"5 secrets of story structure" by K.M. Weiland (PenForASword Publishing, 2016)

The 5 items are Inciting Event, Key Event, Pinch Points, Moment of Truth, Climactic Moment. These are intersperced amongst other milestones in a 3 act structure. Here's a longer list

• Inciting Event - after the hook of the first line, this first hint of the challenge ahead happens halfway through Act I. It breaks the possible monotony of the setting-up
• Key Event - at the end of Act I, 25% through the book, the setting-up is over, and the main character engages with the challenge. The Key Event is when the protagonist leaves the old world, the "1st plot point" is when the adventure world is entered. These 2 moments may coincide.
• In the first half of Act II (from 25% through the book to 50%) the hero battles. Things don't look good.
• Pinch Point - at 37% there's minor challenge that may introduce new backstory information.
• Moment of Truth - at 50%. "The 2nd plot point", when the protagonist now understands the true nature of the quest.
• In the 2nd half of Act II the hero makes progress (from 50% to 75% through the book). Then there's a fundamental challenge ("the 3rd plot point").
• Pinch Point - at 62% there's minor challenge that may introduce new backstory information.
• Climactic Moment - at the 88% mark the final climactic turning point will launch the story's Climax

In the appendices there's a link to a "story structure database" and a breakdown of Star Wars.

It all sounds fair enough to me, as far as it goes. Though it's most applicable to longer novels/films with an adventure/quest basis ("Ice Age", "Peter Pan", "Toy Story") he also refers to "Turn of the screw", and the pacing is what one might expect from more literary/psychological pieces. Deviations from this structure are likely to be noticed by readers.

"Why we read fiction" by Lisa Zunshine (Ohio State UP, 2012)

One reason that people read novels is that they enjoy a Theory-of-Mind workout, a chance to create motives and characters from observables. Novelists exploit this. Even if readers get the interpretations wrong, it's exercise, though a good piece of literature usually rewards correct interpretations. Sometimes readers are invited to work out several levels of meaning - "X thought that Y said to Z that ...". Dunbar et al in experiments found that readers had 5-10% error rates up to 4 levels, and nearly 60% on 5th level. Readers commonly short-cut some of these levels - "X doesn't like Z". Novels like "Clarissa" offer readers lot of opportunities to practice.

She then considers metarepresentation. When a piece of information ("X doesn't like Z", say) is represented, it's associated with meta-data (e.g. "K thinks that"). Sometimes this meta-data (aka tag) is implicit. It's cognitively hard work to keep in mind all the statements and related tags. She points out that in schitzophrenia, the tags are often lost - "I wish I was beautiful" and "Daddy said I was beautiful" become "I am beautiful". She writes that Our capacity for "monitoring and reestablishing the boundaries within which each representation remains useful" thus underlies crucially our practices of literary interpretation. She considers two particularly challenging scenarios -

• Unreliable narrators - "Lolita", where the tag "I think that" is elided by the narrator, and the reader forgets that when the narrator says that many other men were attracted to Lolita, we're seeing things through his eyes. In such pieces the readers' initial trust is broken.
• Detective novels - Readers initially distrust everyone. Sometimes (to increase the final surprise) the reader's not told what's happening in the detective's head. If in a novel the reader's usually told, then the exceptions are significant. She points out that "The narrative economics of the short story, which necessarily limit the number of minds that could be read and misread, makes it convenient to posit the detective's mind as one of the "mystery" minds, along with that of the main suspect" and thinks that Auden's "In his sexual life, the detective must be either celibate or happily married" observation might be because the complexities of relationships (at the same time as source-monitoring to solve the crime) will overload the reader.

I found the book useful.

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Merja Polvinen (Broadly speaking, whereas our Theory of Mind makes it possible for us to invest literary characters with a potential for a broad array of thoughts, desires, intentions, and feelings and then to look for textual cues that allow us to figure out their states of mind and thus predict their behaviour, our metarepresentational ability allows us to discriminate among the streams of information coming at us via all this mind-reading. It allows us to assign differently weighed truth-values to representations originating from different sources)

"Postscript to The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

• "the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left", (p.3)
• "I would define poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed" (p.8)
• "It is necessary to create constraints in order to invent freely" (p. 2 5)
• "when a writer plans something new, and conceives a different kind of reader, he wants to be, not a market analyst, cataloguing expressed demands, but, rather, a philosopher, who senses the pattern of the Zeitgeist. He wants to reveal to his public what it should want, even if it does not know it. He wants to reveal the reader to himself" (p. 4 9)
• "the rediscovery not only of plot but also of enjoyability, was to be realized by the American theorists of postmodernism" (p.6 5)
• "every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism)" (p.6 6)

"The Craft" by Rishi Dastidar (ed) (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

I have a few book on how to write poetry, amongst them -

• Judson Jerome's "The poet's handbook". An old classic. "Most good poetry is metrical writing", it says, with chapters on accentual syllabic meter, end rhymes, etc, ending with chapters entitled "Sensationalism in modern poetry" and "Finding and audience: publication."
• Paul Hyland's "Getting into poetry". This is much more about the UK poetry scene - movements, readings, small-press, competitions, organisations, where to get help.
• Ruth Padel's "52 ways of looking at a poem". This has articles about particular poems. I like it.

Nowadays a book to help poets develop needs to be more than a text book containing the rules of sestinas, the use of line-breaks, etc. Sections on Marketing and Networking are useful too, as are sections on various moral and psychological issues, and how to avoid scams. And the examples shouldn't just be from old, canonical poems. What brought this home to me years ago was reading John Redmond's How to write a poem, which dealt with several broader issues and used a Jorie Graham poem in the final chapter ("one of the greatest poems of the late twentieth century") to bring together the ideas from earlier chapters. It's not a beginner's book.

This new book, "The Craft", has articles/essays by many practicing poets. In his Foreward, Dastidar notes that craft "can become a way of excluding people from the art, through suggesting ideas of standards that are unclear to beginners - and even to those who have been writing for a while" (p.11). I've experienced this when others are admired for their mastery of line-breaks. He goes on to write that the book's aim isn't "to supplant craft in poetry or overthrow it, but rather to broaden and deepen what it means in the 21st century".

The sections deal with Forms, Making Poems, Bringing Poems to Life, and Craft meeting Real Life. I like the approach. It mixes informative sections with sections that focus on the poet. Indeed, I'd be tempted to have sections that pull back even further from the text itself. Why are you trying to write poetry rather than prose? Why write at all? Why show your work to others? Creative Writing tutors alas have a vested interested in keeping people writing.

Personal mentors also want the people who pay them to continue writing, though I heard on a podcast recently a mentor who said that she sometimes only had a single meeting with clients. A mentor can ask the client what they want and help them achieve it. Or the mentor may begin by finding out what the client really wants - if they think they were brought up badly, publishing poetry about their experiences may not be the best option.

