music downloads)

Retention

Once a new poetry reader is on board they need to be given things to do. Too often people drawn into poetry by Residencies, best-sellers etc lose interest. My feeling is that non-anthology UK poetry bestsellers don't lead readers into the poetry world. Ted Hughes' book of poems about Plath leads to biography. And it's not clear where Heaney leads anyone - his claggy surfaces are rich enough for many to look no deeper. Follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and have too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books.

I don't think poetry has anything comparable to Eco's bestseller "The Name of the Rose". "it was not expected to be anything close to a best-seller... Eco himself has admitted that the first hundred pages were deliberately opaque, a sort of semi-permeable membrane that allowed passage to only the most dedicated reader. ... The novel has since taken its place as a contemporary classic, a work that for many readers has become a stepping stone from popular fiction into the world of modern literature."

One way to lock new poetry readers into a lifestyle commitment is to turn them into writers. My introduction to the poetry world was via library books of dead poets. I presume modern poetry books were there too, but I didn't recognise any of the poet's names so I didn't borrow their books. By chance one public library was the evening venue for a writers group. This led to my discovery of poetry magazines (available only by post). It was a slow journey. The web has changed all this - subcultures are no longer hidden. There are sites that let one slide from reader to writer, and anyone can edit their own magazine. This activity is hard to compare statistically with that of previous generations. My impression is that the web is helping to increase the membership of writers groups (and reading groups) and may be helping to delay the reduction in booksales.

I think that the poetry book market is in recession and institutional publishers are retreating to their heartland - the stuff that only poetry can do. Comedy? Leave that to stand-ups - they do it better. Narrative? Flash writers do it better. You may not like "pure poetry", "specialist poetry" (call it what you will) but I can understand why funds concentrate on it. It's meant that the gap between "high" and "low" poetry has been emptied, so that there's less flow and intermixing between the extremes (to the detriment of both, perhaps).

My suggestions are that

Poetry reading and writing can be mutually re-enforcing. Contacts between to 2 activities should be kept open.
More attention should be paid to keeping people interested in poetry after their initial trial. The sort of poetry that people first meet when they enter the poetry world may not be the poetry that sustains their interest. They need to be led beyond tempting though fruitless competitions and vanity press. If they liked Cope, what should they read next?

Arts Council England has produced Thrive! poetry project: strategic development report. Here are a few extracts

Fragmentation and points of connection - Changes within the poetry sector are such that many question the traditional primacy of publishing and the significance attached to becoming a 'published' poet and the critical and popular success of ensuing publications. At present, a poet's significance might be judged by one or more of: publication in collections, publication of individual books or CDs, invitations to perform, size of live audiences, and prizes received. Linkages across and between the different strands and niches of the sector are poorly understood and documented.
The established order - Many believe that at present there is an 'establishment' comprising a small number of poets and organisations with close personal connections to each other, which tends to dominate funding, publishing, media coverage and prizes.
Reaching out to audiences - The sector is quick to point out that poetry, for all its potentially wide appeal, is a relatively 'difficult' art form that rewards sustained engagement. As a consequence the sector is keen that new audiences are exposed to poetry and encouraged to build their relationship with it, in an appropriate manner. Most feel that an appropriate manner means not denying or diluting poetry's complexity, and yet not giving the impression that poetry is only suitable for highly educated and dedicated enthusiasts.

Pamphlet Publication in the UK

2011-01-31T13:24:00.003Z

Pamphlets are becoming increasingly popular, for several reasons

As objects they can afford to be more innovative than books.
Some of the traditional book publishers are fading away.
More people nowadays make a career from teaching writing and need publications for their CV. It can take years to assemble enough poems for a book. Pamphlets can be produced more frequently.
A pamphlet needn't be padded with fillers like so many books are.
Some "poetry books" are little more than expensive pamphlets - books by Picador etc can cost 9 pounds and contain 39 pages.
The book world is dominated by Heaney and co. Pamphlets inhabit an alternative world of prizes and outlets, where commercialism doesn't dominate.
Prizes now exist for pamphlets. The PBS promote them too
The WWW offers a way to sell pamphlets. Spineless pamphlets were never popular with bookshops.

Don't think of pamphlets as an easy option, a way to publish sub-standard poems. To take just one example, "Skylight" by Carole Bromley (Smith/Doorstep 2009) has 1st prize winners from the Bridport and Yorkshire Open competitions as well as many other acknowledgements.

So how can you get your pamphlet published? Options include

Mentoring - Fairly recently some mentoring schemes have started up (supported by Arts Council England) that scout for talent, provide help for a period and then offer the chance of publication. Smiths Knoll seek candidates from people who submit to their magazine. Faber have a network of talent scouts. tall-lighthouse have their pilot project
Competitions - Templar (deadline May), Flarestack (deadline February), Iota (Ishots, deadline November) and The Poetry Business (Smith/Doorstep, deadline November) are amongst the organisations that run competitions.
Publishers - Some publishers print pamphlets as well as books. There are some specialist pamphlet publishers. HappenStance's submissions 'window' has just opened. You can read their checklist of what factors they take into account. Some publishers print pamphlets as well as books. HappenStance have links to some poetry presses on their site.

If you live near Cambridge and you like pamphlets, drop into the Amnesty International bookshop on Mill Road. They have a wide selection of pamphlets in a drawer for you to rummage through.

What's clear from all this is that participating in the poetry scene and getting published in magazines helps significantly when you want a pamphlet published. In that respect, like many others, pamphlets are like books.

Poetry and Society in the UK

2011-01-15T21:33:00.005Z

An attempt to list the participants in the UK poetry scene, map some of their interactions, and describe their impact on the non-poetry-loving public.

The Players and their reputations

Many parties participate in the creation of the canon. In this section I'll briefly introduce them. In the next I'll look at at their interactions. The parties are roughly classified as follows

Media
- Anthologisers - Traditionally they have quite a lot of power, marginalising and reviving writers.
  - General - The Motion/Morrison anthology of the 80s provoked several reactions, in particular "A Various Art". Recent anthologies assembled by non-UK people ("Oxford Guide to English literature", "Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry") have reassessed the canon presented in these older anthologies - out goes Douglas Dunn, in comes J.H.Prynne.
  - Themed - Some of these (e.g. "The Faber Book of Love Poems") are aimed at the general public. Others (e.g. "A Various Art", "Naming the Waves") attempt to publicise a new school/tendency or destablize a prevailing one.
  - Annual - Two main publications
    - New Writing - sponsored by the British Council. Poetry and Prose. Mostly commissioned or agent-driven, I think.
    - The Forward Book of Poetry - prizes for best/first collection, best poem etc. Room for a few surprises amongst the short-listed pieces.
- Magazines - The Poetry Review is far more influential than any others. The UK has few campaigning magazines though there are some women-only ones ("Writing Women", "MsLexia"), and themed ones (Shearsman - late-modernist, "Parataxis" - experimental). In the USA there are more single-school magazines - e.g. "The Formalist".
- Book Publishers - Fewer nowadays. Does that make the remaining ones more important? Or have books in general become less influential? Smaller presses are making something of a come-back. A few publishers (Chatto, Oxford) produce(d) showcase books with about 6 new poets presented. The Forward Press (founded in 1989) have (according to their web site) published over 800,000 poets (in books and various magazines, etc) and are "the largest publisher of new poetry in the UK". They publish many anthologies (often themed) under various imprints.
- Reviewers - Do they affect people's buying choices? Newspapers and publications like the Times Literary Supplement have few poetry reviews nowadays, and poetry magazines have an increasing rarefied audience. Even if reviews do affect sales, do book sales matter very much?
- Newspapers - A few have weekly or even daily poems. Ruth Padel's column had an influence during her period on The Independent.
- Radio - Programs like BBC radio 4's 'Poetry Please' reflect rather than influence public tastes.
- TV - Negligible impact. Tony Harrison's V appeared on channel 4 and was much discussed - for the bad language as much as anything else.
- Film - Negligible impact. My impression is that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" had a greater impact than "Sylvia".
- Celebrities - Hughes, Heaney, John Hegley, Zephaniah and Poet Laureates attract column inches. They can be quite important, championing other poets.
Education
- Academics - Little impact: a life-support system keeping poets' work alive long enough for others to notice.
- Curriculum designers - These have quite a long-lasting effect. Current trends ("creativity" vs "cultural studies" vs "national heritage") will influence the choice of poets represented and thus the set-books.
- Creative Writing/Workshops - in the US this is a self-sustaining subculture. The UK isn't yet at that stage.
Performance
- Performance Poets - An increasingly popular scene and a useful springboard, though not as big as in the days of Horowitz's Albert Hall show (1965).
- Singer/songwriters - Not a factor in the UK but elsewhere the size of their audience is significant
- Poetry festival directors - They network as well as decide who to invite to their festivals
Organisations/Initiatives
- Arvon writing tutors - Their recommendations have influence with publishers, editors, etc.
- Initiatives - National Poetry Day (promoting populist poetry?) Poems on the Underground (promoting short poetry?)
- Competition Organisers - The Whitbread awards (and to a lesser extent the National Poetry Competition and Peterloo competition) are covered in the press. The organisers pick committees of judges who'll preserve the status quo. If big competitions are judged by (say) McGough, some types of poems will be denied the chance of publicity. The Poetry Business competition winners have a book published - such competitions are much more common in the USA.
- Local poetry groups (word of mouth) - negligible influence.
- Poetry Society - Involved with many national initiatives, so its stance matters. It also publishes the "Poetry Review".
- The Poetry Book Society - sells discounted books by post and recommends certain books. In 2004 they had a 100k ACE grant and about 2,300 members.
- Grant-giving organisations - NESTA (who sometimes give 6 figure sums to poets), the Society of Authors, the British Council (who have an agenda).
- Regional Arts - The Arts Council feeds money to regional offices. They are in control of grants and residencies, and can have quite an impact on the type of poetry encouraged in a region. Sometimes they support magazines and wider participation, sometimes they focus funds on individual writers. Here are some rough figures from the list of regularly funded organisations in 2008, to give you an idea of scale - Arvon £320k, Poetry Society £260k, New Writing Partnership £200k, Carcanet £110k, The Poetry School, £100k, Bloodaxe £90k, Anvil £90k.
Movements - Based on common race, ethnic background, gender, style, etc - feminists, experimentalist, Welsh-speaking. These used to be loose agglomerations of friends who lived in the same region, though nowadays organisations like the "Long Poetry group" survive with a scattered membership. Improved communications (e.g. using the WWW) have made distance less of an issue.

Several of these agents are also importers.

The Action

If one wants to influence events or make progress it helps to know how these groups interact, and how one thing leads to another. Some of the bodies mentioned above have little power or influence but can act as a useful bridge between other bodies, formalising the "Old Boys Networks" of the past. Relations between these various power bases aren't always cordial - links are fluid and alliances temporary.

In the UK a small group of friends can be in control of various groups (publishers, judging committees), and from time to time people suspect a poetry mafia. The Poetry Society plays a central role in national events, as a transmitter at least. To take a hypothetical example, suppose a famous poet reveals in a Sunday newspaper supplement's interview to having suffered years of mental health problems. This opportunity could be exploited by poetry-as-therapy groups, who'll have a chance to write follow-up articles, appear on the radio, and have a more sympathetic reaction to grant-applications. An association with the "Poetry Society" would strengthen their hand, with the possibility of longer term National Lottery or National Health Service support. A "Poetry Review" feature would put the poets on the map. There'd be more workshop tutoring openings for sympathetic poets who in turn will be able to write more, and sell more. They may champion the cause of certain neglected poets from the past, or be asked to put together a themed anthology. The participating poets become better known and more influential, being asked to judge competitions. Before long there could be a small but perceptible shift in the poetry climate - even a shift towards a pre-existing pigeon-hole like confessional poetry.

A few examples serve to illustrate the diversity and transience of associations (some of which are one-way)

Media
- Magazines are read by contributors and other editors. Nowadays book publishers are unlikely to look there for talent. With major publishers less interested in the poetry market, new ventures have appeared linking poets to publication
  - Magazines are beginning to publish books again - "Rialto" and "Acumen" for example.
  - Creative Writing courses (UEA, Sheffield) are producing anthologies of work, magazines or even single-author books.
  - High-quality books are being published online - the Shearsman Gallery series for example.
Education
- Academia and creative writing are no longer in opposition - creative writing is now finding its way onto university syllabuses and MA courses. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses.The established centres (Norwich, Machester, etc) act as magnets for writers, conferences and publications.
- The UK usually lags behind the USA in curriculum development. Currently the trend is away from creative writing (and before that heritage preservation) towards cultural studies (Carol Ann Duffy, etc).
Performance
- The ability to perform is becoming more necessary for published poets in the UK, which has helped traffic in the other direction. Several semi-regular venues exist, even outside London. A mix of performance specialists and book-based writers read. Other outlets are festivals, schools and events run by libraries/councils. Poetry Slams are on the increase, the UK championships being televised by BBC3 in 2004.
  Recordings of modern poetry are uncommon though in Poetry Review V94.1 (Spring 2004) there was a CD featuring Lavinia Greenlaw, Tom Raworth, Keston Sutherland, etc.
- With music as vehicle, poetry can reach bigger audiences. North America has a tradition of Poet/Songwriter links. Dylan, Cohen, etc produce lyrics which work on the page, and in the USA some performance poets use music and sell CDs. The performance circuit in the USA is sympathetic to musical support (percussion and bass guitar if nothing else). Joy Harjo speaks poetry over a musical/jazz backdrop (John Betjeman in the UK did it with a Cello, I seem to recall). And there are Performance Artists who use if not poetry then at least words - e.g. Laurie Anderson of "O Superman" fame.
  France (at least until the early 70s) had strong lyricist links too (Greco sang Prévert and Apollinaire, Jean Ferrat sang Aragon) and also there were singers who were considerable poets - Brel, Aznavour, Trenet, Barbara, Brassens.
  In the UK I think only the Beatles have gained any respect as lyricists.
Organisations/Initiatives
- The New Generation Poets campaign (mid 90s) made an impact and is still discussed a decade later - "A new wave of poets has been scooping the prizes", it was claimed. The Poetry Society administered it (when Peter Forbes was Poetry Review editor). Most of the choices were very safe bets - all the poets had been published by major companies. 20 poets (under 40 years old or having had their first book published in the previous 5 years) were promoted in bookshops, in a series of readings and in the media. Support came from BBC Radio 1 (a pop music channel), the Arts Council, the British Council, various smaller charities, Waterstones (booksellers), and the publishers of the poets. Not all the poets were enthusiastic about the venture. I suspect it boosted the career of some marginal figures (Sue Wicks, Sarah Maguire).
  The Next Generation Poets were announced in June 2004 - 20 poets who'd had their first book published in the previous 10 years. 7 judges: 3 poets (Motion, Armitage, Evaristo), a short-story writer, a member from Radiohead, someone from the PBS and a radio journalist. The 5 page article in the Guardian included no poetry but had a 2-page photo-spread.
- National Poetry Day has become established. It's a chance for organisations to combine forces, keeping poetry in the public eye.
- The slant of the Poetry Review editorship affects the UK poetry climate. During Eric Mottram's reign (1972-1977) experimentalists had a look-in. Currently one of the editors reviews for the Guardian and is sympathetic to the so-called avant-garde, re-opening that channel of communication. But such shifts can foment rebellion amongst the mainstream membership.
Movements - Movements can have tie-ins with Anthologies, Magazines, Presses and Festivals. In some other countries (Italy for example) movements are self-defining and manifesto-driven (an early example being the Futurists). UK movements are less strident, more of a journalistic convenience. Indeed, the unity of such groups ("The Movement", "The Lakeside Poets", "The Martian Poets") is sometimes an illusion created by posterity or the press. Take for example "the Cambridge School". Nobody belongs it. By day they teach Keats to younger generations but under cover of darkness they experiment in their labs, producing small-circulation leaflets or books published by Salt, maintaining international contacts, and meeting yearly at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. Movements are amongst the most vulnerable components of the poetry community. Their survival depends on how well they exploit networking, but the marketing benefit of self-branding can cause internal tension -
- Solidarity and individuality can be in conflict. In the UK black feminists found themselves fighting on several fronts - should they align with white feminists? with black males? or against black males, striving for representation within the black movement? In the USA, feminist writing had a more experimental edge than it did here (Emily Dickinson may have been the cause. Rich helped). In the UK Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley (and from the less experimental tradition Carol Rumens) were quiet at first then criticised the regressive poetic styles of feminist anthologies.
- Forms are considered old-fashioned in some countries but in others they're used by the avant-garde. In the UK modernism never took hold and forms remain in the mainstream.
- The mainstream-experimental divide waxes and wanes. Every so often like a lightning bolt a name crosses the chasm and tension lessens. Just as often each side remain invisible to the other. J.H.Prynne's a case in point. He's unmentioned in most general anthologies, though his collected poems were nominated for a New Yorker book prize. In China, a translation of "Pearls That Were" (only 500 copies of which were produced in England) has sold more than 50,000 copies. Edward Larrissey (author of 'William Blake' etc) wrote that Prynne's poems are as "rich, complex and powerfully original as any poetry written in the English-speaking world in this century". Andrew Duncan views J.H. Prynne's 'The White Stones' as being 'probably the most significant single volume of the 1960's.' Duncan, like many putative avant-garde sympathisers, reads widely. Though keen on Ted Hughes he thinks that "Larkin never managed to write a good poem,... The one moment which saves him from complete vileness is the phrase 'accoutred frowsty barn'". As Peter Middleton writes (in Poetry Review V94.1, p.53-54), "The avant-garde and voice-based poets don't share values, poetics or literary theories"

Career Paths

The traditional career path (publication in reputable magazines leading to pamphlet then book publication, then inclusion in anthologies) is still viable for some mainstream poets, but there are other ways in, exploiting the routes described above. Flexibility and risk-taking are required to exploit these options. Such an approach is hard to combine with a conventional 9-5 job or parenthood. Describing the US situation, Sam Hamill wrote that "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. ... The typical poet teaches". The UK isn't like that yet, but the signs are there. Unless one commits oneself to poetry wholeheartedly, one might be restricted to the traditional paths thus having one's progress delayed.

