About

About the TextEtc Blog

Much of Textetc was written a decade ago, and the Internet is now a different place. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, many worthy sites have not found the time to update their coverage, and some have disappeared altogether.  Conversely, social media has  become much  more important, and poetry sites in languages other than English have grown enormously.

This blog is exploratory, therefore, and tries to summarize what is happening of the poetry scene now: the poets who seem to me the more accomplished and/or important, the movements worth watching, and the latest publishing ventures. It’s a personal venture, I should stress, though I’ll try to be as objective and wide-ranging as possible. All poetry institutions are doing something similar, or claim to, but this blog is by a long-term practitioner who should be resistant to the scramble for status and university appointments, and so be able to analyze dispassionately what the various movements promote as self-evident. I’ll aim for an informed posting once a week, in one category or another. There are three at present.

Translation
Translation is an important aspect of poetry, in making poems in other languages better known to us, and in helping to hone a poet’s craft skills to cope with other traditions and expectations. To kick off, a few magazines catering for translation:
1. Modern Poetry in Translation. http://www.mptmagazine.com/
2. No Man’s Links: Translation Magazines. http://www.no-mans-land.org/links_translation_magazines.htm

Reviews
No one can read all the poetry published today in traditional form, let alone the torrent that pours off blogs, websites and online literary magazines.

Many reviews are largely promotion, reciprocal arrangements between poets to commend each other’s work to the public, but some do attempt literary criticism and make more honest and detailed assessments.

I’ll be making detailed shortlists over the next few months. Please let me know of your own favourites.

Poetry Magazines
I’m currently reading work put out by leading online literary sites, a long process that will probably take me a year or so. Where possible, I select a few poems for comment from each site that seem representative and/or especially worthy of notice. Unfortunately, some important sites – New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New Quarterly, NYQ, Paris Review, etc. – provide little or nothing gratis, and here my slender budget has obliged me to leave them off the listing. I have also omitted sites which seem not to contain commendable work in any style.