I suppose it has to be the pupils' choice in the end so why shouldn't they write poetry if they want to, even if they might be more successful - even by their own definition of "success" - if they wrote prose. And this book will help them. Anyone who writes poetry will find help here, along with things to argue against. The articles all include practical advice.

Marvin Thompson gives useful advice about choosing sestina end-words and breaking rules - see also my sestinas article. I don't agree with Carrie Etter's definition of the prose poem, or with the idea of producing such a definition (though I agree with her observation that "writers generally fall into one of two camps: those who 'spill' or overwrite and them slash away, and those who build a piece of writing word by word" - I'm a builder). I prefer Tania Hershman's article showing how assumptions and techniques can be sneaked across the border between prose and poetry - "I often find with both stories and poems that I have buried the beginning in the middle, because I've had to write my way into it, the way a high-jumper has a run-up before she leaps. So I delete the first paragraph, the first few lines".

Karen McCarthy Woolf gets a bit heavy - "The possibility to expose and resist the binary via the couplet's duality, which can simultaneously rupture and repair, was also compelling". Caroline Bird makes several points I'm going to bear in mind -

• "When you reach the line you instinctively suspect is the end (perhaps it neatly sums up an an emotion or brings the situation to a close, or lands on a particularly beautiful image) slalom through it"
• "A metaphor doesn't know it's a metaphor, it thinks it's real, just like a dream believes itself, so the poet's job is to dream the dream not translate it"
• "keep writing until the subject matter is no longer what the poem is about"
• "If you commit with enough gusto and grit to following the impetus of language, writing into the nothingness, focusing on the pictures as they appear in your head, then literally any subject matter can and will lead you to profundity whether you like it or not"

Monizi Alvi tackles line-breaks - "it's as well that reasons can be given for them in terms of what they're doing, or achieving, in the poem" she writes. Indeed, but even when she can choose the poems to comment upon, I don't find her explanations convincing. She writes "I was also keen to to avoid any possible rigidity of form" yet in the accompanying extract the left-alignments are regularly organised. Antosh Wojcik's piece might work better as a live demo.

The pieces are enthusiastic rather than balanced, not mentioning downsides. Rishi Dastidar suggests that poets try the very types of (gimmicky?) titles that make me distrust the poem. Liz Berry's advocacy of the vernacular could be viewed as privileging of one's own language over that of the majority of readers - should the English abroad really continue speaking English, only louder?

Dean Atta discusses writing in other voices, a topic whose controversies are largely evaded here. If people are impressed by a poem in the voice of a racist homophobic white man, it shouldn't matter who wrote it. You might think that a non-racist female would have more difficulty writing this than a racist homophobic white man would, but knowing that Patricia Smith wrote the poem doesn't make the poem better - it makes the poet more impressive. And if Patricia Smith's poem wasn't good, I don't see why it's any more shameful than writing a poem unconvincingly set in Paris. Atta suggests reasons why poets might want to adopt personae - "Do you want to better understand and empathise with someone who has wronged you? Do you want to write a bridge between your experience and theirs? Do you want to highlight some universal truth that transcends race, gender, sexuality, age, etc? Or are you simply just bored or writing about yourself?"

Clare Pollard in her article on translation points out how it can lead to friendships and to escaping the limitation of local trends. She admits to admiring Somali poetry "which can seem clumsy ... the politically charged rhetoric ... the seeming bagginess, the extreme alliteration, the shifts in address, the digressions" thinking that "they just use techniques which are currently deemed 'unfashionable' on Creative Writing courses".

Harry Man, dealing with tech, points out that "It's often said among the security services, their successes are private and their failures are public, where for poets the inverse is true". I've never used Instagram. He points out that "Instapoetry's craft is in its hashtags and the timing of posts, in its similarities to famous quotes, its combinations of backdrops and text, consistency of style and approach, community interaction, keywords .... These elements of an instapoem's craft have usurped a lot of the techniques we're used to seeing ... So nobody panic, the instapoem is just as well crafted, it's just that we can't always see the brushstrokes". The list of apps (for AR, etc) is eye-opening. I might try a few.

Joelle Taylor points out that spoken word "is bound with the politics of class, race and gender", and that "Authenticity is a key word in the art. When dissected 'authentic' invariably means 'working class'".

Julia Webb offers tips on how to write about others without upsetting them. She also points out that "Changing or losing some of the details of a real-life event can make it more believable as a poem".

The nearest I've come to writing this type of article is Truth to materials and Heather McHugh which fits in with the Craft theme, but is short on practical advice.

Other reviews

• then do better
• Jake Morris-Campbell
• Billy Mills ('The Technique' would make for a less snappy book title, but perhaps a more accurate one.)

"The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2nd edition)", H. Porter Abbott (CUP, 2008)

"this book ... is not an overview of approaches to narrative. It is, rather, my best attempt to harvest and make readable what is known about how audiences and the forms of narrative interact" (p.xv). There wasn't much that was new for me here, so maybe my grap of theory's improving. Points that I made a note of were

• "This human tendency to insert narrative time into static, immobile scenes seems almost automatic, like a reflex action. We want to know not just what is there, but also what happened" (p.7)
• "The term "closure" can refer to more than the resolution of a story's central conflict. It has to do with a broad range of expectations and uncertainties" (p.57)
• "In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote the conclusion of King Lear, not only saving Cordelia's life but also marrying her off to Edgar ... That version held the English stage for the next 160 years" (p.58)
• "Actually in all narratives there are already at least two worlds, not one. They correspond to the levels of narrative. 1) The storyworld in which the characters reside and the events take place. 2) The world in which the narration takes place." (p.169)
• "Crux: A critical point, often a gap, in a fictional narrative where there is an insufficiency of cues, or where cues are sufficiently ambiguous, to create a major disagreement in the intentional interpretation of the narrative" (p.231)

I like the term Hayden White used - "emplotment" - for the tendency to twist historical facts to make them into "masterplots" (standard story skeletons like "rags to riches").

"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide" by Richard Bradford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

With section headings like "What is poetry?", "Evaluation" and "Why do we write and read poetry?", this book was hard to ignore.