Winning the National Poetry competition will make a poet momentarily more famous, and may result in book publication, but this will not lead to climatic change unless another factor is present. Such a factor could be the unlikeliness of the person winning (by virtue of age, education, etc). It's unlikely that the winning poem will be innovative - the judges are mainstream and besides, they're in a committee. So the poet might need to follow the links listed above to amplify their influence. Fellow poets, the public and anthologisers will use different criteria to evaluate success. To be a successful published poet nowadays it's useful to be a performer and to be able to run workshops, but as we'll see later, there's a limit to how many groups one can join - some are mutually exclusive.

The USA's Associated Writing Programs offer a different way to fame in a literary world - master-classes, guest readings, etc. I read recently that at Brigham Young University "3 poems equals one research paper published in a peer reviewed journal".
John Hegley, Ian McMillan, etc have made the transition from stage to page.
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets became known by being the subject of critical discussion by scholars, being included in specialist magazines and invited to international conventions. Cambridge School poets follow a similar path.
In the UK the range of options for career development has widened.
- Lavinia Greenlaw is successful in publishing (with Faber) and major competitions. Her CV reads like a career guidance manual - 1990: Eric Gregory Award; 1995: Science Museum residency. Arts Council Writers Award, and British Council Fellow; 1997: Wingate Scholarship; 2000: three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also reader-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall; 2003: Cholmondeley Award. Jobs include arts administrator, freelance writer, reviewer and radio broadcaster, teaching on a Creative Writing MA Programme and working on the Tate and Hayward Gallery education programmes.
- Mario Petrucci (Ph.D in physics) took a more performance/workshop-based approach with Blue Nose poets and ShadoWork. He's a qualified secondary school teacher and "a leading exponent for site-specific poetry and has devised a number of successful residencies involving public art", including a Year-of-the-Artist scheme which led to the schools Poetry Study Pack in Essex and Havering. He's a regular Arvon tutor and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. He's had a residency at the War Museum, London.
Both these poets have tapped into many of the power-bases listed earlier. Neither align themselves to any particular movement (though each have specialisations: Greenlaw science, and Petrucci war). Both have written successful prose. Only by being active on many fronts do they have any hope of earning a living by writing.

Another route is to take advantage of Consultancy and Mentoring.

The Public

My suspicion is that very few poets are known to adults beyond the poetry world. Exceptions are: Motion (poet laureate who writes articles on Dylan, soccer chants, etc), Heaney, Paulin (known by arty types because he appears on a TV review show), Hegley, McGough and Zephaniah. I suspect more people have heard of Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper-Clark than Simon Armitage, though Armitage (and Sophie Hannah) has recently become better known though his prose.

My guess is that while Arts-minded people might feel obliged to see particular films and plays, or read certain novels, they don't feel the same pressure to keep up-to-date with poetry. As Rupert Loydell said at Warwick University's "Poetry in Crisis" debate, "poetry as an art form does not seem to be part of our culture".

In the "Rhyme and Reason" survey, family, education and media were the 3 influences most cited as reasons for being interested in poetry. Much of the poetry world is isolated from the general public, though there are a few points of contact. Again, I'll group according to broad categories

Media - The greatest outbursts of poetry tend to be after events like the death of princess Diana. Regular events like the Whitbread prize-giving and Poetry Day events still receive coverage. Whenever the poet laureate publishes a poem (most recently on England's rugby success) the media cover it. But the event that gained the most attention of late was probably when a writer was given £2,000 by Northern Arts in 2002. Words were painted on sheep's backs to create a new form of "random" literature. According to the poet "I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep."
- Magazines - The general public rarely sees specialist poetry magazines - some are on sale in the Borders bookshop chain, but that's about the limit of their visibility.
- Newspapers - Ruth Padel's column in the Independent tried to explain modern poems to the lay-reader. The columns were collected in a book - "52 ways of looking at a poem".
- Radio - The people who listen get what they expect
- Books - Only Heaney amongst living poets sells in worthwhile quantities. Themed anthologies dominate the poetry book sales, especially around Christmas.
- Films - sometimes spark interest
- Celebrities - people like Viggo Mortenson attract attention. The current poet laureate (Andrew Motion) does a good job of keeping poetry in the news. Benjamin Zephaniah writes for kids as well as adults, and got publicity when he was candidate for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Education
- Traditionally, teachers of English who have been introduced to poetry through their work acquire an interest in contemporary poetry.
- There are many more "creative writing" evening classes nowadays
Performance - Hegley does slots in mainstream variety shows as a poet/stand-up-comic.
Organisations/Initiatives
- The annual Poetry Day, and in particular "Poetry on the Underground" give people the chance to meet poetry and poets.
- Residencies (in museums, take-aways, department stores, etc) offer a way for non-poets to engage in poetry. Attempts have been made to target particular professions (scientists, etc) and Arts (poetry as "the New Rock'n'Roll").

Most of these brief encounters lead to nothing. Not infrequently follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and has too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books. The "Poetry on the Underground" scheme spawned a book which has sold well, and once someone buys a poetry book there's a chance that they'll buy another, though poetry books are thin and expensive compared to epic novels.

The WWW has become the first place to look for those with an emerging interest in poetry. This interest can easily spread to non-WWW activities - many writers groups have grown since the advent of the WWW, and poetry books are often bought online.

The Future

The WWW provides a hitherto unavailable direct link from the public to contemporary poetry material and dedicated poetry groups. This bypassing for traditional media/organisations might have several consequences

The situation is likely to grow more dynamic as institutions (in the form of paper magazines) lose their influence and more international links develop. General anthologies will be treated with more suspicion. With groupings being WWW-mediated, it will be easier to belong to contrasting groups.
WWW-books and magazines may gain more respect as paper magazines fade away. Arts Council England's 2007-2011 vision statement said "While not disregarding the benefits of traditional production and distribution methods, we want to see these presses and magazines take a lead in developing new methods of distribution and explore new uses of technology for both publishing and distribution", which may signal further pressure on paper magazines.
As more people use MP3 players, audio poetry/magazines will grow in popularity.
Major publishers are publishing even fewer books by new poets. In March 2007, George Szirtes in "The StAnza Lecture" said "Bloodaxe's noble act of redress in favouring women poets means that very talented young male poets have really only had Michael Schmidt's Carcanet to go to, before applying to less influential publishers, since houses such as Faber, Cape and Picador take on very few new poets of either gender". Small presses show signs of filling the gap - the recent Forward Prizes had more small press representation than even before.
Poetry organisations will tend to prefer the general media to literary channels when advertising events.

In the UK the increase in creative writing Higher Education courses will open new, more stable, job opportunities and lead to more flexible career plans.

Once the links between organisations are better understood perhaps money can be more effectively spent on networking rather than on organisations or magazines. The rift between intellectuals (not just scientists) and poetry has led to poetry being starved of useful input and audience. Also the career difficulties of those forced to follow traditional routes is detrimental to the development of poetry. It may even prove useful to constrict the flow along certain links. An "anyone-can-write" initiative, broadening the base of the pyramid, is one way to bring new money to poets who are prepared to be tutors, but it may not help the poets' writing.

Poetry about Science in the UK

2011-01-15T21:25:00.002Z

Our world has been transformed by technology so one would expect cars, TVs and test-tube babies to appear in poetry. And as the percentage of scientists in the population grows, the lives and preoccupations of their profession feature more often in poems.

But the world we can't see directly has changed too. Relativity and (even more so) Quantum Physics have shown us that we live in a world beyond what common sense can cope with. And Mathematicians, dealing with topics like (and here I quote at random from the first maths journal at hand) 'Examples of tunnel number one knots which have the property 1+1=3' live in a stranger world still.

One might have thought that adventurous poets would have rushed into these newly opened territories, but it seems to me that poets over the last few centuries have withdrawn from trying to tackle the big questions about the Nature of the Universe. They tend not to deal with the moral complications that new technology engenders, and it's rare to see a Blakean anti-materialist piece attacking scientists. Instead, poets' attempts to write science poems fall into these main categories

Awe and Wonder - like children given a microscope for Christmas
Effects on relationships - e-mail and the mobile phone
Science Fiction Poetry - there's a book of StarTrek poetry
Biographical pieces about famous scientists

These are topics that can easily be tackled by people who know little about science. And yet, more poetry is written by scientists nowadays than in any previous era. So why don't we have more poetry from the frontiers of science? On the international front, the internationally acclaimed Czech poet Miroslav Holub was also a serious immunologist. It is perhaps significant that he had doubts about twinning poetry and science. In "The Dimension of the Present Moment" (Faber and Faber, 1990) he wrote

"At first glimpse one might suspect that literature would be closer to the sciences than other art forms, because sciences also use words and depend on syntax for expressing their findings and formulating ideas. ... [but] There is no common language and there is no common network of relations and references. Actually, modern painting has in some ways come closer to the new scientific notions and paradigms, precisely because a painter's vocabulary, colours, shapes and dimensions are not congruent to the scientist's vocabulary." (p.130)
"In the use of words, poetry is the reverse of the sciences. Sciences bar all secondary factors associated with writing or speaking; ... poetry tries for as many possibilities as it can." (p.132)

In New Scientist (24 July 1999) Graham Farmelo (Science Museum, London) wrote "Be sceptical of any science-art initiative and you are liable to find yourself marked down as a narrow-minded reactionary. If a new work of art is based on a theme related to science, most critics will give it an easy ride... It seems that this flavour of political correctness encourages intellectual laziness, allowing shallow and sentimental nonsense about the relationship to pass for serious thought". So perhaps we should be wary of some recent initiatives.

In the UK ex physics/maths professors appear in small magazines, and Mario Petrucci, who's active in many areas of UK poetry, has a physics Ph.D. London's Science Museum sometimes has a poet-in-residence. The best known holder of that post is Lavinia Greenlaw. In 2000, she was awarded a three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. She said she'd use the £67,000 to "undertake formal study" in science, and journey "to places with extreme perspectives - precarious and changing landscapes, or those which experience the natural phenomena of eclipses and equinoxes". For television, she has written a sequence of poems about the meaning of numbers for an Equinox documentary. Her WWW site is http://www.laviniagreenlaw.co.uk. Also worth a look is LUPAS (Liverpool University Centre for Poetry and Science).

If you want to read science poems, 2 UK anthologies of note are

"Poems of Science", eds J. Heath-Stubbs and P. Salman, Penguin, 1984.
"A quark for Mister Mark", eds Maurice Roirdan, Jon Turney: Faber, 2000.

Let's Twist Again

2011-01-15T20:55:00.002Z

One of the problems with a "well-constructed" piece where "not a word is wasted" is that of predictability. As Chekhov said, if a shotgun is mentioned early in a story, you can bet it'll go off before the end. O. Henry (1862-1910) based many stories around a final twist. Such stories still exist, but the purest forms have become genred - the whodunit, etc.

Stories that depend on a twist in the tail have to contend with the possibility that some readers will guess the ending. One can deal with this by adding several Red Herrings, demoting the plot in favour of character or mood, or writing a thriller where there are several twists. There's another way though, that keeps both the naive and world-weary reader happy while retaining the "well-constructed" craftmanship. What you do is write a story with a twist as usual near the end. Experienced readers may well have anticipated this twist, but the writer needn't worry, because while the readers are gloating and off their guard you twist again. The first twist masks the second. It's a misdirection trick sometimes used by magicians - they let the audience think the trick is done one way, then they overtrump the trick.

It's hard to pull this off. Ideally you need to make the naive reader miss the clues to the first twist, and make the expert reader miss the clues to the second. However, readers vary hugely in their ability/desire to see clues, sometimes missing obvious points. Studies have been done to see how adaptable readers are and how their interpretations change from one paragraph to the next. At the start they often don't know the gender/age of the characters, the setting, or the genre. Some readers cling to their initial assumptions, others remain non-commital. If a first sentence read "What's your name?", Sam barked. you might assume that Sam is an angry man, though perhaps Samantha turns out to be a curious dog. See What Happens When Our Students Read, and What Can We Do About It? for a report on how a bunch of people read Graham Greene's "The Second Death".

In Agatha Christie's whodunits there's often a sequence of false endings, some rather unconvincing. When you Twist the Twist, the first twist must be good (satisfying enough to be a final twist) otherwise the 2nd twist won't work. Mamet's film "House of Games" has something like the same form.

An example

In "Precipitation within Sight" (Wendy McKechnie, Pulse Fiction anthology) the narrator (one of the last inhabitants of a Scottish island), thinking that it's time to get more experience of people and the world, attempts to get friendly with a male visitor. In the last paragraph we read "I'm not getting any younger - I was fifty-five last birthday". Throughout the story there are hints that the character was a young woman. I suspect that this revelation of the age is supposed to be a surprise. The final sentence is "There's no pleasure in being ... the only gay man for two hundred miles" which is supposed to be an even bigger surprise.

The readers who keep an open mind and are happy to keep it open may not be suprized by these revelations, especially if they're experienced readers used to anticipating literary punchlines. But having 2 punchlines offers 2 chances to surprise the reader, and even experienced readers seeing the statement about the age may be lulled into believing that this is the final punchline. With their guard down they may be unprepared for the gender news.

I think in general that surprises work if they're seen to be

Plausible - not a deus ex machina
Fair - the story shouldn't make the surprize seem impossible
Illuminating - the surprise should force a re-evaluation of the earlier text. Ideally the piece should make more sense in the light of the denoument
Unexpected - If the 1st punchline is a showstopper and the 2nd follows quickly, the impact is greater.

In this piece we have

the narrator wearing "vests and extra pants"
"Bridget and Anne were ready to retire, but I wasn't"
"There are no people of my age, or within twenty years of it"
"I'm no Leda, and it's a flesh and blood, feather-free Prince I'm after"
"I sing Casta Diva like Maria Callas"
"and I come kicking down the hill, wellies out, like a chorus girl"
"maybe even go back to school. It's not too late for me to make friends, have relationships"
"I told him how much I liked .... cotton/silk underwear next to the skin"
"I thought of Joan Collins, my heroine"

Only towards the end does the misdirecting becomes a little unfair - which is fair enough. The surprise is plausible - the piece is a first person narrative, so any suppression of adverse reactions by others is reasonable. There's isn't much illumination though.

In this example I think the trick works because the author isn't assuming that the reader expects all relationships to be heterosexual, but is assuming that the readers expect an isolated fishing community to have repressive sexual mores.

Genre and critiques

2011-01-15T20:53:00.002Z

To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and interpreters. Alastair Fowler goes so far as to suggest that 'communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre' [1]. It's difficult to separate Mainstream pieces from Genre pieces - the mainstream's only a loosely related mass of more popular genres. There are even people who look upon each piece as a unique sub-genre, self-defining a way in which it can be read. Genres make life tricky for critiquers though. Pieces by Agatha Christie or Robbe-Grillet don't have character development - should we worry? Plot-driven works like Harry Potter use character development as a filler between action scenes - is that better? Gertrude Stein's repetition and restricted vocabulary are part of her game. Were Hemingway's later mannerisms as vital?

