Splodgy marks on coloured paper: a review

I bought an Australian poetry and literature magazine yesterday in Sticky - I'm not saying which one it was, because it's not fair to single it out. As I left I started leafing through the pages, and I suddenly realised that the magazine looked too much like Art. I didn't like that at all. It felt like I was holding an item in an exhibition, not a book or a magazine.

Every page was carefully prepared and decorated and full of vague images in dull colours that symbolised intangible spiritual entities. The pages were huge, and the poems would appear as small splodges of words, right in the middle of them. It seemed like an incredibly uneconomical way of using all those vast pages - I kept on longing for a bunch of ads to fill in some of the gaps. Other poems would appear superimposed on the top of, or even below, images that covered the whole page - very confusing, because everything became like a varying shade of grey: the words were a very dark grey, the image was a medium grey, sometimes changing to a whitish grey. It's a bit like trying to see a ash-white cat in a cloud of smog during a foggy morning.

Now look, the poems and the writing were all right. But the whole magazine gave me the impression that it was trying to be Important. It was trying to appeal to my pretensions. It was as if I was supposed to feel Better about buying it , while not necessarily feeling better about it.

Even worse - I realised today that I do some of the same things in my latest zine. I'll have to try very, very hard to avoid this sort of thing next time I do one!