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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up
2. Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed
3. Simon Collings on blurred genres
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. 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By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. 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Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. 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Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? 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By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | 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 | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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The prose poem.
What the hell is it?
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
IT’S AN ENIGMA, that’s what it is, especially in English; a form that is far more common in French. The “poem in prose” was taken up by many Gallic poets in order to escape the clutch of the Alexandrine – twelve syllable couplets of iambic hexameter – an orthodoxy which tyrannised the making of French verse during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Baudelaire used the prose-poem to liberate his writing from the Alexandrine, and Rimbaud followed with his brilliant Illuminations.
—Arthur Rimbaud (John Ashbery’s translation – Carcanet [UK] 2011)
Some of the finest prose poems have been written by those mystics and philosophers who engage us through…aphorism.’
In my view, some of the finest prose poems have been written by those mystics and philosophers who engage us through the saying. An aphorism with its laconic precision is equivalent to a prose “verse” and there are several fine exponents of this usage. In The Fortnightly Review of March 1877, Sir M. E. Grant Duff writes: “It would possibly be rather difficult to disprove the thesis that the Spanish nation has produced the best maxims of practical wisdom, the best proverb, the best epitaph, and the best motto in the world. If I had to sustain it I would point, with reference to the first head, to the Oráculo manual.”
Do not be completely dovelike. Alternate the cunning of the serpent with the candour of the dove. There is nothing easier than to deceive an honourable man. The person who never tells lies is extremely credulous and the man who never deceives is very trusting. To be taken in is not always the result of stupidity but sometimes of virtue. There are two types of men who ward off injuries with ease: those who have suffered them, very much to their own cost, and those morally insensible people who have learned their lesson at very great cost to their fellows. The wise should show themselves as ready to suspect as are the cunning to ensnare, and no one should want to be so good a man as to cause another to be bad: one should be a mixture of dove and serpent; not a monster, but a prodigy.
—L. B. Walton translator (London J. M. Dent 1953)
This is how The Oracle should be used. Open it anywhere, and that paragraph you first set eyes on constitutes an oracular reading for the day. There is a Machiavellian irony to the thought (The Prince appeared in 1513). And by deft usage of symbols, Gracián creates imagery to support argument.
Gracián’s paragraphs are aphoristic, and another great exponent of the axiom forceful as as a proverb was François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the first edition of whose Maxims and Moral Reflections came out in 1665. After a heroic youth, the Duc entertained La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, Molière and others at his home in Paris; a glittering life that generated a host of glittering bon mots. Swift wrote of these:
Often the maxims are single sentences:
The accent of a man’s native country is as strongly impressed on his mind as on his tongue.
Grace to the body is like good sense to the mind.
So the sentence, polished, finely calibrated, becomes an object constructed with art – a European form of the haiku. Sometimes the sentences come together in a paragraph:
Nothing is so contagious as example. Never was there any considerable good or ill action that hath not produced its like. We imitate good ones through emulation; and bad ones through that malignity in our nature which shame conceals and example sets at liberty.
—John Fletcher Hurst translation, 1899
With Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, darling of the Romantic composers, German prose itself became pure poetry. You can tell it’s poetry, surely, if you can open it anywhere and it takes your breath away – as is the case with the writers already cited. There isn’t the same drive forward that the narrative thrust of the novel imposes.
—Hesperus, translated by Charles T. Brooks, Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1865
But this is page 148 of a two-volume work of well over a thousand pages. Jean Paul’s prose is not exactly purple. Rather than overblown, it seems suggestive. It comes over as a precursor to the lyrical modernism of Salvatore Quasimodo. There is intensity and precision and at times acerbic satire, as in this passage from his novel Flower, Fruit and Thorn, which retains the verbal density of a prose poem:
A passage that employs heightened imagery, parataxis and emotional effects is the generally received view. I get the sense that the “unit” of the prose poem is actually the sentence itself. A prose poem can exploit the way a sentence balances subject and predicate, how it can serve paradox and rhetorical figures, how the construction of an opening phrase can cut across the drift of the previous sentence. And yes, truncated, it can yield parataxis and a fragmentary way of saying; all part of an insistence on the sentence as a material form, rather than the line with its ordered feet.