Once you're inside a genre, sub-genres appear, sometimes replicating the genres in the higher layer. Within Science Fiction for example there's hard-SF (written by highly qualified scientists), speculative-SF (idea-driven), comic-SF, space-opera, "1984", "The Handmaid's Tale", etc. Each sub-genre has implicit rules and priorities - it's easy to pluck a paragraph from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and enrich its variety of structure and vocabulary, but doing so may well be counter-productive. There's no reason why expert scientists should make expert SF writers, though as readers they're best placed to offer the kind of factual critique which fans will appreciate much more than the rewriter's literary suggestions.

In this context where do criticisms like "sloppy writing" stand? Van Gogh's a terribly sloppy painter compared to Vermeer, and Vermeer's a mess compared to some Hyperrealists. And yet one doesn't want "it's a genre piece" to be a license for any type of writing ("so what if my story has a few spelling mistakes - so has Finnegan's Wake"). The genre competence of an experienced reader needs to be both nimble and creative. To readers who've read Fantasy and Realism but nothing in between, a piece of Magic Realism may seem an unfortunate mix falling between 2 stools.

Criticising a text might be tantamount to criticising the genre, and someone with no previous experience of the genre will have a hard job. Genre-sensitive criticism (aware of, but not subservient to, the demands of the genre) tries to relate the piece to its genre, using terms like

"Good of its type" - a description sometimes applied to a good example in an unappreciated genre.
"Stylist" - a writer whose elegance of prose exceeds what the genre promises (Forsythe for his spy thrillers?)

Because of this genre-related complication, some critics try to focus on factors which are common across genres. "Well-written prose" may not be a requirement for swashbuckling SF but surely there are some standards which apply to many genres. However, the value of elegant prose in itself is contestable. We're used to the idea that dialog can legitimately contain errors - after all, we're only human. The omniscient narrator is just another voice, and it's a genre issue (rather than one of quality or sophistication) as to whether that fact should be hidden. One can "show the working" - in a sense, all narrators are unreliable. A work's uniformity of narrative mode (or point of view) is also used as a supra-genre indicator of writerly skill, as is the writer's ability to make all readers think the same thing, or the author's ability to carry out his/her putative intentions. These too are genre-bound concepts though, considered ideologically suspect by some.

John Hartley argues that 'genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text' [2] . Key psychological functions of genre are likely to include those shared by categorization generally - such as reducing complexity. This is a price we pay when trying to communicate, but genres can play a role in innovation too (in "The Name of the Rose", perhaps), providing familiar ground for readers to stand on while they come to terms with the unfamiliar.

New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge

Mutation - a variation on an existing genre: often a change in the proportions of the ingredients
Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some hybrids may be sterile.
Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres

As usual, once a reader strategy is identified, writers will exploit it. Readers look for categorisations that increase coherence and satisfaction. Writers such as Borges take advantage of this desire, leading the reader into one genre-context before surprising them with another. More radical genre experiments abound - "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations" [3].

"A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216
"Cultural Studies (Studies in Culture & Communication)", O'Sullivan et al, Routledge, 1994, p.128
"The Ideology of Genre", Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University Press. 1994

Losing your voice

2011-01-15T20:50:00.001Z

For budding poets each poem's a mystery tour, its form and destination unknown. Before long a repertoire of ways to develop an initial phrase or idea is built up. These plus our experience and notebooks are used to complete poems. Then one day someone tells us that we have found our 'voice'. Should we be relieved that we've finally found ourselves?

Poets used to have styles, but now that we're offspring of Romantics and Confessionalists, uniqueness of voice is what matters - modern readers seem to want to know the person behind the words. Eavan Boland considers it more essential than ever that poets should discover "a real voice, a true voice". Of course, this authentic voice may not turn out to be distinctive, but unless it is, no-one (not even the writer) will be any the wiser. Paz in 'The Other Voice' thought that "the singularity of modern poetry does not come from the ideas or attitudes of a poet, it comes from his voice", and Harold Bloom has noted that "When we open a first volume of verse these days, we listen to hear a distinctive voice, if we can, and if the voice is not already somewhat differentiated from its precursors and its fellows, then we tend to stop listening, no matter what the voice is attempting to say."

But do established poets really have a voice? Maybe if you pick a particular phase of their work (as with Rich), or just their best pieces (as with Larkin) they may speak with one voice, displaying a distinctive mood, language, vocabulary and form, but over a lifetime there's usually quite a diversity. Besides, for some newer kinds of poetry the concept of being true to one's inner voice isn't appropriate. I think there's a case for saying that when writing we adopt a poetic persona, and like an actor, we gradually feel ourselves into the part. Some of us are character actors, happy to explore different styles, others stick with what gave us our breakthrough role. But having a distinctive voice doesn't ensure quality; it could be affectation.

So if you're told you have a voice, don't jump for joy. Maybe you've just become rather set in your ways. It makes good business sense, but if it means that your poems resemble each other too much, then there's a danger of self-parody. Even at workshops there's detrimental typecasting - people are likely to greet a new poem with "it's not like your usual stuff" rather than judge it on its merits. Especially if you're young you may want to challenge the authority of this voice before it takes you over. Take a rest from writing, lock away your old poems and notebooks, seek out new influences, try dramatic monologues. You may even consider submitting poems under different names. If nothing else, these activities will add nuances and new inflections, helping you to lose your voice - with style.

The formalist/free avant-garde/mainstream UK/US splits

2011-01-15T20:40:00.003Z

Formalist/free

It's understandable when outsiders describe a formalist poem as "mechanical" or a free verse piece as "sprawling" - these are alternative (albeit derogatory) terms for characteristic features of the types. But there are other features (let's call them "secondary characteristics") that seem to have become attached to certain types of poetry even though there's no necessary connection. For example, Formalism (by which I mean here reliance on meter and/or rhyme) doesn't imply thematic/tonal coherence, though increasingly in practice it seems to. Other potential secondary characteristics include continuity, dependence on old-fashioned aesthetic theories (often in the guise of being theory-free), tendency towards pastoral, and avoidance of modern diction.

Are these characteristics a consequence of the form or the poet? I think metered verse makes using long words harder, increases the number of meter-padding words like "upon" which are infrequently used elsewhere, and is likely to reduce the range of (and rapid shifts between) voices - "The Waste Land" had to be in free verse. However I don't see why meter and closed form should impose any uniformity and insularity at the conceptual level. Perhaps nowadays, with no obligation to write formal poetry, those drawn to write it are more likely to be by temperament attached to these secondary characteristics. Their poetry in turn perpetuates the connection.

On the face of it, formalist and free verse have access to much the same poetic effects (rhythm, rhyme, imagery, voice, etc) so one might expect critiques to be similar. In practice however, the critiques are dividing along similar lines to the poetry. When Formalists comment on free verse they won't criticise the lack of "form" but they might bemoan the lack of the secondary characteristics that they're used to. For example, lack of "unity" is sometimes treated as a fault, though it can arise for reasons which nowadays should no longer be causes for concern

Extensive use of juxtaposition. Gregory Ulmer described collage as "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century". David Antin remarked "for better or worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset".
Use of several motifs that have a family resemblance but no common central feature. The 'centreless poem' has a tradition going back millennia.
Appropriate allusions to several unrelated sources outside the poems (rather than internal cross-references).

Formal poems lend themselves to types of analysis that are less immediately applicable to free verse. The sound/spelling "techniques" may not need to be as central to poetry nowadays as they used to be. To focus on them at the expense of more worldly concerns might be considered rather a navel-gazing endeavour. Non-Formalist criticism uses more theoretical/technical considerations that also could be applied to wider spheres - other uses of language, and other cultural/idealogical considerations. For example, free-form has at its disposal a range of linguistic effects that are also used in prose - rapid tonal shifts, quotes, etc - but are hard to deploy in Formalist works.

The strain between formalist and free verse has increased since the free verse category has broadened, taking over some territory once belonging to prose. When Don Paterson wrote a one word text he had little choice but to call it a poem. And when someone in the English speaking world has a bon mot or joke nowadays the easiest way to get it published is to insert some line-breaks. I don't think Novalis lived under such conditions. Were there a market for short literary prose I think there'd be fewer conflicts between formal and free verse.

Avant-garde/mainstream

The formalist's stock criticism of free verse applies even more strongly to avant-garde writing. Each year the "Cambridge School" of poets (a school that nobody belongs to) hold the CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry). CCCP poems tend to have broken sentences, multiple styles and perhaps most strikingly, multiple voices. Dialogue with the reader isn't just implicit. Eliot's "that's one way of looking at it - not very satisfactory" becomes integrated into the poem (indeed, at the readings it isn't always clear when the poet's introduction ends and the poem begins). In contrast, mainstream poems have an air of dramatic irony - they, like an actor in a farce, seem unaware of what's going on behind them, things obvious to a well-read audience.

UK/US

The divides mentioned above manifest themselves differently in the US. Formalist verse appears less in syllabuses over there. Under the aegis of "New Formalists" the flag still flies, but their main publication - "The Formalist" - has just ceased publication. In the Dec 24th/31st TLS 2004 Roger Caldwell compares "The Best American Poetry 2004" (ed Lyn Hejinian) with the UK's "Forward Book of Poetry" 2005 (ed Greenlaw et al). It's a rather unfair comparison in that the Forward's a by-committee selection rather than a personal choice but I think the differences (though greater this year than usual) apply more generally. The UK anthologies always contain some rhyming poems, the US ones often have none. He says that

the UK poems are "technically adroit, up-to-date in their diction, go through the usual poetic motions but have nothing to say". The selection's "traditional in its touching belief in the translucency of language ... and in poetry that is as much oral as written ... tame stuff indeed". "it is typically in the attempt at a resonant closure that poetic lift-off typically - if belatedly - takes place".
the American poetry is "fresh, adventurous, daring ... self-regarding, prolix and pointlessly obscure ... little sense of any kind of quality control". It's narrowly based on the "stale aesthetic of yesterday's avant-garde".

Our mainstream is less avant-garde than that of the US (or at least, the UK mainstream have less contact with fringe elements). Randall Jarrell felt that in the UK Modernism never got "beyond the level of the Sitwells" - i.e. not far. Of course we English love our eccentrics, but that doesn't mean we take them seriously. We politely put up with them hoping that they'll get fed up and go away. In the US "modern poetry" seems to have been absorbed into the mainstream - perhaps because US universities have more contacts with poets, and because their tradition includes Wallace Stevens rather than Larkin. People like Jorie Graham would have had trouble breaking through here. Robert Sheppard's review of Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Peter Barry) gives some background to UK developments.

Fusion

My generalisations above are more applicable to bad writing than good. Also when formalism feels under threat (as in the US) there might be more polarisation. In the US the formalist/free streams of poetry may have diverged so much that they can no longer interbreed. If free-versers read older books they might be surprised how many kindred spirits are there, and if formalists read newer ones they'd find that Derrida et al often use formalist texts as source material. In the UK the split is far less decisive. Our fissure is more between innovative and mainstream poetry. The CCCPers I've met read mainstream poets (in an interview with Bernstein, Drew Milne said he didn't read it much though - "it doesn't look like poetry to me". Most mainstreamers don't even know the names of the CCCPers. The Aristotlean idea of unity and coherence is still strong in the UK mainstream - something that (by dint of style or content) doesn't "fit in" is considered a hole out of which the poem leaks, rather than a door through which the reader can gain entry and begin trading.

In his review, Caldwell wishes for the best of both worlds. How might the rift be closed? Sometimes a strong poet can shift public sensibilities. Eliot combined new and old techniques. Nowadays Don Paterson is playful, but hardly revolutionary. Ian Duhig's worth tracking, though I think we need to place our hopes more in publications

Eric Mottram in the 70s opened Poetry Review to more experimental work. The magazine gained new editors in 2002 who were sympathetic to the CCCP. Their contracts are up for renewal.
UK poets need more access to US poems. Our magazines contain few big US names, and we buy few of their books.
Recently in the UK the annual "New Writing" anthology has included a section entitled "Texts" to include unclassifiable pieces. I think this will help free-verse to escape from some of its prosey obligations.
The anthology by Oxford University Press ("20th Century British and Irish Poetry", edited by the Canadian Keith Tuma) tries to be more inclusive. No Prynne (because he refused) but no Fenton or Douglas Dunn either. As one reviewer wrote, "it's worth buying for the omissions alone".
Reviewers have a large role to play. Individual poets may have narrow ranges but critics need to be open minded, coping with books of different styles, but also lines of different styles within a single poem. Rather than disparaging disunity, it's worth trying to characterise the type of disunity/discontinuity more carefully before assessing its effectiveness.

Breaking into print

2011-01-14T15:08:00.004Z

Contents

What's the point?
Inhibitions and how to overcome them
Planning
Sending off - Where and How (and electronic submission)
Keeping records
Rejection
Acceptance
Marketing
No Reply
Shortcuts
Conclusions
References

So, you have some poems, or short stories or maybe even a novel. You all know about the Writers and Artists Yearbook, you've all seen stories and articles that you could have written yourselves, so why don't you send things off? Today we'll try to identify what's holding you back.

I'll talk first about general issues, then deal with the details about sending off, then what to do after. I'm not going to deal with blockbusters - I'm going to assume you're happy to start at the shallow end. If it all sounds like too much work, don't worry - I'll offer some shortcuts at the end.

What's the point?

I suppose firstly we should look at the incentives to sending things away.

Money - Unless you regularly write articles, you won't get much, but it's nice to get paid for something you enjoy doing (especially if you get paid £20 for a haiku). I still treasure the £1 cheque I once got from the BBC.
Fame - It's easy to be a big fish in the little pool of poetry or short stories
Participation - Ever read something and thought "I could have done that"? Going from being a reader to a writer is a big leap, one you've already made. The next step is to become part of the writing community. It's a big step, like progressing from taking music lessons to becoming a public "performer". By going to workshops and sharing your work you're already well on the way to being a public performer. Now it's time to take the next step and get published.
Improving your writing - Even if you're just writing for your own enjoyment, getting published can help. Writing without publishing is a bit like talking to yourself.
- Angela Carter thought the writing process incomplete until the piece was published.
- Poet Don Paterson wrote that "the poem begins with inspiration and ends in publication, not just completion"
- Jane Holland (poet and editor) wrote in April 2008 that "people learn most about writing poetry from actually seeing their work in print. ... Contrary to popular belief, new writers don't learn as much from sitting in workshops ... To see a new poem in print is the best way to learn, because you are far more likely to spot your mistakes once a poem is set against others in a public context, and suddenly realise how to fix them"
Because if you don't, others worse than you will!

To me nowadays publication is an integral part of the writing process. The only unpublishable pieces are those that aren't good enough - though some are harder to publish than others

Inhibitions and how to overcome them

Fear of boasting - I've published 137 poems, 16 stories, 14 articles, 2 reviews, 1 academic paper, and 1 computer game, as well as various WWW stuff. How do you react to me saying that?
- Am I showing off? - Modesty (false modesty especially) is something you'll need to overcome. It helps neither you or your audience
- Is it all true? Even if it is, what hasn't been said? How important are the magazines? Why haven't I published a book? - You don't need to make your CV into a confession! If you've won 3rd prize in a local writers' group competition that makes you a "prizewinning author"!
Fear of failure - Don't worry: only you will know. All the same, it can be a "character-building" experience. Writing is used in therapy and self-esteem courses, and the success of the writing can be confused with the success of the person. If you have low self-esteem you might have some dark periods on your way to success. One way round this might be to have systems, mechanisms and schedules in place so that you don't have to repeatedly motivate yourself to send things off - it becomes an automatic reflex.
Try to remember that successful people fail more often than other people - the difference is that they keep trying!
Dislike of marketing - In a "Paris Review" interview Kurt Vonnegut said that "In a creative writing class of twenty people ... six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by". When asked what distinguishes those two he said "They will probably be hustlers".
Marketing doesn't come naturally to all of us. To be your own agent you may have to take a drink or two. But you'll get used to it. Or you go into "P.A." mode or Civil-Servant-mode, depending on your experience. Don't let it drain your creative juices. You could keep your submissions folder separate from your writing folder.
The excuse of wishing to keep your art pure, untainted by commercialism, is no excuse at all.
Fear of embarrassment once published - Use a pen name if you're worried that workmates or family might find out
Fear of the expense - Well, mountaineering, horse riding or supporting Chelsea isn't cheap either. Publication shouldn't be costly but you may need to invest initially. It's recommended that you study a magazine before sending to it. Buying the magazines becomes expensive, but you can browse at Borders, Heffers, the University Library, or the Poetry Library at London. You may also be able to browse online. Postal costs shouldn't be an issue unless you're sending to the States. And there's always e-mail
Fear that your work/ideas will be stolen - It happens, though rarely. It's one way to become famous.
Fear that when your work's published it will be adversely reviewed - if your work's ever reviewed, just be grateful!
Fear that you're too old - you don't need to be young and beautiful to embark upon a writing career. You can be 35 and still win "Young Novelist" competitions. You can be over 40 and make a splash. Venessa Gebbie (from zero to story-collection in 4 years) and Helena Nelson (poetry) burst onto the scene later in life and rapidly had many successes. They had more money, more time, more common sense and much more to write about than youngsters had. Blinking Eye Publishing promotes the work of writers over the age of 50.
Fear of too much work - Don't know where to start? The Writers and Artists yearbook lists hundreds if not thousands of addresses. It's hard to know where to begin. Keep listening ...

