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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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The significance and frailty of Raymond Crump.
A Fortnightly Review.
Chords. New and selected poems.
by Raymond Crump
Afterword by Peter Riley.
SSEA Press and Face Press (London & Cambridge) 2020 | 68 pp| £12:50 (paper) £22:00 (hardcover)
By NIGEL WHEALE.
RAYMOND CRUMP’S POEMS all have this frail strength; simply brief, they also just evade you at every reading, me at least, and so they should.
Part II comprises twenty poems written after 2010. These are less evanescent, more declarative, in that sense, perhaps more conventional. These differences apart, there’s no apparent narrative development in the collection, one lyric succeeds another, then they stop.
I must have puzzled over Crump’s poems when I first saw copies of The English Intelligencer in 1968. My teacher, Roger Langley, was intensively coaching me, post-A level, for the Cambridge Entry exams. I was sent a few gratis numbers, having tried to join that tightly corresponding, mimeographed circle, but had been politely declined membership, by Andrew Crozier — I was just a callow sixth-former, after all. But Rog was an inspiring genius; he had written only one poem at that time, ‘Matthew Glover’, closely focused on the history of the landscape near his home in Shenstone, but following Charles Olson’s ‘open field’ practice:
Roger talked me through his poem, half-embarrassed, but maybe half-convinced that he had as much right to be a poet as, well, all those others. He would go off to mythic Cambridge for three or four days each holiday, and return with his poet-friend and mentor’s latest work. He told me how J.H. Prynne would keep him up through the night till dawn, interrogating him line-by-line about his own latest poem, which he seemingly understood no better than Roger — ‘“Mallet path!” What the hell’s a “mallet path”? He doesn’t know either!’ Again, that half-quizzical, half-inspired sense for him that this was utterly new writing, and not understanding it was precisely its virtue and point.
Roger never dared to mention his own poem to Prynne, who never asked about the progress of Roger’s work when he became more prolific, and finally published by Carcanet in 2000. When I arrived at Cambridge, the first collection of Prynne’s that I bought, partly from my scholarship winnings, was the then-utterly mystifying Kitchen Poems (1968). I’d already seen some of the texts in copies of The English Intelligencer that Rog had shown me, at school. Another reading revelation at Cambridge was George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934), thirty-one poems somehow linked together, but on a much larger scale than anything suggested by Raymond Crump’s Chords.2
‘Intelligencer’: earliest meaning in UK English, 1540, as ‘spy’, and then later, ‘reporter’; a broadsheet to convey intelligence, as information and as, well, intelligence. English Intelligencer, perhaps following on from The Freeman’s Journal, Or the North-American Intelligencer, which circulated in Philadelphia, 1781 to 1792; in Washington, the National Intelligencer was the local journal. By the mid-nineteenth century, the earliest issues of the Scientific American were subtitled the ‘English and American Intelligencer’. But there had also been the Cambridge Intelligencer:
‘Dispersed gratuitously in the most unfrequented parts of the Country’ could apply as well to The English Intelligencer as to its Cambridge forerunner.
Raymond Crump’s Chords is beautifully made, the size of a large notebook, white cover with vibrant yellow card flyleaves. On the cover, an abstract, blue pen-and-graphite drawing, ‘Suspended Chord’ [shown above], by the author. The fifty-two poems are risograph-printed in the same pale, mimeo-blue; wide margins place them perfectly for a slow, sustained read, and re-read. The poems call for this. I have always loved Matsuo Basho’s haiku in his Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, and Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel — spare, naturalistic, yet endlessly meditative. I can read Raymond Crump’s poems with the same kind of attention, and pleasure. They are freighted ephemera.
The frailest elements — light, flower, petals — are charged with significance; the poem is the place where words are concentrated.
The three sentences appear unrelated, but take the reader on, to a different percept, line by line. The frailest elements — light, flower, petals — are charged with significance; the poem is the place where words are concentrated. Crump’s poem is utterly original, but calls up every other poem ever written about time passing and our ephemerality:
A white flower.
The spring is old days
And the dream is cold. (Ozaki Hosai)
Peter Riley notes, in his Afterword, ‘The eye is alert to beauty, in the singular instances by which it manifests itself. The language gathers round it until a completion is formed, an ending, a summation, frequently dominated by nouns, a final stasis.’
The longest poem in Part l, ‘Of the Black Garter’, is in five numbered sections — another occulted narrative of which we see only dislocated shards. There seem to be three involved — a lover, a she, and another male, ‘he, leader’. As in the shorter poems, you read but what you follow is ever elusive, meaning side-steps you, the poem refracts to somewhere else, that could never be totalised.
The final poem in Part l is a perfect miniature, that could have been written by Basho during his dangerous journey to Mount Fuji:
The twenty poems of Part ll, written since 2010, are, in Peter Riley’s words, more ‘substantial … moving more slowly towards a wider and more resonant conclusion’. They are in that sense, to me, more conventional, and in most of them I miss the slightness and evanescence of the poems in Part I. The first poem, ‘Woodpecker’, serves as a kind of thesis, a sustained metaphor for the nature of language, meaning, and their convergence in the written word.
Raymond Crump is a great musician of words, and his lines can sing: ‘Wee / twittering tit sticks the twigs with stitch / and stutter.’
The second poem, ‘Hooded Raptor’, might be haunted by Hughes’ crows, but then escapes anything so obvious by characteristic indirections and swiftness: ‘Grey rooftop heron. / Flown smile horizon.’
‘Flight of the Deer’ describes a particularly poignant roadkill incident, the kind we all drive in fear of, and seems orchestrated to deliver its final line, ‘Crash landed in a sudden grace of death.’
‘Charnel Ground’, ‘Skiff’, ‘Meridian Walker’ and ‘Castaway’ are meditations on an estuary, hulks abandoned, skiffs stranded, pathos of seascape and shore as emblem for some ‘hapless crusoe’.
‘Shower on the Garden’, ‘Wet in Wet’ and, superbly, ‘At Churt’, have that lovely attention to almost nothing that makes Raymond Crump’s poetry utterly singular, and rewarding:
♦
Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here.
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 9 June 2020, at 13:46.
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