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Thing Envy (Body Horror)

 

The current version of John Carpenter’s The Thing showing in cinemas comes across a little unclear in terms of its purpose. Whether it’s a remake, a prequel or a “reimagining” is confusing, as the film blends elements of all three. But, if a remake, it certainly does not fall in with the usually terrible type of film-making that category holds. It’s not great, but it certainly doesn’t do anything that would make you want to shout at the screen. In fact, I quite liked it.

But. This probably owes a lot to the fact I am enamoured of body horror.

It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? Our own recognisable, safe and familiar structures, distorted to grotesquely monstrous, alien, new forms? Everything we can take for granted suddenly warped out of all recognition. The idea has a pretty long standing tradition in cinema, particularly Cronenberg, although I’m sure there are loads of other directors doing this type of thing. Right now I can only think of two examples: The Human Centipede, something which, as a concept at least, has an irrefutable appeal (it’s just a shame the concept is swallowed a bit by the bog standard nastiness expected of torture horror genres); and there’s also Brian Yuzna’s fantastic orgy of mutating flesh in Society.

Even when it’s done in a subtle way, as with Black Swan, it’s beautiful and thrilling to observe. Natalie Portman’s peeling of her own finger skin and the strange crunching of the bones in her feet affects the audience in a way that no amount of over the top shocks could ever do; but it’s when fighting herself in her dressing room that body horror truly comes to the fore as a gripping cinema trope. With her eyes turning glutinous and red, Portman’s neck distends horribly with a sickly cracking sound as it takes on the swan’s shape, spine bulging through skin, head manic and ravenous and almost separate from the body. Perhaps it’s the outlandishness, the look of terror in the eyes of those characters who witness this happening before them in film? I’m not sure.

Possibly, it is the desire to replicate such bodily feats. Who would not enjoy more control of their body? How many films have we seen wherein a character may morph their basic shape, changing arms into weapons, or subsuming the body of another. I think maybe we feel trapped in our own skeletons, limited in terms of what we can actually achieve with just arms and legs that go up and down and forwards and backwards and do little else for us.

In this new version of The Thing there is a definite standout scene. It comes when all those cooped up in the Antarctic base are supposed to gather in one room to take a test that will determine who is human and who has been infected by the monster. Almost unnoticeably at first, the character of Edvard dislocates his arm, which then scuttles spider-like onto the body of another man, latching to his face and gorging on his proteins. This whole scene is underpinned in quite a subtle way by sexual tones. Not only is there the elongated rope of muscle attempting to force entry into one man’s throat, but there is the next part, in which Edvard’s rapidly mutating body, having grown numerous muscled arms and legs, clambers over the character of Adam. What it does next is filmed and animated (this being CGI) in a bizarrely delicate, almost loving way. Edvard’s head, still recognisably human but evidently now part of a monster, extends on its neck and drapes itself across Adam’s face. For a protracted moment, with its mouth wide open, it appears to be seeking out Adam’s mouth as if to kiss him, but eventually the skin of their faces simply coalesces, a single sheet of flesh stretched over two skulls, as the monster head rolls its cheek caressingly against Adam’s.

Here, there are overtones of that idea where we idolise or find ourselves infatuated with somebody to such an extent that we actually just want to be them. It is the outward, visual realisation of that idea: becoming somebody via absorption. I’m not sure whether the director was going for this feel, but this scene is possibly the most simultaneously romantic and horrific depiction of human conflation there is.

Incidentally, it was also the point in the film at which I found myself thinking, God, I wish I could be that thing. Absorbing other people into ourselves, subsuming everything about them, existing as that kind of physically malleable, limitless entity. Whatever the “thing” of the title is, yes, I would very much like to be it. Wouldn’t we all?

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The Problem with Networking

 

Since joining Twitter, I’ve come to realise that networking, far from being a simple process of hobnobbing, is a tactile skill all of its own. Moreover, it’s a skill I’m not entirely sure I want to possess. The term ‘networking’ – I’ve always seen it for all the self-serving ugliness it embodies. Unfortunately, most arenas, the poetry arena included, rely to some extent on networking. Certain publishers make no bones about how vital it is that you, as a poet, make connections in order to boost sales and become the lucrative figurehead they’ll desire to publish in the first place.