Re "What is poetry?" he emphasises "double pattern" - the medium and the message. In "Evaluation" he suggests that aspects of the medium and the message are first explored, then how those two work together. here are some quotes -

• we should add a third element to tenor and vehicle: the 'ground' [context] of the metaphor ... the dynamics of contrasting and associating verbal images has unsettled the stabilizing function of ground or context, p.14
• the relation between the vehicles unsettles the relation between vehicle, tenor and ground, p.15
• When we deconstruct a text, we show how its apparent affirmation or order or truth is constantly unsettled by its necessary dependence upon the falsifications of language ... The problem that had taxed the New Critics was of how to return the perverse, irrational discourse of poetry to the world in which language is supposed to disclose truths and make sense. Deconstruction provided not so much a solution as an escape from the problem. Deconstructionists argue that out attempts to distil an unrefined and immutable truth from any kind of linguistic text is a contradiction in terms since language creates rather than mediates truth, p.23
• The period when the so-called 'Augustan couplet' was the predominant feature of all verse was the one in the history of poetry when the collective will of poets and the broader cultural establishment maintained that the principal criteria for acceptable poetic writing were clarity, precision and coherence, p.37
• because the material that we draw upon to make poems is also the stuff of wills, death certificates, constitutions and declarations of undying love between very real people, our breaking and rewriting of the rules that govern non-poetic language are much more than indulgence or entertainment, p.40
• Andrew Marvell is seen as the only poet of any worth who maintained the Metaphysical tradition into the later 17th century, p.60
• Donald Davie ... divided poetry into five stylistic types: subjective, dramatic, objective, like music, like mathematics ,p.71
• the heroic couplet was used in more than half the poems published between 1660 and 1750, p.74
• The paradox that had beset Romanticism, of how the 'real language of men' could be reconciled with a medium that was self-evidently separate from 'real' discourse, had become the poem's means of self-preservation, p.101
• The early Modernists, primarily the Imagists, had engaged with the ideals and objectives of the Romantics and, in practice, had been far more pioneering and radical in their attempts to realize them, p.108
• the Modernist and post-modern poem are the same thing. No other aesthetic genre, linguistic, visual or musical, involves the same degree of formal continuity, p.115
• after the 1950s ... Literary history is now complete ... There can, of course, be limitless combinations and permutations ... but none in their own right will ever again involve a break with convention ,p.119
• The poem is the point at which the rational and the illogical are caused, deliberately, to coexist and interact, p.166
• poems are, by their nature, self-deconstructive ... the poet is the conscious premeditated source of these acts of auto-deconstruction, p.171
• Three women, Hilda Doolittle ('HD'), Harriet Monroe and Amy Lowell were actively involved in the Imagist rebellion against the entrapment of the lyrical 'I' within the forms and conventions of a male-dominated high culture, p.196
• Poets such as [Tom] Leonard and Kwesi Johnson regard conventional poetic structures and indeed the orthodoxies of standard English as hostages to cultural hegemony. They are, however, in the minority, p.226
• In terms purely of skill and technique, good poets are those who create a fertile contrapuntal relationship between the two dimensions of the double pattern ... the quality of a poem is concomitant with the poet's success in creating from the double pattern a perspective upon a theme, idea, experience or object that cannot be obtained via non-poetic language, p.243
• excellence is apparent when naturalization [i.e. paraphrasing] appears unproblematic but where it is equally evident that the skills employed by the poet achieve the apparent state of transparency, and test and sometimes exceed the capacities of the critic to describe how they do so, p.250
• For much of the [1700s] Poems could indeed address any idea or theme but they could do so only as ostentatious subsidaries to the work undertaken by prose, p.256
• it can be no accident that the emergence of Romanticism brought with it a collateral programme of writings that sought to justify the independence of poetry according to purely aesthetic principles, p.257
• We attempt to form a paraphrase of the poem, yet the poem, by its very nature, resists us. It is the dynamic between these two trajectories that holds the key to our attraction to poetry, p.258

"Post-colonial literature" by Christopher O'Reilly (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

"Much of the focus of this book is about how authors from subjugated peoples and races have come to take the English language, taught to them initially by their colonial masters, and have used it for their own literary purposes, transforming it in the process. This book seeks to provide an introduction to why, how and when this occurred" (p.8)

• "the establishment of [Indian] colleges led to the creation of an English-educated, and predominantly Hindu élite, who would be critical of both their own religious orthodoxies, such as the caste system and child brides, and of British rule" (p.17)
• "the trade for slaves and gold along the west coast of Africa was conducted by African middlemen at the coast. no significant British incursions were made into the continent until the 19th century" (p.30)
• "There is no doubt, however, that missions in Africa were a powerful force which radically altered African society" (p.31)
• "The experience of colonisation in Kenya was different from that in Nigeria because of the amount of land which was taken by white settlers" (p.39)
• "The Caribbean is unique among the regions under discussion in that its original inhabitants, Amerindian, Arawaks and Caribs, no longer inhabit the area" (p.48)
• "black women were not depicted as naturally beautiful in the imported popular culture that influenced much West Indian society" (p.54)
• "The experience of women within empire was often one of double oppression" (p.67)
• "It is also important to bear in mind that much, though certainly not all, discussion of post-colonial literature takes place within the context of post-modernism" (p.103)
• "Though both colonialism and patriarchy have been closely entwined historically, an end to formal empire has not meant an end to the oppression of women in the former colonies " (p.111)

"After confession" by Kate Sontag and David Graham (eds) (Graywolf Press, 2001)

Poetry as autobiography. Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" gets several mentions, as does Lowell's use of a wife's letters. In the introduction it says "Aesthetically speaking, personal poems can go wrong in many ways ... they might fall anywhere in the deadly spectrum that runs from cocktail-party bore to megalomaniac" (p.6). But who cares if it's personal or not? "Questions like "can the speaker of the poem be identified with the poet" are "the equivalent of asking not if an object is useful or beautiful but how much it cost" (p.12). What is the self anyway? "We're an anthology of selves, and so, inconsistent; but the anthology is chosen by the same editor, and so, consistent" (p.12)

Andrew Hudgins' article includes a useful list of autobiographer's lies. The earlier one are white, consciously done and harmless -

• Removing the boring stuff. Combining minor characters.
• Replacing lost detail
• Adding fictional conventions
• Emotion evasion
• Recreating the self (i.e. lying to oneself)
• Appropriating facts from others' lives
• Inserting one's adult thoughts into one's childhood mind
• Misinterpreting memories
• Misunderstanding memories, looking back as an adult "the biggest lie, the least defensible logically, ethically, or morally; and it's inescapable for a writer attempting to create an artistically coherent work" (p.195)

I found Judith Harris's essay is the most readable - informative while defending Olds against Glück. I liked Carol Muske-Dukes' too. She writes "The last line of [Ariel] is "Fixed stars govern a life." Plath's own version ended with the visionary "bee" poems, and the last line of her book would have read, "The bees are flying. They taste the Spring."" (p.289)

There was little unexpected about the morality of being confessional about others. "Intention seems to be crucial in what one divulges about others. Are you willing first of all to divulge as much about yourself as you are about others? Are you able to realistically examine your motives? Are you trying to be the hero or are you trying to educate yourself? ... I often think the true nonconsensual participant on one's writing is some part of oneself that resists being revealed, like some secret inner personality" - Robin Hemley, Nonconcensensual Nonfiction: Writing About Those Who Don't Want to Be Written About

