Thematic List

n.b. A free PDF collection of some of these articles on poetry technique is available online. A free PDF book of workshops for literary prose teachers is online

Workshop theory

• Tact attacked (published in Poetry Nottingham)
• Psychology, Psychiatry and Writers Groups

Publication

• Organising a poetry collection
• Organising a story collection
• Winning story competitions
• Breaking into print
• Pamphlet Publication in the UK
• Getting poetry published in the UK
• Career paths
• England's literary magazines, 1985-2012
• Poetry competitions
• Poetry sales
• Paying for literary success

Form

• Strange Forms (published in Horizon Review)
• Poetic Forms
• The Legacy of Form (published in Able Muse)
• Relaxed Forms

Linebreaks and punctuation

• Gappy poetry
• Notation in Poetry and Music
• Poetry Punctuation
• A Theory of Line-breaks
• More on line-breaks
• The End of the Line for Modern Poetry (published in Acumen)

Short prose

• Flash
• Short Fiction
• Recent UK flash fiction
• Adapting short texts for the market

Poetry/prose

• Prose poems
• Classifying - prose and cons
• poetry or prose?

Prose

• Story Beginnings and Endings
• Dialogue for writers
• Crisis? What crisis?
• Time and Narration
• Transparency, Barthelme and Lahiri
• Multiple points-of-view
• Child narrators in adult fiction
• Let's Twist Again
• What's wrong with SF?
• Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation
• People who need people (a workshop about character)
• From words to Flash (a workshop about writing sentences)
• Point of view (workshop notes)
• Rewriting workshop
• Death and Resurrection of the Short Story
• Elizabeth Baines and Innovation
• Style and substance (a workshop)

Authenticity

• Games poets play
• Word, Image and Cornelia Parker
• Charlatanism, Poetry and Art
• The Great Poetry Hoax (published in Acumen)
• The Poetry Circus
• Writing and Authorship
• Losing your voice (published in Poetry Nottingham)

Poetry and Arts

• Eliot and Cinema (published in Acumen)
• Painting and poetry styles
• Painting and poetry styles (part 2)
• Art and narration

Arts and Sciences/Maths

• Science and the Arts
• Poetry, Mathematics, and Computing
• Fractals and poetry
• Poetry about Science in the UK

Other connections

• Jokes and Poetry
• Chess, Beauty and Literature
• Poetry and gardens
• Poetry and maps
• Trains in literature
• Literature and boredom

Poetry

• Poetic Voice
• Poetry, voice, and discourse analysis
• Linguistic psychopathology of poets and strangers
• Is poetry inside language or beyond?
• Hybrid Poetry - something old, something new
• Recent UK poetry anthologies
• The poetry mainstream
• Aging poets
• Poetic expertise
• The Avant-garde and Language poetry
• Poetry, madness and cure
• The formalist/free avant-garde/mainstream UK/US splits (published in Acumen)
• The post-Romantics (published in Acumen)
• Poetry and Society in the UK
• Popularising poetry in the UK
• Poeticisms
• Poetry about Poetry
• Truth to Materials and Heather McHugh
• Poetry and precision
• Sestinas

Sound

• The Sound of Poetry and the Poetry of Sound (published in Acumen)
• Choosing between sound and sense
• Sound clusters
• Rhyme

Individual Poems/Stories

• The Lammas Hireling (Ian Duhig)
• Memory (W.B. Yeats)
• Reading your comics in Eype (Chrissy Williams)
• Remaking the Moon (David Gaffney)
• The Dinosaurs on other planets (Danielle McLaughlin)
• Repossession - Tessa Hadley's "Bad Dreams"
• David Almond's "A kind of heaven" and "1982"
• "Mrs Fox" by Sarah Hall - compromised genres

Reviewing

• The WWW and Literary Standards (published in Acumen)
• Writing Book Reviews
• The language of reviews
• Mixed Reviews
• Blindspots
• Genre and critiques
• The use and abuse of literary theory

Individual Features

• Reality and symbols
• Show and tell - Waterman and Heaney
• Juxtaposing text
• Metaphor and Simile
• Allusions
• Misdirection
• Epiphanies
• Poetic leaps
• Repetition in Jon Stone's 'School of Forgery'
• Repetition in Paul Stephenson's 'Hard Drive'

Difficulty

• Not so Difficult Poems (published in Envoi)
• Obscurity (published in Sol)
• Difficulty and obscurity in poetry
• Poetry and communication
• Pragmatic approaches to difficult texts
• Padel McGuickian and I
• Understanding Medbh McGuckian's poetry

Combining Features

• Gestalt effects and poetry
• Attention, Agility and Poetic Effects
• Word Association
• Poetic Requirements
• Broken mirrors, flattened hierarchies
• Literary Depth
• Literary Order and Chaos
• The Scale of Meaning (published in Envoi)
• Ingarden and the Sense of Resolution
• Reading strategies: when top-down meets bottom-up

Part/Whole

• Literary Unity
• Mind the gap (continuity and fragmentation)

Interviews

• Helena Nelson
• Vanessa Gebbie
• Tania Hershman
• Joel Lane
• Diana Brodie

Authors

• William Blake
• Ali Smith
• Alice Munro

Misc

• Minimalism - does absence make the art grow stronger?
• Schrodinger's cat in literature
• I.A. Richards' influence
• Sentimentality in literature
• Nothing to Hide
• The Emperor has no clothes
• Paper tiger, burning bright (published in Jennings)
• Attention to Detail (published in Envoi)
• Factoids
• Beyond Reason
• Memory and Imagination
• Fancy and Imagination
• No idea
• Sherlock Holmes and the Cambridge Mystery
• Happenstance press
• Rewriting
• Creativity and writing
• Quality versus Quantity
• Translating Dante's La Commedia Divina
• Emergence and literature
• Offensive poetry
• A guide to diversity/inclusion for writers and editors
• A summary of my views about poetry
• Empathy and literature

Psychology

(Repeats of some of the above entries)

• Psychology, Psychiatry and Writers Groups
• Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation
• Poetry, voice, and discourse analysis
• Linguistic psychopathology of poets and strangers
• Poetry, madness and cure
• Gestalt effects and poetry
• Attention, Agility and Poetic Effects
• Memory and Imagination
• Creativity and writing