This leaves people such as myself in a tricky position. If I’m not prepared to hobnob and make these connections, then maybe I shouldn’t be seeking publication in the first place. But must it be as clean cut as that? What if I really do want to publish, but want my work to speak for itself and accumulate recognition on its own merit, and not because of who I know? Is that allowed in the contemporary poetry world? Or is it a complete, unfeasible fantasy?

Aside from anything else, I simply don’t understand how to network. To strike up a conversation with a total stranger, somebody whose voice you cannot hear, whose body language you cannot see, within the global limbo and unreality of the internet, seems absurd. Even if you do attempt communication, it usually yields a few surface-level comments, a pleasantry or two, before the wick burns down and the two of you fade into the obscurity from whence you attempted your online interaction.

Perhaps this relies more on the type of people available to me on Twitter; I noticed that a clutch of the poets whose work I truly love do not use any of these social websites, and that’s probably telling me something about the type of people I respect and the type of writer I want to be. I’m not really a fan of the internet in general, nor of any of the big social networking sites, or the culture these intrusions into our once peaceful lives has bred. I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to do with my Facebook account, besides endure the craze of people taking photographs of tables laid out with plates of half-consumed food. Joining Twitter was done in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm for something new and gleaming; the effect it’s really had is to make me feel as though I’m continually shouting down into a deep, dark, echoing well, from which no other voice issues back.

The other problem I have with self-driven publicity is the feverish way it ties in with the idea of achievement. There is so much emphasis on achievement now, and I think it is the outwardly-growing canker born from some in-built human terror of the ephemeral nature of life. We can’t quite be okay with the fact there is nothing we can hold onto, nothing that is solid and will stay with us. Achievement links to ideas of possession – if you achieve, you have. But what is it exactly you come to own? We almost believe achievements are solid, concrete things, like the crystals a character might acquire in a computer game. And so, writing purely for the pleasure it brings is not enough. We have to transform that simple pleasure into a life quest, an unrelenting series of small accomplishments that build and build to a pamphlet, a collection, an award maybe.

Despite everybody’s constant assertions that if you’re in poetry for money and fame, you’re in the wrong business, I don’t think people can stop themselves from dreaming. Who doesn’t imagine their poetry being talked about? Surely I’m not the only one who feels a bit sad by the fact poets are never seen in the public eye. Talk shows line up actors, musicians and comedians, but never poets. In fact, I’ve noticed it’s increasingly rare even for big name authors to appear on television these days. It creates an interesting paradox, because people often say they’re not pursuing poetry for fame or financial gain, but by the same token if that’s true (and I know myself that people really mean it when they say that; the joy, the motivational force, is purely the act of gaining pleasure from language and expressing ideas) then why not be content to simply write? What compels us to publish?

I think a shade of it is ego. It as to be, really. Think about it. You’re writing things down , looking at them, and thinking “Other people should read this!” For all modesty and insecurity, you must believe in the power and worth of your writing somewhere deep down if you are motivated enough to send it off to an editor. You also need a thick skin and toughness of heart to handle the piles of rejections. I think the ego must be quite developed, that a little arrogance must exist in a person who decides to be a published poet, rather than simply a poet.

And the other reasons? Well, I’m not sure.

But all this achievement calls to mind stark imagery of humans scuttling about and clambering over each other like beetles to get somewhere – and where are we destined to end up? Where do we all think we’re going, and what prize, what gleaming solidification of inner success do we imagine we’ll be holding when we get there? Existence has been boiled down to a series of goals we must tick off our list: do well at school, go to university, get a good job, marry, buy house, buy stuff to fill house with. We don’t even need any of this useless junk, we’re just encouraged to have it, because having is a goal in itself.

