Anonymous poetry, a new mysterious zine

Last week I was intrigued to be invited to join a Facebook group with the curious name of Eponymous Anonymous. Because the person who invited me to join was one of the several Helens of my acquaintance, at first I thought it might be some mega-group of Helens, but it was not.

What it is, is a project to publish 'a low budget, old school photocopied folded paper journal with no names attached. It might be one writer writing as dozens, or a dozen writers writing as one.'

Intriguing.

Generally we poets are trying as hard as we can to make a bit of a name for ourselves - get people interested in our work: 'If you liked that, then perhaps you'll like this.' We like to rack up a wee list of places our work has been published, we like people to know our names, we want our work to represent us. But along with our name comes restrictions, and sometimes opportunities. People might or might not publish our work because they have developed an idea about whether or not they like us or our work. We might feel restricted in what we we'll write about (or at least have published) because we're worried about what people might think, about what our mother might think, because it doesn't go with the kind of image we're trying to present as a poet.

The idea of anonymity makes me nervous, and excited. And a little bit free. I am going to try to write some work for this project that is a bit different from what Helen Rickerby, poet, might ordinarily do. I'm going to try to use the anonymity as an advantage, and a inspiration.

Interested?

You can visit the Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113800348667528 for all the info. (All the cool kids have Facebook groups. Did you know JAAM has a Facebook group?: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8420259164.)

All you have to do is write something that you are happy to have published anonymously and submit it to:

theeponymousanonymousproject AT gmail.com

Or even better get together with some poetical, piratical friends and create a few poems or a collection to submit together. Create a character, a cast of characters or simply be eponymous anonymous.

Submissions close 8th August.

BTW - if you're interested in the intriguing punctuation mark (top left), which Eponymous Anonymous is using as its image, it's called an interrobang (or a quesclamation mark). It is basically a !?, but as one character. It was invented in the 60s, and is not much used, as you might expect. I only know all this because, well I checked Wikipedia, but also because non-standard punctuation was a topic of conversation among my colleagues last year, because one of them really needed some kind of sarcasm mark. He was in luck, because there is the irony or sarcasm mark: ؟.