Work

The WORK issue is on its way. I hope it will be online tomorrow, all being well. All not being well, it will arrive on Wednesday at the latest.

In terms of numbers of submissions, this has been the most successful special issue ever, I think.  At first I didn’t receive many WORK offerings, but then they arrived and arrived and arrived.

Choosing has been difficult. the main criterion is whether or not it’s a good poem, but I’ve also borne in mind the need for varied subject matter; this issue will present many many kinds of work. I’ve also had a tendency to prefer poems that seem to come from the writer’s own experience, rather than those in which a job is merely imagined – though one or two of those have crept in.

I’m still selecting, rejecting, wondering, making difficult choices. Editing can be hard work. The results of my labour will be online soon.

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WORK

A reminder – May Snakeskin will be a special issue on the subject of Work.
Please send us poems (in a style of your choice) about jobs (your own or someone else’s.
We’d like to hear about hard work and soft jobs, about rewarding labour, about easy skives and about work of mind-numbing tedium.
We hope to include as many different types of work as we can, so please send your version to editor@snakeskin.org.uk within the next couple of weeks.

Snakeskin 250

Our 250th edition is now online!

I remember how excited I got when we reached our fiftieth edition, our hundredth, our two hundredth… At 250 I’ve grown, not exactly blasé – more accepting that this is the thing I do, and those issue numbers are going to keep on rising until I’m halted in my tracks by death, dementia or debility. Which I hope will be not too soon.

The 250th issue is one I’m especially pleased with – good poems, and varied as anything.

But another Snakeskin tradition is technical problems. This morning my email is playing up. I can’t send messages to the poets whose work has been selected. With luck I’ll be able to fix this soon. In the meantime – apologies.

Update: Email is now working again, the return to smooth operation as unexplained as the original malfunction. these are deep mysteries.

Love is in the air…

The November LOVE special issue is nearly ready – it will probably go online late this evening. I’m delighted to say that we’ve got a wide range of different approaches to the subject, from the romantic to the sardonic, the regretful to the passionate.

December and January will be straight non-theme issues. And after that – well, we’ll see.

Thanks, Jessy

Thanks to Jessy Randall for guest-editing the February issue of Snakeskin, on the theme of Maths and Numbers.

It’s meant that I’ve had a nice easy January, with nothing much to do, except set up the poems she chose, decorated by images from an ancient Maths book.

Life will get busy again now, with a general edition coming up in March and a new special issue in April…

January Snakeskin is online

It’s online, but in a bit of a rush, because I’m off to a big (and I mean big) New Year’s lunch.

No time to notify poets properly at the moment – will do so later.

Happy New Year to all!

December

Well, it’s been something of a rush, because I’ve been away on holiday, and have had to do most of the magazine-assembling today – but the December issue is now online.
And a very good issue it is, too.

November Snakeskin

November Snakeskin is now online.

As the editor I know I’m biased, but I reckon it’s a very good and very varied issue.

Last month in the Politics issue I asked for seriousness rather than satire. This month, to balance that, we’ve got a thoroughly scurrilous and ribald set of poems by Brian Allgar, tracing the career and crimes of a fairly vile politician.
Among the bustle of other excellent poets, please take a look at the work of Annie Fisher, whose pamphlet Infinite in All Perfections is published today by Happenstance.
I’m also very glad to have a new (translated) contribution by K.M. Payne, who was a key presence in the early days of Snakeskin. He did a Rimbaud and gave up poetry for quite a few years, but now seems to be drifting back, which is excellent news. He is, of course, my  co-author of the huge and absurd poetical hypertext project The Maze of Mirrors.
My own contribution this month is a bad-tempered snarl at those who campaign for academic safe places, where they will hear no opinions that contradict their own. Snakeskin believes that universities, like poems, should be intellectually unsafe spaces, where the assumption should be that assumptions are there to be challenged.

February Snakeskin: Maths!

Once again Jessy Randall will guest-edit the February 2017 issue of Snakeskin. (You can find out more about Jessy at:http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/ )

This year the theme will be NUMBERS / MATHEMATICS. As always, the theme is open to interpretation.

Send up to five poems to jessyrandall@yahoo.com. No attachments, please, except in the case of visual poems (please send jpegs). Simultaneous submissions are fine. The deadline is December 1. Expect a response by December 15.

Jessy Randall
(Photo by Wendy Lovell)

Down with Poetry!

The proper kind of poetry
has resonance – it’s heavy.

Her verse is light, the critics said
she writes it on the bevvy.

This is part of Helena Nelson’s ‘Self-portrait as an Unsuitable Poem’, in her new collection Down With Poetry, which the postman brought to my door the other day, to my huge delight.
The book brings together her previous ‘unsuitable’ collections, and adds more to them. The term ‘unsuitable’ is inspired by a magazine’s rejection note many years ago: ‘Many thanks for the poems. These aren’t quite suitable…’ Helena has a keen ear for the intricacies of language, and realised that the editor wasn’t saying the poems were no good – just that they were ‘unsuitable’ – they didn’t fit the standard category of poems that get published. Maybe because they don’t make a show of taking themselves too seriously.
Helena’s ‘Unsuitables’ are sometimes rude about poetry and poets: