-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Hatcheston Halt by John Matthias
2. Disinterest and Aesthetics Pt 1 by Tronn Overend
3. Out of the house and into the business district by Martin Stannard
4. We need to talk about Vladimir, by Jonathan Gorvett
5. Two new poems by Fred Johnston
6. Several dwarves and one pet by Meg Pokrass
7. The wheel in the tree: An appreciation of Penguin Modern Poets 12. By Ian Seed
8. Wonder Travels: a memoir by Josh Barkin
9. Five poems from Fire by Jaime Robles
10. Three instructive texts by Rupert M. Loydell
…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: On John Wilkinson’s ‘Wood Circle’, by Rupsa Banerjee | The Ringstead Poems by Peter Robinson. With an afterword by Tom Phillips | From Dialyzing: poetry by Charline Lambert. Translated by John Taylor | The O.E.D Odes by Lea Graham | Demarcation and three more poems, by Pui Ying Wong | What are poets for? Alan Wall on Nathaniel Tarn’s Autoanthropology | Martyrdom. Anthony Howell on the Russian invasion of Ukraine | Bard-think: Anthony O’Hear on teaching with Shakespeare | The Pleasure of Ferocity: A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor | Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg | Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt | What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane | The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall | The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias | Young Wystan by Alan Morrison | Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner | Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez | Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell | 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.
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
Time Out’s New York listings here.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
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.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
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.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
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.
♦
Related
Publication: Sunday, 1 March 2020, at 18:46.
Options: Archive for Alan Price. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.