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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Peter Taylor in triple vision by John Matthias
2. Representation in millimetres by Alan Wall
3. Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia by Simon Collings
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: 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 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: Kino Atlantyk and more prose poems by Maria Jastrzębska | At this moment by Rupert M. Loydell | How the robots of the world’s richest man decide what you may read by Ian Gardner | ‘Measuring Distances’ and four more prose poems by Kimberly Campanello | David Baddiel, another famous Jew by Howard Cooper | John Fowles, Gentleman by Bruce Kinzer | Art and Innocence by Victor Bruno | San Miniato, a poem by Michelene Wandor | To Field Flowers, a tribute to Philippe Jaccottet by John Taylor | Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley | ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor | The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall | Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. 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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. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. 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. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. 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. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. 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? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. 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? 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John Ashbery Was a Quiz Kid.
John Ashberry 1927-2017.
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
ACCORDING TO JOE BRAINARD’S Little-Known Facts about People, John Ashbery was a quiz kid. He certainly had a phenomenal memory, recalling the name of Daffy Duck’s kid sister as easily as a paragraph from the Centuries of Thomas Traherne. He introduced me to many wonderful books: Hebdomeros – the surreal novel by Giorgio de Chirico, Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, the poems of John Wheelwright, the writings of Raymond Roussel and the novellas of Adolfo Bioy Casares. He never hesitated to go off-piste, and eschewed the canon in favour of the “byways of literature”.
Ashbery was happy to join fellow ex-pats in Paris, becoming the art editor in the mid-1950s for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune: the paper Jean Seberg sells in the street in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle. He found it easier to critique a field in which he wasn’t involved, and his admiration for artists was always founded on an astute eye, as can be seen in his long admiration and critical support of the work of R. B. Kitaj. His cogent art-criticism, gathered together in Reported Sightings shows how he was perfectly capable of making sense. It was simply something that was not a priority for his verse. And in terms of a highly unusual but hugely enjoyable narrative read, few books are as entertaining as A Nest of Ninnies, the novel he wrote with James Schuyler in 1969, which I must add was much admired by Auden in the New York Times, who was convinced their book was “destined to become a minor classic.”
Ashbery was a species of magnet. Poets, artists, essayists gathered round. With Sonya Orwell, he edited the twelve issues of Art and Literature-1964-67 – to my mind the most important journal of the latter half of the last century. You’ll find Philippe Sollers writing about Poussin in its pages, a dialogue with Philip Guston, poems by Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Laura Riding, an essay by Maurice Blanchot. For once poetry, visual art and cutting-edge philosophy seemed engaged in a congeries. For a British poet, hailing from a London where visual art was strictly separated from literature, where all arts were discrete as well as discreet, this magazine, with Burroughs and Genet also among its contributors, was an inspiration. Ashbery edited the “New Poetry” issue of Locus Solus – 1962 – that was also edited by Harry Matthews. The poets gathered together here include the nexus of what was to become known as the New York School.
The anthology of that name, edited by Padgett and Shapiro, introduced a wave of great writing, by Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara et al: abstraction can be user-friendly, narration need not be about anything much, sonnets can still work…The New York School projected a welcome sense of relaxation, names could be dropped, rather as they could in the days of Dante’s dolce stil novo. Ashbery was at the centre of this new enlivening hubbub.
Ashbery showed you how it was done, how, when ignored by the establishment, you went out and created your world…
Ashbery showed you how it was done, how, when ignored by the establishment, you went out and created your world, your sphere, your culture. Welcomed by a party thrown him at the factory by Andy Warhol, Ashbery’s return to New York in 1965 marked the advent of a renaissance in US poetry that was also a change in direction, a change of emphasis – from meaning to manner of saying. And that was when New York was the place to be, when it was the art world: Larry Rivers playing sax in the evenings, and painting in his studio during the day, Allen Ginsberg sitting in John Cage’s lap, as they shared a chair at an all night reading at St Mark’s in the Bowery of the work of Gertrude Stein. Twelve hour performances by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffmann School of Byrds at The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Hard Edge was out. Minimalism and conceptual art were coming in.
As was his way, Ashbery went off and championed the dead-pan figuration of Alex Katz and the work of Jane Freilicher, Robert Dash and Fairfield Porter. That was a typical twist of Ashbery’s Moebius strip, to champion figurative art while writing surreal poems. But again, it was the material sense of the thing, how it was done, which distinguished a work, not so much the orthodoxy to which it adhered. There was something of the dandyesque about this aesthetic. A fastidious sense of the eccentric.
Or perhaps it was a sense that what might be labelled eccentric was simply original but little known. The gramophone would be playing piano music by Charles Ives and then some obscure British composer, Frank Bridge perhaps. Later we’d watch a Ritz brothers movie from the hire store. High culture mingled happily with slapstick. Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape effectively lifted the sestina from scholarly obscurity into crude up-to-date health, and conferred immortality on Popeye.
Ashbery created intense little collages, and he was a collage in himself. Another artist he admired was Trevor Winkfield – also a poet – and British – whose iconic yet enigmatic paintings have disparate emblems in them which never quite collide, though they ought to; something one can understand the quiz kid responding to; the paintings are full of things which might mean, but do they? A feeling one can get when deep in Ashbery’s lines.
— September 4, 2017.
For a link to a reading by John Ashbery on Grey Suit Editions, and two earlier essays of mine on his work –
John Ashbery 1927-2017
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More readings by Ashbery here:
http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/ashbery.cfm
The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard – a special publication of the Library of America, 2012.
Reported Sightings – Art Chronicles 1957-1987, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 1989
A Nest of Ninnies, Ashbery and Schuyler, Carcanet, 1987
An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, Vintage, 1970.
Notes on John Ashbery in the Fortnightly.
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Publication: Tuesday, 5 September 2017, at 09:09.
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