I stopped being a passive reader and realised I could be part of "the printed world". I read actively, asking myself "could I do better than this?". After that, I conquered my other inhibitions without too much trouble.

Planning

I mostly do literary stuff. Every few months I plan ahead. I look

at forthcoming competition deadlines (they're inflexible, so I consider those first)
for magazines that I've not sent to for 9 months
for my pieces that deserve to be published

It helps to know whether magazines will reply in days or months. I've a group of magazines that I regularly sent to, so I know what to expect. Every so often I try a new one.

For articles, poetry and prose, look out for themed issues of general magazines. Sometimes the only way to find out about these is to read the magazines, though often the magazine's web pages help. Also check for forthcoming anniversaries, especially when you can tie them with some contemporary event. Remember that magazines often plan months ahead.

Sending off - Where and How

Good publishers are never short of authors, so don't bother replying to adverts in the press. The details about sending off vary a lot depending on the genre. An SAE is usually obligatory if you're not using the web or e-mail. There's no excuse - when Masefield was poet laureate he sent his official poems to the Times, even he included a stamped return envelope in case of rejection.

Poems and stories

There's is big split between literary and general outlets.

Literary - The UK literary world is tiny. Don't think about sending a book off until you've had many pieces accepted. Remember, you're in competition with students from hundreds of Creative Writing courses whose homework includes having to submit work to magazines, so you can't afford to be amateurish.
- Where? - don't aim too high or too low. League tables aren't easily obtained. For US magazines there's Jeff Bahr's US poetry magazine ratings which gives information like the following
  
  For literary outlets Duotrope lets you search markets by genre, word-length, etc. Or you can try Word Hustler. In the UK see
  - Magazines publishing short stories
  - Poetry Library archive
  The lists might look long, but many of the magazines come and go. Focus on the long-standing magazines, or magazines that you like. A UK list of worthwhile, feasible outlets for stories in print might have 5 mags. Tania Hershman keeps a list of UK literary story outlets (111 mags at the moment). For poems, 10-15 is a more reasonable number. See the Happenstance list of reputable publications for ideas.
  I wouldn't bother sending to competitions until you have a fair idea of what's likely to succeed.
- How? - see submission guidelines. Some magazines are fussier than others, especially regarding multiple submissions, but you can't go too far wrong if you send a story or 3 poems along with a biographical note and SAE.
- What? - read magazines and judge's reports. One of the most common reasons for a piece being rejected is that it's inappropriate. Some editors have pet dislikes and quirks (yet another poem about Paintings, yet another story about Alzheimer's, etc). Remember that editors like to provide variety, so throw in the odd joker. Larkin said that the poem he included in a submission "to make the others look good" was often the one that was accepted.
- "Bio" and covering letter - I don't include a covering letter unless the guidelines say so or I'm sending to a magazine for the first time. Ditto with biographical notes. I keep them simple (town, family status, profession, recent publications) unless they specify otherwise. I keep a lit CV online.
  If you write a cover letter -
  - Try to name the person you're sending to (don't use "Dear Sir")
  - Say what's in the submission
  - Say why you chose to send it to that particular place
  - Give a brief bio and summary of past writing experiences
  - If it's appropriate, say how you might promote the resulting publication
  It's worth spending time on your bio because it might be published and it can affect the likelihood of your work being accepted. E.g.
  - The guidelines for "Anti-" magazine says - "Include a cover letter with your name, contact information, a contributor-note biography of 50 words or less, and a statement of 50 words or less on what you're against in poetry. This statement can be general or specific to your submitted poems, serious or tongue in cheek, broad or ridiculously minute."
  - The guidelines for the recent "Woman and Home" Short Story competition (the theme was PASSION) asked for a story of max 2500 words, a recent photo, and 200 words about yourself.
  - "Horizon Review"'s submissions guidelines say that You must include a 75 word biographical note
- The 1st ten seconds - many pieces are rapidly rejected. Make sure your work doesn't fail at the first hurdle. Think speed-dating.
- Avoid vanity press!
If an editor's giving a talk it's useful to attend. You'll get a better idea of how they sift submissions and how ruthless they have to be.
Non-literary - Suppose you've written a humorous poem about Allergies. If stuck-up literary magazines reject it, look for non-literary opportunities. You might get published in Readers Digest, New Scientist, Men's Health, Supermarket magazines, etc. There's a literary magazine that's designed for doctors' waiting rooms. Letters columns are a useful way in to magazine publication.

Novels

Different rules apply! Get an agent! See a list of literary agents. Alternatively enter a competition where the winner has their book published.

Some magazines print chapters nowadays.

Preditors & Editors is "a guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers". It has examples of cover letters, legal advice and much else besides.

Articles

A huge market, one we should take more advantage of. Maybe the easiest thing to do is to idle in a newsagents for a while and browse through the magazines that interest you. Again, it's a matter of getting into the right mindset and becoming an active participant in the print-world. The money's often good, and you may not need to work too hard - exploit what you know rather than research. Use your past as a library.

Years ago I was asked to write an article about 'Children and Allotments' for a proposed local leaflet. It didn't take long to write. The leaflet wasn't produced in the end, so I put the article online. Where could I have sent it instead? Since then

A Sheffield organisation found it and asked if they could use it.
"Home and country" magazine found it and asked if they could use it.
2 TV companies have been in touch (Look East visited!)
I've seen articles in Sunday supplements, food magazines. When Harrods publicised their roof garden, several spin-off articles appeared. 'Bricks and Mortar' (Times) had 2 pages about allotments, showing how they save money now that food prices are rising. No doubt Saga magazine, parenting magazines, and health magazines regularly deal with the topic, etc.
The new towns in our area have brought community garden and allotments into the news. 2 of the 4 candidates in the local Trumpington elections mentioned their allotments in their literature!
The Dept of Architecture and a Cambridge Art Gallery both had exhibitions about allotment buildings

The opportunities are there. It's all up to you! I think it's easiest if you're already a specialist in something - it's easier to adapt what you know than learn something new - but there are many outlets for common topics too. Many magazines have Travel sections (gone for a walk recently?), food sections and book sections. Or you coud just string together some things you like and call the article "50 reasons to be cheerful" or "5 best things to do" (both of these appeared in a recent issue of "Good Housekeeping"). Several magazines don't accept freelancers though - read the guidelines or "Writers and Artists".

As Jane Wilson-Howarth's pointed out, a headline-grabbing title's very useful.

Don't neglect foreign markets - your knowledge of UK small literary magazines, or Cambridge, or pubs, may not be exceptional but some people in Canada for example may be interested.

And don't forget that you can use ideas more than once - if for example you get lost on holiday, you can use the episode in a travel article, a story, or a letter.

Exercise: List some skills or life-events that could be made into an article. Done anything strange? Anything you learnt something from? Any dinner party anecdotes you could write up? If your partner's trying to impress some new acquaintances, what do they say about you? What did your parents say to humiliate you when you brought a new friend home? How do your children describe you to their friends? What will be written on your gravestone?

Reviews

There are shortages of reviewers sometimes - magazines (especially small literary ones) sometimes advertise for them. Rattle magazine (in the US) have an online list of book that they'd like reviewed. If you ask for one they'll send it to you as long as you send them back a review.

Send off samples (preferably previously published ones) in the first instance.

Some people say that it's relatively easy to get reviews accepted, and that they lead to other opportunities.

Electronic submissions and the Web

Electronic submission to paper-based magazines is cheap and fast, but you still need to do your homework. Don't be sloppy! Many American magazines offer an online submission facility where you need to register first - you'll need to fill in a form but but it's nearly always free, and offers benefits. For example, you'll be able to track the progress of your submission and perhaps look at your record of previous submissions. On the right you'll see my attempts to be published in "Quick Fiction".

The web offers new writing opportunities, a foot in the door on the way to paper-based publication. Web-only publications are increasingly respectable (selections from online magazines are now regularly included in the Best American Series of annual anthologies; online editors can nominate their contributors for the Pushcart Prize; the National Endowment for the Arts permits up to half of one's qualifying publishing credits to be from online journals). Even if you self-publish on the web it can lead to recognition - for example, the BBC have interviews with people whose only qualification appears to be that they publish a blog.

Keeping records

Don't send to the same place too often (Iota magazine said that one year a poet sent them 68 poems!). Don't send the same piece to the same mag (editors have excellent memories!). I keep

a spreadsheet of who's rejected what
A list of when I've last sent to each magazine
A list of what's in the post

See my list of what's in the post (messy, but it does the job). I guess I average about 10 pieces in the post at any moment. Sometimes I have 30 pieces in the post.

To help me analyse my progress I make graphs of my results.

For literary outlets you could use an online database like Duotrope.

Not only will this help you track your submissions, but the response time, etc, is added to a database so that all Duotrope users can get an impression of how long they might need to wait.

Rejection

So you've read the magazines, prepared your manuscript, sent it off, filled in your spreadsheet. After a few weeks you notice an SAE on the doormat ...

The odds are rarely much better than 1 in 50 even in literary backwaters, so brace yourself. Of course, editors can have legitimate reasons for rejecting good work - they really might be full; maybe they really do have another piece dealing with exactly the same topic - but it's depressing all the same. There are many instances of classics (e.g. the first Harry Potter book) being rejected many times, so it's worth being stubborn. Less well advertised (and far more common) are the self-styled "neglected geniuses" who waste time and money bashing their heads against brick walls. I once had a poem accepted on the 15th attempt ...

If a piece repeatedly fails, maybe you should think about sending it to a different kind of outlet altogether. If the BBC turns your play down you could perhaps make it into a school play or a Whodunnit evening. Your failed novel for adults might be a blistering success with Young Adults.

People who send off material with autobiographical elements have particular trouble with accepting that it's not their soul being rejected, just their piece of writing. Even battle-hardened writers get hurt by rejections. E.g.

I don't like receiving 2 rejections in a day. It happens.
With e-submissions, e-rejections can arrive any when, even Sundays.
I once got an acceptance from a mag with a note asking me to send more on straight away. The editor later replied saying something like "thanks, I'll stick with the first one"
Some rejections make me wonder what else I could do - "This is a great read - it's extremely entertaining and very witty. I don't think it's quite right for ..."

In the US there are agencies who will do the submitting for you. There's also

the Rejection Collection site
Literary Rejection on display
Rejectionwiki (to see whether you have a standard, tiered or personalized rejection)
"A Writer's Guide to Overcoming Rejection" by Edward Baker (Summersdale Publishers, 1998)

Anything other than a standard printed rejection slip (as from the New Yorker below) is progress. I once received a rejection letter which was 2 packed A4 pages long, from Interzone

Below is a more recent (2008) rejection I received. It softened the blow
Thank you for sending us three of your poems for consideration for Magma 42. I have now been able to read and re-read them a number of times and I've enjoyed much in them. They respond very interestingly to the issue's theme of engagement with feeling and I've held on to them till now in the hope of being able to take "Believing in myself".
However, I'm afraid this isn't going to be possible. The response for Magma 42 has been enormous, greater than usual, and we've received well over 2500 poems. With the pressure on space, it won't be possible to take one of your poems, but I thought you might like to know it was a near miss.

It's worth holding on to rejection slips - the editors might become famous. Here are 4 of the rejection slips I got from David Almond ("Skellig", etc).

Occasionally one gets rejections like this -
Remember Goethe's advice to the misanthropic young Schopenhauer ... if you wish to enjoy (your) life, then you must ascribe value to (love) this world (as it is). Somehow you need to get out of yourself, your intellectual self.

Some online mags offer detailed rejection slips. Here's one I received

 
Editor 1 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 1 Comments:    I feel like I'm on a tour run by the Ghost of Christmas past.

Editor 2 Vote:        No
Ed. 2 Comments:    Too much distance from the subject

Editor 3 Vote:        Yes
Ed. 3 Comments:    Pulls its strands together nicely.

Editor 4 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 4 Comments:    Intriguing.

Editor 5 Vote:        Yes
Ed. 5 Comments:    Great sense of style and voice.

Editor 6 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 6 Comments:    I like the writing, but I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

Here are some tricks I've used to lessen the pain

As part of your planning, assume a piece will be rejected and have a place ready to send it to next - bounce it straight out again without brooding
Use personal and embarrassing material in your work so that you'll be secretly relieved when it's rejected
Have someone else open the envelopes.

Acceptance

Rejoice! One acceptance can make up for handfuls of rejections
Success breeds success - you become more confident; editors recognise your name; and you can add more to covering letters. Once you've published your novel you can write articles about how you did it!

You'll be expected to write a bio if you've not already done so. Here are some examples

Catherine Smith's The New Bride was shortlisted for last year's Forward First Collection. Very drunk on her own hen night she sang her way down Streatham High Road. She is still married (Rialto)
Sarah Oswald writes fiction inspired by places. She grew up in Canada, lived as a traveller, spent many years in Wales and now lives in Devon. It's her ambition to write something as beautiful and disturbing as walking on Dartmoor in the rain with no map and a podful of ISIS ... (Riptide)
Erik Campbell: "One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn's poem "Tenderness" on The Writer's Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work." (a sample from Rattle's submissions page)

Exercise: Write a bio. It can be straight or wacky. Max 75 words. Say what sort of magazine/publisher it's for.

Marketing

If you have a book accepted, don't expect book-shops (even independent bookshops) to stock it, though you're welcome to try. Organise a local launch (in a bookshop perhaps) and organise some readings. You could organise for several blogs to feature you as part of a "tour". For poetry at least, don't expect adverts and reviews to help. Here's what the Shearsman editor wrote in 2010 - "I used to advertise, but found that it had no impact on sales. In fact, when I cut advertising completely, sales went up by 25%. This suggests that the only kind of marketing that works is the targeted variety. Reviews generate very little sales, although a generous notice in the TLS will have an impact that is immediately noticeable. The same holds for Ron Silliman's blog."

No Reply

When should you start chasing up? I never have. Some literary magazines take several months to reply anyway. Check first that you've read the guidelines - some magazines warn that if you send at the wrong time of year, or if you include insufficient postage, you won't get a reply. Others (especially if you submit by e-mail) say that if you don't get a reply within a month, you've been rejected.

If you don't get paid, well, eventually there's the Small Claims Court.

Shortcuts

Sounds too much like hard work? Here are some alternatives

Become a celeb first, then publish later - see Viggo Mortenson
Apply for all the grants/awards you hear of. The Society of Authors and Regional Arts Boards can help. If you're young enough, try for a Gregory award.
Try to get into any book you can. Some Regional Arts Boards fund anthologies. Find out what themed anthologies publishers are planning.
Going to Arvon courses helps to meet the right people.
Go to conferences. Mingle at coffee breaks.
Put aside money to regularly enter the main annual competitions - Bridport (Poetry and Prose), National Poetry Competition, Peterloo Poetry Competition. Unknowns can win these.
Consider WWW publications, local radio.
Establish yourself in a niche market (SF, short-story reviewing, U3A workshops, etc) then "go transcendental"
Find a gimmick. If you can sell 100 or so copies on the strength of radio interviews, press releases, you're viable. So corner the market on football poetry, allotment poetry, stories about twins.

Conclusions

Looking back, the mistakes I made were mostly to do with investing too little, too late. I should have more quickly subscribed to magazines (I didn't know they existed until my mid-twenties), went to a residential workshop run by a magazine editor, and entered competitions with more dedication.

(At the end, ask each person what they're going to do - pieces they're going to write/adapt, research they're going to do.)