Personally, little enjoyment comes to me from success. When something I write finally finds its place in a magazine, I get a jolt that lasts a few seconds and seems very unreal, followed by relief. I feel relieved because I’ve scored another point, which will count towards some ultimate final tally. I’m looking forward, but not enjoying the moment itself. True pleasure comes from the act of writing the poems or short stories in the first place, in the tinkering stages that follow. Likewise, daily life things that bring me pleasure are infinitesimally small. Fairy lights in winter. Coffee with a sugary powdered doughnut. Walks in autumn. The feel of a nice new jumper. Sitting in a cafe. Listening to rain falling at night. (Horribly twee things, I admit, but there you go).

It seems enjoying an activity or idle domestic bit of fluff for its own sake isn’t enough anymore; we’re unable to extricate it from some bigger plan. It calls to mind the culture of gyms, and that social pressure to always be on the move and exercising so that, what, we can feel ourselves alive or somehow puff and pant our bodies out of dream and into reality, assure ourselves we’re real? We’re terrified of being idle, of simply being still.

All of this clashes, unfortunately, with the irrefutable fact that I do need to feel my work accepted, for it to be looked at by strange eyes and deemed fit to publish. The desire is just there. So how are these two reconciled, without feeling hypocritical?

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Poetry is the Skeleton

What if writing poetry is the one coping mechanism a person has in a life fraught with difficulties nobody ever really sees; what if it’s a shred of joy, a frame around which self worth and purpose can be built – does it become a frivolity then?

This is just a little ramble, some thoughts that have been going around my head lately. It’s definitely not a complete argument. I think the catalyst was this post by Dave Coates and the assertion that poetry is not important that got my fingers typing away. I can see it being easy to fall into two categories here; either I end up seeming too serious, or decrying poetry in order to seem somehow trendy and cool – “He’s a poet who thinks poetry is trash, he doesn’t care!” Mostly I just don’t think one person can speak for the myriad of internal thoughts and feelings present in so many other people, so here is the way that I perceive poetry and all the reasons it is certainly not, to my mind, frivolous.

There’s a duality in the way I think about poetry, or any individual pursuit that is creative. Sometimes I will look at my piles of notebooks and their scribbled nonsense and think to myself, It’s all meaningless. What are you doing? I passed a woman in the street recently; she was clutching a large sketchpad under one arm. I found this sharp disdain rising in me, imagining her absorbed in her little sketches, thinking she must be doing something really worthy. There was just that odd sense of, how come we’re allowed to do this? Shouldn’t we be engaged in bigger things, more important things? And if so, what are those things supposed to be? On the one hand, society largely enjoys taking the piss out of artists, while at the same time encouraging us to achieve our dreams. But with so much insistence that we achieve something, there is pressure there that shouldn’t exist, making us feel we’re not living up to our potential; it transforms life into little more than a series of targets or goals we must tick off our list. Ultimately it can have the opposite effect and make you wonder why achieving these pipedreams is so vital in the first place.

I’m not sure I believe I’m doing something necessarily worthy when I write, it’s not about worth or validity. To be honest, I don’t put that much thought into the process. It’s as simple as this: ideas, words and images pop into my head, and sometimes I like them, and I write them down. That’s it. I have no grand illusions; my only driver is the desire to create something I feel to be singular and original. There are times these self doubts intrude, and they make you feel that what you’re doing is silly. People believe there are more worthy things to invest time in. But I’ve always rankled at comparison, the hierarchy of importance dictated by others and bestowed upon personal activity. Hundreds of years ago, people mostly tried to survive, to avoid illness and eat well. And now we have all these little hobbies and concerns, we have magazines and degree courses and talent shows and interior design and art classes. It’s meaningless, but somehow it’s what we consider privileged.

So should I denounce poetry and work in a supermarket for basic pay so that I can somehow claim to be on a par with Chinese sweatshop workers and claim some patronising solidarity? Does a person rejecting all forms of self indulgence and suffering help anybody or change anything? World hunger and poverty matter, but to use such weighty issues as a club with which to smash to pieces the small joys of other people is ridiculous. It’s like tactlessly saying to somebody who’s going through a divorce, “Well think of all the people starving in Africa.”

Comparison doesn’t help.

What if writing poetry is the one coping mechanism a person has in a life fraught with difficulties nobody ever really sees; what if it’s a shred of joy, a frame around which self worth and purpose can be built – does it become a frivolity then?