In English literature, the pioneer of this form, for me, is Thomas Traherne, whose Centuries of Meditations were written between 1666 and 1671, so they are contemporaneous with the Maxims:
—Thomas Traherne, section 57 of the “First Century of Meditations”
Here one senses the influence of the “authorised version” – the first edition of which came out in 1611. Cadence and repetition are favoured in a way that is reminiscent of the Bible’s verses, and yet this flavour is tempered by the Pagan classical references. It’s a poetry of nouns guided by a repeated verb. The last use of draw is deftly camouflaged by a near rhyme – allure – which in turn is rhymed with more and nearly echoed by Desire, lower down. It is very definitely a structure made of words considered in sentences.
The sentence is a random unit, but a unit nevertheless, in that words can become a whole between the opening capital and the stop. Consider. The weight of a single command, suitably framed by start and end, may balance the wordy modification used in the next sentence. This is a form which appeals to modernists like John Ashbery who acknowledges Traherne as a precursor.
ASHBERY IS ALSO a champion of Giorgio de Chirico as a writer, as well as an admirer of his painting. The Italian artist is well known as one of the Italian metaphysical movement – Pittura metafisica – a group established in 1917 which included Carlo Carrá and de Chirico’s brother and later Giorgio Morandi as well as the Englishman Paul Nash.
In 1970, Ashbery brought out Three Poems: The New Spirit, The System and The Recital. These were all prose poems, and the most significant development of the form in English literature since Traherne. Renowned for his mastery of syntax, Ashbery’s poetry flows from one line to the next, and it feels appropriate that this line should follow the one before, although, for all the grace of it, sense may elude the reader, who may need to come to terms with the notion that the meaning resides in the grace itself, the fittingness of the phrases.
In the UK, my take on such writing has been kept out in the cold. Our literary establishment remains deaf to the notion that meaning may be gauged by anything other than narrative significance. All too often, this does not hold true for radical creativity. Once, in an interview, Peter Maxwell Davies said, “People have criticised me for writing music in which they find no meaning. I take it for granted that what I write has got a meaning. I think a composer should be able to take that for granted, otherwise he should not be in the business at all.” This applies to poets, as it does to all artists.
IN THREE POEMS, it is the sentences that follow each other in a way that feels right as we read, but we shouldn’t project abstraction too forcefully on the text. Like a dolphin, the meaning dips in and out of the ocean: sometimes we understand, or feel we understand, and sometimes understanding slips below the surface.
—From “The System”, Three Poems, The Viking Press, NY 1972
Through the Glass Mountain (Bloom Books 1997) and Petrol (Anvil 2012) are both novella length prose-poems by Martina Evans. Each is arranged in numbered episodes, each is a column of prose which might be half a page or a page and a half long. In each there is a narrative, moving and tightly constructed; so narrative in itself does not disbar the prose from being a poem. Each accurately conveys the tone of a narrating character – but why should this eliminate the writing from inclusion in the genre under discussion, since all of this could be said about Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” – and that is most definitely a poem? Again the sentence is the lever, poised on the fulcrum of its verb, the effort of its subject equal to the load of its predicate. Its verb is its force. The predicate may be designed to generate surprise, and it’s that surprise which makes Petrol, for instance, poetic.
There is a “throughness” to conventional prose. With it, we travel on through one sentence to the next, and we are building something by going towards it.
There is a “throughness” to conventional prose. With it, we travel on through one sentence to the next, and we are building something by going towards it. The writing may well feel “transparent” – we are simply looking through it at the sense. With prose poetry such as the above though, each sentence comes at you from its own direction. Each is its own whole, an atomic sentence. That is, it may differ from the previous sentence as much as one atom may differ from another. We don’t experience the same drive to get anywhere. This strategy may be used by “language” poets in a particularly abstract way, dislocated from meaning; but in the case of these intense prose poems, a story is being collaged together, a vivid story that hangs together in a disconcerting way, as one might concoct an image of a cow from many different images of cows. So we are in a double place where we savour the words in each sentence as if it were a separate dish in a Chinese restaurant at the same time as we make a meal of the yarn. And a good one is being spun, while each sentence sparkles like an Irish gem, and trade names and specific nouns are embedded in a tone that with authority sets the voice. We know where we are at the same time as we are surprised by where it is. Reading these texts is a delicious experience. Martina Evans has just released recordings of sections of a new prose poem, a chilling exploration of the troubles, the “auxies” and the “black and tans”, on RTĒ 1, available this March – anniversary of the 2016 Easter uprising.