References

"Making Money from Writing", Carole Baldock (1998, but still useful)
The Bookseller - a weekly magazine containing industry news and analysis (in public libraries)

Organising a story collection

2011-01-14T15:02:00.001Z

Ok, so you've had a few stories published, maybe even won a prize or two. Perhaps it's time you thought about a publishing a book. Though we're not in a golden age of story collections, the situation's not quite as bad as some people claim: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut short story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies", won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Short Review lists 96 short story collections published in February in the UK alone, so there's hope yet! Moreover, UK publisher Salt has started The Scott Prize (deadline 31st Oct - 45k words, 18 pounds entry fee) which will lead to publication of up to four more collections. Why not have a go!

But how should you organise your collection? Should you just chuck your best stories together? Probably not. The ordering of the stories needs consideration for a start, but you might want to (or need to) do more than that.

People mention several reasons for the popularity of linked story collections.

Writers like them - some authors want to produce unified harmonious work
Critics like them - Ra Page noted that "when you get a collection or - even worse - an anthology - all the [critics are] left with is either the anthology's theme, if they're interested, or just to list what's available in this collection, and pick out a couple of highlights."
Readers like them - if they're used to anthologies (readers of ghost and Sci-Fi stories in particular are) then they'll be used to the pacing of disconnected stories, but for mainstream readers used to multi-volume series and doorstep best-sellers, by the time they've got to know the characters and location of a story, it's ended, and they have to start all over again. Or at least, that's what the marketing droids lead us to believe.

These pressures can lead to several reactions -

A book might be planned from the start as a unified collection - almost an episodic novel. "Pavane" by Keith Roberts, "London" by Edward Rutherfurd or "Accordion Crimes" by E.Annie Proulx might be viewed that way. David Mitchell's interwoven "Ghostwritten" began as 3 separate stories but we worked them into a collection.
Pieces may be adapted to fit together better, or keynote stories written to integrate existing pieces. When Hemingway was putting together "In our Time", he read Joyce's "Dubliners" and noted how "The Dead" helped integrate the other works, so he wrote his story "Big Two-hearted river" to do the same for his own collection.
Better pieces might not be selected in favour of pieces that fit the collection better. Additionally, the collection can be given a misleading title, with "short stories" not mentioned on the cover.

One would expect a bunch of stories written by the same author over a year or 2 to have things in common. However, if an author doesn't write much the collection might contain decades of experiences and artistic phases. Venessa Gebbie (another author published by Salt) wrote her 1st collection's stories in 3 years - she wrote 200-250 stories in that time though, which may explain the variety of her book.

I think that were Dubliners written today, it would be sold by a major publisher as a novel - we're more tolerant of baggy novels nowadays.

But maybe this trend towards linked stories is on the wane.

Salt author Tania Hershman knows as much about collections as anyone. Not only does her book "The White Road and Other Stories" ("... an author dripping with talent, this is as good as modern reading gets" - New Scientist Christmas Books Special: Best of 2008) bring together a wide range of stories (from 100 words to thousands) but she also runs The Short Review, an excellent (maybe unique?) review site for short story books. Here are her views

Did you feel the need to have a theme for your book?
When I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing in the UK in 2003, I was under great pressure to not write short stories ("they don't sell" blah blah) and if I was going to insist on a short story collection "at least they should have a theme"! I had always wanted to do some kind of science-linked fiction, which isn't science fiction but what I would rather call "science-inspired fiction", so this is what I did: all the stories I wrote for my MA final manuscript were inspired by articles from New Scientist magazine. However, I didn't have quite enough for a book, and I also wanted to include a number of flash stories, very very short stories I have been writing a great deal of since the MA. When Salt accepted my collection, they didn't care at all about a theme or anything, which was very refreshing. Thank goodness for small presses who just love short stories!

What affected the choice of pieces and their order?
I decided to alternate between longer stories and flash stories, I thought it might work like a sort of sorbet, something intense and small, in between courses. There are mixed opinions about this depending on the reader and whether they like flash stories or not. The collection contained all but one of the science-inspired stories I had written, because of space, and pretty much all the flash stories; I am not a writer who produces vast quantities, so didn't have any choice but to include almost everything.
When it came to order, I just couldn't do it myself, I could "see" the stories anymore, couldn't see how a reader might read them all, so I printed them all out and my partner James laid them on the dining table and shuffled them around. There are various themes that emerge when you see them all together, and he ordered them so stories that might be considered similar weren't next to each other, for variety. I wanted the title story to be the first story, and the last story was picked because it echoes some of the themes from the first story, as the ending of a short story should have some resonances of the beginning, I think.

Did you reject some stories merely because they didn't fit?
Nope!

In the collections you read, do you see a trend towards linked stories?
Nope! I read a short story collection a month, at least, to review in The Short Review, and I don't believe I have read any linked collections since we started, a year and a half ago, and it's not that I deliberately avoid them. There are a few on the site under the category "novel in stories", but very few. Most short story collection these days are published by the wonderful small presses, and they don't buy into the myth that if you pretend a short story collection is a novel, people will buy it. They are happy to proudly shout about short story collections, thank goodness!
To give you an idea, here are how some of the authors we've interviewed on The Short Review answered the question "How did you choose which stories to include and in what order?"

Warren Adler (New York Echoes) "I tried to put the stories in some rhythmic order that was purely subjective, trying to place them by judging dark to light, serious to lighter, less irony to heavy irony."
Allison Amend (Things that Pass for Love) "There were some practical considerations: start strong and middle strong and end strong. Don't put all the really short ones next to each other. Separate the 'golf stories.' And then [my editor] Gina organized them to her own particular logic. I didn't even ask her for an explanation."
Elizabeth Baines (Balancing on the Edge of the World) "I think people rarely read collections from cover to cover like novels - I don't anyway - but I still think order is important: an overall impression is created, and the opening and closing stories, which I think people are most likely to read first, will be taken as pointers to the whole book. Since irony is on the whole my stock-in-trade, I decided to begin with two of the more comic stories, while beginning and ending with two stories which best summed up a main preoccupation of the collection: that of the unacknowledged or surprising viewpoint. It was interesting to see the different ways in which my stories 'talked' to each other according to the order in which I placed the rest of them - creating different rhythms of mood or style or situation. In the end I found a journey through situations and subject matter - stories about adults to stories about childhood and back again via stories about parenting - which also to some extent followed developments of mood and style."
Richard Bardsley (Body Parts) "The order was dictated to a certain degree by the structure of body parts I'd chosen, which ran from head to toe, the opposite of the old song, Dem Bones, though I obviously didn't include every single minute part of the body. As for deciding which stories to include, the collection was written at random rather than consecutively, and since I wanted the styles, voices and tone of each one to vary, I went back a few times, had a cull and started again from scratch if successive stories became too repetitive. It all sounds rather calculated but it actually happened quite harmoniously."
Nona Caspers (Heavier than Air) "The final book order came from a brilliant friend of mine, Maria Healey. She's also a writer. I didn't know how to order the final stories once the book had been accepted for publication, and she read the manuscript and said - here, try this. I think order is partly intuitive and partly world building and juxtaposition of texture and tone."
David Gaffney (Aromabingo) "Me and my editor Jen of Salt press went through everything I had, and selected from there. Jen at Salt is very good at working out the running order - I sometimes wonder whether with very short fiction people dip in and out randomly. It is possible to organise my short fiction much more - I have several stories set in offices, and several in shops, several about relationships, and these could have been put together, but ... .I'm not sure this structuring would add anything."
Peter Hobbs (I could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train) "Due to the variety of styles I'd been writing in, it did look like it would be a problematic process. More of a mess than a collection. But there were underlying themes that recurred in many of the stories - some of which I was completely unaware of as I wrote - and after we (my editor Lee Brackstone and I) looked at what I had, it became clear we were pretty much agreed on which pieces worked, and the collection itself came together. Once they were collected it began to look almost organic, as though they'd always been designed that way. Ordering them was entertaining - it's an odd art, and was mostly done by instinct."
Roy Kesey (All Over) "Somewhere along the line - two or three years ago, I guess - I realized that I was closing in on having enough material for not one collection but two. I went through all of the stories, trying to sort out a way to split them up more or less evenly. None of the usual suspects (time, place, character, theme) stepped forward, so I went back to the matter of form, and ended up splitting the mass down the middle, with the more structurally playful work to one side and the less-so to the other side. The stories in All Over are all from the more-so half. Once that was done, I wanted the book itself to share the same conceit, so after discarding a few stories that no longer seemed quite strong enough to pull their weight, I did what I could to arrange the rest such that no two stories in a row have too much in common in terms of length, form, character, or point of view. That turned out to be a not-quite-possible puzzle, but it was fun work all the same."
Paddy O'Reilly (The End of the World) "I decided early to put only first person narrative stories into the book, told by wildly different narrators in wildly different styles. Not just as an indication of my split personality (!) but because one of the joys of writing stories is the freedom to be anyone. I hoped readers would feel that freedom too. As for order, that was a case of looking carefully at how the stories held each other up. Kind of like a string of different objects all tied together and trying to float."

Discussion points

Have you ever been impressed by a collection's organisation?
Have you read a "novel" that was really a collection of short stories? Janice D.Soderling replied mentioning "The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan which, though it is called a novel, is actually an intricate weave of short stories from the perspectives of eight women. Each story can be enjoyed completely separate from its mates, but together they give more. Tan even has a kind of index to help the reader keep track of who is who - until we learn to know them.". She also mentioned Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".
Do collections require organising? Don't readers just dip in nowadays, making their own play-lists?
I've not seen an author produce a book of stories and poems, though several (Updike, Lasdun, etc) could have. Why is that? And would the reasons apply also to mixing Flash Fiction with longer stories?

Poetry and Gardens

2011-01-14T14:58:00.001Z

It's not surprising that gardening has been compared to writing poetry. Like gardeners, poets mark out an enclosed area within which elements of the natural world are manipulated for aesthetic ends. What's stranger is how close the two disciplines have stayed through history. For the ancient Chinese nature was orderly, peaceful, and helpful to humanity so conflict between nature and artifice was minimal. Gardens were poems where man could come to terms with the universe: scaled models of nature. Arabs had a different attitude. The gardens of the Taj Mahal and the Alhambra emulated the idea of Persian paradise, an escape from the desert heat. Even as late as medieval times, Britain's gardens were much more humble affairs. Most of those that we know of were associated with monasteries. But in Europe during the renaissance when there was a sudden increase in gardening, the balance changed. Over the next century or two, landscape architects rose to fame, organising cheap labour and writing treatise about how cascades, canals, gilded figures and follies could help owners flaunt their mastery over Nature. Meanwhile for the poor, gardens provided nothing but sustinance, and poetry was only for churches and balladeers.

Theories of landscape aesthetics were developed, many features applicable to poetry: desire for a sense of unity and proportion, inspired exploitation of natural features, use of texture and colour, light and shade. More than just something to view from a terrace, gardens were an experience: somewhere to walk, paths carefully contrived to surprise with twists in the plot and new vistas. And there was a recognised need to offer something different on each revisit.

Tired of French formality and grandiosity, the emphasis in the 18th century was on naturalism and curves: assymmetric groves and serpentine lakes. In the 19th century, as a reaction to this, people concentrated on fussy detail or indulged in uncontrolled eclecticism. Keen amateurs slaved over crowded Victorian cottage gardens. In the early 1900s exotic foreign influences lead to the introduction of many new plants. But nature was found to be insufficient. Species were developed that could only survive in a garden, regressing back to a wild state if neglected or, like second rate verse, unable to reproduce.

Now the trend has reverted to naturalism again. We are content to do the spadework, provide nourishment, control weeds and do a bit of pruning. We let plants have the last say, no longer striving to conquer nature, but compromising with it. We've long forgotten how few common flowers and words are native. The artificial is acceptable as long as it's educational, kept under glass, a different world subject to different rules. Hothouse academia can only exist by virtue of artificial pollenation.

Exotic cultures flower in our modern verse, arranged in the rhythms of demotic speech. Now anyone can have a windowbox, and a visit to a garden centre or writers group will assure if not originality then at least competance. Gardens can so easily become suburban, utilitarian. One thing we can be certain of is that there never was a garden of Eden, a place of pure poetry, of contemplation. That first mythical garden was responsible for the first farmer, content to sow line after line of the same seeds each year for profit, rotating crops rather than innovating. We need farms much as we need novels, but gardens are what we'll always retreat to, what we'll treasure.

Poetry, Madness and Cure

2011-01-14T14:55:00.000Z

Society's definitions

Society and Madness

As Professor Philip Thomas (Lancaster University) says "There have always been people in societies and cultures who have different experiences of reality compared with the majority, and there's always been an overlap between people who have those gifts, or insights, and people who are identified as suffering from mental illnesses." ... "it's the strangeness of people's experience, and what they try to communicate about it, that's dangerous, threatening, anxiety-provoking to those of us who have conventional rationalities"

Society's opinion about madness and how to deal with it varies - isolationism, integration, or normalisation have been tried. Foucault argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness came to occupy this excluded position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is a literary version of one such exclusionary practice, the practice of sending mad people away in ships.

Society and Creativity

The nature of creativity is another socially defined variable. In the 19th Century, Sass writes, the tradition of the romantic poet was the paradigm of a creative human. Eccentrics and outsiders had more trouble in some other times.

Useful Madness Traits

Schizophrenia and depression are the mental illness most linked to creativity in the historical context says Dr. Schuldberg. Most often, artists who

focus on emotions and feelings in their work are manic-depressive. Dr. Sass writes that poets like William Blake, Lord Byron, Shelley and Keats all suffered from manic-depressive illness
remove themselves from the world are more often associated with schizophrenia. Creative people with schizophrenia often experience a sense of alienation from the self, from their bodies and from the world. They become hyper-self-conscious but are able to step outside themselves, allowing a more cerebral form of creativity.

Some traits associated with these illnesses could be seen as useful to writers.

Obsession - writers need to be determined and focussed
A-social distancing - writers need to be observers. It may even help to lack empathy with the people being observed. Also, staying away from people frees up more time for writing. Awareness of a lack of social empathy may result in useful compensating strategies - increased observation, etc.
A-social self-revelation/freedom - freed from the constraints of politeness and political correctness, writers might produce more interesting work
Decontextualised thinking - randomness, chaotic/original thinking "outside the box", and finding unusual connections between things may help with creativity.
Multi-level thinking - a characteristic of some schizoid thinking is the ability to see the underlying media without inferring meaning, seeing pattern as well as plot; noticing fonts, etc.
Sensitivity - HSPs and "neurotic" people might see things that others miss.
Inhibition - control may lead to Formalism, Oulipo
Private language - Seeing things from a new perspective

Arts

Some of these traits suit particular movements.

Romanticism - trying to be at one with nature presupposes a split between the mind and the world
Modernism - reading Sass's "Madness and Modernism" one might easily believe that modernism is dominated by schizoids
Nouveau Roman - might suit the mind-blind
Surrealism/Dada - these schools are based on random or subconscious images
Confessionalism - easier if you don't care what others think of you

Normalisation

Once a writer is stigmatised as in some way different or impaired, solutions are offered. If nothing else, normalisation increases the chances of being published.

Asylum - rather than change the writer to fit society, new, surroundings can be found to suit the writer. Some art colonies (and academic worlds) are big enough to be self-contained worlds.
Borderline cases - those with borderline symptoms may be encouraged to be conventional. And a mad person might try to write a normal piece with a mad person as the main character
Drugs - Prozac may be offered to make life easier, but it may dull writing? Dr. Schuldberg suggests that drugs blunt the creativity of patients with manic-depressive illness more than that of schizophrenic patients.
CBT - behaviour change (e.g. being encouraged to meet people) may dull writing or use up time.

Poetry and Therapy

There's

The National Association for Poetry Therapy and the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy have information on training
The UK's Poetry Society were/are involved with various projects. See their healthcare page.
More distantly related is Survivor's poetry. See their magazine.

References

Neurotic Poets
"Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process" (ed Richard M. Berlin), John Hopkins UP, 2008

Child narrators in adult fiction

2011-01-14T09:09:00.000Z

with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert

Introduction

Writing from a child's point-of-view isn't easy. Done well though, it can be effective and affecting, so it's worth a try. Most stories of this type use a third-person-priviledged point-of-view, though a first-person treatment is possible. Some people (me included) rarely produce child-centred stories, which is odd - after all, we were all children once. Two story collections I've read in the last year or so have a fair proportion of child-centred stories, so I thought I'd bring the authors' views into the discussion. Some writers raid their own pasts

"The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child - ... when I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow ... never to forget what it was like to be a child ... But I do also happen to have a very good memory: ... 'Leaf Memory' is based on a real-life memory of my own, aged two years and two months" - Elizabeth Baines

My memory's nowhere near that good. I'm a parent, which you'd have thought should be useful in this context, but childlessness may have advantages. Parents have less time to write, but that's not all - in "The Psychologist" March 2009 they reported on a survey that found that parents are no happier than childless couples. In fact, once the children leave home, parents are sadder. One begins to wonder what the point of children is.