When I have these thoughts, questioning whether what I’m doing is somehow childish, I eventually come back to all the reasons why it is so important. Poetry is not a hobby for me. It underpins absolutely every experience I have in life. Every conversation with a good friend, every wonderful moment of insight, every surreal piece of imagery conjured up during a 2am chat; it is a way, my only way, to engage with a world I do not feel, most of the time, has anything to do with me, a world I have struggled to accept as reality since childhood. I do not read newspapers or watch the news or particularly care about world politics or whether I’m on the right or the left, or whether I’m green. These are all just compartments. This is not my world, it’s someone else’s nightmare. The only way I can chisel the ice of the world into something I recognise is through poetry. Only through poetry can I translate peoples’ ramblings into a language I speak. If I don’t write for a long period of time, I feel moody, lost, directionless, confused, depressed, as if my internal compass, my centre, has been torn out.

Poetry is not a thing I can take or leave, it’s infused with my existence, it’s my skeleton.

All of this may sound heavy, but the wonderful thing is that, because I funnel everything through a poetic scope, it actually means I can take things less seriously, when appropriate. I indulge in these huge universal questions with friends with humour and a brilliant feeling of lightness; because I’m not just working a job and going out to get hammered on the weekend, suffering through daily drudgery and a lack of imagination. I have something else to turn to and look forward to, and that’s the freedom poetry gives me. Is such powerful, levitating freedom a frivolity to be taken lightly?

Humour is nearly always present in life, but to demand it of people is dictatorial. It’s the equivalent of saying “Lighten up,” to somebody – that most infuriating of shorthand that’s really a deflection against answering a question you are uncomfortable with or frightened by. And humour itself can be such a general term. What does it mean in the context of poetry? – must poems be littered with gags or quips or puns? It’s entirely possible to discuss serious subject matter in a way that is absurd, or humorous; the two need not be separate. The poets I’d like to know in reality are the ones with a really warped, imaginative view of existence, not the ones cracking jokes or going for easy rhymes or being rude with their supposedly “edgy” references to sexual organs.

But really, what should it matter? Both serious and lighter poetry exists, and poems that blend the two also exist. To attack something for not being what it isn’t is absurd. Do you pick up a banana, shake it and cry “Why aren’t you a Muller yoghurt?”

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The Beautiful Unfinished and The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema

I find it difficult to finish things. Poems, art projects, cups of coffee. I had zero chance of finishing the novels I used to write as a teenager. Perhaps this is what drew me to poetry initially – the quickness of it, the fleeting stab at insight, the way an idea can be crystallised to a grain of sand in a few lines and then left, to either be mused over or forgotten about.

There was talk of the now defunct Succour magazine holding a themed submissions call for incomplete written pieces one might find on their desktop. I loved this idea, and really wish they’d gone ahead with it. In fact, I wish another magazine would take the idea up. Where else are those fragments supposed to go? Your burst of creativity that only ever amounted to a synopsis, or the first two stanzas of a poem, or a few pages of script for a play – in what format can they be expected to find a home? You must consider how hard it is to go back to something you were writing two or three years ago and complete it. So much will have changed, your mood, your experience, your skills. Chances are you won’t be in the same mindset as you were when you wrote that first, unfinished, paragraph, so do we just leave these truncated pieces to rot on our hard drives forever?

No. I think these premature babies deserve a home.

In his documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek discusses this concept. He talks of the theory that our world is not fully real or fully constructed, that the person who made it was a buffoon who fumbled the drop, and so our world remains half finished. As a result, there’s this idea of an ultimate version of self which continually haunts us – the things we might have been, but sadly are not (as illustrated by Ripley in Alien Resurrection discovering the horror laboratory in which all previous attempts at cloning her lay about, malformed and half-dreamed).

