Earthquake Triolet
Quakes in China, the seaboard shelf. Whose faults
are these? I think I know. Inside the house
the windows shake. Some plaster falls.
China quakes on the cupboard shelf. Whose faults
are these: TV filling up with snow, some false
all-clears some decades back. I think I know the hows –
but whys… a China Syndrome of halts
and starts somewhere where the core is housed.
♦
Lot’s Wife
– after Akhmatova
His massive shadow thrown against the [...]
From ‘burning sage’:
sage brushes blue-grey leaves
once soft leaves, staining my hands moth-wing grey
now waiting, furled, rigid, waiting to flare
into nothing
Michael Blackburn: ‘Of course, I may be suffering the same illusion as everyone else in the poetry ghetto, that there’s a way out, that we’re not just muttering to ourselves. I’m not bothered any more if that is the case but I still like the idea that someone, somewhere is taking a look at the poems and enjoying what they see. If the only way to make that happen is to use the latest technology and expect no payment, then why not? As Rimbaud said more than a century ago, “Il faut être absolument moderne”, so let us be absolutely modern.’
Tom Lowenstein: ‘This is an extract from a sequence of Notebooks and Fantasias in the voice of a late eighteenth-century poet who had just completed the composition of Kubla Khan. Although the identity of S.T. Coleridge obviously is implied, the work makes no attempt at biography or literary criticism. In the following passages, pseudo-Coleridge, either in person or in imagination, is walking in the Swiss mountains. The book contains many anachronisms.’
M. D. Armstrong: ‘The white dust higher!
The pikes are clustered like harbor-masts,
The chariot-wheels on the pavement thunder,
And the horses leap at the trumpet-blasts.’
Tom Lowenstein: ‘Buried in [John Collinson's] Preface, Rack’s presence counts for nothing. He’s the ghost in the corpus. Once he has done service, this Norfolk weaver’s son (who’d made his living as a dyer), is penned up in a sentence. The book’s proclaimed author is a Church Patrician. While Rack exits, once he’d briefly entered, like a footman, in a single movement.’
J. B. Bury: When historical methods of aesthetic have been perfected, there may be some chance of sifting out the Greek ideas in comparative purity; and it may be possible for the imagination, in some measure, to grasp the Greek world. The processes of analysis are slow, and our race shall have seen many generations of historians pass, and shall have celebrated many a grammarian’s funeral, before the most skilful navigator can touch the shores of “Hellas” and behold the smoke curl upwards from the hall of Euphrosyne, even then only in the distance.
Anthony Howell: “Prince was a Catholic, but his commitment as a writer was primarily to literature. Having been invited to chair the English department of Kingston University in Jamaica, he grew exasperated when students handed him manuscripts avowing their religious zeal. He said to me once, ‘Literature allows one to become emancipated from oneself.’”
James MacGuire: ‘For even as Dennis’ older son waited up at night for his father to appear, the rescue workers found Dennis’ body, on the third day after the attacks, beneath a beam just north of the South Tower. Laying close beside him was his friend, Bob Barnes, both of them identifiable by their Rescue 2 gear and the cladagh rings they wore.’
John Welch: ‘He is always in sight of death / Lifting high each careful unwebbed foot. / I notice – I cannot help it – how / It’s all to one purpose, this killing machine / With its concentrations of stillness.’ – From ‘Heron’.
Peter Riley: Noon brings this to poetry through his placement of the authorial self, you could say centrally but not subjectively – it is a perfectly objective attention to particulars as a means of attaching the whole (“the general makes me more specific” – Sonnet 1). Lyrical description is perhaps a good label for what Noon gets up to. The song qualities enhance the description and the description holds the singing to realities.
Peter Riley: Some 10,000 poems on slips of card have been rained over London by helicopter. This enterprise was the work of Chileans, who last did it to celebrate the imprisonment of Pinochet. I could have thought of a number of politicians and newspaper moguls whose imprisonment could have been celebrated in this way but unfortunately they haven’t yet been caught.
The world’s most exciting poets, rappers, spoken word artists, singers and storytellers are gathering for this huge event that will make history as the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK. Including a sidebar on Hungarian poetry.
It is so nice to be out in the air. If I stand quite still, I can be a poplar tree in early dawn. Hyacinths, fawns. Running water and garden lilies. London is so dreary, compared with being in the country with my father and the dogs. I am a pirate, reckless, unscrupulous, riding on the omnibus up Whitehall, all sails spread. I am free…’
Writers Museum, Dublin: tat and ephemera.
The youth tactic. | Edward Dorn – a two-part review. | What’s happened to ‘working-class’ poetry? | The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett. | The prosaic declarations of ‘world poetry’. | Books received: Summer 2012. | Alistair Noon and the English Sonnet. | Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press. | Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus. | Denise Riley and the force of bereavement. | Poetry beyond the cults and enclaves.
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.
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Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett.
Peter Riley: ‘Anthony Barnett’s is a very distinct brand of poetry, only tenuously connected to the work of his contemporaries, and to very few of them. To him the works of British and American poets at large, especially those gaining big sales and official endorsement, are simply contemptible – “lies”. They are lies because they are untrue to the nature of written language as a multiple instrument where sense includes silence and every item of meaning carries a load of echoes and exceptions, and they are untrue to their materials in experience and the world.’