Seth Canner (from ‘Footnotes on Suffering’): ‘Obscure (a) isn’t a word that I’d usually circle back to, but I’m going to do it. In a recherché sort of way, we all know exactly what ‘obscure’ means without having to define it. This is interesting as it suggests we know exactly how to define a thing ‘not expressed or easily understood.’ William Blake writes, “What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.”’
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About the Trollope Prize.
1. Anthony Howell on the three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions
2. You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap.
3. Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century.
More below…
4. YOU HAVEN’T READ IT ALL. MORE…
Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last
Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | Augustus Young: ‘La Petite Gloire’, from a fragment by Queneau | James Gallant: Two short essays: ‘The other side where sight is without eyes’ | Alan Wall completes his ‘Midrash’ with part four: Lingua Adamica | Vanessa Waltz: A polyptych for Anne Frank | Anthony O’Hear reviews Simon Blackburn’s On Truth | Anthony Howell celebrates Nicolas Roeg and the necessity of risk | Peter Riley‘s three-part Summer Shelf of poetry reviews | Three new poems by Karl O’Hanlon | Into the NHS’s vortex of care: Augustus Young’s Heavy Years, reviewed by Marianne Mays | Three récits by Georges Limbour in new translations by Simon Collings | Jona Xhepa: Morton Feldman and the listening body at the Hugh Lane, Dublin | Anthony Howell on Shame and shamelessness: Freud, Gide and Immoralism | Nigel Wheale reviews Martin Schwabsky’s Heretics of Language | Simon Collings: Somewhere else: A review of New Town Utopia | Nick O’Hear reviews Martin Slater’s National Debt: A short history | ‘Henry James and his palpitating secretary, Theodora Bosanquet’, introduced by Pamela Thurschwell | From the archive: Henry James profiles Pierre Loti | Nigel Wheale reviews Midsummer Night’s Dream at Wilton’s | Elisabeth Bletsoe: The Birds of the Sherborne Missal | How language can lead to genocide: Tom Zoellner on Rwanda | Peter O’Brien on Antonin Artaud in Ireland | From our archive: Ibsen’s new drama, the first appearance in print by 18-year-old James Joyce | Three poems by Yorkshire’s Sam James | Seven new poems by Peter Robinson | Anthony Howell reviews The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives at the Arcola Theatre | Three new poems by David Cooke | Walter Sickert: the Pennells’ ‘new life of Whistler’ | Mr Benjamin goes to town: Walter Benjamin and the City by Alan Wall | James Gallant on Jeffrey Kirpal’s ‘extreme religious experiences’ | Through the eyes of Laura Potts: The Picture in Ireland | Art and Literature: Alan Wall on that liminal year: 1922 | Robert Desnos: Rrose Sélevy, in a new translation by Simon Collings | Five new poems by Lana Bella | Chloë Hawkey’s American Note: ‘Thought Leaders and Ted Talks’
[published last month]— Alistair Noon’s magnificent epic: Essay on Spam | Five poems by Emily Critchley | ‘At Ladywell Cemetery’ and ‘Rossiya’: new poems by Carol Rumens | Alan Wall reviews the autobiography of painter R.B. Kitaj | Two new poems by Carola Luther | Andy Owen asks ‘Why write about war?’ | Data-driven lit-crit from Stanford: Chloë Hawkey on Canon/Archive | Fiction the size of a small deckchair by Nigel Ford: The Attendant | Ian Seed’s new translations of poems from Max Jacob’s ‘The Dice Cup’ | Six pages from ‘Lots of Fun with Finnegans Wake’ by Peter O’Brien | Tronn Overend: An objective theory of Modernist aesthetics || For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
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Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577Poetry 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.
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. Now running. In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement, submission guidelines, and proposing new Notices.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- 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.
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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.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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European populism? Departments
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