ANOTHER WRITER MAKING the contemporary prose poem his own is Ian Seed. I heard him read several of these on The Verb recently, in an edition devoted to the new town. Ian McMillan, the programme’s host, considers the prose poem an apt form for Basildon – “An angular slab of words surrounded by white space.” Interviewed on the programme, Ian Seed expressed a kinship with “outsiders, and odd surreal moments.” He said that his poems often moved from “a concrete place into a more dream-like world.” He pointed out that the prose poem “sets up the idea of a contradiction in terms…it forsakes the tool of the line-break.” For him, flash fiction differs from the prose poem because its sense of story enables a resolution, whereas in the prose poem “you still want a resolution.”
I am taken by the notion that the prose poem “forsakes the tool of the line break”, just as blank verse forsakes rhyme, or free verse forsakes a standardised metre.
—Ian Seed, Identity Papers, Shearsman Books, 2016
Here the sense of the sentence as the essential unit is epitomised by the last one in this particular piece. It does not resolve, it transfixes the poem. The entire context is somehow sucked up into its final image. I am taken by the notion that the prose poem “forsakes the tool of the line break”, just as blank verse forsakes rhyme, or free verse forsakes a standardised metre. Art seems to evolve, to grow, when some time honoured tenet is “let go of” – though this tendency to grow by relinquishment often offends pundits and traditionalists – who may accuse blank verse of “not rhyming”, for instance; ignoring the absurdity of their judgement.
Ian Seed has also published, Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), another collection of prose poems. The work is that of a “Europoet” – sometimes residing in Italy or elsewhere, but it is always a contemporary elsewhere. His prose poems are non-denominational, in that they embody the sort of narrative that may not appeal to lovers of narrative, but may well interest practitioners of language poetry and abstraction. A metaphor may be touched upon, implied, suggested, not quite clinched, so that there is an openness of space around the dissimilar things being alluded to as having a connection. There is a dryness here, similar to that I relate to in a painting by Gwen John or Giorgio Morandi, or indeed Paul Nash. While the sentences may each be dynamic, at the same time there is a quality to the overall surface of the text, akin to the notion of matière — a sense of the surface as some unique matter, matter that coheres (very much sensed in Morandi, for instance) — it’s a term that may aptly be applied to these prose poems.
In literature, I’m reminded of the work of Italo Svevo. There is the same self-disparagement in the sensibility of the protagonist – who is one to whom things happen, rather than one who makes things happen. Svevo has a passage concerning three sisters and a proposal of marriage – and so does Seed. I leave the reader to sleuth these out.
Both Ians on The Verb expressed an admiration for the poetry of the American Charles Simic, who wrote prose poetry with a ragged right hand margin. However, this tips the debate into the question of the longer line in contemporary poetry – as well as touching on the longer poem, and extended narrative in poetry – all fertile territory for several American poets. I know Martina Evans admires Driving and Drinking, a narrative in verse by David Lee (Copper Canyon Press, 1979), and there’s also the work of George Pitts, who writes with a significantly extended line in his long poem Partial Objects (Jerkpoet, NY 2016), but this notion of line length and narrative length in poetry warrants a separate essay.
Finally, in this disconcerting age of the multitudinous, I note the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, one of whose editors, Robert Alexander, has a comprehensive essay on the prose poem available online here. The site makes the prose poem a speciality and offers anthologies of the same and samples that can be read online.
These days, it feels as if everything can be mass produced by the sheer number of poets out there. I know of two sites specialising in Fibonacci series poetry, and doubtless there are sites offering a comprehensive survey of poetry on pottery.
♦
Also: Poems in Prose by Oscar Wilde, from The Fortnightly Review, July 1894.
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