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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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Words and lies.
A Fortnightly Review
The Liar’s Dictionary
by Eley Williams
Doubleday US | Heinemann UK | 288 pp | £11.55 $19.53
By PAUL COHEN.
Williams’ plot hinges, in a satisfyingly complex way, upon deliberate false entries in the dictionary, reminiscent of the false passages in the books at the centers of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon. One of her protagonists is tasked with eliminating these entries from a dictionary, much as the character Cinoc, in Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, works as a dictionary’s “word-killer,” though Cinoc targets obsolete rather than fake words. Since Williams’ novel, more than these others, is all about, and frequently composed of, rare and unusual words, her employment of these themes is particularly appropriate, and she is able to apply them in distinctive ways.
Though Williams’ chapter headings, starting with “A is for artful (adj.),” stress the alphabetical structure, the novel’s binary structure—alternating chapters set in the present and 1899—is more crucial and highly effective. The counterpointed relationships between the two stories—present/past, female/male, gay/straight, upstairs/downstairs and so on—which take place in the same institution and building, make for an absorbing and moving dual narrative.
Without resorting to supernatural connections, Williams sets up subtle links between her present and past characters. In an old photograph taken outside the building, Mallory, the modern protagonist, notes that her predecessor “must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.” Although she is sitting with her romantic partner at the time, Mallory “propped the photograph in the centre of [her] desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.” Similarly, her 1899 counterpart presciently imagines that “some poor clerk or printer’s devil” might in “five years? Ten years? A hundred?” be “tasked with winnowing out these entries,” just as Mallory has been.
Nevertheless, The Liar’s Dictionary is not just a showcase for its author’s linguistic ingenuity. Its affecting characterizations, its absorbing plot, and even its vivid evocation of the largely forgotten but deadly 1899 explosion at Barking have much to offer the reader.
♦
Paul Cohen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University, has written on literature, art, music, film, computing, pedagogy, and, for The Fortnightly Review, on ‘Pataphysics, Remy de Gourmont, portraiture in fiction and Tom McCarthy.
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Publication: Thursday, 14 January 2021, at 15:21.
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