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1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
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7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
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10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
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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 and Blind Summits
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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A charming sense of novelty.
By CHRISTOPHER LANDRUM.
So you hear people talking how miserable a King must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place.
………………— Samuel Johnson1
So, understandably, I couldn’t help but reflect on Prince William’s recent tidying of the hedges around his ears. Nor could I help contrasting his haircut to Donald Trump’s shorn mane.
As an American, I don’t believe I’ve ever empathized on an intimate level with any member of the royal family. Until now.
I even felt a charming sense of novelty upon learning about the Prince’s new look. Being only ten months older than him, I had certainly sympathized with him and his brother while watching a nation mourn their mother. I’ve also always found the last letter of Charles I to his son, written on the eve of the father’s regicide, to be quite moving. But only the recent headlines about haircuts were enough to cue my conscious to ponder what it is like “to be the Prince.” For as an American, I don’t believe I’ve ever empathized on an intimate level with any member of the royal family. Until now.
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Yet, not only do our minds squeeze square new pegs into round old holes, but as Machiavelli has observed, humans tend to need the new to realize the old:
Two centuries after Machiavelli, the nonconformist minister Henry Grove similarly observed: “this Fondness for Novelty … makes us out of Conceit with all we already have.” Applying their words to the topic at hand, we can say that once an individual begins the new experience of balding, that person tends, no pun intended, “to cut their losses.” Most grow jealous to keep, and sometimes attempt to cultivate, whatever hair they still have left. But there are different manners in which that can be achieved, and I know of no greater contrast in manners on this matter than that of my nation’s president and your kingdom’s prince.3
♦
IF THE OLDER Dr. Johnson were a terrific arguer, it was because he had tempered the tyrannical style of banter used in his younger days. “When I was a boy,” Johnson recalled, “I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.” This is probably why Johnson later praised a passage from Goldsmith: “When I was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over; for, I found that generally what was new was false.” Goldsmith’s words compare well beside another of his friend Johnson’s observations: “what is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught.” No one, however, appears to oppose the current Prince’s recent hairstyle choice.4
It is only the tyrant who tries to make everything appear so new that nothing resembles the old.
Machiavelli writes that legitimate governance, by either a prince or a republic, tends to accomplish new things for their people. This is because illegitimate governance is so common that its opposite always feels quite remarkable. But these new things, in order to be effective for the people, must resemble the previous things––even if their resemblance is completely contrived. For it is only the tyrant who tries to make everything appear so new that nothing resembles the old. In this weird way, the tyrant attempts to make whatever is new appear ex nihilo––an absurdity on par with Johnson purposefully arguing for the wrong side in a debate, or a president daring to claim he coined the phrase “prime the pump.”5
Yes, the Prince has a new look. Yet, whatever is new is, at least according to Machiavelli, accidental. Accidents, like the genetics that bequeath one with baldness, are but random events. But, as the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson once pointed out, “without the random, there can be nothing new.” God save the new.6
♦
Christopher Landrum’s work has appeared previously in The Fortnightly Review as well as Real Clear News of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas and writes about books at bookbread.com.
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 27 February 2018, at 15:08.
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