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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. 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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Typesetters’ delight, those little blocks of text.
British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines
Edited by Jane Monson
Palgrave Macmillan 2018 | 370 pp | £89.99 hardcover
By SIMON COLLINGS.
British Prose Poetry takes a historical perspective. Part I includes an overview of the topic, an essay on early Modernism in Britain, and another on US influences. Part II, ‘The Early Narrators’, looks at the origins of the prose poem in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose, at William Carlos William’s Kora improvisations, and at Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. There’s an essay on James Joyce’s youthful ‘epiphanies’ (later recycled in works like Stephen Hero) and the ‘Giacomo Joyce’ sequence he wrote in Trieste between 1911 and 1914 (which was not published in his lifetime). T. S. Eliot’s single published prose poem, ‘Hysteria’, is analysed in a further chapter, and the essay on Beckett’s How it is also appears in this section.
Part III includes essays on a diverse mix of poets, with the emphasis on major ‘influencers’. There’s an essay on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns from 1971 (which Hill did not consider ‘prose poems’ but ‘versets’). Another essay discusses Seamus Heaney’s forays into prose poetry, particularly Stations (1975). Mark Ford’s only prose poem, ‘The Death of Hart Crane’, and the work of Vahni Capildeo are examined in two other essays. The final piece in this section discusses Rankine’s Citizen, the prose poetry of Simon Armitage, and work by Peter Riley.
‘Other voices’ are presented in Part IV, with essays on David Gascoigne’s Surrealist prose poems of the 1930s, on Jeremy Over, on parallels between developments in jazz and prose poems by Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth and Patience Agbabi, plus the analysis of Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra by Peter Robinson. The final section, Part V, contains two essays: the American poet Patricia Debney on her experience of teaching prose poetry in Britain, and Michael Rosen on writing it.
Aside from Nikki Santilli’s 2002 work on British prose poems…there has been no book-length study devoted to the form, and this volume certainly helps to fill a gap.
All the contributors offer interesting insights on the texts and issues they discuss, and the book serves a useful role as a collection of essays providing scholarly comment on examples of ‘prose poetry’, defined in a broad sense, mostly from Britain, both historical and contemporary. Aside from Nikki Santilli’s 2002 work on British prose poems, Such Rare Citings, there has been no book-length study devoted to the form, and this volume certainly helps to fill a gap.1 Its publication is itself evidence of the changing attitudes it describes.
Where the book doesn’t live up to the expectations created by Monson in her Preface, is in answering the question of why the prose poem is finally becoming more widespread in twenty-first-century British literature. The historical sections, while valuable and interesting, shed no real light on why the literary establishment shunned prose poetry for so long. Clearly there were early Modernist writers working in something like a prose poetry form, but what does this have to do with the emergence of the prose poetry we see now in Britain? There is a suggestion that Eliot was a malign influence, but this argument isn’t pressed very hard. No other explanations are offered. In the spirit of ‘celebrating’ the prose poem’s ‘arrival’, questions about British literary culture in the second half of the twentieth century are side-stepped.
The works by Hill and Heaney discussed in Part III appeared in the 1970s. Andy Brown, writing on Heaney, argues that the Irish poet’s example is a critical factor behind the recent emergence of the prose poem in Britain. He claims that Maurice Riordan’s The Holy Land (2007) is ‘unthinkable’ without Heaney’s example, and that: ‘One might go so far as to argue that…Stations has influenced other high profile and popular contemporary lyric poets’. He lists Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars, John Burnside’s ‘Suburbs’, Robin Robertson’s inclusion of prose poems in his collections, and Alice Oswald’s Dart. But there are surely more obvious factors which would account for some of these poets embracing prose formats. Armitage has said that if there’s a template for Seeing Stars, which appeared in 2010, it’s Return to the City of White Donkeys by the American poet James Tate.3 Oswald’s Dart (2002) is usually compared with the work of James Joyce and Ted Hughes.
