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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
2. The Pleasure of Ferocity. A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor
3. Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg
4. What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane
5. The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall
6. Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell
7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
9. Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner
10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
…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 and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Time Out’s New York listings here.
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.
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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.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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European populism? 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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