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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections,Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying
· Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
DEPARTMENTS
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Montaigne’s ‘genial scepticism’.
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
By Sarah Bakewell
Other Press 2011 | 400 pages | Paperback: £7.49 | $14.44
By ROBERT McHENRY.
Montaigne is conventionally credited with having invented the essay form. This does not mean that no one before him ever wrote a shorter-than-book-length composition. It does mean that he wrote down, then revised, then reconsidered his reflections on matters both large and small and then, despite having arrived at no certain conclusions, published a book of them. That was certainly original. Bakewell’s subtitle captures this novel style of sharing his thoughts perfectly.
Among the myriad works that have claimed to be essays are Alexander Pope’s stately, philosophical “Essay on Man” (“One truth is clear, whatever is, is right”) and Josh Billings’s orthographically antic “Essa on the Muel” (“The muel is haf hoss and haf Jackass, and then kums tu a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake,…”). A definition that comfortably encompasses both is hard to imagine.
Discount those writings that depend upon mere invention, mere hair-splitting, or mere verbal style, says Bacon.
Montaigne’s younger contemporary Francis Bacon offers an answer. Exclude, he suggests, all writing characterized by any of the three “distempers” of learning, the vanities of “imaginations,” “altercations,” and “affectations.” Put another way, discount those writings that depend upon mere invention, mere hair-splitting, or mere verbal style. Take seriously only those that engage with the real world in a search for truth and understanding.
The “real world,” of course, can be as stubborn a beast as the muel. Hence error; hence the need for continued engagement and rethinking; hence the “genial scepticism” that one nineteenth-century commenter identified as Montaigne’s outstanding character. It was he who, for example, wrote of social customs:
A worthy essay is one that looks into some familiar aspect of life…and then retires with a more or less explicitly provisional summary, says Montaigne.
(As Bakewell explains, it may not be coincidental that Bacon published a book of “essays” just a few years after his brother had visited Montaigne in France.)
BAKEWELL’S APPROACH TO describing and understanding Montaigne’s method is the startling one of actually using it. As biography her book is unusual, in that it goes back and forth over periods of the subject’s life many times, each with a different question in mind and each bringing out details and considerations that might not otherwise have emerged. As literary criticism it is equally unusual, certainly for these times, in that it seeks to find the sources of the writings in the life, rather than declaring that they can have meaning only in the mind of some arbitrary reader.
It is useful to notice that while the book’s title is given as How to Live on the cover and the title page, in the table of contents and in the text it becomes How to Live?, the one question of the subtitle. A good sense of how Bakewell has read her subject emerges from the tentative answers she infers from the Essays, including
and, perhaps most telling,
As thus:
Bakewell homes in on the unique character of Montaigne’s thought in this way:
Nor is uncertainty limited to pathological circumstances:
But skepticism in Montaigne, however stern and thoroughgoing it may seem at one moment, retains always that geniality that has charmed so many readers over the centuries:
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Publication: Sunday, 18 January 2015, at 03:09.
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