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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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Doing silly on the equinox.
A Fortnightly Review
The Faction Theatre Company, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by William Shakespeare.
Wilton’s Music Hall
26 to 30 June, 2018.
By NIGEL WHEALE.
The Faction Theatre Company, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Mark Leipacher. Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, Wapping/Whitechapel, 26 to 30 June, 2018.
The Faction’s Dream is a dream, because each element is as compelling as another. But there is an angle.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice.
The cast are uniformly terrific — like the performance. The contending elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — comedy, romance, low-lifers, nobility, Athens versus the wood, humanity struggling with the feys – are difficult to keep in balance. Productions can emphasise just one or two of these competing narratives over all the others. Having played Oberon in my primary school production, I completely understand these challenges. The Faction’s Dream is a dream, because each element is as compelling as another. But there is an angle. Tamarin McGinley’s Hippolyta gives ‘I was with Hercules and Cadmus once’ with a winky glance to audience. Herb Cuanalo’s Theseus comes back, too quickly and defensively – ‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind’, a great hoot moment, which says it all. Twenty-first century gender politics gets a rise out of the text here, as in so many places.

But the Mechanicals do deliver the play. Theseus demands it, Tamarin McGinley’s Hippolyta grimaces — her compassionate lines, ‘I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged, / And duty in his service perishing’ (5.1.85—6) are cut. When you go back to the text, to see how it has been excised, nuanced, spun, it’s for ever a complete mystery how those lines might then have been given, so long ago. Yet Pyramus and Thisbe’s tedious brief scene of tragical mirth must always have been a brilliant hoot. The hardened ushers at Wilton’s, who have seen it all, were still laughing out loud on the second night. Christopher York’s Snout, his Wall, and all the between-the-legs business, was so naughty – Holes and chinks. This was one gross author, audience, we still are. But then, Bert Brecht whispers through Wall — lays bare the device, Russian Formalism on Bankside, 1595:
Lowri Izzard’s Starveling – ‘an undernourished or emaciated person’ – really struck home. Moonshine is so lovely, but it’s also, just moonshine. Beauty is frail, and ephemeral. We are just players.
The Faction’s supernaturals are tough, rugby-type creatures – Christopher York’s Mustardseed really threatening. Director Mark Lepaicher describes the cast: ‘Most of these actors have worked with The Faction before, continuing our drive towards a permanent ensemble. It’s a genuinely diverse company in terms of age, class, ethnicity, sexuality and 50:50 in gender parity. It’s important to us that we are representing society on stage.’
This isn’t righteous tick-box selection by the director: The eight actors don’t just do ‘double’ parts, four of them actually do ‘triple’ roles. This versatility is astonishing, Herb Cuanalo morphing between Theseus, Quince, and Oberon – a traditional echoing of roles there, the mirror patriarchy of Athens and faery, as with Tamarin McGinley’s Hippolyta/Titania. Linda Marlowe’s doubling of Egeus and Puck is brilliant, disruptive of the city-state’s hegemonic ambition. Mark Lepaicher says, ‘It’s a particular joy for me that Linda Marlowe is joining us to play Puck. I first saw Linda on stage twenty years ago performing Berkoff’s “Women” when I was still a student’.
When I see work like this, chat with the company, I get the sense of utterly committed people who are devoted to a moonshine project, slightly not there, where you are. Who are you, anyway? It all passes, the event itself leaves no possible trace, despite all of the trailing commentary, blogging blagging. What kind of commitment is this? Who turns up? Read their programme entries, and many of them are all over TV and movies, of course — but some of them aren’t. The commitment to acting is a moonshine game, yet compulsive. They are dreams, our dreams, what we are made of. Bless ‘em all.
♦
Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for written for the Fortnightly may be found here.
More: Nigel Wheale on Shakespeare’s ‘Islamic’ Poem.
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Publication: Friday, 29 June 2018, at 11:25.
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