What he’s talking about here is the unfinished as a permanent source of frustration for humans, a ghostly niggling in the backs of our minds, a reminder of the wholly complete state of being we cannot reach. What I want to find is a way of making the incomplete acceptable, welcome, desired. A great deal of the time, I find the bare bones of an idea to be enough, without the need for fleshing out. Sometimes, you only need to watch the two minute trailer for a film in order for it to take root in your heart and fill you up, and you can flesh out the skeleton of that trailer in your own mind without needing to see the film itself. But, you go watch the film anyway, and afterwards you either feel a vague sense of overkill, or that the film has in fact ruined the beautiful preconceptions of what you imagined it was going to be about.

If we run with the idea proposed by Slavoj Zizek in this documentary, then really we are at one with the unfinished pieces of life – we are their kin, and our contrivance to forge completed stories is a foolish one and simply a drive born out of frustration to excel our own half-constructed existences. This is why I think a collection of incomplete stories, poems and ideas would be a gorgeous little thing, something small and precious you’d want to keep (and something I’m almost definitely going to try, one day). It would give you the seeds of ideas, which your heart would then be free to nourish, a kind of collaborative creativity, across minds and time and distance; what somebody begins somewhere in Japan in the germ of a novel three years ago, I will continue or finish here, now, in Britain. Imagine all the weaving of ideas snaking over the earth, like a million batons our minds pick up from each other and run with.

So, any editors out there reading this, won’t you consider a submission call dedicated solely to the neglected saplings gathering dust, on discs and on stacks of paper tucked away in drawers? What if we don’t look for endings, or even middles? How about a world of beginnings, of opening paragraphs, of first scenes? Our imaginations can fill in the rest.

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Creative Thought Makes Life Better

“Nothing is more dangerous than a weak imagination” —- Katy Evans-Bush

I realised today I’ve been far too caught up with the modern wave of poetry acting as a diary, a dictaphone, a recording device, as opposed to a far more creative tool. You have the school of thought that poetry should represent the world, should tell us or show us “how things are.” If I compare this to the visual arts, it puts me in mind of realist paintings, landscapes and portraiture. These have never been the types of art to interest me. I once saw an enormous canvas of a cityscape at sunset, which had no doubt been meticulously crafted, but all I could think was how, if the ultimate goal was to capture the most life-like essence of a view, surely taking a photograph would be much better – the ultimate accuracy, but still with its flaws. It has a long standing tradition and is often admired, but I find it a redundant medium. If we want to see the world we may simply look. Art should re-imagine the world and, I believe, so should poetry.

We are uniformly taught the same things and spoon-fed the same systems of belief and ideologies. We’re dissuaded from imagining and daydreaming and knocked down pathways of dull, meaningless labour, boozy weekends and not much else. Poetry can be an antithesis to this, a sort of kit out of which we may construct new belief systems, new ways of engaging with reality. It’s very hard to describe, but if I play certain types of music as I’m walking along or sitting on the bus, and if I let myself open to all those thoughts wanting to rush in, then it’s as if a new utopia of words is being constructed by a million ants in my brain. Images, sentences, fragments, thoughts that I haven’t even been able to fully articulate yet. These pieces, like scales of ghost armour, almost create a second self – a hologram I may project and live through, a decoy-me I may send forth to fight my battles. I believe if you are able to tackle life with this poetic tool kit, it can help you survive the mundane, the repetitive, the disappointing. Your mind becomes a muscle strengthening itself against reality through the power of imagination.

From a very personal standpoint, I feel if there are difficult times you’re going through, if you’re able to step back, outside of it, and dismantle the entire reality of it with creative thought alone, like tearing down the facade of stage scenery, reconstructing how you view the situation, how you feel about it, how you might get through it, then, well, that has some worth, something to be said for it – doesn’t it? I don’t always believe events in life are these solid towers of stone we cannot get around, but dissolvable glimmers we can let sluice through our perception of reality, or re-build into something new, Transformers-style.

Molly Naylor explains it well in this quote, taken from The Rialto’s blog:

“ …that’s what saved me: the fact that it’s easier to scrub, and clean, and wipe and serve if you have poems in your head. If you have developed the capacity for creative thought and been given the tools to reflect on the world and view it in a framework outside of ingrained capitalist ideals. If you have discovered some ways of thinking that recalibrate notions of aspiration and its relationship to the acquisition of possessions and status.