Here's a list of snippets -

• "Milton never wrote a poem about his mother ... or any other relative ... not even a sonnet about his daughters ... if we started with Augustine's Confessions (c.400), we could traverse the next 1,365 years with hardly an egotistical bump in the road until ... Rousseau ... It is with Wordsworth that all this changes" (p.81), Billy Collins
• "Our relationship with literature has long been a mix of the clinical and the passionate. We tend to go public with the clinical while keeping our passionate attachments to ourselves " (p.90), Billy Collins
• "current wisdom tells us that a poem must be true to itself, not to the facts." (p.88), Billy Collins
• "Archetype is the machinery through which autobiography achieves something larger than the single life; and autobiography is the means by which archetypes are renewed" (p.105), Stanley Plumley
• "Language poetry, notwithstanding the political posturing of its advocates, seems to me politically vacuous not only because of its captious repartee, and its systematic abandonment of the lyric "I", but because it denies that the morally responsible human subject is even theoretically possible" (p.319), Alice Ostriker
• "I would feel more comfortable with persona poems if each poem would in same way advise me that the experience presented may not be the poet's own" (p.159), Ted Kooser
• "The background of confessionalism is one of a convergence of anxieties shared by an entire population shaken by Word War II, and by the individual's dissociation from some of the values - religious, social, and moral - he or she once relied upon for personal stability." (p.260), Judith Harris
• "A novel, if it is to be convincing, must share characteristics with the world we live in. Its people must act in ways we recognise as human, and do so in places and with objects that seem believable. We are better prepared for reading fiction because most of what it tells us is already known. In a poem most of what is said is neither known nor unknown. The world of things or the world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually fades into the background. It is as if the poem were replacing that world as a way of establishing its own primacy, oddly asserting itself over the world" Mark Strand, The New York Times Book Reviews, 15th Sep, 1991, p.36
• "Greek lyric poets did not aim to make themselves interesting by their peculiar sensibilities, but sought rather to demonstrate the general and the basic by the example of themselves" - Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, 1962 p.151

Other reviews

• Edward Byrne

"Understand Postmodernism" by Glenn Ward (Hachette, 2010)

I found this book useful. I think I'm a postmodernist, albeit reluctantly. I'm happy with the arbitrary sign. I think word meanings aren't trivially deduced, that they depend on other words (I believe in Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a word is how it's used). However I don't see why that leads to assuming that language can't point beyond language or that there is no world beyond language, or that translation is impossible. Language isn't neutral/transparent (though it's often sensible to treat it that way). I think that language can affect thoughts (e.g. our traditional use of "he" isn't helpful). It may give rise to thoughts (in maths, a new notation can spur development) Our thought patterns easily end up as binaries which may not be explicit in our writing.

I can believe that "the self is an effect, and not a cause, of the facade", and that "You are "a peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a while"" (Goffman). Who we are depends on who we're with.

There are many similacrums around, each an addition to reality. A painting might not be a depiction of something that existed, though it may look so. It's an additional object or event. And yes, we might be living in "The Matrix". Equally we might be in need of a job, and a lectureship in this sort of stuff might be our only hope.

The author points out that architecture (its rejection of modernist failures) and literature were particularly important at the start of po-mo. Developments in other arts were generalised from these. Its mixing of past-styles could be seen as nostalgia.

Whatever one believes about the truth of science or quantum mechanics, your mobile works whatever the discourse. Lyotard's observations about science seem fair enough (and nothing new) but from them one can't conclude that science "can no longer be valued for the contribution it makes towards human progress" (p.223). If "Lyotard ... argues that scientific truth-claims can only be legitimated by reference to the specific language game in which they are made. There are no absolute or universal facts, only stories that 'work' at particular times for their particular 'speakers'."

Here are some quotes -

• "Images are vivid but shallow, and meaning is in crisis. There are no truths, only interpretations. 'Meanings' occur between audiences and signs; they do not emerge directly from authors or 'reality'", p.ix
• "The 'self' is replaced by 'identity', and identity is a collage of cultural scraps" p.ix
• "Postmodernism breaks with some aspects of modernism but continues or extends others" p.17
• "Postmodernism theory sees Enlightenment values as, at worst, excuses for imperialism, social control and the exercise of power" p.17
• "For many critics, Baudrillard's work became increasingly silly after the early 1980s" (p.97)
• "German and Italian neo-expressionist painting, once threatening to New York art, was foundering, and young Americans ... were ready to take charge. Baudrillard's Simulations arrived right on time to buttress these artists' claims and give an aura of theory to what was, for the most part, a shrewd move by art in the direction of the media and advertising industry", Sylère Lotringer (Artforum, 2003)
• "According to Greenberg, every historical age has a 'dominant art form', and between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries the dominant art form was literature. This means that literature became the prototype which all other art forms tried to imitate. For example, nineteenth-century salon paintings tried to tell sentimental, melodramatic tales and, in doing so, they were aspiring to the condition of literature" p.57
• "anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial" John Searle, NYR of Books, 1984
• "Foucault [...] has a tendency to romanticize emotionally disturbed people as subversive elements in society" (p.202)

What about the production of testable hypotheses. If language creates reality, and flies crash into windows, is it necessary to posit that flies have language?

"The great modern poets" by Michael Schmidt (ed), (Quercus, 2014)

An anthology where most poets get 2 pages of poems (Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Lowell, and Ashbery get 4), a page of photos and a page-long introduction. The editor points out that "all of [the poetry was] written to be read, and to be read aloud, though not in the first instance to be performed. Each of the poets in this book intends the poem to be sounded". He's excluded some difficult poets, though he adds that "The problem most readers have is that they want to understand through paraphrase. They want to compel the poem to make a prose statement. ... Few make sense in the way prose makes sense ... No good poem makes common sense: the essence of a good poem is the uncommonness of the sense it makes. It is a structuring of words in which many meanings, or meanings at many levels, are enacted. If we read poems as prose, they have very little to say" (p.4)

Edna St. Vincent Millay is there. So is Betjeman and CH Sisson. The introductions aren't always neutral - "[Larkin] did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry" (p.153). The poetry's not as knock-out as I thought it would be. I liked "Imagine a forest/ A real forest" (WS Graham).

"Gothic" by Fred Botting (Routledge, 1996)

The book charts the Gothic from being a reaction against the order and certainties of neo-classicism to postmodernism where "uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form" (p.168).

