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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…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: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | 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. 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? 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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Roeg elements: innovation and risk.
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
— For Nicolas Roeg on his 90th birthday: one of the only British film “auteurs” deserves our accolades for the innovative films he directed such as Performance, Bad Timing, Castaway and The Man who Fell to Earth. I mark this event with a celebration of artistic risk-takers, young and old.
WE LIVE IN confused and confusing times. As I was growing up, sharp young writers and artists were extending the territory of modernism, while there were old codgers who persisted in exalting the Georgian poets and even more retrograde figures who were inclined to argue for a return to Victorian romanticism, sentiment and bombast.
From being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets have turned into being the acknowledged advocates of nonsense.
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Today, I seem to be the one who is out of touch with the zeitgeist. Issues appear to be all-important. Prizes and rewards go to those who promote animal rights and a vegan lifestyle. People come together because they share the same feelings rather than the same thoughts. Poems get published in established magazines because of what the poet cares about. Faber now publishes the work of those concerned with identity, shame, gay shame, healing, gender and trauma. The actual quality of the writing is only referred to as an aside. Many of these poets are one-trick ponies, for as their pet issue goes out of fashion, so do their poems. Prizes financed by submission fees encourage a general kow-towing to amateurs and their sentiments. From being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets have turned into being the acknowledged advocates of nonsense.
The millennium seems to be wishing upon us the restoration of mawkish and short-sighted values – perhaps not the values of patriotism, fidelity, grace and tradition that preoccupied swathes of nineteenth century verse, but in many ways the appeal is the same. It’s an appeal to the emotions. We are supposed to appreciate the poet because we share the sentiment promoted by that poet’s verse, and we wish to join forces to promote the issues the poet endorses. To care far more deeply about the surface of the poem, determined to grasp its materiality, how it makes use of words whatever its issue, if it has one at all, and how it creates surprise, how it provokes questions regarding the meaning of meaning, is now indicative of what an old codger one has become.
Here is a poem of hers called “Tax”:
There is a mystery to her poems, a synaesthesia that creates the surprise that Hugo Williams considers “the engine of a good poem”. Pascale Petit says of her work:
Faber has lost the plot. These are some of the names we should be watching out for. And, at present, their work has to be sought out tenaciously, since it is relegated to the margins of our literary establishment.
♦
Well, the prose poem may render prose poetic, but Field is important because he began shaping the poetry in prose. This is Whitman, but without the cadences. Metaphor is a rarity in his work, as in the work of William Carlos Williams. Life must speak for itself, since it is life itself that makes resonant a poem such as “World War 11” – that describes in simple but forensic detail the experience of being shot down in a bomber over the North Sea. Field shares with John Ashbery a love of cartoon characters such as Nancy and Aunt Fritzy Ritz, and he also has great feel for American variety shows and films, presented in poems that are sometimes intensely moving, “The Life of Joan Crawford”, for instance. Field also has an unflinching regard for the reality of our bodies and our “body-life” – from early memories of children who “pull down pants and bloomers, and stare and stare at each other“ when “Playing in the Backfields”, to how our desire continues, even into our nineties:
I also want to celebrate some old timers in fields other than that of poetry. In all honesty, I find it hard to limit my thought to a single field in the arts. All my life, I have lived in a milieu that has included painters, sculptors, composers, film-makers, dancers and performance artists as well as writers. I find it inspiring to think how I might bring off a poem in the manner of a certain painter, how I might get a poem to unfold in the way a certain film unfolds. The arts in Britain have always suffered from segregation from each other. I like to imagine myself part of a “café society” — where Picasso is sitting at one table (or Michael Craig-Martin) and Debussy is sitting at another (or Michael Nyman) and everyone knows each other and exchanges ideas. That was how it was in the sixties in New York. I remember John Cage sharing a wooden chair with Alan Ginsberg at an all-night reading of The Making of Americans. And that is how I have always envisaged my own life and culture.
Bob Janz is an unsung master. For me he epitomises the Japanese spirit of wabi-sabi — the Japanese sense of transience and imperfection, which may sometimes be a return to simple rusticity, loneliness and “getting away from it all.” The impermanence that his work celebrates signifies a sublimity that few artists are willing to devote their lives to revealing.
♦
Finally, I wish to celebrate the work of a neglected master of British cinema.
In this country, unlike France, there are few auteurs where film is concerned. One was undoubtedly Alan Clarke, director of films of sheer joie-de-vivre, such as Rita, Sue and Bob too, but also films of uncompromising grit, such as Scum, as well as Penda’s Fen, written by David Rudkin: one of the eeriest of all the films I have seen, suggestive of dark cults existing alongside the C of E respectability of county life. Clarke died in his fifties, in 1990.
There are few auteurs today. At least, in France, where the term was created among the pages of Cahiers du Cinema. Christophe Honoré keeps up this notion of creating a film as a work of art, as can be seen in Métamorphoses (available on Netflix), his wonderfully bizarre retelling of Ovid’s stories on a contemporary sink estate. But the creative energy that went into the experiments in “material film” in the UK in the ’70s seems to have subsided into tasteful videos projected now in art galleries. David Larcher’s amazing, anarchic celluloid marathons and his researches into what video might be capable of, now go unsung, and what a disgrace that is. Our preoccupation with what constitutes a respectable moral life for the middle-classes has all but destroyed our reputation for eccentricity and originality.
Bad Timing is one of my favourite movies. It has helped me define my notion of artistic immoralism. Art Garfunkel stars as a personable psychoanalyst in Vienna who cannot control the sexual impulses of his girlfriend, Theresa Russell. He breaks up with her, and sometime later she rings him to tell him she has taken an overdose of pills. He goes over to her place and finds her in a coma. Instead of ringing for an ambulance straight away, he adjusts the clock so that it looks as if he has arrived a while later than is actually the case. He then makes love to her while she lies in a comatose state. For once, he is in control: she can only receive him with an utterly passive, indeed unconscious, stillness. It takes a while for the investigating detective Harvey Keitel to suspect this foul play. The analyst is a plausible young man, a type with whom many intellectual professionals might identify, and his crime, which amounts to a callous endangering of life, practically a murder attempt, is carried through not with a violent weapon but simply by the innocuous action of adjusting a hand on a dial – it’s hardly more than a white lie, a small malicious adjustment within the capability of any civilized person.
Another film of Roeg’s that I admire is Castaway, based on a true story, where a gent advertises in Time Out (remember Time Out?) for a girl to share a year on a desert Island with him, a sojourn he will write a book about and make his fortune. Made in 1986, the film starred Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed. Reed was an actor who most definitely had a penis; his was a sheer sexual presence on the screen. But on their island things go wrong. Very soon, sexual tension ruins the idyll. The plan to grow food and make a home for themselves in paradise falls apart since the girl is not particularly keen on sleeping with the author. What makes Castaway sad is that the machismo Reed exemplifies seems to be ebbing away, drained by an awareness of inadequacy. And then there is a scene where the naked couple have a frightful row among the detritus of neglect, opened baked bean tins and so on. This has always struck me as one of the most original of all nude scenes. There is no glamour. The argument is savage. But that’s life. You can loathe someone in the nude as easily as you can when fully clothed. Repeatedly, in his films, Roeg has revealed a bourgeois reality that has seldom been explored: the violence that masquerades as a mere detail, the tawdriness that mocks aspirations of brigandage and sensual success.
So let’s wish Nicolas Roeg a happy birthday, and thank him for making some of the most riveting films of the latter half of the twentieth century.
♦
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Publication: Saturday, 11 August 2018, at 00:00.
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