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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, "Sky...

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 th...

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 ...

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 - use a "false ending". 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 worr...

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 Scien...

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...

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...

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...