The Binnacle's Ultra-Short Competition

The Binnacle, the literary journal of the University of Maine-Machias, runs an annual competition for poetry and prose under 150 words. The competition deadline's past, but it would be good to mark the calendar for next year, especially as submissions are free. Last year entries were accepted from 1 December.

A prose poetry exercise

For a good prose poetry exercise, please see my blog entry for today.

UK magazines regularly publishing prose poetry &c.

I'm developing a list for my Sudden Prose students I thought would be of greater interest, especially to readers of this blog. Here's what I have thus far (and I welcome your additions) for UK magazines that often publish prose poetry:

Obsessed with Pipework

Poetry Wales

Shadowtrain

Shearsman

Stride

Tears in the Fence

10th Muse

Magazines that have been known to publish prose poetry from time to time:

The Interpreter's House

Iota

The London Magazine

Magma

New Walk

Magazines that rarely if ever publish prose poems:

The London Review of Books

Poetry Review

The Times Literary Supplement

The McDonald's Experience prose poem exercise

As I haven't posted in a long while, and today's the first day of National Poetry Month, with some, myself including, trying to write a poem a day, I thought I'd share a prose poem exercise I just gave to my undergrads in Sudden Prose. I'd be delighted to see your results.

Choose one of the following and talk about how the place would be transformed if it were set up like a McDonald's: mechanized, automated, branded, etc. Don't mention McDonald's anywhere in the piece.

McLibrary
McHospital
McHotel
McPolice
McUniversity
McCattery
McKennel
McPost Office
McPrimary School

Write as much as you can--try for at least eight sentences, then edit back to your most vivid, original details, for a total of 4-5 sentences.

For the last sentence, describe what the people/animals leaving such a place look like now that they've been through the Mc experience.

I apologise if this requires field research.

Thumbnail Magazine for short works

A new online magazine, Thumbnail, seeks short works: prose up to 800 words, poetry up to 40 lines. Read the first story of the current issue, Dorene O' Brien's "Alien Invasion Tapes, #87," and see if you don't laugh out loud like I did.

"Hidden from View: The Prose Poem in English Poetry"

is a useful historical overview of the situation, written by David Caddy and up on his blog. It originally appeared in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, edited by Tom Chivers and published by Penned in the Margins; see the book's page on the press website for details of further essays on contemporary poetry.

David Gaffney's The Half-Life of Songs

Salt Publishing has brought out what looks to be an interesting collection of flash fictions by David Gaffney. To read more about the book and a delightful selection from it, please see this entry at Tony Williams' blog.