• "Gothic signifies a writing of excess ... Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic" (p.1)
• "Throughout the eighteenth century the sublime constituted a major area of debate among writers and theorists of taste" (p.3)
• "Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction ... The decade of the French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was at its most popular" (p.5)
• "transgression is important not only as an interrogation of received rules and values, but in the identification, reconstitution or transformation of limits [though] the line between transgression and a restitution of acceptable limits remained a difficult one to discern. Some moral endings are little more than perfunctory tokens, thin excuses for salacious excesses" (p.8)
• "In the eighteenth century the emphasis was placed on expelling and objectifying threatening figures of darkness and evil, casting them out and restoring proper limits ... In the nineteenth century, the security and stability of social, political and aesthetic formulations are much more uncertain. ... Gothic became part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression" (p.10)
• "One of the principal horrors lurking throughout Gothic fiction is the sense that there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language" (p.14)
• "In the United States, where the literary canon is composed of works in which the influence of romances and Gothic novels is far more overt, literature again seems virtually an effect of a Gothic tradition" (p.16)
• "The popularity of the Gothic novel highlights the way that the control of literary production was shifting away from the guardians of taste and towards the reading public" (p.47)
• "Many of the main ingredients of the genre that was to be known as the Gothic novel can be found in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ... The mixing of medieval romance and realistic novel tries to overcome the perceived limitations of both ... English Protestant culture is distinguished from the southern European, and thus Catholic, background which is constructed as both exotic and superstitious, fascinating but extreme in its aesthetic and religious sentiments" (p.48)
• "throughout Radcliffe's novels, it is the heroines who, though subjugated, persecuted and imprisoned, still escape ... Apart from the malevolent villains, men play a very small and generally ineffectual part in the narratives" (p.70)
• "In the period dominated by Romanticism, Gothic writing began to move inside" (p.91)
• "Frankenstein, though one of the texts now synomymous [sic] with Gothic, deploys standard Gothic conventions sparingly to bring the genre thoroughly and critically within the orbit of Romanticism" (p.101)
• "[Frankenstein] was dramatised, in burlesque and melodramatic forms, fifteen times by 1826. The theatre was important in the process of popularising Gothic terrors and horrors" (p.105)
• "In the mid-nineteenth century there is a significant diffusion of Gothic traces throughout literary and popular fiction, within the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories, especially" (p.113)
• "At the end of the nineteenth century familiar Gothic figures - the double and the vampire - re-emerged in new shapes" (p.135)
• "It has been the cinema that has sustained Gothic fiction in the twentieth century" (p.156)
• "With Coppola's Dracula, then, Gothic dies, divested of its excesses, of its transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter" (p.180)

"A brief history of diaries" by Alexandra Johnson (Hesperus Press, 2011)

From Pepys to Blogs, via travel diaries, war diaries, and writers' diaries.

• 'What is a diary as a rule?' wondered Ellen Terry. 'A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards' (p.13)
• 'As a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal,' Boswell mused. (p.32)
• It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries, but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it - Francis Bacon (p.35)
• From courtship in 1862 to Tolstoy's death in 1910, their lives were defined by diaries. A year into marriage, Tolstoy decided they should share theirs. For forty two years, they read, wrote in and commented on the other's diaries ... While Tolstoy's diary is sparse when writing his two masterpieces, Sonya's nearly doubles (p.56)
• By the time of her arrest, Anne [Frank] had rewritten nearly two-thirds of her diary (p.76)
• On 23 January 2010 Pope Benedict XVI urged priests: ... 'to proclaim the Gospel by employing ... blogs' (p.89)
• Pepys' diaries weren't deciphered until 1825 (p.100)

"In other worlds" by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 2011)

A pacy, informative and entertaining book about Dystopia, Utopias and soft SF - a mix of autobiography, articles, talk transcriptions and reviews, from the point of view of a reader, student and writer. Her reading seems patchy - she's read Northrop Frye, and as a child read many of the SF classics. Here are just a few quotes

• Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? ... Are we the slaves of our own stories - our family narratives and dramas, for instance ... Are they essential to us - part of the matrix of our shared humanity? (p.41)
• Marxism and its cousin, Christian socialism, were such neo-mythical structures. Their pattern was a linear one, like that of Christianity, but for God's grand plan they substituted History, a godlike entity that would enfold in an inevitable way and justify you id you were on the right side (p.53)
• So that's why Heaven and Hell - or at least some of the shapes their inhabitants have traditionally taken - have gone to Planet X. A lot of other gods and heroes have gone there as well. They've moved shop because they're acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn't be here (p.65)
• Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often - traditionally - signalled by a shipwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures (p.157)

Other reviews

• Kevin Barry
• Martin Petto (In Other Worlds, then, is a book about science fiction written by someone who doesn't know much about it for an audience that presumably knows nothing about it. Why on Earth should the science fiction reader continue? Many won't ... her 2002 New Yorker review of Le Guin's The Birthday of the World and Other Stories provides a dress rehearsal for the first section of this book: the clumsy taxonomy, the linking of SF with theological speculation, the idea that the Soviet Union put the nail in the coffin for utopia. At the same time, it continues to reveal how half-formed some of her views are.)

"In other words" by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury, 2017)

A book of articles (dual language - English/Italiano) that initially appeared in Internazionale. In the "Author's Note" she writes that "Apart from obligatory correspondence, I have written exclusively in Italian for more than two years" (p.xiii). She wrote the book in Italian, in Italy. It's translated by Ann Goldstein.

She was born in London, and brought up in the States, using Bengali until she went to school. After that, Bengali remained the preferred language at home, her mother trying to stay as Indian as possible. She's multi-talented (several degrees, a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, a Pulitzer for her first book of short stories - though she writes "I received a prize that I was sure I did not deserve, that seemed to me a mistake", p.167).

I know several people who suddenly had to cope in a new language. I've read about people who, because of brain injury, etc, struggle with language. I'm not convinced that Lahiri's experiences of learning a new language are any more interesting than theirs. There's no humour in this book, and her insights and observations sound rather mundane to me. She thinks that

• "Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, of possibility" (p.41)
• "reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading" (p.163)

Even her views on a work's scaffolding sound familiar. What is interesting is why such a good writer in English should abandon writing it for 2 years. It's only as late as p.153 that she writes "I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali". She thinks that "No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are part of me. ... I'm a writer: I identify myself completely with language, I work with it. And yet the wall keeps me at a distance, separates me. The wall is inevitable. It surrounds me wherever I go, so that I wonder if perhaps the wall is me" (p.142). Adding to her problems is her feeling that "a sense of imperfection has marked my life. I've been trying to improve myself forever, correct myself, because I've always felt I was a flawed person" (p.111) and "I write to feel alone. Ever since I was a child it has been a way of withdrawing, of finding myself" (p.185)

And what of her own family? Though we learn early on about how languages affected her early life, it isn't until p.136 that we learn about whether her husband and children are with her, and how they communicate.

