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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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Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship.
A FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW
Citizen: an American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
Penguin Poetry/Greywolf | 160pp | $20.00 £9.99)
By MICHELENE WANDOR.
Rankine makes no concession to euphemisms or alternatives – no use of ‘person of colour’, for example; she says ‘black’ when that is what she means.
There are seven numbered (and some unnumbered) sections, mainly with prose paragraphs, and some interspersed images, in colour, from art, and also with a black (!) and white (!) photograph of a public lynching. Together these explore what it is to be black in America, chronicling ‘the quotidian struggles against dehumanisation every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color’. Rankine makes no concession to euphemisms or alternatives – no use of ‘person of colour’, for example; she says ‘black’ when that is what she means. Also, in a telling context, she does not fear quoting the ‘n’ word, virtually with a note of defiance in her very use of the term, to show how prejudice and racial hostility are still very much present in many quarters, So even though the language throughout deploys repetition and subtle uses of rhythm (the explicit tropes of poetry) – this is clearly also a polemic.
The ‘lyric’ in the subtitle implies a first-person expressiveness. And, indeed, there is a self weaving through the pages, a self ironically constructed mainly via a second person voice – being a teenager, painful encounters with police, above all, what it is to be black in a world where hostility seems always to be not just round the next corner, but often there, full frontal.
Not everything is directly about being black. Section 1V evokes the struggle to keep going, through hours and days, with a poetic repetition of ‘sigh’ and ‘sighing’. Here the self sometimes is part of the world (turning on the TV with the sound down) and sometimes not, and the mantra of the sigh is joined by the repetition of the occasional balancing ‘soothe’.
To return to the title. Does Citizen strike a triumphal note? In the text, the notion of the citizen shifts through social and emotional uncertainties. In the subtitle, ‘American’ may refer to specific geographical location, but alongside this, ‘citizen’ and ‘lyric’ are redolent with irony, as they struggle to find a place and space within the ‘American’.
How might this book be summed up? It could be described as a meditation, but given the spiritual connotations these days, that wouldn’t be appropriate. It is too active in its fierce challenges, constantly demanding more, different action. However, the book invites those who are receptive to think about, meditate on matters of race – primarily on what it is to be black in the Western world, and then, by implication, what it is to be white.
This book does not make for comfortable reading; it may be cathartic for some, because of its passion. It may challenge others to think about their own ethnic place in their world. Some may find it too uncomfortable to confront. One reviewer called it ‘an unsettled hybrid’. It is also unsettling. Its hybridity is one of the elements which makes it unsettling – at times content seems elevated over form, but the power of the writing and the mercurial structure mean it must be taken as a serious, contemporary literary and imaginative statement about the experience of race.
♦
Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She has also written a critique of Creative Writing — The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave).
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Publication: Tuesday, 24 September 2019, at 08:02.
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