-
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.
.
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
Subscribe
0 Comments
Ian Seed’s ‘true surrealist attentiveness’.
A Fortnightly Review.
New York Hotel
by Ian Seed
Shearsman Books | 90 pp | £9.95 $17.00
By JEREMY OVER.
Seed’s prose poetry makes its own way clearly, although it harks back, at times, to the early European modernists like Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob
New York might be the ideal destination for the uprooted protagonists of Seed’s poems, with their memories of former lives in France, Italy, Germany and Poland. And the backdrop of the New York ‘School’ of poets seems a congenial one for Seed’s poetry which, especially when in verse form, operates in an identifiably post-Ashberyan mode of lyrical and dreamlike bemusement. Seed’s prose poetry makes its own way much more clearly, although it harks back, at times, to the early European modernists like Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob who were amongst the favourite sources of inspiration for New Yorkers like Ashbery, O’Hara and Padgett.
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.
We are not told what those old tricks might be; the book is full of mysterious almost Kafkaesque hints dropped teasingly like this, but never expanded upon. When reading from New York Hotel on Radio 3’s The Verb in 2018, Seed did however, disclose some of the techniques, or ‘tricks’ involved in his prose poems, comparing them to little blocks or houses, each containing its own world, though ‘quite a fragmented, subjective world … an atomised world’, the atoms building up with cumulative effect. Seed was perhaps obligingly fitting in with the theme of the programme, which was to do with new towns, and the image of the prose poem as atom or block suggests a hard edged minimalism and uniformity which doesn’t quite convey the fluidity and richness of his work. The point about the cumulative effect of the poems does ring true however. The gathering, and arrangement, of his prose poems is, in effect, an act of collage or assemblage at the level of the book. Each poem is a discrete entity and a coherent, if minimal, narrative, but they really need to be taken together as a surrounding whole. Angus Fletcher’s writing about the ‘complex living neighbourhood’ of the poem, or book, as environment in the context of Ashbery’s work seems relevant here.
The cumulative effect Seed says he is looking for lies in the subtle shifts and echoes between the poems…
This is not to say that there aren’t singular delights to be had when reading New York Hotel; there are. ‘Vertigo’, for example, is a perfect and complete, if dizzying, attempt to follow behind a child at play with language: ‘Caterpillars become butterflies, but crows become frogs,’ she said, ‘because they croak so much and fly too close to the ground.’ And ‘Smooch’ is an intriguing and very funny blurt of a poem about an ‘ancient dwarf lady…romancing with David Cameron, to the accompaniment of 1950s doo-wop songs.’ But the cumulative effect Seed says he is looking for lies elsewhere, in the subtle shifts and echoes between the poems as one reads on.
‘Late’, for example, is followed by ‘Views’, which features another hotel setting with a similarly ‘ancient lift’ so it feels like the narrative may be continuing, but it never becomes clear whether the ‘old philosopher’ who ‘has not paid his hotel bill for as long as anyone can remember’ represents another side of the disappointed father in ‘Late’ although he seems to share with the protagonist, this time described simply as ‘the foreigner’, a familial fondness for gazing.
Themes and moods recur sometimes after much longer gaps in the book. In ‘Baptism’, in the second section of the book, for example, the protagonist is again discomfited, this time by a woman who asks him to look after her dog for a few minutes, but then fails to return. In his search for the woman he stumbles upon, but cannot quite reach the kind of earthly paradise often evoked in dream scenes within the films of Andrei Tarkovsky:
A feeling builds up, as one reads through the book, of something happening just off stage as it were; connections being made by dreamlike association, again much as they are in the montage technique of Tarkovsky’s Mirror. There’s something artful yet carefree about Seed’s collection and arrangement of these poems which at times have the air of found material simply being laid out before us. Donald Revell once wrote about this quality when noting that Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell both shared
Neither does Seed give in to panic. Although he is no Rauschenberg, splashing about and gluing goats and tyres to his canvases, there is a resistance to the impulse to contain. There is an openness, a true surrealist attentiveness, to the logic of the dream world when arranging his materials.
This refusal to contain and hoard has a relaxed generosity to it. Some of Seed’s prose poems share on the surface a similarity with the absurdist and psychoanalytical humour of the Americans Barry Yourgrau and Russell Edson but I believe this greater openness marks Seed out from them. Yourgrau is a self-confessed hoarder and has written a book about it: Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act. Reviewing Mess in ‘Division Review’, Nuar Alsadir writes:
Seed’s prose poetry, well-represented by this latest and perhaps most fully developed collection, allows the reader’s mind to go to those uncurated places between what poems and life might be supposed to be and see beyond the clutter to the original strangeness of our home.
♦
Jeremy Over has had two poetry collections published by Carcanet press: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001) and Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009). A third, Fur Coats in Tahiti, is due out in July 2019. He has had reviews and articles published in various places, such as PN Review, Poetry Review and Writing in Education. He is currently completing an AHRC funded Creative Writing PhD at the University of Birmingham, responding to the poetry of Ron Padgett.
An archive of Ian Seed’s work in The Fortnightly Review.
NOTES.
Related
Publication: Monday, 29 October 2018, at 12:37.
Options: Archive for Jeremy Over. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.