Let's say you are harbouring a modest fleet of maiden verses, hopeful of lighting on a publisher to launch them. What could be more sensible than forking out Pounds 14.99 for a copy of The Writer's Handbook 2008? This 700-page volume, the twenty-first in the series, contains sections on Poetry Presses, Poetry Magazines, Organizations of Interest to Poets, and the like.

With this in hand, it will surely be possible to say one day: Go, little verses.

It is prudent to start by reading the prefatory article, "The Globalization of Poetry", by Chris Emery, director of the avant-garde poetry publishers, Salt.

"The publishing industry is in turmoil", writes Mr Emery, getting the bad news out first. Publishers "face the massive expansion of the Web, with literary blogs, online stores, aggregators, specialist retailers, author portals, eBooks, free content, samples". You'd take his word for it, if only he will say where your little verses come in. "Poetry's advocates and practitioners, its investors and consumers, face a rapidly changing world; globalizing, shifting from high street to hypertext, from introspection to Internet". Here is the good news: poetry is "an art of resistance and transubstantiation, of magic and alchemy, an ungovernable power which reaches past its adherents and advocates into and out of the silence of generations". The poetry world is a "dynamic, dizzying and demanding landscape".

You, of course, would settle for an undizzied publisher who sees poetry as an art of precision and restraint, in a universe without aggregates or author portals. A glimmer of hope emanated from the subsections in Mr Emery's article on "Festivals", "Competitions", "Book clubs" and "Magazines"; then dimmed when we read, of the last, that "paper based models are rapidly being replaced by blogzines and webzines". By the end, we were warned that no poet "can afford to avoid the power of search engines, eCommerce, networking sites like MySpace, Second Life or public archives of video clips at YouTube". There is no room for despair, however. "We see poets as global citizens in ways never before envisaged."

Our efforts to update the TLS Reviewer's Handbook were on the verge of collapse last week, after we read Jennifer Coates's review of How Language Works by David Crystal (TLS, July 20). Mr Crystal is the linguist who "has published 100 books" on the subject of How Language Works. Ms Coates cited his views on punctuation, which include the democratic idea that it hardly matters whether you carry home a pound of potatoes or potato's. "All people who complain about punctuation errors", Crystal believes, "do so on the grounds that a mistake in punctuation is a loss of clarity." This statement is demonstrably untrue: we hereby complain that punctuation lends rhythm to a sentence, and rhythm may be elegant or not. Punctuation is therefore a musical element. Or to set it to a different tune: Punctuation is, therefore, a musical element.

Coates also cites Crystal's view that, in her words, "nobody reading the word 'potato's' outside a shop would struggle to understand it" -another notion that is obviously false. Many foreign speakers have learned by rote the rules of English punctuation, in the expectation that those born to the language adhere to them, even in signwriting. We know many foreign speakers who struggle to understand the English of those whose vocal and literary skills express Crystal's idea that "prescriptivism (in grammar) is intrinsically elitist, arising from the class-conscious belief that 'some people's (middle-class) usage is better than others'". There are some people who believe that only cloth-eared linguists would consider eloquence to be elitist.

Readers might have noticed a reference in Ms Coates's review to "Lynne Truss's Eats Shoots and Leaves". We could hardly have planned a better example of Crystallism if we had intended to but we didnt. Head's will roll.

The 1939 Photoplay Edition of Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous contained illustrations from the MGM film, starring Spencer Tracy (who won the Academy Award for Best Actor) and Freddie Bartholomew. The jacket pictured above features in Rudyard Kipling: The books I leave behind, an exhibition of writings, portraits and early editions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, until September 15. A catalogue of the same title, by David Alan Richards, is published by Yale at Pounds 16.99.

The poet Vernon Scannell, now aged eighty-five, has received a special award from the Wilfred Owen Association, "in recognition of his contribution to war poetry".

Scannell's best-known book of war poetry is Walking Wounded (1965). The title poem recollects a column of men returning from battle:

No one was suffering from a lethal hurt, They were not magnified by noble wounds, There was no splendour in that company.

Scannell is also the author of a delightful and candid memoir, The Tiger and the Rose (1983). The delight derives from the un- adorned narrative, taking in five years' military service and a brief boxing career. The candour lies in Scannell's willingness to write about the conclusion to his Army life:

Twenty-five years ago, 1945 . . . was the year I made what might seem like a desperate decision and performed what might appear to be an act of criminal folly, manic selfishness, zany recklessness, abject cowardice or even, perhaps, eccentric courage. I deserted from the Army.

The first recipient of the Owen Award, Christopher Logue, author of some of the best war poetry of the past half century (in the form of versions of the Iliad), spent two years in a military prison, on a charge of handling stolen pass books.

What would Owen say? He'd say: Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

Metafiction III: in which we seek works of fiction containing a character or characters from someone else's fiction. Piers Burton-Page submits the first entry, citing On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes by Raymond Queneau, which borrows "at least half a dozen minor characters from Ulysses and casts them centre stage as tragicomic rebels in Dublin, 1916". They include Corny Kelleher, Mat Dillon, Chris Callinan and Cissy Caffrey, who is transformed into a man for her crossover from Irish into Gallic fiction. Mr Burton-Page points out that "the rebels' password, just to confuse things, is 'Finnegans Wake'".

J.C.

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