Being a learner of Italian I was interested in what she found difficult. She makes a note of the Italian words she doesn't know - "Rereading the notebook, I notice certain words that I have to write more than once, that resist my memory. Simple but stubborn (fruscio, schianto, arguto, broncio" (p.49). I have a similar issue with some words. The translation seemed fine to me though on p.222 "uno scacco matto" is translated as "a dead-end", which may be correct but it's a surprise, because literally it means "checkmate".

Other reviews

• Joseph Luzzi
• Tessa Hadley (I’m not so sure about the style in In Other Words, at least as it is rendered in translation (I can just about read the Italian, but can’t judge it). Sometimes its abruptness just feels blunt ... Lahiri’s book feels starved of actual experiences of Italy, or reflections on how that language gives form to its different world.)

"The Ghost - A Cultural History" by Susan Owens (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Ghosts have changed over the years. John Donne said he saw a vision of his (living) wife. Samuel Johnson was open on the ghost question. Richard Burton (of Anatomy of Melancholy fame) studied the documentary evidence through the ages, and this author does likewise.

• The witch of Endor in the bible summoned up the ghost of Samuel.
• "While a modern ghost might materialise, drift gently towards a door and disperse, in the medieval period it was more likely to break the door down and beat you to death" (p.9)
• The Reformation got rid of Purgatory, which was a source of returning spirits.
• "The rise of pamphlets towards the end of the sixteenth century coincided with two other decisive factors: a skeptical attitude to pre-Reformation religious doctrine and a growing cult of personality" (p.42)
• "Having lost their traditional role at the Reformation, ghosts were ripe for re-invention ... They became obsessed with seeing justice done. Ghosts found a natural home in revenge drama" (p.46)
• "Marlowe's drama conformed to the latest state of post-Reformation opinion (that 'ghosts' were actually spirits and not the souls of the dead)" (p.49)
• "As they were represented in ballad form, ghosts ... put things in order that had been thrown into disorder." (p.92)
• Around 1660, the rebuttal to Hobbes' materialism was that people who didn't believe in ghosts and spirits probably didn't believe in God or any principles of religion.
• "One of the main reasons for ghosts wearing white was to do with the colour of grave clothes ... the Burial in Woollens Acts began to come into effect [in 1666] decreeing that English wool must be used for shrouds" (p.164)
• By 1730 "a sceptical attitude to ghosts had become a litmus test for membership of intelligent, urban society" (p.107). Hoaxes (e.g. the Cock Lane ghost), when revealed, were opportunities to mock the gullibility of the masses.
• "For Wesley, apparitions and other supernatural phenomena served as evidence of the spiritual realm." (p.111)
• In the 18th century "The churchyard began to exert an irresistible magnetism for poets" (p.115). "Over the course of the eighteenth century it became fashionable to appreciate ruins" (p.121)
• "Until Walpole wrote Orlando, ghosts had generally been regarded as symbolic figures ... Walpole revived the medieval idea, expressed in saints' biographies, that ghosts could be visitors from the distant past, stirred into violent retributive action by injustice" (p.124)
• "It was Lewis [writer of The Monk] who caught the mood of the times. He insisted on the physicality of ghosts" (p.125)
• "In the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of the sublime introduced the concepts of terror and wonder as emotions to be pursued" (p.126)
• "Romanticism, with its focus on the expression of intense emotional states and subjective, individual experience, was transforming the arts ... inventing a bold visual vocabulary to express the ghosts" (p.132)
• Shelley wrote "We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron nor Monk G. Lewis seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without also believing in God" (p.138)
• "At the end of the eighteenth century, a new kind of social satire emerged which simply presented ghosts as funny in themselves - both for their peculiar physiognomy, and in the effect of their appearance on their victims" (p.162)
• "the late eighteenth century also saw a more general change in the appearance of ghosts: it was a time when a range of sartorial options became available to them" (p.164)
• "It was only in the late eighteenth century that ... they became see-through ... concurrently with developments in optical entertainments and light shows ... In visual art, this new quality was also to do with an increasing use of the medium of watercolour ... When Dickens made Marley's ghost see-through in A Christmas Carol, he was drawing on a convention that had only relatively recently been established ... In time, purportedly true accounts of cloudy or see-through ghosts began to be recorded" (p.168)
• "a strong connection was made between ghosts and the aristocracy: ghosts were walking evidence of a family's antiquity" (p.177)
• "Victorian ghosts were shaped by the demands of the magazine format: stories had to be brief, gripping and sensational" (p.190)
• "In the middle of the Victorian era ... The British stopped being afraid of ghosts, drew the curtains and tried to usher them in ... Crucially in most quarters (if not all), spiritualism was not regarded as a challenge to Christianity, but as complementary, even affirmative" (p.200)
• "Early photography was almost uncannily predisposed to the creation of ghostly images " (p.204)
• "Ever since the Reformation, [British artists and writers] had mostly described ghosts visiting people in their urban environments. In the late nineteenth century ... they began instead to find them deep in the country" (p.222)
• "from the 1890s until the Second World War, artists and writers took ghosts out of the historic mansions and urban homes they had so vigorously haunted for most of the Victorian era and re-located them in the heart of the country, down leafy lanes, deep within ancient barrows and along the routes of old pilgrim-paths" (p.9)
• "the post-war years and 1950s turned out to be relatively lean ones for ghosts ... As people's imaginations were captured by space exploration ... the traditional place of ghosts was quickly usurped by aliens" (p.249)
• "Norman's book is one of an enormous number of works published from the middle of the century onwards that discuss and list British ghosts in such detail" (p.254)
• "ghosts have been liberated from the confines of their habitual haunts and let loose in a larger arena" (p.263)
• "Now liberated from the margins of visual culture and from ghost-story ghettoes, ghosts' rich emotional potential, whether as metaphor, Gothic reality or something indefinably in-between, is decisively shaping art and literature " (p.267)

So ghosts survived for several reasons -

• Belief in ghosts opens the way to belief in spirits, angels and gods
• They're a useful literary device - a wander in a graveyard would lack drama without them
• Urban legends - publicity stunts
• Mental problems

"My Grandmother's Glass Eye" by Craig Raine (Atlantic Books, 2016)

The inside cover says "There is something Johnsonian in Craig Raine's common sense - an elegant wrecking ball used with precision and delicacy to pick off the pretentious, the platitudinous, the over-promoted". Chapter headings include "Vagueness and Accuracy", "Rhythm", "The Line", and "Metaphor". He deals with these issues in a way that poetry readers might find useful.

