"Cake: Issue 5"

I've not seen this magazine before. It publishes poetry, reviews, articles and Flash (max 500 words). Big names are involved - the associate editor's Paul Farley, and there are contributions by Ahren Warner, Helen Mort, etc. For details, see www.cake-poetry.co.uk.

The theme of this issue is manifestos. I like Dan Barrow's contribution the most. He mentions Nathan Hamilton (whose Rialto selection interested me) and whether pluralism exists within poems rather than between them.

There's a range of poetry styles here between Charlotte Geater's and Roy Marshall's. My contribution to the topic is a somewhen pluralist poem on p.40 that's self-conscious about its language, with rhymes, anagrams, and misreadings. Here a some notes -

• The Black Mountain poets included Creeley and Olson
• The uncanny valley effect happens when the more accurate an imitation is, the more unsettling it is
• "second h=e=a=v=e" alludes to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and Pound's 'to break the pentameter, that was the first heave'.
• It ends by asking whether to get away in a "big red car" or "red big" one. The former, of course, because we don't say "red big car".

Jamie McGarry of Valley Press points out that of the 21 authors so far published by the press: 5 were already friends; 4 semi-established writers were approached; 7 semi-established writers approached him; 2 were talent-spotted at open mics; 3 were submissions.

David Tait suggests that "lesbianism is wrongly perceived as a form of extreme feminism"