Simply put, it’s about instilling basic artistic sensibilities. Which link to being able to question the way we live our lives and how we relate to the other people we encounter in the world”.

Today, walking in the crisp autumn air through dappled shade and sunlight, I was half-caught in a glittering wave, I was resident of an ice palace on the moon, I was conducting a symphony with Medusa on the beach, I was stepping away from a dead summer party in the garden of Versailles in which blue china cups and orange paper parasols had been discarded and the echo of chatter from long-retired party guests still ghosted the air, I was X-rayed and imploding to scatter shots of violet dust only to reform and disperse endlessly, I was having a wonderful conversation with someone who makes me feel incredibly happy while baroque-styled girls with bat wings shook their crinoline garments in the shadows of shop doorways, and all the while passing through my local village, among Co-ops and post offices and hooded kids flitting about on bicycles trying to persuade strangers to buy them cigarettes. All these things happen when I go out for a walk, especially with headphones, and when I’m open to the possibilities of what might be behind the facade of everyday living. Poetry should make all fantasy and all dream the living, breathing world.

(So! This has sort of become a critique of “realistic” writing, and a self-help exercise in how to cope with life. Hmm.)

What this really leads me to is the style in which people write, and how we go about capturing this impossible existence we cannot touch.

I’m finding myself looking back to abstract writing lately, instead of trying to accurately portray a moment in time, or a scene I have witnessed that took place in somebody’s living room or in an office. The problem is, it’s an incredibly difficult skill to master. Too much abstract imagery can quickly slide into a frustrating muddle of nothing. I believe in ordered and constructed non-sense, but this is only a step away from a style of writing that leaves the reader cold and fails to engage. Perhaps the glittering pool of ephemeral abstract thought is a starting point, out of which we might build some solid castle of meaning. I’m not sure. All I know is that, for a while now, I’ve felt there’s something always out of my reach, just beyond reality, that’s trying to push its way into being, or I’m trying to grab it and hold it, if only for the time it takes to crumble to dust, and poetry, for me, is the building of a ladder to reach that (possibly unattainable) plateau.

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Poetry for the People

The gist of this strange little idea (one I’ve been thinking about on and off for a while now) is that I don’t believe a “poetry for the people” exists.

For one thing: who are “the people”? We’re all people. What would you call those who can’t subscribe to this brand of poetry – inhuman? Transformers?

Secondly, “the people” is a term that would essentially bracket a big clump of society or class together without considering the important fact that there’s no such thing as “the masses”. We’re all individual, self-contained brains and hearts. This is one of my major grievances with the way the media attempts to cluster us all together into these little groups (and we ourselves are guilty of it too). Out of such an outlook, the only thing that flourishes is prejudice. If you lump a class or subculture together it’s easy to thrash out wild sweeping statement after statement, but unless you actually know somebody from that particular background you’re never going to have a voice and a personality on which to base your opinions.

Likewise with this people poetry ethos. Essentially I think it’s the notion that you can appeal to everybody, anywhere, all the time, with every poem you write. I find this quite egocentric, largely because it assumes everything you’re saying is a universal truth all people who read your work will relate to.  There’s also the issue of content, the removal of anything that might be considered specialist. The only way you can go about it is to dilute your poems to such a bland extent that you set out trying to appeal to everybody and end up appealing to no one. Imagination is essential in poetry, as it is in life.

It’s also an insult to the intelligence of people, and undermining what they’re capable of. I’ve known writers who’ve thought that by making their poetry as broad-based and middle of the road as possible, they’re somehow on the side of “the people” and giving them what they want, and that to write in a way that is deemed snobbish or somehow elitist is to exclude those same people. In actual fact, they’re the ones who’re condescending toward their audience and doing them the disservice of assuming they won’t be able to engage or get on board.

It’s lovely to be presented with new ideas, fresh points of view, bizarre styles and quirks of personality. It’s one of the joys of reading to be introduced to strange new names and concepts. Even without looking certain references up, my enjoyment of poetry is rarely diminished; sometimes simple imagery and the idiosyncratic placement of words, or that quick fluttery feeling when something just clicks, is enough to make a piece of writing great. We don’t need to understand every single thing. As Gertrude Stein said “If you enjoy something, you understand it.”