Clarity

• "I am against poetry which is vague, pretentious and exaggerated. I am against neither difficult poetry nor pellucid poetry", p.x
• "Bad readers, like the poor, are always with us. And their badness takes the form of the complacent confusion they bring. Poetry isn't diminished by clarity", p.xx
• "It seems odd to me that we are still trapped in the idea that art and sincerity are logically incompatible to poetry", p.2
• "both music and poetry appear at once unspecific and all-encompassing. If a single meaning cannot be assigned with any conviction, then perhaps this is because both arts are too profound to be paraphrased", p.12
• [of Ricks] "What is the procedure, the methodology here? To notice a pun, notice it is irrelevant, yet explain its 'function' - as a suspect to be eliminated from enquiries", p.36
• "the first task we require of poetry is to mean something. Second, when we read, we eliminate unhelpful connotations of words and look for the relevant meaning - the one which unlocks the sense of the poem. Deconstruction is no way to read poetry", p.155
• "Banville is not alone in this preference for imprecision, for indistinctness, for fog", p.125
• "Paul Muldoon's 'Quoof' is a genuinely difficult poem. Here are three critics - Tim Kendall, Clair Wills and (not sorry about this) Tom Paulin again - all getting it wrong", p.148

Rhythm

• He quotes several poets who claim that the rhythm of a poem came before (sometimes years before) the words - e.g. "Words fall into rhythms before they make sense. It often happens that I discover what a poem is about through a process of listening to what its rhythms are telling me", Anne Stevenson, Poetry (March 2007)

Metaphor

He compares the execution of some attempts tackling the cemetery-city trope - e.g. "Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones" (Julian Barnes), "citylike miniature eternity" (Allen Ginsberg), and "headstones presented the appearance of an overdeveloped city of the future" (Ian McEwan), "the high-gloss obelisks of the new burial plots, a miniature Chicago of the dead" (Julie Maxwell) - trying to identify what makes a successful metaphor -

• "The conceit is the opposite of the epic simile which maximises the distance between the two things being compared - to maximise the satisfaction of closure when it eventually comes", p.84
• "What makes a bad metaphor? Metaphor which is vague, metaphor which is pedantic, metaphor which is slow", p.95
• "For a metaphor or simile to work, there must be an obvious distance between the tenor and vehicle ... The effective simile is also a self-conscious simile", p.82

Subtexts

• When a poem (e.g. "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening") seems too simple, it's worth delving. The poet often leaves clues - "a surface 'inadequacy' that prompts further searching", p.120
• "the simplicity, the fit of this solution to the words on the page, is how we know the meaning is right", p.144

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown (The book, it becomes clear, was born out of Raine’s frustration with what he sees as the indulgent and at times ridiculous mystification of poetry, and his corresponding desire to strip it back and show us that poems do, actually, have concrete, graspable meanings. ... it soon transpires that though his aims may be high-minded, his methods are frequently anything but. The cogency of his arguments is warped by their interspersal with what amounts to a series of vendettas waged against other, lesser critics whose fatal misapprehensions and vanities Raine is determined to expose. ... This is an undeniably gripping book – in part because Raine’s own close readings can be insightful and elegant, but also because of the sense you have, holding it, that you’re in a front row seat at a boxing match. Still, there is a fine line between invigoration and assault, and alas, it’s a line that Raine regularly fails to observe. Despite his neat trick of implicating his readers by cosily including us in the circle of his brilliance (“we realise”, “we understand”, “we are all familiar with … ”) the ad hominem nature of his attacks becomes first wearing, then distancing and ultimately alienating)

"Deaths of the Poets" by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, 2017)

A rather relaxed travelogue, dutifully visiting locations associated with the deaths of many poets, starting with Chatterton, then visiting the States, The Spanish Steps, etc. It's a shame that there are no photos.

There are little bursts of interesting writing - the start of Larkinland on p.102 for example - and some interesting details -

• "Do Not Go Gentle ..." was written 6 years before Thomas's father's death.
• "[WCW's] son Bill was called upstairs, examined his father and pronounced him dead, exactly as WCW had done for his own father" (p.216)

I found Olivia Liang's The Trip to Echo Spring about alcoholism more analytical and interesting. There's also "The Savage God: A Study of Suicide" by A. Alvarez.

Other reviews

• Rachel Cooke (The combination of literary biography and what we might call, for brevity’s sake, psycho-geography seems to me, potentially, a bewitching one – particularly when practised by two brilliant, northern poets. But on the page, it doesn’t work at all, and not only because their narrative is so lacking in clarity and vision, so badly in want of a thesis. There are problems of process, too. Oh, but they will hop around. ... It makes you wonder what all the long train journeys and turbulent flights were really for.)
• Stuart Kelly (So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy that the reader easily forgets how tensile and tenuous the strand gathering it all together is. To their supreme credit, they admit misgivings, winningly, throughout, wondering about writing a Footwear Of The Poets and recording a friend’s description of their tour as “holidays on the backs of dead poets”.)

"52: Write a Poem a Week. Start Now. Keep Going." by Jo Bell (Nine Arches Press, 2015)

A crowd-funded motivational course, with prompts and example poems from poets big and small. It can be done alone or (preferably) with a group. I'm trying it alone. I won't wait a week between poems, but I'll try to produce something (Flash or poetry) for most topics.

I think Jo Bell's a good thing for poetry, someone who can engage poets and non-poets. I like the no-nonsense opinions - "poets can be divided into those who are interested in poetry, and those who are only interested in their own poetry" (p.13); A poem is never actually about what it's about. You can write about the same thing on two different days, and get entirely different results" (p.29); "Sport: Personally I hate it. Yes all of it." (p.33); "Don't try to make it Mean Something." (p.102); "Beware sentimentality" (p.119); "nostalgia ... is a kind of poetic comfort eating" (p.133);

She knows that people might opt for easy options, so she offers extra challenges. E.g. re "High Street" - "Make this ... more than a list of shops, more than [a] lament for the days of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Celebrate the cornucopian delights of Aldi, the confessional privacy of the hairdresser. Be a child, a dog, a pigeon" (p.37)

The exercises mostly require delving into one's memories or being observant. Consequently language is largely referential. Though there's encouragement use particulars, and to be individualistic regarding content, the starting points are common to all readers. Self-criticism and checking if one's work is to much like that of others is deferred. In the final section she lays her cards on the table - "You don't need a prompt: just look at the world around you. ... The value of poetry is surely to share experience, precisely and with impact, so that reader and writer can connect ... It is communication, on the level of emotion ... Your job as a poet is to be wholly human, alive to the world around you, and to share your findings" (p.164).

I think some grouchy people may find the optimism off-putting - e.g. the first section ends with "Turn over a new leaf and begin. Everything is going to be amazing" (p.15), which tempts me to reply with a Larkinesque "Bah humbug".

The success of the book partly depends on the reader responding to unanalysed poems. Beginners might not find this easy, either with poems that are centuries old, or newer ones. Why does the first line of the first poem end at "heavy"? Why is it broken into triplets? Why does the poem on p.120 use ampersands? Wouldn't "If In America" be better without the "If"s? What's Claire Crowther's poem about? There's a temptation for people to slavishly imitate poems they don't understand. Perhaps a few notes about the difficult poems might have helped. On the plus side, the sample poems vary in difficulty - readers can reject what they don't find useful.