Vahni Capildeo is a very different kind of poet from Simon Armitage, John Burnside or Robin Robertson. Her first collection, No Traveller Returns, which Jeremy Noel-Tod discusses in his essay, was published by Salt. Poetry in prose format features as a major element throughout Capildeo’s work. And her writing practice is profoundly shaped by her Trinidadian background. She had four more collections published by small press publishers before being taken up by Carcanet and winning the Forward Prize. Is she ‘mainstream’? She is undoubtedly a vital presence for a younger generation of writers, but her rise to recent prominence is surely a function of changing attitudes in the UK, even if she also contributes to that change.
Peter Riley is another poet whose many works in prose form owe nothing, I would suggest, to Heaney’s example. See for example Lines on the Liver, originally published by Ferry Press in 1981 and included in The Derbyshire Poems published by Shearsman in 2010. He would also not normally be thought of as ‘mainstream’. For several decades Riley’s work appeared only in small-press publications. Carcanet published a selected poems in 2000, and has brought out other volumes of Riley’s work since, though he also continues to publish with Shearsman and other small presses. Riley is much respected as a critic and his ‘Poetry Notes’ published in The Fortnightly Review (available in book form from Odd Volumes) have had a following in the UK, though mainly among more ‘experimental’ poets.
To her credit Monson does refer in her Introduction to a wide variety of contemporary writers of prose poetry, and does not attempt to distinguish between them. It’s unclear, therefore, why she feels a need to classify writers into ‘influential/mainstream’ and ‘other’ when structuring the volume. Current practices are diverse, as are the networks of influence which give rise to them. Is the concept of ‘mainstream British poetry’ useful when reviewing the contemporary scene? I’m not sure it is. I also don’t believe that changes in literary practice can be explained solely by pointing to the ‘influence’ of certain high-profile figures.
Since the 1960s there has been an active community of poets working in prose formats, their practice influenced by developments in American and European poetry.
So what might be some of the factors which have contributed to recent changes in British prose poetry? One important element, as David Caddy points out in his overview chapter, is that since the 1960s there has been an active community of poets working in prose formats, their practice influenced by developments in American and European poetry. Peter Riley, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher, all of whom are discussed in British Prose Poetry, are examples of such poets. Other members of this group who receive fleeting mentions include: Lee Harwood, John Ash, Gael Turnbull, Geraldine Monks, Gavin Selerie, Brian Caitling, and Martin Stannard. These poets (and there are others like Denise Riley and Peter Larkin who are not mentioned) continue to influence younger poets drawing on those same traditions, and this is part of the diverse range of prose poetry being produced now. Some of these older poets have become better known in the last 15 years, with work that was largely unavailable being published as a ‘collected’ or ‘selected’ poems by publishers like Salt, Shearsman, Reality Street, Arc, Bloodaxe, and Carcanet. Peter Riley is a case in point. The internet has also made their work more available.
Additional factors influencing recent trends are proposed by Monson in her Introduction. These include technology changes, access to other writing through the internet, reading on screens (including phones), a growing preference for shorter formats, the emergence of short prose and ‘flash fiction’ in the 1990s (think of Lydia Davis who Robert Vas Dias mentions in his essay), and the growth of creative writing courses. Monson seems to pull back from pressing these as lines of enquiry, but I think her first instinct is right. These wider social, cultural, and technological trends are likely to offer richer insights into the diversity of current British writing practice than an appeal to the examples of Hill and Heaney. There is a lot more that could be said about contemporary British prose poetry.
♦
Simon Collings lives in Oxford and has published poems, stories and critical essays in a range of journals including Stride, Journal of Poetics Research, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse and PN Review. Out West, his first chapbook, was published by Albion Beatnik (2017), and a second chapbook, Stella Unframed, was published earlier this year by The Red Ceilings Press. An archive of his Fortnightly contributions, including his film commentary, is here.
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