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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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Turner’s Loom.
A Fortnightly Review.
Loom
by Matthew Turner.
Gordian Projects 2020 | 80pp | £10.00
By MICHAEL HAMPTON.
As a story though, Loom starts in the most humdrum way, as its main protagonist hovers on a kerb waiting for traffic to clear in order to cross the road. However, at this very moment his attention is caught by a single gold filament that’s become snagged by the weave of his own overcoat. This provides a thread to follow, as the writer/artist’s methodology unwinds, while the street in question turns out to be no ordinary thoroughfare, but The Bishops Avenue N2, said to be the wealthiest row of houses in London, and a nirvana for estate agents (according to Zoopla, the average price of property in December 2020 was £7.5 million). Employed as a caretaker, Loom’s unnamed narrator has privileged access to a run down Bauhaus-type family home, the kind of rectilinear modernist building of the 1930s (think Isokon flats), and clean-cut European architecture so vilified by John Betjeman, which must have looked like an oddity to the average Londoner of the period, so used to sooty Victorian terraces. Turner describes the road as
Turner’s Loom, with its fluctuation from Swiftian close-up to chilly filmic overview, places him alongside other recent London topographical explorations of the capital city…
In the process, the narrator, the house, and London itself (which features as an oblique presence) have all been made utterly strange, and Turner’s Loom, with its fluctuation from Swiftian close-up to chilly filmic overview, places him alongside other recent London topographical explorations of the capital city as uncanny per se, viz Nick Papadimitriou’s Scarp (2012), Gareth E. Rees’s Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares on the Edge of London (2013), and Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Critical Theory of the London Underground (2017),1 where research-driven defamiliarization, or a ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’ as supercritic Arthur C. Danto put it, turns life into art, and, particularly in Turner’s case, curates decay.
Only an on-site security guard in a ‘creased Oxford shirt’ provides any social normality, a slacker who makes himself known by an occasional creaky floorboard or burst of unintelligible radio static, though interactions are off-hand and loaded with menace. And yet in a classic plot twist it becomes clear that the protagonist is not who he says he is, ie a casual handyman, but an undercover operative, a maniac who has returned to salvage a personal cache of gold concealed at the house, revealing too that the build was a design based on Adolf Loos’s functionalist Villa Müller in Prague (now a museum ̶ of itself! ̶ and behind Lucy McKenzie’s 2013 installation Loos House, described by Jonathan Griffin in Frieze as ‘an act of deliberate slippage, a provocative mistranslation’, words which could equally apply to Loom). So then, having found and tugged on a golden thread embedded in plasterboard, his treasure unravels completely in a glistening spool, and this phoney caretaker escapes with the sound of police car sirens in the background. Loom has all the hallmarks of a parable, a new take on the anxieties surrounding art as derivative form, and art as commodity, its maker’s right of droit-de-suite weakened in a post-Brexit market economy; concerns which Turner might well have to address in his role as Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts.
Yet it is as a re-writer of London that Turner is most effective, joining the crowd of post-Sinclair names cited above who are re-imagining the city, a cross between Urbex trespassers and sober archivists, equipped with proprioceptive sensitivities that can tune into both ancient resonances as well as stand witness to traumatic contemporary change. In Loom so-called ‘Internal Edgelands’ emerge, pockets of dark space inside the metropolitan area which the virus has nullified. For as the administrative centre and Canary Wharf are purged of tourists and commuters, once again the cluster of villages which were slowly fused together in the nineteenth and twentieth century as Greater London, postcodes from Barnes to Walthamstow, Hampstead to Gypsy Hill, start to look more and more vital as local life hubs. But Loom as its name implies, builds up surface patterns — line upon line — woven into Paisley arabesques, expressing the creeping horror of the haunted house idiom.
♦
Michael Hampton has written extensively about the practice and theory of artists’ publishing. His Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book was published by Uniformbooks in 2015, to critical acclaim. Between 2009 and 2019 he wrote regularly for Art Monthly, and has contributed to many exhibition catalogues, and titles such as 3a.m., The Blue Notebook, Unofficial Britain, The Penguin Collector, The Swedenborg Review, Invert/Extant and most recently the urban horror anthology Denizen of the Dead.
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Publication: Friday, 5 February 2021, at 12:11.
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