If one didn't know beforehand which section a poem was in, it would be difficult to guess, but I suspect that also applies to the poems produced by the prompts - they're likely to wonder off-topic.

I'm hopeless at doing writing workshop exercises. With this book I was able to give myself a few days for each theme's ideas to accumulate. Even so, I couldn't do anything with the suggestion that I should write from an animal's PoV, using Ted Hughes and The Windhover as inspiration. I had trouble with Sport too. In the end I came out with more poems and more Flash than I'd otherwise have produced, so I'm glad I read it.

Other reviews

• Goodreads (oh, big mistake. This was not my book. I expected it to be for beginners but I couldn't have been more wrong. Intimidating as hell, and I don't like most of the poems in the book. - Emma Sea)

"Writing short stories" by Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman (Bloomsbury, 2015)

This isn't just a standard "how to write" book (though it rather turns into that later on), and though it's put together by two writers, each section is written by one person (addressed by their first name, so I'll do likewise). This more personal approach makes it an interesting read. It begins with a helpful summary of the short story's history -

• Short fiction's popularity begins temporarily to wane in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for many reasons, from the emergence of the novel to a renewed interest in drama and poetry ... The short story seems to have been hardest hit in England, where it hadn't become as popular as elsewhere (p.5)
• It's widely perceived that the short story went through a lull after the high of the Middle Ages. The common man and woman used them as a form of ribald entertainment rather than instructions for life, or even serious art (p.18)

- later showing the influence of genre, the pros and cons of epiphany, and the way that some writers define their Flash pieces as poems. The two authors write about how they got into writing and what they think about their collections -

• Where do stories come from? ... It's the kind of question most writers don't like to be asked, and most, including me, have developed some pat answer that closes the questioner down (p.36, Courttia)
• I thought the other things I often do while writing - playing online Scrabble, emailing - were to distract my Inner Editor, the voice that immediately starts telling you you're rubbish. But they also keep me in the room (p.48, Tania)
• I spent seven years learning to write short stories and not submitting anything anywhere (p.53, Tania)

Tania's happy to produce a sentence out of the blue then later try to understand it.

The most interesting section for me was "The evolution of a short story: 'Under the Tree'", where Tania describes 7 drafts of a story that took 2.5 years to write and ended up being 804 words long having been 2,200 words at one point.

On p.83 Tania writes "the gift Roy Kesey and Paddy O'Reilly gave me was permission - to take risks, do something I might not otherwise have done. Once I became aware of how I can get permission from other's work, it happens again and again". I've seen other writers use this idea of "permission" in situations where I wouldn't think of using the phrase, which hints of control and authority. I get ideas from people and their writing, and realise that I have needlessly constrained my writing. They don't have control over me, so they can't give me permission. They're most likely unaware of their effect on me. I don't need their "permission" to break the "rules". I chose to follow the "rules" and they have no authority over me.

In Part 2, which is about 30 pages long, there are some short articles by well-known writers - Doerr, Vann, etc

• To me, it seems that there are two distinct types of epiphany. Two kinds of stories, one in which the epiphany happens within the story to the characters, who are either left in the light of that realization about to change something, or, if it's a tragic story, to acknowledge too late the reality of their situation. Then there is another kind of story, in which the character continues blithely on in error off the edge of the page without realizing anything at all, but instead it's us, the readers, who have the light bulb moment about the character. (p.91, Julia Bell)
• The antagonist has the same problem as the protagonist, expressed in a way which antagonizes the protagonist ... The protagonist and antagonist can also fight over physical objects, which become charged with significance because of this fight, and these are called symbols (p.120, David Vann)
• when you write a short story you're relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps (p.121, Clare Wigfall)

In Part 3 the authors take turns to write about topics and offer exercises. Here's one

Ask the class to write about a location that meant a great deal to them when they were eight years old. They must write in present tense and use all the senses to make the piece come alive, and feel as real as it did then. After they have shared their work, ask the group to partner up with the person to their left and pen another short piece, using their partner's location in any way they like

Tania produces a close reading of Janet Frame's "Between my father and the king", which I liked.

Other reviews

• Goodreads

"Making Poetry Matter", Sue Dymoke, Andrew Lambirth and Anthony Wilson (eds), (Bloomsbury, 2013)

The subtitle is "International research on poetry pedagogy". It's repeatedly pointed out that teachers tend not to read or write poetry and hence have trouble teaching it in any other but an academic way. Their feedback to school students about their poetry is understandably constrained by their worries about criticising the personal aspects of the poems. Perhaps art teachers share those concerns.

In places I thought exaggerated claims were made for poetry - in one project where children made "digital poetry", I suspect the (at times minimal) poetry content had little to do with the project's success. And Sasha Matthewman wrote that "Bate writes that poetry has a unique and special power to make the natural world present to the reader and to prompt an emotional connection with nature" (p.73)

There wasn't too much edu-speak. One example is "In this chapter, I frame perspectives towards intercultural communication and ideology within a dynamic paradigm that teachers and students are continually negotiating" (p.146)

Here are some quotes -

• "Some evidence suggests that poetry is the least well-taught part of English curricula in the United Kingdom and abroad ... and is indeed disappearing from the curriculum in some schools in England ... This situation is in stark contrast to the wider interest in poetry of society at large where it is currently finding new audiences through rap music, the slam movement festivals, open mic readings and online" (p.1)
• "we are producing a lot of teachers who remember being anxious around the reading and writing of poetry when they were children themselves, and who are therefore very likely to end up communicating that anxiety, rather than anything else" - Andrew Motion (p.23)
• "OFSTED reported inspection findings in which over half the cohort of teachers interviewed could name only one, two or no poets at all" (p.24)
• "exams - for which poems are in some senses seen as the ideal focus (short and packed with 'language') - ensure that poetry retains a significant place in the curriculum, but often lead to pedagogies which do not result in a satisfactory classroom experience" (p.34)
• "poetry writing has been given very little serious attention in writing research" (p.51)
• "To hold a perception of poetry that identifies the voice of the poem with the self of the writer and outside the constraints of form can leave teachers, according to Andrews, in a difficult position when it comes to responding to such writing" (p.88)
• "there is no clear relationship between teachers' explicit academic knowledge and their effectiveness to teach literacy" (p.89)
• "teachers find difficulty in separating the poem from the individual. The resulting 'sacrosanct' approach may in some part be responsible for a lack of development in the children's capability to redraft their poetry that was noted by Ofsted." (p.93)
• "Contemporary students are arguably at an advantage in that their culture is characterized by what Walter J. Ong has described as 'secondary orality'" (p.120)