"having no children myself means that I've never fully grown up. I'm at the age where many of my friends are wondering why hostile, sulky delinquents from outer space have occupied their teenage children's bodies. And what do I do? Easy, I side with the kids. ... Basically, I can't grasp the crisis from the parent's viewpoint, however hard I try." - Charles Lambert

Writing's hard enough as it is without burdening oneself with extra handicaps, so why should authors restrict themselves to a child's viewpoint and vocabulary? It's fair enough in children's fiction but what about fiction for adults? Let's look at each restriction in isolation

Viewpoint - Though children might not understand what's going on, and might be unable to be involved in the scene, they have certain advantages as observers - like cameras, they might see things from a new angle and might be ignored by the protagonists. The child might not understand what's going on, but readers are likely to. The difference between the character's and the reader's understanding can be exploited for laughs or for more serious effect. On the BBC's web-site they give the example of this - a child bursting into his parents' bedroom, upset to find them wrestling naked on the bed. Successful writers consciously exploit this irony
- "children can have instinctual knowledge which we adults can lose, and these insights yet gaps can be the stuff of dramatic conflict and motor a story" - Elizabeth Baines
- "one of the things I'm doing when I choose to use children as the channel through which the narrative is seen is what Henry James did with Maisie; I'm exploiting their clear-sightedness and innocence. Children see everything, but don't necessarily understand any of it. Whether they're protagonists or witnesses, they tend to be one step behind - or to one side of - the attentive adult reader, which sets up an interesting narrative gap through which the unsettling elements can squeeze." - Charles Lambert
A way round both of these limitations is to use a fluid 3rd-person priviledged point-of-view, rather as in the Joyce example below.
Language - Children may not have a wide, intellectual vocabulary, but that needn't be such a restriction. They can be original in their use of words, less restricted by convention and social mores.

Examples

Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artists as a young man" - `When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father.' (not quite first person, but the book's language grows as the boy does)
Hugo Hamilton's "The Speckled People" - people have said "The world here is viewed through the eyes of a child who does not judge, merely details and describes." .... "Though Hugo matures as the story unfolds, the simple, declarative sentences of a child's confused and partial understanding do not. (...) He has made an attempt on something impossible - to show from a child's point of view what a child can't see. To the degree that he succeeds, it's remarkable."
Paula Sharp's "Crows over a Wheatfield" - people have said that "the characters are so involving - not since 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or the opening chapters of 'Jane Eyre' has there been a more acute and astute child's view of the world".
Sue Townsend's "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4". Comedy.
Colum McCann's "Everything in this country must" - this collection's stories have 1st person narrators in their early teens.
Roddy Doyle's "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" - has a 10 year old 1st person narrator
Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters was written for adults by a 9 year old
Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" - has a 6 year old narrator.
Emma Donoghue's "The Room" - has a 5 year old narrator.
"The Life of Pi"? "The Tin Drum"? "Empire of the Sun"?

Problems

It's very tempting to slip out of character for a few paragraphs. A commonly used way to include an adult's viewpoint is for the child to be an uncomprehending messenger - e.g. to have the child find an adult's diary and read it (Paula Sharp calls that a hackneyed device though!). Here's Elizabeth Baines' approach
- "The story 'Power' ... strictly, use[s] a child narrator, ie, the voice is that of the child as a child, and in this case in the present tense, as the story is happening. This is the most restrictive way of adopting a child's viewpoint, with least chance for authorial intervention. The main way I get round the restriction here is to splice the child's narrative with the mother's phone calls on which the child eavesdrops."
- "In 'Star Things' ... the child is constantly and innocently quoting things her parents have said"
She notes however that "the children's voices in these stories aren't entirely naturalistic, I do take linguistic licence, as they're not intended as straightforward dramatic monologues"
Even the best adult books with child narrators risk being treated as if they're children's books
It can be difficult to convince the reader of the narrator's age. Authors often seem to have over- or under-estimated the child, but kids have an irritating habit of not acting their age - one moment they talk like an adult, next moment they sulk like a baby.
One has to be rather careful about using material that can be traced back to a particular child - moreso than with consenting adults.

Special Needs

Authors have tried combining age limitations with other features. In a sense, these writers are having it both ways; they can exploit the freedom and freshness of the child narrator without having to make too many compromises in vocabulary or intellect.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" (Mark Haddon) has a clever, autistic 15-year-old narrator
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (Jonathan Safran Foer) is held together by Oskar, a precocious and obsessive nine-year-old polymath
"How the Light Gets In" (M.J. Hyland) has a highly intelligent, damaged 16-year-old
"Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes) doesn't have a child narrator, but the IQ and language of the narrator change in the course of the novel.

Authors quoted

The quotes are used (with the authors' permission) from Virtual Booktours that they made - Elizabeth Baines' "Around the Edges of the World" Tour and Charles Lambert's "Something Rich and Strange" Tour

Elizabeth Baines won 3rd prize in the Raymond Carver Short Story Competition 2008. Her book, "Balancing on the Edge of the World" (Salt) was shortlisted for the 2008 The Salt Frank O'Connor Prize.
Charles Lambert was an O.Henry Prize winner in 2007, along with William Trevor and Alice Munro. Books include "Little Monsters" (Picador) and "The Scent of Cinnamon" (Salt)

Discussion Points

Are child-narrator stories usually autobiographical?
What other devices do authors use to bring an adult perspective into child-narrator stories?
What 1st person child narrator novels/stories have you read? Did they work?
Try writing a 1st person child narrator story!

Charlatanism, Poetry and Art

2011-01-13T15:52:00.000Z

Hoaxes happen often in Poetry and in Art - lost works by masters such as Shakespeare and Vermeer are rediscovered only to be revealed as frauds by stylistic or forensic analysis. For the hoax to work the copied master needs to be unavailable for comment - either by being dead or by never existing. Literary examples of the latter include Ossian (Scotland) Ern Malley (Australia) and more recently Araki Yasusada (Japan) - all created by skillful hoaxers who are frequently surprised that their work is taken seriously.

Writers too develop their characters and self-promote. They may invent personae and pastiche works. They may even identify with the persona and take the persona seriously. They flourish in similar environments to those where hoaxes profilerate. They induce criticism because to some their fame or wealth seems undeserved, even fraudulent, distracting attention from the quality of the work itself. Such criticism is enflamed by artistic flamboyance or media hype. The critics and members of the public with few (typically one) criteria of judgement - verisimilitude, for instance - are amongst the most vociferous. The supposed charlatans sometimes emerge as important artists, or at least (as with Dali) the case remains open, so in ideal conditions one doesn't want to be too quick in starving these artists of funding. Nevertheless, with competition for public money increasing, it's worth exploring the public reception of "charlatans", in particular in Art and Poetry.

The potential for charlatanism in Modern Art is greater than in Modern Poetry, and public reaction is greater. The reasons for this fall into 3 main categories -

Ease of production
- In Art, it's easier to get away with having little technical skill, thus making entry-level charlatanism simpler. When a praised piece of abstract expressionism turned out to be done by an chimp, some critics still defended the quality of its Abstract Expressionism.
- Moreso than literature, Modern Art deals with the ephemeral (pop art), the secondhand (postmodernism), and the trashy (kitsch art). Also the mere act of presenting an object constitutes a "treatment", an artwork.
- Because translation may not be necessary, artists can more easily and quickly borrow from styles distant in time and space. Being ahead of their audience they can more easily present the merely exotic as art.
Definitions and Boundaries
- Art has changed more quickly than poetry, with more artists than poets challenging boundaries. History has more famous artists once dismissed as charlatans than it has resurrected writers, thus making critics more hesitant about criticising charlatans. But could critics have made any difference anyway? Matthew Collings writes (p.121) that "the 80s ... was the decade when critics were laughably weak and galleries and collectors were shockingly strong"
- Art still has a cult of Authenticity, a desire to create (and own) the unreproducible - leading to Installations, Happenings, etc that cross media boundaries.
- Many things are described as "Poetic", but poetry books are still texts. Use of the term "Art" has widened, and because the media used in Art has widened, many of these products termed "artistic" can be accommodated in Galleries - or anywhere.
- Genre and Art/non-Art boundaries are unclear both in literature and Art, but Performance Art and Conceptual Art have made the boundaries fuzzier. If 2 people carry a plank through a city centre and call it art, can we disagree? Does a voyeur become an artist by making a project from it and keeping a diary? The Pornography/Erotica dimension in particular troubles people, with writers like Henry Miller teasing the boundary as much as artists do. In the last decade several stories have hit the headlines both in the UK and the USA, making grant-giving bodies cautious. Photographers and performance artists predominate -
  - Robert Mapplethorpe (photographer of "homoerotic images")
  - Jock Sturges (photographer of nude young children, 1990). A federal grand jury failed to indict Sturges, and his career was enhanced by the notoriety.
  - Marilyn Zimmerman (tenured professor at Wayne State University, photographer of her nude daughter, 1993). Charges dropped, but her ex-husband used the photograph controversy to gain primary custody in court.
  - Natsuki Uruma (Performance Artist, pole-dances to London tube travellers, 2000)
  That shocking the public (or "making them think") can be artistic comes partly from Surrealism. Breton himself said that "Surrealism attempted to provoke, from an intellectual and moral point of view, an attack of conscience, of the most general and serious kind". The creator's genre classification of their work is a hint about the way the viewer might approach the work. It may be (deliberately) unhelpful or provocative. We needn't trust what creators say about their work. We needn't believe their claim that their own work is "Wonderful", so why should we heed their classifications - and intentions? And if we don't, where does that leave the work's value?
Social Factors
- There's big money to be had in Art, especially in the USA. In addition to the tax breaks for private collectors, several states and some 40 cities have a "percent for art law" that require a percent or more of public building projects be set aside for the purchase of public art. The giving of public money to artists has brought the issue of the nature of Art into the open - when Art and Hospitals are competing for funds, public reaction can be heated. Studying public art controversies has itself become a growing field, represented by a flood of books and studies that aim to help agencies head off complaints before they occur and lessen their intensity after they arise. See The Nation's article for details. Poetry developments have been shielded from the glare of publicity.
- There's more Minimalism in Art, which is provocative - though people sympathetic to the Arts might think it fair enough that one should take time with overtly obscure and difficult works like the Wasteland or Ulysses, many would not be prepared to stare at a pile of bricks too long. And it's not unusual for gallery furniture to be mistaken for pieces of art. Matthew Collings writes (p.225) "Relatively recently the assumption was that there was no point in thinking about contemporary art because it didn't mean anything to anyone except artists... Now there is a growing anxiety that there might not be any point to it because its meanings are too available and also too available elsewhere".
- Images have more of an impact than words.
- Mainstream poetry is closer to public sensibility than mainstream Art; literary avante-gardism is peripheral even to the literary world. Whereas winners of major art awards (the Turner prize in the UK, for example) initially provoked anger, poetry winners are welcomed by indifference. Now, as Matthew Collings points out (p.226) " the Turner Prize .. is an amusing talking-point, a laugh on the cultural calendar, but not an outrage". It's something that the media enjoy and thus sustain.

Where Modern Art is, will Poetry follow?

Theory
Theoretical approaches are converging. When evaluation of a work emphasises issues like Ethnicity, Gender, Power and Politics, other more aesthetic issues can be neglected. Novelty is prized not only in the works but in theories about the works, and the more theories there are, the easier it is to justify a piece.
Contextual devices
Poets are making more use of contextual devices. Art (Duchamp, etc) exploited the "Gallery Effect" (the changed perception of an audience when in aesthetic mood) long ago with his readymades. Audience reaction has become part of an artist's work - the work is incomplete without it. Part of the "art" of being an artist is being able to judge the right time for such a piece of work. Picasso, for instance, had the idea of producing a blank canvas long before someone did it (he also had the idea of coating common objects with fur) but maybe he felt that part of the work (namely the audience) wasn't ready. With "Found poetry", poets are catching up.
Reaction
Publicity stunts are becoming more common (the Dada poets and Dali providing role models), and shock value sells books. Bluff and double bluff are on the increase. Suspected pseudo-science and pseudo-intellectuals are attacked by their counterparts, but suspected pseudo-artists are only attacked by non-artists. Sometimes there are theoretical backlashes (see for instance the summary of "What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand") but the art world is self-sustaining, and it's hard to see how any re-evaluation is likely to succeed.

Perhaps charlatans are nothing to worry about. After all, they are sometimes only sincere, pretentious creators who have gambled and lost in the posterity stakes - we need artists who gamble. But I think it's worth comparing the ability of intellectual pursuits to deal with charlatans. The sciences in the main deal with them rapidly. Art seems slower than Poetry at coming to a settled judgement. This is laudable in that all such judgements are provisional, but if public funds are limited and Art gets much more funding than Poetry, Art has at least some obligation to show that in more ways than one it takes fraud seriously.

Notation in Poetry and Music

2011-01-13T15:45:00.000Z

Poets rarely use more notation than prose provides. Hopkins used stress-accents and Dickinson's dashes may have lengths that correspond to the intended length of pauses, but apart from these, line-breaks are the only non-prose way to indicate stress and pauses.

More advanced notations exist, used by linguists transcribing soundtracks, and by poetry theorists. Poetry theorists less often work from performance, marking up stress using purely the text, and breaking lines into "feet" - all of which makes their work rather subjective, and easy to manipulate to support their theoretical viewpoint.

Of diacritical marks the most commonly used have been

the acute accent (´) for primary stress, stress in general, or "ictus"
the grave accent for secondary stress
the macron (¯) to indicate a "long" syllable
the breve (u-shaped marking) for a "short" syllable
dots above or after the symbol to indicate duration
the caret (^) for pauses or omissions. Relative duration is indicated by addition of macron or breve or dot(s)
| to separate feet

In rhythmic analysis, diacritical marking of normal text is less satisfactory for most purposes than some kind of graphic transcription, extracting essential features

Letters of an alphabet were used to represent prosodic values in ancient Greek prosodic (and musical) notation and in the ancient Sanskrit Chandahsutra of Pingala (where G = long or heavy, guru, L= short or light, laghu. Pingala used single letters also to represent systematic combinations of these values, or "feet": M =GGG, N = LLL, R = GLG, etc.);
More recently in English,
- x (or .) = unstressed, a (or + or /) =stressed. Iambic pentameter may be represented as
  x / | x / | x / | x / | x /
- S = stressed, O = unstressed, L = light stress, p = short pause or replacing a light syllable, P= long pause, or replacing a stressed (following G.R. Stewart, Technique of English Verse, 1930)

Less often, numbers have been used to indicate stress or pitch. Notations to support other features exist - e.g where long/short syllables (classical Greek and Latin poetry) or pitch (Chinese poetry) matter.

Music

Serious music tends to have been written before played, written in measures even if one can't hear them. "traditional" music often gets written down after it's been played. The choice of notation matters to the composer and the archivist of "traditional" music. It also matters to experimentalists and theorists. Quoting from Musical notation - according to Philip Tagg and Richard Middleton

"musicology and to a degree European-influenced musical practice suffer from a 'notational centricity', ... a methodology slanted by the characteristics of notation
Notation-centric training induces particular forms of listening, and these then tend to be applied to all sorts of music, appropriately or not
Notational centricity also encourages reification: the score comes to be seen as 'the music', or perhaps the music in an ideal form."

Before music notation became standardised, several methods were tried. After standardisation the number of performance cues increased, but the notation remains restrictive. Alternatives have been developed. Graphic notation refers to the contemporary use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music. It is used for experimental music, which in many cases is difficult to transcribe in standard notation.

Fusion

Conventional musical notation has often been adapted for rhythmic analysis of verse. For English, occasional and partial use of musical notation begins with C. Gildon (Complete Art of Poetry, 1718), and recurs frequently in the later 18th and 19th century; since S. Lanier (Science of English Verse, 1880) full musical notation has often been used by writers whose analysis of verse is musical or exclusively temporal. Poe, for example, used it. At the very least, duration of pause may be indicated by conventional musical notation for rests.

