Short Poems

The new Snakeskin is online, packed with short poems. Nothing over ten lines, I said (and note sadly that some good poets are actually unable to count accurately. Never mind.)

The editorial inbox bulged this month. I had plenty to choose from, and found myself reluctantly rejecting some competent pieces that would definitely have made it had competition been less tough.

I was particularly pleased by the quality of the serious short poems submitted. Don’t worry, we have clerihews and double dactyls in the mix for those who, like me, enjoy those classic comic forms. But the ones that stood out while I was editing were the shorties that made a poignant or disturbing point with economy. There are some very good ones. And I’ll make sure we have another short poems special issue soon.

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Short

I’ve recently been sent two volumes of short poetry. Both enjoyable, but very unlike.

Max Gutmann’s Rewriting History collects a large number of vigorous short pieces written in two forms associated with the comically biographical – the clerihew and the double dactyl. If you don’t know what a clerihew is, Max explains:

A clerihew
Makes you aware o’ who
Humphrey Davy was. Or Sir Christopher Wren. Or anyone else you might be hazy about.
Usually in a way Davy or Wren wouldn’t be too crazy about.

He illustrates the Double Dactyl (sometimes known as a Higgledy-Piggledy) thus:

Jokery Folkery
Higgledy Piggledies
Called Double Dactyls by scholars, I think –

Offer biography
Pseudo-historical
(Meaning the data
Are likely to stink).

If you like Max’s explanations, you’ll like his collection (for details contact him at: info.maxgutmann@gmail.com ).

Mark Rutter’s poems belong to a different short poem tradition. That of minimal modernism, with nods to the concrete poetry of that remarkable creator Ian Hamilton Finlay. He offers Finlay an epitaph:

LAY
FIN

Some of his poems are shorter than that, and sometimes I don’t get the point. The word ‘mouseleaks’ by itself on a page perhaps means more to him than it does to me. Sometimes there is clever wordplay:

when philosophers fight
sophisticuffs

or

the anti-christ
turns wine into water

Sometimes they are not jokey. I liked this one:

an open space
of gorse and heather

A pink orchid
with spotted leaves
Once seen
reveals another.

You can get Mark’s collection from Amazon for £5

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Back to Life

Dry your tears. Snakeskin is back online. The firm that looks after the site tells me that there were ‘issues’ with the server. These now seem to be resolved.

Make sure you take a look at the SHORT POEMS issue, which will arrive on July 1st. There’s some brilliant stuff in it.

Short poems for November

November Snakeskin will be a Short Poems special issue. Any subject, any style – but nothing over nine lines.

Send your minuscule efforts to editor@snakeskin.org.uk

April (No fooling)

The Short Poems issue went online today.

This one has been fun to edit, though it’s been a lot of work. Snakeskin’s readership has grown recently, and so have the number of submissions. Choosing is getting difficult.

I’ve always liked to include a wild card or two in an edition of Snakeskin. An unpolished poem with a bit of punch, a poem by a newcomer whose voice is distinctive even though not quite formed yet. this gets difficult when I have  a mass of accomplished poems to choose between.

If your short poems  weren’t selected for this month’s issue, please don’t feel grim and sad about it. You’re in good company. Plenty of poems that in other years might have made the cut had to be set aside this time. Don’t be discouraged. Send some more, and maybe they’ll be just what we need next time.