Mr Muggins
Do you take your readers for fools? Didn’t you think we’d notice
the way words repeat syllable by syllable in chains of correspondence all through each issue’s letters page? Do you think us Mr Muggins?
Were we to examine their cursive scripts, their Basildon Bond?
do you think we couldn’t read between the lines? Pen-name,
alias, nom-de-guerre: the loop of each Yours faithfully’s the same.
One hand and one hand only writes these grim epistles.
Show me pictures, an address for Thrash’em, Realist, Bored
By It All. Most normal folk keep schtum, prison their opinions
in the cage of their own heads. It has been mooted more than once these missives are the fruit of your own ghostwritten brain. Far be it from me to make suggestions, or to suppose this letter will not see
a printer’s plate, but don’t you think you ought to reproduce the letters
all your readers send? What is your readership? We should be told. Are we conversing across a vacuum?
Signed
Mr Silent-As-the-Grave.
Page(s) 66
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The