Music scores are for performers rather than receivers. In poetry, receivers "perform" the poetry when they read it. Music notation tends to restrict composers. Extra poetry notation would in contrast restrict readers/theorists. It's unclear to me why so many poets with widely varying views on poetry allow such liberal interpretations of their work. Given the increasing specialisation of of the poetry audience, the paucity of auxiliary notation is surprising.

Phonetics - The text doesn't always unambiguously represent the sounds. The accent of the author may well matter. Even between standard English and standard American there are many pronunciation differences. If sonic effects mattered to the poet, one might expect some indication of how the words should be said. Composers usually indicate the instrument they're writing for; poets rarely suggest that (for example) a piece should be rendered with a Geordie accent.
Pauses - Music notation has clearly defined pause lengths. One can sometimes use metre to calculate the length of pauses. In the hands of William Carlos Williams the typewriter offered a way to produce accurate spaces, though there's little to suggest that the relative length of these spaces mean much. Line-breaks are coarse indicators
Speed - Should a poem be read slowly or quickly? Does relative speed matter? Again, line-breaks can be used - short lines are supposed to slow readers down.
Loudness - crescendos could easily be rendered.
Emphasis - bold/italic fonts along with upper-case are used, though newlines are more common.

Given the resistance to other notations, it's not so surprising that the line-break is so popular - a single tool with many uses. However, it performs none of them very precisely.

Interpretive Freedom

An interpretion needn't follow the author/composer's intentions. Sometimes (e.g. when actors in Macbeth dress as Nazis) it's done deliberately. Elsewhen (e.g when old music isn't played on period instruments) the decision may not have been consciously made. Some of these choices are controversial. Poetry readers have at least as much freedom as performers in other Arts. At poetry recitals audiences don't seem to mind an English male performing an American woman's poetry as long as the subject matter isn't too incongruous - sounds can be changed ("tomato" and "Z" pronounced differently) as long as words aren't.

Private readers may well make many unconscious (and uninformed) decisions. Perhaps it's assumed that such misreadings are of minor consequence compared to conceptual misunderstandings, and that it's not worth cluttering the visual impact of the text to reduce the errors. The "look" of the text matters, especially when expressive line-breaks are used.

WWW

Nowadays it's nearly as easy to have sound online as text. Even movies aren't too hard, with optional subtitles, like a DVD. Perhaps the age of "The Master Text" is coming to a close.

Even restricting oneself to text, I don't think one need tie oneself down to a minimalist notation, especially now that color and graphics are cheaply reproduced.

Multiple points-of-view

2011-01-13T15:42:00.000Z

Stories often have a single "privileged" character through which the world is seen. These characters can be rendered in the 1st, 3rd or (usually unsuccessfully, though "Bright Lights, Big City" (Jay McInerny) might be an exception) 2nd person. But there are also "ensemble" pieces with many equally important "glass-heads". When inside a head the other heads are opaque, so we have a chance to see characters from the inside and outside.

The technique is fairly common in documentaries (clips of several talking heads involved in the same event are spliced together). It works ok in songs like "Penny Lane", and in some films. In novels the point-of-view can easily be changed at a chapter break, and 2 or 3 clearly distinguished time-lines or story-lines are juggled. Less commonly, short numbered sections (or even paragraphs) are used ("if nobody speaks of remarkable things" by Jon McGregor is a recent mainstream UK example).

When the text is broken down into short sections, it's harder to identify the voices, and the narrative stream tends to become a collage. Short stories using this technique have little choice but to risk collage and consequent rejection.

Voice separation is an issue (though not a necessity). In a film like Wings of Desire not only the audio track but also the images help identify the source of the words. In a book like "The Waves" the changes of voice aren't clearly defined, though with practise one begins to identify the characters' style. In some pieces, voice-identification is all part of the literary game that readers are supposed to enjoy. In other pieces I suspect the author's more into creating an ocean-of-consciousness feeling than presenting individuals. Here are 2 quotes from "The Creative Writing Coursebook", Julia Bell & Paul Magrs (eds), MacMillan, 2001

The key [to changing viewpoints] is to look as though you are in control, and not to apologise or try to disguise what you're doing ... This means establishing your technique near the start and following it confidently", Jenny Newman, p.147
"If you are going to write multiple viewpoints you want to make sure you have a strong narrative view", Julia Bell, p.164

I like the "The Wasteland" - some of the voices and transitions are more ambiguous than others, but the non-mythical characterisation is clear enough. I think that if the author knows who's saying what (I bet Woolf knew), then the reader might as well be told. Maybe the text should be set out a little like a play script (e.g. as in The Time Traveler's Wife). At least the changes should be clearly shown - by a line across the page, or by centred stars, etc. The reader might well be able to work out the transitions a few words into a new section, but I think that puts the reader at an unfair disadvantage.

Jokes and Poetry

2011-01-13T15:37:00.000Z

Language is full of pitfalls and ambiguities. Usually we use rules of thumb to interpret what people mean. Grice (amongst others) attempted to list these rules. The co-operative principles he observed were -

Always contribute as much information as is needed in the exchange; not too much, and not too little.
Always try to say what is true.
Be relevant.
Be brief, clear, and orderly.

Readers assume that speakers are following these guidelines when they interpret phrases like

Members are requested to wash teapots after use and stand upside down in the sink

How long will the next bus be?

The police are looking for a man with a deaf-aid

Many jokes and poems depend on the author breaking their side of this contract. Shaggy dog stories, for example, are more effective the more they break the guidelines. Neither poems nor jokes are trying to compete with direct statements. Both exploit ambiguities in language, playing tricks by mixing the descriptive use of language with more linguistic uses. Hockett described jokes as 'layman's poetry', but I think that's rather unfair to jokes. For example, look at

Sum ergo cogito
Is that putting Des-cartes before de-horse?

To understand this requires high readerly skills - noticing the quote; noticing the inversion; knowing that Descartes was French; knowing the cart/horse idiom. Perhaps this is more clever than funny, but often there's a fine line between flashes of insight and comic punchlines. The context affects the reception of the text. What about these - funny or clever?

Alas poor Yorlik, I knew him backwards

What do you call a man who used to be interested in tractors? Ans: An ex-tractor fan.

Wordplay, is, of course, only one of the numerous ways of provoking laughter. Sometimes there's no wordplay, as in

Answer the phone.
It's not ringing.
Why leave everything to the last moment?

Such jokes are easily translatable because they're about the world rather than words or the interaction between the two. Some poems are easily translatable too. However, many jokes do depend on the dual modes of language. Cicero wrote that "a witty saying has its point sometimes in facts, sometimes in words, though people are most particularly amused whenever laughter is excited by the union of the two". One way to demonstrate the gulf between the world and the word is to show how a little difference in a word can make a huge difference to the meaning.

He leaves 2 sons and a window

The context of a word affects its meaning too. In

Mummy, Mummy, I don't like Daddy.
Then leave him on the side of your plate and eat your vegetables

the second sentence forces a retrospective recontextualisation. Such "flips" are common both in literature and jokes - readers are lulled into assuming something that turns out to be false.

Comprehension of jokes (and poems) passes through several stages

The first stage is to get the listener in the right frame of mind, to tell them that they're leaving the normal world. In poetry this is done by putting line-breaks before the right-margin. With jokes the performer can start with "I say, I say", or "did you hear the one about..." etc. Even something merely cryptic can be a sign that a joke is coming up - "Can a shoe box?" (answer: No, but a tin can) Put into this state the listener joins a world in which anything goes. In this receptive state the reader can see new potential in old material - hence the possibility of found poems and found jokes. The performer needn't play along though

What's the difference between an elephant and a letter box?
I don't know. What is the difference between an elephant and a letter box?
I shan't ask you to post a letter then!

Longer jokes can depend on the real world returning to clash with the joke's world.

When the Cauliflower family are on their way to visit their friends the Radishes, little Jonathan has a bad accident, his leaves flying everywhere, and is rushed to hospital. His parents pace nervously outside the operating theatre. The surgeon comes out and says "I'm sorry to inform you that your son's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life".
The next stage is often identification of the genre. Here again, the performer can play on expectations. In prose much use is made of expectation and surprise, but only at the plot level. In verse the effects are more pervasive - once the form, metre and rhyme-scheme are established, any deviations will gain significance. Jokes use some standard patterns
- The Rule of 3 - In longer jokes (especially of the englishman/scotsman/irishman type) something happens, it happens again with a minor variation, then the punchline happens in the 3rd occurrence (Mozart does the same thing).
- The joke as ritual - some jokes engage the reader in formulaic dialogue - "Knock knock", etc.
- Shaggy dog story - the recipient knows the joke will be poor and that most of the narrative is inessential to the plot (though the reader still has to store information, and there's a final release)
With jokes as with poetry new forms emerge, and variations of the form are developed. Readers need to recognise the form before they can appreciate the piece.

Examples rule, e.g.

or

Apathy rul
In some cases the language processing stage is transparent, but jokes often require the receiver to appreciate the difference between how the text might conventionally/logically be processed, and how the text offers an alternative interpretation. If the realisation of the difference is sudden, and the 2 interpretations sufficiently different, humour might arise. Each stage in the processing can lead to errors which jokes can exploit - misspellings, contextual misunderstandings, or, as in the next example, ambiguous parsing

His name is double-barrelled
Finally the receiver can enjoy the joke or poem. Some jokes fail because of a lack of shared understandings - not every country feels the same way about mothers-in-law, Irishmen, etc. Besides, personal tastes differ: "The concept of what people find funny appears to be surrounded by linguistic, geographical, diachronic, sociocultural and personal boundaries." (The Language of Jokes. p.5).
There's pleasure in understanding difficult jokes which goes beyond smugness. Many jokes and poems succeed because they make the listener work. The writers of the Frasier comedy series (unlike those of Friends) deliberately add what they call 10-percenters (jokes which only 10% of people will understand) to cater for this. Jokes, like poems, aren't necessarily improved by making their "meaning" easier to understand. It's true that if a joke has to be explained, it's unlikely to be considered funny even once it's understood, but you shouldn't try to please everyone all the time.

Lessons

What can poets learn from humorists? Quite a lot, I think. Jokes are generally simpler than poems. Some jokes are merely unexpected changes of meaning (often caused by a change of context) - the more surprising the better. It's easier to see how jokes work and fail (especially in translation) than to analyse the mechanics of poetry.

The Framing Problem - Sometimes it's difficult for the listener to know whether something is a joke or not. When a performer talks about their mother's death, maybe they're not joking. When the audience realises that it's allowed to laugh, relief adds to the effect of release. Writers can make art from this early uncertainty; the issue of whether prose or poetry conventions are appropriate can be a text's central theme. Poets and humorists (especially stand-up comedians) need to be able to anticipate how their audiences think, and need to steer their thoughts. Jokes generally destabilise language, increasing reader uncertainty, making them more easily led. Often no context is provided for a piece; each piece creates its own mini-world and the listener has to quickly work out the conventions. Whose fault is it when they get it wrong? If you (like Blake) begin a poem with "O rose, thou art sick!" should you expect modern readers to worry about the sanity of someone who talks to flowers? If you (like Frost) begin a poem with "Spades take up leaves/No better than spoons/And bags full of leaves/are light as balloons" are you trying to compete with Alan Titchmarsh?
Difficult lines - if Frasier can use 10-percenters surely poets shouldn't hesistate to use them too (though I agree that 10% of a poem's readership might be a small number).
Punch lines - Psychologists have already noted similarities between the aha! and Ha-ha effects. Some poems (especially those with wild analogies) try to be aha! but end up Ha-ha. If poets studied comedians more closely they might make such mistakes less often. They might also write better comic poems.

References

"The Language of Jokes", Delia Chiaro, Routledge, 1992
"Pragmatics", Grice, HP New York: Academic Press, 1961.
"De Oratore", Cicero, II LXI, 248
Christmas crackers

The Great Poetry Hoax

2011-01-13T15:30:00.000Z

Schools and the legacy of Leavis encourage the idea that poetry teaches us something about life. Poetry traditionally is treated with tolerance and reverance, and thought of as a vehicle for eternal truths and deep emotion, so some people cast their opinions into poetry to make their thoughts deep and eternal. Populists and propagandists, knowing that people are more gullible to poetry than to prose (and more gullible still if it's set to music), cast their message in an overtly traditional poetical form or use overly poetic phrases, hoping to cash in on poetry's heritage and bask in the aura of the greats.

But it's not only Lady Diana-lovers who do this. Good writers too know that calling one's short prose poetry is a useful (sometimes the only) way to get it read. As well as gaining respect by categorical association with past works, a poem offers the writer many ways to make the reader believe that the poem is significant - e.g.

putting bold, unsupported declarations at key points (end of the poem or stanza) - see Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn"
adding some emotive words in key places - see Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
name-dropping - an initial quotation or dedication; allusions to great works.
dealing with a serious subject (death, god, poetry, etc).
using extensive white space (a form of underlining) around key words.
adding gnomic semantic gaps, removing punctuation or fracturing the syntax so that the reader has to slow down - readers will tend to justify time spent on a text.
using obscurity or ambiguity to overload the processing of language - if readers find a text hard to read, they may think it profound.
repetition and chanting - see Walter de la Mare's "The Traveller"
ostentatious display of credentials and awards, authenticating the text so that readers question their own abilities rather than the poet's.

The above list of ploys includes features that some have described as defining characteristics of poetry -

"the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
"poetic effect ... is an acculumation of side-effects", Sperber and Wilson, "Relevance"
"The technique of art is to ... increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important", Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"

Poetry seems rich in such facilities, which is perhaps why readers often think a poem deep but can't say why. As so often, evolution may provide an explanation.

The human brain is an amazing organ, one that's developed through evolution from being able to clobber mammoths to knocking off sonnets. However, evolution never does any more than necessary. As sight evolved, there was no survival advantage in being able to deal with situations that didn't happen in real life - our eyes might be able to help us distinguish friend from foe at a hundred yards, but they're easily tricked by optical illusions. Thought and language processing is even more complex than visual processing, so perhaps it's not surprising that poetry can create an illusion of depth and meaning by short-circuiting the normal routes (much as stereograms give the effect of depth though they have none), exploiting a loop-hole that evolution has left open. As with stereograms, surface obscurity may be necessary to produce the effect, and there's a lot of skill involved in producing an effective illusion. Indeed, I'd say that not merely skill is involved; it's an art.

The intelligent layman no longer looks to poetry for insights into our times. The only surprise is how poets got away with it for so long. Yeats' "Easter 1916" and Eliot's "The Wasteland" may have summed up a generation's hopes and fears, but that was long ago. The game's up now. Even poets admit that poetry's explicit statements aren't always to be taken at face value. TS Eliot said that "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."

There's still much of interest in poetry but we shouldn't kid ourselves that poetry will solve our problems or have anything to say about the human condition; it says more about human conditioning. Something that provokes feelings of profundity needn't be profound. The modern lyric simply doesn't have sufficient width to support such depth. Let's leave profundity to prose.

References

The Character and Future of Rich Poetic Effects

Writing and Authorship

2011-01-13T15:28:00.001Z

T.S. Eliot said that "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". In the age of the WWW it's easier than ever to steal poems (though it's easier to get found out too). Here are some examples of prose/poetry plagiarism and related activities (some more legitimate than others), along with some questions.

Copying Others

In the TLS, 1965, it was revealed that "Perfect" by Hugh McDiarmid consisted mostly of Glyn Jones' prose.
In 2006 "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" by Harvard Student Kaavya Viswanathan was withdrawn after an initial print run of 100,000 because over 40 passages were similar to those in 2 novels by another author.
In 2006 the author of "The da Vinci Code" was taken to court by authors of a non-fiction book because of a similarity of ideas.
It's not unknown for UK poets to send poems by famous US poets to UK magazines, pretending it's their own work. And vice versa.
Mike Slippkauskas pointed out to me that Hart Crane's "Emblems of Conduct" is almost wholly an uncredited collage of lines from several poems by Samuel Greenberg.
It's not unknown for poets to accidentally copy an image from another poet. If it's done deliberately is it acceptable to claim that it's an allusion?

Translations

People don't always say that a work they've submitted is a translation of someone else's work. "Stad" (by Grobler) which won the prestigious Eugyne Marais on South Africa (2005) is an almost word-for-word translation of Anne Michaels' 1999 poem "There Is No City That Does Not Dream" from English into Afrikaans. ... Grobler, for her part, has admitted to being a fan of Michaels' work but has denied any intentional plagiarism and said that the similarities were due to "absorption that takes place naturally when one is an avid reader". See http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=66 for details
Should translators of previously translated works check to see whether their translations are too much like the older ones?

