-
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.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein. Now running.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement and submission guidelines.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Back in the building.
A Fortnightly Review
Reconsider Baby:
Elvis Presley: A Listener’s Guide (Second Edition: Revised and Expanded)
by Shane Brown
Shane Brown | 445 pp | £12.99 paperback $20.49 paperback
By IAN SEED.
I am trying to remember what it was that brought Elvis to my attention in the first place. It may have been Radio 1’s 1971 documentary series The Elvis Presley Story, which was aired on a late Sunday afternoon after the weekly chart show, Pick of the Pops. The idea of Elvis’s “comeback”’ in the late sixties really caught my imagination. It may also have been the 1971 re-release (in the UK) of Heartbreak Hotel. I had never heard anything quite like it, having of course missed it first time round in 1956.
But in fact, 1971 was a good time to discover Elvis. The market was not flooded with endless Elvis trivia as it is now, and of course there was no internet back then. To listen to Elvis, I would take the bus into Leicester on a Saturday morning, and go to Bree’s Record Shop on the High Street. There I could flick through Elvis’s LPs and choose one to listen to in a sweaty booth. Slowly, as my pocket money would allow, I bought the best of those LPs one by one, starting with the 1970 album That’s the Way It Is. I was mesmerised by the song, I Just Can’t Help Believin’, which was a top-ten hit back then. This was the first song that I actually saw Elvis sing on BBC’s Top of the Pops in a film clip from the That’s the Way It Is documentary.
During Elvis’s lifetime, journalists and music critics rarely attempted to evaluate the music on its own terms, and indeed the criticism was not focused at all on the music, but on other factors.
The 1990s was also a time when some kind of proper critical perspective could start to be taken, as evidenced by Ernst Jorgensen’s 1998 book, Elvis Presley: A Life in Music: The Complete Recordings, which remains the most important critical landmark to this day. During Elvis’s lifetime, journalists and music critics rarely attempted to evaluate the music on its own terms, and indeed the criticism was not focused at all on the music, but on other factors. In the 1950s, most of the commentary was rock ‘n’ roll’s supposed corruption of the young, on Elvis’s (for the times) outlandish appearance and sexually-charged stage act, and on the wild reaction of the audience. The voice went unheard, not only at the concerts because of all the screaming, but also by the reviewers of his music. Those who did comment on his voice were in the main hostile, and had obviously not bothered to listen to it properly, dismissing Elvis as flash-in-the-pan. By contrast, in the 1970s, when rock criticism had become a respected form of journalism, Elvis was accused of betraying his supposed rock ‘n’ roll roots because of the fact that most of his new recordings tended more towards country, easy listening and semi-operatic ballads. In fact, Elvis had always loved many different kinds of music, from blues to opera, and was of course soaked in gospel. It just so happened that it was rock ‘n’ roll which made him famous.
The text draws on over 500 contemporary articles and reviews, revealing for the first time how Elvis and his career played out in the printed media, and how this has continued to distort our perception of him to this day.
A unique and fascinating aspect of Shane Brown’s book on Elvis (in this revised and expanded edition) is the way in which with academic rigour it investigates and exposes the hollowness and superficiality of much of the commentary made during Elvis’s lifetime. The text draws on over 500 contemporary articles and reviews, revealing for the first time how Elvis and his career played out in the printed media, and how this has continued to distort our perception of him to this day. Much of it was surprising to me. For example, I had no idea that Elvis’s innocently — and unimaginatively — titled Christmas Album (1957) caused such a stir at the time, with radio station CKXL claiming it was “one of the most degrading things we have heard in some time”. Elvis was also described as “panting” his ways through the songs. Many radio stations removed it from their playlists. As Brown points out, much of the music from the album has stood the test of time. For example, the raunchy blues song Santa Claus is Back in Town is still irresistible today – even if, apparently, it was not this song which caused all the controversy on release, but, bizarrely, Elvis’s version of White Christmas. He does not do anything particularly irreverent with the song, but perhaps the establishment was horrified that someone of his ilk should even dare dream of singing such a family classic. Also revealing was the fact that Elvis’s famous 1968 TV Comeback Special, now regarded as a landmark performance, was not particularly well-reviewed at the time. One example quoted by Brown is the review in Variety which declared that Elvis “still can’t sing” (which he obviously could – think of If I Can Dream, for example) and that the “words are still unintelligible” (one wonders if the Variety reviewer had at any point actually listened to the songs).
Brown uses opinions from the time as a springboard for his own balanced and insightful examination of all the recordings – there are over 700 of them – that Elvis made in his lifetime, taking us all the way from the first private recordings made in July 1953 to the June 1977 live Elvis in Concert, made just six weeks before his death, and which was used as a TV special, showing, in Brown’s words, “an overweight, struggling, often seemingly-disorientated Elvis” (noting however that the album release “used no pictures from the special, but images of a healthy looking Elvis from a few years before”).
