Instead of an Editorial So we’ve been going for thirty years. I could blather a bit about pious hopes for the future, but instead I’m going to look back, to that distant time of 1995, when John Major was P.M. in Britain, Bill Clinton lorded it in America and Boris Yeltsin clung to power in Russia. Golden days? They didn't seem it at the time - except that the Internet was beginning, and seemed full of possibility... Back in 1995, how long did I think Snakeskin would last? An issue or three, maybe. It was a whim. The story of the magazine’s origins has been told before, most notably in an interview with Helena Nelson (originally published in Sphinx magazine). That explains how we started. But today I was looking back and wondering – why? Why did a middle-aged man suddenly think it might be a good idea to start a poetry magazine? I warn you – I’m going to descend into autobiography, and tell you the story of my poetic life. I’d been an on-and-off versifier for most of my life, though in my twenties any writing ambitions I had were for playwriting. I taught in a school in Zambia for three years, and wrote plays for the students – one of which was taken up by an experimental University group and performed in distant provinces. I came back to England, and after a while found myself in a job where I was extremely unhappy (because utterly incompetent). Writing bitter verses was a sort of therapy. |
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They never directly addressed my situation, but were monologues of Londoners as glum and disoriented as myself. Sort-of-symbolist rants against the staleness and grimness of the world. I sent one or two off to editors, but nobody was interested. I’m not surprised. Reading them now they read like off-cuts from an inferior version of The Waste Land.
As I became happier in my life, the urge to write grim verses declined. But after a while I took up another literary activity; I gradually became addicted to entering the New Statesman literary competitions. I had long admired the light-verse masters of this minor genre – Martin Fagg, E.O. Parrott, Roger Woddis, Wendy Cope and so on; I enjoyed their work much more than that of most of the ‘proper’ poets whose work was used as column-fillers elsewhere in the magazine. My own first entry was a one-liner, and earned me a pound. I was hooked. My first winners were prose, but I soon entered with verse as well. The thing about the New Statesman (and the Spectator, which I soon started submitting to as well) is that while in the main pages of the magazine, free verse was the norm, in the competition strict competent formal rhymed verse was demanded..
I’d always really preferred formal verse to free (though in my misery-poem period I had followed respectable fashion by mostly eschewing rhyme, or just chiming irregularly.) Doing the comps disciplined me, and taught me how to use rhyme effectively.
Another thing that helped me with that was meeting Steve Pogson, a composer, with whom I began to write songs and shows. We began by writing school pantomimes together, and progressed to cantatas for choirs, two of which were published by Boosey and Hawkes and still get performances worldwide. Songwriting sharpens the rhyming muscles, too.
The other, rather different factor in my life that led to the birth of Snakeskin was my growing interest in computers. School students showed me the Sinclair ZX81 when it first came out. A small, rather tacky box, with just one K of memory, but it had such potential... When its successor the ZX Spectrum went on sale, I was an early adopter. Almost all you could do with those early computers was play primitive games or program. I programmed. I learned BASIC and was excited by it. I created little educational programs, and I explored the possibilities of using the computer to manipulate language, and eventually to write poetry – or verse, anyway. In my mind, computers and poetry sort-of went together.
And then came the Internet. I got myself a modem, and connected to the likes of Compuserve, which seemed to be full of rather tedious people. Not my thing.
But then, round about 1995, the actual free Internet began to develop. I searched web pages and found very little in the way of poetry. And what there was was mostly subjective lyric – a genre that has never appealed much to me.
That is why, when my Internet provider (primex.co.uk of loving memory) offered 100k of web space to work with, I thought : what this Internet thing needs is poetry magazines that are not just college students being soulful. So, half as a joke, I created one. I had, after all, a fairly large supply of poems at home, that I was quite fond of if nobody else was. A selection of these, under various pseudonyms, constituted the first number. Some people actually found it and read it.
