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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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Just a smack at Auden.
A Fortnightly Review.
September 1, 1939
by Ian Sansom
4th Estate 2019 | pp. 341 | £16.99 (hardback) £9.67 )(paper, 20 August 2020); $19.66 (hardcover) $17.99 (paper, 1 September 2020)
By ALAN WALL.
Sansom’s book took twenty-five years to write. It comes in at just over three hundred pages, with some pretty generous spacing. So, it’s hardly The Anatomy of Melancholy. If there were a Stakhanovite measure for productivity of page production, Sansom would fail with maximum demerits. To be fair to him, he is aware of the ludicrous nature of the enterprise. Towards the end, there is a splendid anti-writer rant: ‘…most writers, in my experience, are so wrapped up in their own dawdlings that it’d take a smack in the face with a piece of two-by-four to get them to sit up and take notice of the world.’ Couldn’t agree more. We’re a bad lot. And Sansom should know, given the number of books bearing his name.
Auden’s verse engaged the contemporary world, did not shirk political action and was ready to get down and dirty with the kids.
The poem is also famous for its description of the 1930s as ‘a low dishonest decade’. This was striking, since for so many people Auden had represented the 1930s in one of its most striking aspects. His had been the poetry which had replaced the high modernism of Eliot and Pound. This was a verse which engaged the contemporary world, did not shirk the requirement for political action and was, in effect, ready to get down and dirty with the kids. There was something populist about Auden, MacNeice, Spender, Day Lewis. They were all public school boys who went to ancient universities. So they weren’t terribly down and dirty with the kids. And the grubbier kids weren’t known for reading verse anyway.
But these boys were on the right side in the class struggle. They were committing their talents to the Revolution. One way of reading September 1, 1939 is that this is the moment when Auden said it had all been a waste of time. There wouldn’t be a revolution; there’d be a war. And here he was boozing in a dive on 52nd Street, pondering. Orwell could have predicted it. He had shown his own commitment to his left-wing beliefs by taking a bullet in the throat in Spain. And he had pointed out that the rhetoric of Auden’s ‘Spain’ was grand, but did not always grapple with the realities involved. In a lethal comment, he said the line ‘the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ could only have been written by someone who had never pulled the trigger. Auden never pulled the trigger. He soon suppressed ‘Spain’ as well.
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What Sansom discovers in the stanzas of this poem is a fair bit of confusion. Auden didn’t know what would become of the world (who did?) and has become intolerant of his own previous facility in diagnosing the world’s ills. With his previous quirky combinations of Marx and Freud, he had been able to tell you how the buildings got so high or why the rabbit trembled. Nothing had been beyond his perceptual remit. Now he wavers. Accuses himself of glibness. Orders another drink. Martini, usually. If Auden was addicted to verse-making, he was equally addicted to alcohol, and various forms of chemical assistance that came in pills. The late Auden could be disreputable, turning up to readings pissed, burning a hole in Basil Bunting’s piano with his cigarette. ‘Well, it doesn’t affect the tone,’ he remarked, comfortingly. At the High Table in Christ Church he was asked to moderate the obscenity of some of his tales. ‘I know what is permissible in male company,’ he intoned. Here Sansom records this thought from the Table Talk: ‘The great question now is, what would give one pleasure? Ought one to write poetry, or fuck?’ A lot of poets have found it possible to do both, of course, if not necessarily simultaneously.
The whole book is a work of splendid exasperation…Almost every page surprises.
Sansom pulls in an enormous number of asides from his wide reading. It works well. The whole book is a work of splendid exasperation. Sansom is utterly exasperated with himself, and equally exasperated with Auden. Almost every page surprises. His wife, who pops in and out of these pages, must be relieved, for a brief while anyway, to live with someone who is not writing a book.
♦
An archive of Alan Wall’s Fortnightly work is here. Ian Sansom is an occasional contributor to The Fortnightly.
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Publication: Tuesday, 16 June 2020, at 14:08.
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