Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Martin Sorrell: So was Apollinaire the lone innovator? Was there anyone comparable writing in English? As Tim Kendall points out, it took David Jones, who’d served in that war, nearly twenty years to produce work such as “In Parenthesis”. Apollinaire, on the other hand, wrote both spontaneously and experimentally, out of the here and now. Take “Flare”, a poem of erotic charge – even yearning.
I had read the obituary notice which I have been quoting, quite by chance, along with a great many others of the same period. It had excited some little speculation in my mind, but, beyond thinking that, if I ever had an opportunity of examining the local records of the period indicated, I would try to remember Dr. Haynes, I made no effort to pursue his case.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
By James Thomson [B.V.]. I COME FROM mountains under other stars Than those reflected in my waters here; Athwart broad realms, beneath large skies, I flow, Between the Libyan and Arabian hills, And merge at last into the great Mid-Sea; And make this land of Egypt.
Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’
Transtromer’s subjects often feel that they have woken from the dream of life. The constant inversion of dream time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical worlds, are abiding themes for this writer, a psychologist by profession who has worked principally with those deemed to be outcasts from society.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Winters could be brutal. As I write this now I’m looking at an unpublished letter from the Poetry Magazine archives — from William Pillin (a poet known as a left-winger in the 1930s) to then-editor Hayden Carruth: ”Dear Mr. Carruth: / Will someone tell Mr. Winters to get off my toes? / His rude designation of my craft as a refuge to ‘fairies and fantasists’ is insulting and untrue.”
A poetry reading, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Abstraction’, will be staged at The Room, London N17, at 7:30pm on 17 September 2011. The poets reading: Vincent Dachy, Fiona Templeton, and Anthony Howell. The exhibition includes work by Bonvin/Eden, Anthony McCall, Stephen Mallaghan, Yuko Shiraishi, Paul Sibbering, Amikam Toren, Gera Urkom and Mark Williams.
Rimbaud suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind.
Stephen Wiest: I wish it, without evocation, or appeal, this desire;
Sans a mutable sign turning this bright zodiac
miming obsession’s coiling serpent; only the simple question,
Will you listen, just listen?
I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea. I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!”
[The New York Times'] Tillinghast’s comments merely celebrated the “middle class, middle brow lifestyle” represented in so much of contemporary poetry as opposed to a “continuation of those literary and humanist traditions that have something more at stake,” in short, writing and thinking like Williams’s. Speaking out against what he perceived as a dominance of this “official verse culture,” Bernstein drew a line in the sand that put him in strong opposition to many of the most revered publishers and advocates of poetry.
Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.
We learn that anyone born under the sign of Saturn shares “a large part of misfortune and bile”.
Michelene Wandor: This has been a rare moment of public protest among atomised artists, as all writers are.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
Coleridge as a poet.
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.