This is a study of very short songs: pieces long perceived as 'fragments' or remnants of longer narrative texts, and dismissed as the by-products of a degenerative oral tradition. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs. The authors argue that the inherently metaphorical and connotative idiom of traditional song makes external critical notions of 'completeness' inappropriate: in practice, such pieces are rarely felt to be broken or lacking by those who sing them - they have a strong metonymic force. A wide range of texts and traditions texts and traditions is...

This anthology is a collection of writing exercises and poetry by a group of poets who met together to try these exercises in a virtual reality environment, Second Life. The subject and style of the work is not focused on the novelty of this process the virtual reality aspect but rather on the sincere wish and group determination to use the writing process as part of the writers inner essence work. Both the exercises and the poems collected here are artifacts of an art based on voyaging away from the ordinary and into more magical realms. The reader is invited not just to read the poems in...