Magdalena Ball's Blog

• On Poetic Quality

  August 25, 2009

  • How do we distinguish between good and bad poetry? There are plenty of people who will say that it’s impossible to judge – that quality is a subjective thing and that one man’s literature is another’s junk. As a book reviewer who spends many hours a week judging the quality of a range of books, many of them poetry collections, I disagree with that. Of course there are always subjective ...
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• In praise of the slow read, or why we need longer attention spans

  August 15, 2009

  • Attention spans are shortening. I hear it all the time, and don’t doubt it either. People are bombarded with fast-paced moving imagery on television, in computer games, in media of all types and we scan, cram, multitask, grab a quick bite and move on. From a literary perspective, Noah Lukeman tells us that we get five pages to capture an agent or publisher’s attention, and there is ...
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• Promoting Poetry: Is it a Mug's Game

  February 2, 2009

  • Let me start by saying, right up front, that publishing poetry is generally not a road to riches. Most of us write poetry for reasons other than its hot selling power. Of all genres, poetry is probably the hardest to sell. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but I’ll hazard an educated guess that it’s because there’s a kind of misconception that poetry isn’t an engaging read ...
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