Copying oneself

In the 2005 T.S. Eliot competition (for new poetry books), the judge Carol Rumens resigned because of her doubts about the eligibility of the winning book by Tom Paulin. Many of the poems had been previously published in a booklet, though most had been changed.
Norman MacCaig often sent very similar poems to different magazines - he kept few records, and didn't always keep copies of the poems.
Suppose your poem wins a prize. If you change a few lines, would you enter it in another competition?

Hoaxes

Ern Malley (Australia), Ossian (Scotland), and Araki Yasusada (Japanese, translated into English) never existed.

Teamwork

In the past, editors have often contributed to works.
Ghostwriters are sometimes not acknowledged. There may be sound commercial reasons for this - both author and ghostwriter benefit. Naomi Campbell once said that she hadn't read her own novel. Jeffrey Archer reads his.
Pound helped Eliot a lot with "The Wasteland", more than the acknowledgement might suggest.
How many workshop suggestions can you use before being unable to claim that the poem is yours? Suppose someone gives you a fine title or punch-line for a poem which you win 1000 pounds for. Would it be enough to say thanks to the contributor? Also some competitions insist that entries are "your own work", so a peeved contributor could hold you to ransom.

Science and the Arts

2011-01-13T15:26:00.000Z

"The purpose of Art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known" - Shklovsky [30]
"Art works because perception goes beyond the evidence and it ignores much counter-evidence" - Richard Gregory [13]
"Art evokes while science explains" - quoted by Richard Gregory [13]
"Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification." - Carnap [5, p.42]
"Science, far from destroying the beauty and romance of the world as seen by artists, musicians and writers, enhances it by revealing the underlying reasons and purposes" - McConnell [21, p.2]
"Science is for those who learn; poetry for those who know" [23]

Newton received a mixed reception from poets. As the scientific revolution that he spurred took hold, the Romantics protested against its mechanistic abstractions. The protest was, in hindsight, valid though it wasn't until the 20th century that mainstream scientists realised the truth of the accusations [9, p.108]. The protest was also ill-informed - the later Tennyson was much better read in the sciences and subsequent generations of poets have always included a few professional scientists. Apart from the debate sparked off by C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" [31] and sporadic fascination with polymaths like da Vinci, 20th century pure science and art continue in splendid isolation, though "the rise of science has had something to do with displacing [poetry] as a publicly important vehicle for those truths that people accept as being centrally important." [4]. The challenge of Positivism caused the Arts to retreat from making great claims about `truth'. Poetry, for example, was cut down to size by I.A. Richards and isolated/protected from other disciplines by its claim to be a unique mode of discourse. Meanwhile literary theory (as opposed to literary criticism) prides itself on being ever more scientific. Technology, with its invitation to control and change, has entered into all aspects of our everyday lives, making artists more aware of contemporary science than scientists are of modern art. This new openness from artists presents an opportunity to build greater understanding between the `cultures'. Connections and analogies have been advanced. Rather than give a general review of the (rather disappointing and often acrimonious) literature I shall pick out a few of the false resemblances and sweeping generalisations that recur, steering clear of sociological and historical discussion in an attempt to find some common ground.

Science is Materialist

Classical science was materialist - the real world was undeniably out there. Relativity was still a classical theory, though more phenomenologically based. With Quantum Mechanics the observer entered into the equations, exciting artists. Notions that the world was "out there" waiting to be discovered were questioned. Many quantum findings still feel counter-intuitive and their interpretation controversial; it's the area where science and common sense part company for good. Maths might be thought to have a simpler foundation, but in fact it encompasses a range of ontological outlooks similar to those in other science disciplines.

"The platonist metaphor assimilates mathematical enquiry to the investigations of the astronomer: mathematical structures, like galaxies, exist, independently of us, in a realm of reality which we do not inhabit but which those of us who have the skill are capable of observing and reporting on. The constructivist metaphor assimilates mathematical activity to that of the artificer fashioning objects in accordance with the creative power of the imagination.", Dummett, [9, p.225]
"In so far as the statements of geometry speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality", Einstein [11, p.3]

Overall, the metaphysical basis of the sciences is closing in on that of the arts - science becoming more constructivist, art less platonic - confirmed early this century by a shared trend towards phenomenology led by Mach in science, and Pound in poetry. It may well be that, as Jon Corelis in private correspondence has suggested "science has made it impossible for poets to value their perceptions as having an intrinsic metaphysical validity - a validity which is proven by the desire, reverence, or exaltation they instill in us. Instead, poets like scientists must now use their perceptions as sense-images (analogous to observations) to which they must attempt to give value by poetic imagination (analogous to scientific theory.)"

Science is Reductionist and Closed

Though science doesn't hesitate to break the whole into parts, art does it too. Even in meditation, people sometimes concentrate on parts of the body first. And many 20th century art developments arose from separating form from content and recombining.

Of the sciences, maths is considered the one that's most simplified, derived from axioms, but Gödel showed that there are true statements which can't be proved. This finding has affected the grand designs of mathematicians. No longer do they look for a list of axioms and rules that can be used to generate all the theorems. It's made no difference to their other work because there's no way of knowing beforehand whether a proof that's being sought exists or not. Certainly no other fields of science have been affected.

Science seeks generalisations but ones which don't compromise. It seeks all-encompassing rules rather than rules which, though covering more cases, leave behind a slew of exceptions. "Reality is complex whereas truth is simple" says John Light [20]. But isn't truth an accurate statement of reality and thus at least as complex as its subject matter? The generalisations of science are simpler only because they're formulae, not lists of particulars.

Science is based on maths, and maths developed on Aristotlean logic where statements are either true or false. This excluded middle needn't permeate up through to science, and besides, new multivalue logics have been developed. Nevertheless it's true that science dislikes ambiguity, (which Empson considered a defining characteristic of poetry). At least when science is reductionist it usually states its assumptions.

The methods of science are popularly thought to be appropriate for only certain kinds of problems - truths of the world, not of people. Though "the part played by new observation and experiment in the process of discovery in science is usually over-estimated" [26, p.28] and most of the interesting results come from "reconsideration of known phenomena in a new context" [26, p.28], science depends on repeatable observation and prediction. In the main, science recognises these limits, perhaps anticipating that its time will come when new instruments and disciplines appear that can probe the previously hidden. For instance in the 70's interest grew in the study of chaos and complex systems, bridging, if only slightly, the gap between the domains. The use of neural nets in computing may signal progress towards a more human, pattern-matching type of computer.

Only in Science can works be wrong or outdated.

There's a feeling (expressed by Paul Mills [24], for example) that science has truth values that are denied to works of art, and that science theories have a limited lifespan. However, truth, even in science, is culture and context dependent, controlled by the reigning (Kuhn) paradigms. Both art and science are susceptible to the Zeitgeist (Rom Harré, [27]). Trends like subjectivity, symmetry, interaction and atomicity can come into favour (Philip Gell, [27], Halliwell, [15]), affecting notions of truth and beauty across the board.

Even if a science theory has been shown to present a fundamentally wrong model of reality, it can still be useful. Einstein's view of the universe superceded Newton's, but Newton's laws got us to the moon and back. Einstein's gravitation theory can't cope with quantum effects, but theoreticians still depend on it. Ultimate truth is not the only factor determining a theory's lifetime. The theoretical physicist Dirac said that when he had to choose between beauty and truth, he always chose beauty [8], expecting later experiments to prove him right.

Even in maths there is less certainty than is generally thought. In axiomatic systems (Euclidian Geometry, for example) there are sometimes disputes about which statements to use as axioms. In Number Theory the Axiom of Choice is contentious (thought by some to be not self-evident) but without it many other results couldn't be proved. And perhaps worse still, we know there'll always be true statements which can't be proved.

In science (and especially the arts) not all the past is discarded. "Both tend to stability by precedents from the past" [13]. An expression like e is an allusion to earlier work, just as much a shorthand as Eliot's burnished throne is.

Art is more natural than science

The methods of science have been compared to those used by children during normal development. Babies learn of the world using observation, experimentation and deduction. Mature science is forging more links with other fields of human involvement; witness Paul Davies' attempts to connect science and religion [7].

Perhaps it's time to look in more depth at those who've excelled in both fields to see if they get similar satisfactions out of their dual endevears. William Empson and Valery were once maths students. Holub, Primo Levi, Goethe, da Vinci, Danny Abse and William Carlos Williams all pursued dual careers. It seems to me that the incidence of scientific and artistic talent in the one person is no more than one would expect were the talents independent. There seems little cross-influence except that poet-scientists use their science experiences as subject matter and some of them (Edward Lowbury, for instance) attribute their dislike of obscurity in art to their scientific upbringing.

Art's a richer language than science

Maths and music make claims to be universal languages of sorts. Science's base metaphors are increasingly mathematical - building conceptual models from billiard balls is a thing of the past. Some theorists (for example Wimsatt) consider metaphor central to poetry. Colin Turbayne [33] thinks that that science is metaphor-laden too, the metaphors dead. Waismann [quoted in 17] argues that scientific concepts are only closed in specific contexts and that they are not different in kind to the metaphors of poetry. Indeed, his "open texture" concept was developed initially to deal with the language of science.

Natural language has room for various language games. Maths hasn't - games aren't maths any more. Maths is one of the games that can be played in language - and you've got to have a net. Its range of expression is limited and consequently maths requires a longer apprenticeship before creative work can be done. Children can write poems but even undergraduate maths students can't express themselves.

Appreciation of the arts also requires a long apprenticeship. The difference between the cultures is that people looking at a Constable can say "that's nice" because it's expected of them or because they like the countryside. Science rarely lets people off so lightly - scientists have to learn how appreciate as well as express, they have to learn the language. Poetasters can fake it.

I suspect that people with an impoverished appreciation of the arts (most of us) can only extract from art `truths' that they already know from lived experience. Playing Mozart to bushmen or reading Ashbery to almost anyone won't impress the audience. Art isn't clearly more natural or even richer than science.

Art and science have much in common

Prof Robert May [22] thinks that "the essential aim of science is to understand how the world works. This is also true of the arts ... the technical trappings of science obscure its underlying kinship with the arts". This is too low a common denominator to be of much interest even if it were true. I think the differences lie deeper than that, and that the aims of art are less clear. The arts also have their fair share of technical obscurity. Like I. A. Richards I'm unimpressed by such attempts to show that "the functions of science and poetry are identical" [28, p.62]. However I think practitioners share some heuristics: concepts may be held together in the mind to see if anything develops (for artists the concepts may differ widely); concepts grow by association (artists have more scope, fewer boundaries and can mix layers); experience builds templates so that future similar situations can be more easily dealt with by pattern-matching.

Intuition and imagination are highly valued in the sciences, though one can plod along quite merrily without them (but then, one can be a very technically accomplished and 'successful' concert pianist, I'm told, yet have little feel for music).

I.A. Richards thought that "the imaginative life is its own justification" [28, p.66]. More recently Holden in [19] says "Poetry is like Pure Maths, an end in itself" but the Arts can contribute to the Zeitgeist, which in turn affects scientists. On the whole it appears that science has been more useful to the arts than vice versa - it has provided materials (oil paints), artforms (cinema) and subject matter (science fiction). It has changed the world that some think is art's duty to describe.

Attempts have been made to find analogies between arts and sciences. Buchanan thought that "The symbolic elements of poetry are words, and the corresponding elements of mathematics are ratios" [2, p.18] and goes on to say that "The mathematician sees and deals with relations, the poet sees and deals with qualities. Functions and adjectives respectively are the symbols through which they see and with which they operate" [2, p.135]. This promising start isn't built on. Elsewhere, the analogies are neither surprising nor interesting:

Methodology - A case has been made (in [21]) that the processes of art and science correspond. I think the likeness rather tenuous. They split the process into 3 contentious stages

observation - true, this is done in both fields. Sometimes in the arts the thoroughness might be thought to match that in the sciences (Monet's multiple views of Rouen Cathedral, maybe, or Picasso and Braque's cubist experiments or a writer's research for a novel).
generalisation - this is seldom done in the arts. Perhaps an artist might extract the general features of sadness from the hundreds of faces seen, but such a result isn't used like generalisations in science. The aim of artists more to explore differences than find commonality.
testing - This stretches the metaphor too far. Comparing how scientific results are judged with the way that works of art are received by the public and critics begs too many questions. Apart from anything else, creators in the scientific world can propose ways that their work might be invalidated. In the arts there's nothing comparable.

The Scientific Method is only science's sense organs, extending mankind's natural ones. It's not the be-all and end-all of science.

Quantum Theory - In Quantum Theory, probabilities can be calculated but only when an observation is made can any certainty be established. Observation is said to "collapse the probability function." This has been used for an analogy to the way that a text is interpreted (dis-ambiguated) by the act of reading [24]. But texts can be re-read!

Relativity - Connections are made between Einstein's Special Relativity and analytic cubism. Awareness of the equal importance of world viewpoints, the impossibility of absolute motion and time perhaps permeated via the Zeitgeist to artists; the link came from no deep mutual understanding.

Gödel - Gödel's findings (see above) have helped soften artists' views on science and has removed an aim of classical science. They have only made maths more obviously like the other sciences. The gap between science and the arts hasn't thereby been reduced.

Geometry - Mondrian is heavily geometric and minimalist. This doesn't make him more appealing to mathematicians. Equally, the 4-colour problem in maths isn't appealing to artists.

References

Bush's and Nicolson's books and the introduction to "Poems of Science" give useful historical accounts. None of the other references are highly recommended. Green's book is interesting in that he's an arts person who took Snow to heart. Polanyi's book is worth a read too.

1. "Science and Human Values", J. Bronowski, London, 1961.
2. "Poetry and Mathematics", Scott Buchanan, Univ Press of Virginia, 1929.
3. "Science and English Poetry", D. Bush, OUP, 1950.
4. "Poetry in a Discouraging Time", Christopher Clausen, Georgia Review, Winter 1981.
5. "The Unity of Science", R. Carnap, London, 1934.
6. "Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision", John Cornwell, OUP, 1995.
7. "The Mind of God", Paul Davies, Simon & Schuster, 1992.
8. Paul Dirac in "Scientific American", CCVIII, May 1963.
9. "Truth and Other Enigmas", M. Dummett.
10. "The Concept of creativity in science and art" edited by Denis Dutton and Michael Krausz, Kluwer Boston, 1981.
11. "Geometry and Experience", Einstein.
12. "Art in the science dominated world: science, logic and art" by E.L. Feinberg; translated from the Russian by J.A. Cooper, New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1987.
13. "Royal Society Conference on The Visual Culture of Art and Science", R Gregory, July 1995.
14. "Science and the shabby Curate of Poetry", M. Green, Longmans, 1964.
15. "Archadia, Anarchy and Archetypes", Jonathan Halliwell, New Scientist, 12th Aug 1995.
16. "Poems of Science", ed J. Heath-Stubbs and P. Salman, Penguin, 1984.
17. "Metaphor's Way of Knowing", P.L. Hagen, Peter Lang, 1995.
18. "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid", D. R. Hofstadter, Penguin, 1980.
19. "Poetry and Mathematics", in "Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry", Jonathan Holden, Univ of Missouri Press, 1986.
20. "Science, Truth and Art", John Light, Poetry Nottingham, V49, No 2, 1995.
21. "Art, science and human progress: the Richard Bradford Trust, lectures" edited by R.B. McConnell, London: John Murray, 1983.
22. Prof Robert May (Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government), "Daily Telegraph", Sept 6th, 1995, p.14.
23. "Meditations of a Parish Priest" Pt i, N. 71.
24. "The Quantum Uncertainty of the Narrator", Ian Mills, in "Poetry Review" V85.1, Spring 1995.
25. "Newton demands the Muse", M.H. Nicolson, Princeton Univ Press, 1946.
26. "Science, Faith and Society", Polanyi, Univ of Chicago Press, 1964.
27. "Common denominators in art and science", edited by Martin Pollock with the assistance of Keith Brown, Aubrey Manning and Barrie Wilson, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983.
28. "Poetries and Sciences", I.A. Richards, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
29. "Science and Truth", I.A. Richards, 1929.
30. "Art as Technique", Shklovsky, 1917.
31. "The Two Cultures: and a second look", C. P. Snow, Cambridge, 1964.
32. "Newton's Sleep", Raymond Tallis, P.N. Review, V17, Nos 3-6, 1991.
33. "The Myth of Metaphor", C. Turbayne, Univ of South Carolina Press, 1970.

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