New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for May 2006: a discussion of the digital revolution's impact on the UK's small literary magazines in the UK, including Aesthetica, Birmingham Words, Incwriters and Route.

"What makes the digital revolution different from earlier technological advances is that it offers not just a handful of new possibilities - like the new font-faces and graphics which came in with electric typewriters and photocopying - but a bewildering array of them..."

To read the whole review, go to http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewezines.php .

The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

A fascinating read! This struck me as particularly interesting:

But literary e-zines from abroad also tend to be more intellectual and esoteric in tone, more obviously aimed at a well-educated, highly literate and possibly avant-garde audience. UK e-zines, by contrast, tend to be typical of British culture in that their tone is often colloquial and humorous, self-deprecating, suggesting both approachability and a horror of pretension.

I wonder why this is? Do Americans view poetry as an esoteric art for the “educated” few where the British feel that poetry has played a greater role in shaping their sense of culture?

Could this have to do with class?

In North America, we like to pretend that class is unimportant. However, most of us realize that we're fooling ourselves, even if we don’t want to admit that the American dream is just that -- a dream.

On the other hand, hasn't late-twentieth-century Britain to be a class-bound and class-obsessed nation, too? Whereas the British tend to be more comfortable with class (in whatever sense) Americans ignore it and pretend that we can rise above class designation very easily.

Is that why the British have produced e-zines (in your opinion) that command a more inclusive writership and readership?

Interesting questions, all. It would be interesting furthermore, to see what you think of American vs British outsider art, et al.

I'm going to come back to this piece when my thoughts are more fleshed out. I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for posting it.

My impression is that amateur writing culture in the UK is different from amateur writing culture in the USA at least partly because of the relative sizes of the two countries' populations. In the USA if you take the subsection of the population which is interested in poetry, and then you subdivide it again in order to focus on the group which is interested in experimental poetry, and subdivide it again in order to focus on the group which is interested in experimental poetry online, you still end up with a reasonably large group. If you did the same thing in the UK you'd end up with about three people. So in the UK the amateur writing culture has got to be inclusive or it will fizzle out into nothing.

There's also the British horror of pretension, which makes us disinclined to be rigorously intellectual about anything; and our horror of confrontation, which makes us disinclined to criticise one another's work. Put these things together and you end up with an amateur writing culture which is a big, loose, diffuse, uncritical, unintellectual conglomeration of all kinds of different people and writing _style_s - although it's still dominated by the teacherly middle-classes.

- Edward

in the UK the amateur writing culture has got to be inclusive or it will fizzle out into nothing.

That's something that we can appreciate here in Canada!

In my opinion, the majority of the small and micro presses here share a very careful attention to design, typography, paper selection, and the use of hand or letter press (often), and navigate the line between the elegance of the private press and the immediacy and simplicity of xerox or offset printing.

It's been my experience that the community is pretty inclusive—although some might disagree.

Jay Millar's Bookthug is good evidence of this. Beautifully designed books and a very inclusive list of authors. He also publishes—along with Mark Truscott —BafterC, a great litmag.

Daniel F. Bradley, who publishes fhole writes in his blog:

the best and most relevant experimental press in this country is run by a guy in room with a Gestetner and no computer, regardless what your lame ass writing teacher tells you. so rejoice and assume your position as a experimental poetry publisher – print your own fucking magazine. do not wait for the pod press to give you the nod. just say no. and steal the printing from your job and print up your magazine and give it away. do not sell it. give it away. make the best books you can. the canada council, the ontario art council, and the toronto art council, will not fund the revolutionary. you do not need a grant to be poor. work, steal, print. what are you waiting for, no one will ever recognize your fucking genius and they certainly will not publish your shitty little poems. do it now.

So I can see some similarities, Edward, in the picture you paint of the UK scene and what we've got going on here in Canada.

I've got copies of fhole and BafterC here if you'd like me to send them your way! I recommend both.

That would be great, if you can afford the postage - I'm always interested in this stuff - but to avoid disappointing you, I ought to point out that The Hyperliterature Exchange is devoted to hyperliterature, ie. the computerised type, and I don't usually write reviews or articles about "traditional" literature. I love it, but there are plenty of other people to do that kind of thing.

However, if you want to send me a couple of copies purely out of interest, as one literary person to another, then the address is 2 Whitewell Lodge, Goudhurst Road, Cranbrook, Kent, TN17 2PR, UK.

- Edward

Hi Edward—aye, there's the rub—there's a dearth of online Canadian litmags, especially those that publish poetry—experimental or otherwise.

I cited those two print mags because they complemented your ideas regarding the differences in approaches to literature—be it North American, European, et al.

It's unfortunate, I think. There's the Danforth Review—but not much else. Check out the Danforth, it's a great mag and read widely by Canadians in the scene, methinks. It used to have a lot of great reviews, but they've moved more towards fiction.

One notable exception is paperplates (a magazine for 50 readers). The current issue is here. It's an online magazine but really exudes that careful attention to design and typography that I mentioned earlier. It's similar to Incwriters, Birmingham Words and Route that you wrote about in that it uses PDF—to "square the circle" so to speak.

But aside from paperplates, I can't think of too much else out there.