I am very pleased to have a found poem about found poetry included in the June edition of this zine which, as editor Julius Smit outlines,

‘The Projectionist’s Playground is an international quarterly A5 size zine for innovative and experimental work in photography, montage, art and poetry. Poetry can range from collage, concrete, sound poetry, found poetry, juxtaposition, deconstruction, manipulation, appropriation, to open field, dada, cut-up and beyond; the emphasis being on the visual.’

It’s great to see a zine/chapbook [this physical thing] dedicated to work like this, and of course for me to be included – my thanks to Julius. The following is the concluding part of my poem

and if you would like to read what precedes this, and naturally the other poems in this edition, please go here for further information.

The mark scheme being prescriptive, it would not allow for this answer to earn a mark. Is it because:

1. The hyphen is in the ‘wrong’ place and corrupts the intended talent for which the grandmother is a champion?

2. The Oxford comma is technically inaccurate?

3. The concept of ‘correct’ is intellectually flawed?

Yes, it is from this year’s KS2 GPS SATs…

Excusing the punning, it is easy to just play games with these rather than maintain a focus on how they fail as ‘tests’ of writing competence [and by extension, as a part of the purposeful teaching and learning of Writing], so here I want to also query how the question can only be worth 1 mark for three required ‘correct’ answers compared with a question about placing a single comma in a sentence which is also worth 1 mark.

It is yet another layer of inconsistency and irrelevance when looking at these. The primary objection is to the discrete and disparate nature of the questions themselves – designed simply to provide ‘data’ – but when the marking system is also hopeless, that compounds the nonsense of it all.

It is more complex than this, I know, but I shouldn’t need to explain further.