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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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Keeping in step.
A Fortnightly Review.
The Step Is the Foot: Dance and its relationship to poetry.
by Anthony Howell (Grey Suit Editions) 2019
By ALAN PRICE.
In the opening chapter, titled “The Gait of the Lizard”, Howell explores what we mean by walking and talking:
“The threshing floor” is a potent image signifying the separating of the grain from the chaff discovering what’s edible (workable) and worth storing (remembering.) Now threshing (or editing) is what most good artists, poets and dancers do. Poetry, initially an oral tradition followed by dance, in Ancient Greek theatre, makes possible so much of our art today (I recently watched again Wim Wenders’s film Pina, about Pina Bausch’s dance company, to appreciate what emerged from “threshing” and the fact that Werner Herzog once said that all filmmakers should first of all be poets.) Howell has only a brief reference to film in the 1960s/’70’s – an unexplored area in his book, for what about the balletic style of Chaplin or angular choreography of Bob Fosse?
But let’s stick with the book we have and not what it might have been included. And here Howell is most resonant on Greek and Roman Classical culture, the concept of mimesis and how the arts once aspired (still do?) to be “knitted together.” Of course twenty-first-century culture is eclectic but that eclecticism (for me and maybe for Howell) somehow lost its power of ritual and therefore daring synthesis. In dance you can be free to let things go and experiment. However tradition has had a deadening effect on poetry. Here I agree with Howell that a great deal of British poetry (post-WW2) hasn’t experimented with form, layout and typography enough. It may be free verse now – ‘liberated’ from cloying Victorian rhyming but it hardly ever frees itself to move on and across the white page. It sits or stands there when you want it to clap its hands, sing and dance.
Howell’s rich experience of working with the Royal Ballet, his involvement with performance art and teaching comes vividly through The Step Is the Foot.
Howell’s rich experience of working with the Royal Ballet, his involvement with performance art and teaching comes vividly through The Step Is the Foot. He directed a group called “The Theatre of Mistakes” and was very influenced by Bruce Chatwin’s Song Lines – a description of the ancient tracks in Australia:
It was the autobiographical element of The Step Is the Foot that I found most persuasive. You read of earlier decades when cultural boundaries and political freedoms were not so rigidly set. As a contemporary of Howell I appreciated this Apollonian/Dynosian cusp of risk and adventure that we once took for granted.
The most popular manifestation of this was the dancing of Mick Jagger (a Howell favourite.) His gyrations proclaimed an anarchic individuality to which we gave our sensual consent. Yet what matters to Howell (and to me) is a sense of focus and discipline, being aware of a violent muddle of creative choices and decisions.
Anthony Howell has chosen to write in a deliberately discursive style –he says so on the book’s back cover. Yet I did feel that his own “omelette” contained an excess of ingredients. The book begins to develop itchy feet. There are just too many references, quotes and inferences thrown up, all leading to a constant process of suggestion rather than a satisfying development and conclusion. I appreciate Howell has tackled an inexhaustible subject with potentially differing conclusions. But I would have liked some sense of summing up and attempt at ‘closure’.
I wanted a deeper reflection on a few core ideas not a free-wheeling multiplicity. Fewer examples of poetry and dance would have made this a stronger and more satisfying work. And what’s very noticeable in a book about dance (a great visual art) is a paucity of illustration. The book needs a lot more photographs and diagrams to make its case – especially in its technical dance instruction. It made me feel that there was a gripping TV documentary series, on dance and poetry, struggling inside The Step Is the Foot and wanting to get out.
So contrary reading impulses were fired up. Is this basically a book to occasionally dip into, skim, or attempt to read straight through in your own measured time? I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Yet The Step Is a Foot remains a perceptive and important book worth investigating by anyone who struggles to write or dance in a challenging manner, or just actively sit back to watch, listen and read the outcome.
♦
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Publication: Sunday, 1 March 2020, at 18:46.
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