Brown’s book does not attempt to tell us the story of Elvis Presley’s life. For that, Brown rightly points us towards Peter Guralnick’s two-volume (Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love) biography. Rather it is a genuine critical appraisal with all the advantages of looking back from a twenty-first-century perspective. What Brown offers us here is a detailed discussion of Elvis’s legacy, session by session. Of course, important biographical information is given in order to set the recordings in context. For example, Elvis’s attitude towards the music he was singing and performing could vary considerably according to the quality of the songs, or to what was happening in his life at any given time. His attitude in turn could affect the quality of his performances. One of the saddest aspects of listening to Elvis is the way in which at times he does not make full use of his voice because he is ill or simply bored. On the other hand, when he believed in the songs and in himself, his performances were unique and incomparable.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice.
Turning the 445 pages of Brown’s Reconsider Baby is oddly gripping, and somewhat akin to reading a detective novel. I found myself at every turn wondering what he was going to reveal next about a particular song, and also how he was going to assess it. Brown states in his Introduction, “My aim is not to persuade anyone to agree with me. In fact, part of the fun of reading a book like this is vehemently not agreeing with the author.” For the most part, I found myself agreeing with him, but not always, especially when it came to his assessments of some of the 1970s songs. For example, Brown believes that Elvis’s 1970 version of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a substantial hit for Dusty Springfield, “brings nothing new to the number other than bombast”. I would strongly disagree and would argue that Elvis’s version is less sing-song than Dusty’s, less melancholy, but instead much more intense, conveying more of an immediate sense of desperation. Brown asserts that Elvis “yells his way” through the song “Rags to Riches” with the “most bombastic of arrangements”. Untrue. He sings the song with power and conviction. On the other hand, I think that Brown overestimates some of the quieter ballads, such as Early Mornin’ Rain, which to my ear, at least, Elvis sings in a bored and uncommitted manner. Thankfully, we both agree on a very high rating of Elvis’s restrained and nuanced performance of I’m Leavin’. I remember hearing this song for the first time on Radio 1 in December of 1971, and both liking it very much and being struck by its unusual arrangements. I can see why it was not a commercial hit – too subtle and understated for the tastes of the time, which favoured grand dramatic gestures, whether this came in the form of the big voice, loud glam rock, or plaintive soul.
Things went downhill for Elvis with tragic momentum after 1974. I have to admit that for a few years I didn’t listen much to his music anymore. I couldn’t tie in my discovery of poets such as T.S. Eliot with my admiration for Elvis. It didn’t fit in with the self-image I had of myself in my late teens. I began listening instead to Bob Dylan, and went through a similar process of discovery as I had with Elvis. A few years on, towards the end of university, a friend educated me on the clear connections between the rock ‘n’ roll of the ’50s and the songs of Bob Dylan and others. Slowly I came back to Elvis, although it has only been in the last few years that I have somehow managed to actually bring him into my own creative writing by making him a character in my prose poems and small fictions, as in ‘Loved’ from my 2018 collection New York Hotel:
It is partly as a result of all the much weaker work that is out there that Elvis’ popularity has declined considerably over the last decade or so.
Uniquely, Shane Brown caries out a short assessment of the posthumous releases of Elvis Presley’s music up until the present. He laments the fact that so much is available now, especially via the internet, and that anyone coming to it for the first time will have no idea where to start. It is partly as a result of all the much weaker work that is out there that Elvis’ popularity has declined considerably over the last decade or so. This can be measured not only by lack of chart success, but also by the plummeting price of Elvis records and memorabilia on the collector’s market. Of course, there are momentary exceptions, especially in the UK as opposed to the USA, with the release, for example, of some of Elvis’s hits dubbed over by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. To Brown and to this reviewer, the results of this kind of saccharine mix are pretty awful, and only bolster those who do not regard Elvis as a singer worthy of serious critical attention. “It all makes one yearn,” Brown says, “for the 1990s, and the time when three boxed sets appeared that were dedicated to the various decades of Elvis’s career.”
True. However, I wonder if Shane Brown, like me, does not sometimes envy those who came of age in the 1950s. How marvellously exciting and liberating it must have been to hear “Heartbreak Hotel” when it was first released in 1956, to have been young at the only time when Elvis’s music had the genuine power to change the lives of a generation.
♦
Ian Seed’s books of prose poems and small fictions include New York Hotel (2018); Identity Papers 2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014); and two other collections containing prose poems, Shifting Registers and Anonymous Intruder, all from Shearsman; and two chapbooks, Threadbare Fables (LikeThisPress, 2012) and Distances (Red Ceilings, 2018). The Thief of Talant (2016) (the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s Le Voleur de Talan) is published by Wakefield. Ian Seed’s work also appears in a number of anthologies including The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books), The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber), The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), and the critical anthology, British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines, edited by Jane Monson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His work has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, hosted by Ian McMillan. He lectures in the Department of English at the University of Chester.
An archive of his work appearing in the Fortnightly is here.
Related
Publication: Monday, 7 January 2019, at 13:54.
Options: Archive for Ian Seed. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.