By attempting to appeal to everybody with a general, non-specific statement, the desire to experiment and try new things is clearly going to be cut right down; too afraid are you of seeming to exclude some people. Ideas such as writing what you know establish a safety net, one from which you’re rarely tempted to stray. The fact is, not everyone is going to “get” what you’re on about 100% of the time, because they simply might not have had that similar experience in their lives.

I’ve been reading a lot of Salt poets recently, and I’m going to have to re-read most of the books I bought as a lot of it went over my head – but who cares? I certainly wouldn’t start brandishing about words such as pretentious and elitist (sometimes, I actually find there’s something harmlessly brilliant with a great humour about pretention, especially when it’s pretty knowing). I guess it depends largely on the way you look at it. You can see it in terms of people trying to be clever and trying to exclude you from something. Or, you can see that people are trying to introduce you to something new, to pull you into their world and let you play around in their minds and hearts for a bit. They want to make you feel the experience, and emotions and experiences aren’t always clear-cut things, they’re hard to grasp and keep and make sense of, they’re chaotic.

To finish, there was an article I was reading recently on the Magma blog, and I think somebody said “I’d rather be pretentious than predictable.” Agreed.

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Anonymous Poetry Submissions

If you purchase enough poetry magazines pretty soon you’ll start to notice, issue upon issue, the same cluster of names coming up time and again. These circling groups of known names may differ across publications, but the core remains pretty much constant, with certain individuals popping up just about everywhere with alarming regularity. It would be wrong to say good poetry is not produced by this recurring crop of writers, but it would similarly be wrong to suggest absolutely everything they write is pure publishing gold.

I’m not going to specifically target individuals, because aside from that being quite petty, the problem is more one of osmosis. I’m sure there are writers with many collections under their belts who have work rejected now and again from magazines, but I’m also sure your name can do a great deal for you when it comes to submitting work. It has to, surely? It’s entirely human to respond differently to something once you know the name of the author or artist attached to it. If it’s an author you enjoy, you’ll most likely be more open to the work and go in with an open mind; if it’s an unknown author or even someone you’ve developed a dislike for, that spark of initial interest might just be missing, or you may be harsher in your criticism of their writing.

It can start to feel as if the poetry world, like so many others, is monopolised; dominated by a sort of inner circle. You’d have to be naive not to believe a fair degree of back slapping and favouring occurs, especially when you do a little research to discover exactly who knows who, and how many times an editor has sprinkled the pages of a magazine with the work of their friends. That’s not to suggest competitions or selections for publication in a magazine are “fixed”. What I’m suggesting is not as sinister as that, but more insidious and perhaps even understandable. If I were to imagine myself in a similar position, I can see how it might be desirable or easier to simply publish the people whose work I know and trust, especially with so many hundreds of submissions flooding the inbox.

However, this grows increasingly frustrating when you find certain works to be empty, flimsy and not especially well written, yet published because of what can only be the editor’s relationship to – or the status of – a certain well known poet. In these instances I confess to feeling genuine anger. Perhaps, in these instances, the poems were simply not to my taste. Either way, I can’t be the only one who would like to see greater variation in contemporary magazines and zines. It sounds like an issue you’d imagine only the bigger magazines suffer, but even the independent places eventually begin to accrue their own special friends list.

For these reasons, I feel anonymous submissions are truly the way to go. When you think about it, what need has an editor for your name and back story in the first place? Surely all that needs to be up for judgement are the poems themselves; they should speak for you and impress on their own terms. How many times you’ve been published before or how many prizes you’ve won really shouldn’t come into it. Even a prize winning author is capable of writing a dud from time to time.

Anon is one such magazine, produced to a high standard and filled with really interesting work. I’d love to see more and more magazines – especially the better known ones – take up this approach, and maybe then we’d have an end to this cliquey style of publishing that, to me, seems to be growing ever more present in today’s poetry climate.