For the next month, I thought I’d do something different. I was at the time annoyed by Seamus Heaney (or what I knew of him). I knew English teachers inordinately fond of him, for what I thought were the wrong reasons. We were approaching the twenty-first century – how could celebrations of rural existence be the way forward in poetry? Much of this issue of Snakeskin was prose ranting, and happily most got lost in various computer failures over the years. All that still exists of it is a piece of verse, 'A Dig at Digging', an attack on the Heaney poem most popular with devisers of exam syllabuses. I still rather like my poem, though thirty years on my appreciation of Seamus has developed.
That was Snakeskin’s most opinionated issue. I quite enjoyed writing slating criticism, but knew it was self-indulgent, so I rationed myself.
Gradually other poets sent their work, from all over the connected world. Bruce, in his essay this month, mentions how I became a member of Cafe Blue, a meeting-place for writers who conversed by email. I met poets of other styles and persuasions there, and several contributed to Snakeskin. Barry Spacks, a fifties formalist who by now had become a Buddhist free-verser, was one that I remember with particular affection. Bruce Bentzman joined Snakeskin as an essayist in what I thought would be another temporary experiment. It turned out to be a permanent one.
People sent me stuff, and I enjoyed reading them. Some were dreadful, most were competent; a few were special. A crucial figure in the first years of Snakeskin was K.M. Payne, who shared my passion for traditional formal verse, and my feeling that there must be more to poetry than the short personal lyric (just long enough to be useful as a filler in magazine pages) that was the poetic norm at the end of the twentieth century. Together we collaborated on experiments, and especially on a massive hypertext. Hypertext was a bit of a magic word in those days. The hyperlink was seen as the defining feature of the Internet. Would it define Internet poetry? Other people’s efforts at making it work were mostly about linking pretty or portentous words together, as in bad word-salad poetry. This was not a conception of poetry that appealed to Ken and myself. Instead we took as our model the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books popular with children at the time. In my programming days, I had experimented with building adventure-game labyrinths and dungeons, and so the poem is a long and (we intended) disconcerting journey through reflections of the reader. Try it. Or read my 'Reflections on Hypertext' here. Our maze gained a certain notoriety, and was quoted in a couple of Ph.D. theses. Today a new reader may find it very much of its time.
Another crucial figure was Helena Nelson, who went on to found the rather wonderful Happenstance Press. My collaboration with her is one that I’m proud of, even though it was a bit chaotic.
Other early notables were the melancholy John Cornwall, who turned his difficult life into touching verse, and L. Fullington, the literary dynamo from Albequerque, who bombarded me with poems that I often found obscure until I worked at them and found them to be very smart. A poet whom I especially valued was Thomas Land (Thomas Ország-Land), whose translations of Hungarian Holocaust poetry were both an education, and a reminder that poetry could deal with the most important subjects.
Snakeskin had ups and downs. Sometimes I was too busy with other projects to give it full attention. At one time I had a hit counter that reckoned our number of readers. When this bust I decided I wouldn’t replace it. It didn’t matter too much how many readers we had, so long as the poets kept coming. I went through a time of writing infrequently, but when I did Snakeskin was there to print my work. I didn’t have to go through the bother of submitting elsewhere. Maybe I’d be a better poet if I’d done so.
The past few years have been a Snakeskin golden age. We now have a repertory company of regular poets who submit poems that I enjoy, so I assume that others will as well. Snakeskin has over the years gained a reputation as a place where rhyme and metre are welcome (though not compulsory). Am I fanciful in thinking that general fashion might be moving our way?
We also have a reputation as a site that welcomes light verse. This is true, but we’re picky. Some poets write deliberately clumsy clowning pieces and send them to us. No. Light verse should be at least as well-written as the heavier stuff.
We have always been totally independent of organisations and funding bodies. I keep forgetting to cancel my subscription to Poetry Review, and each quarter I see what heavily subsidised official poetry looks like. It is poor stuff. You can go through a whole thick issue without finding a memorable phrase – just grievance poetry, weak surrealism, devotion to fashionable causes, the worst kind of academicism. No thanks.
To stop getting in a rut, every now and then I hand over Snakeskin to a guest editor (notably Jessy Randall) with a different aesthetic from mine. The house of poetry has many mansions, and it’s important to remember this.
And the future? We’ll keep on as we are, I think. Send us your poems, serious or light, joyful or worried, formal or informal. We like reading them.
