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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. John Taylor: Remembering Pierre Chappuis
2. Leslie Stephen and Victorian intellectual life by Bruce Kinzer
3. Johanna Higgins: Ghost and a half-dozen more new poems
…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: 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 | 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 byJohanna 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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Freewheeling.
A FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.
Post-Summer Reading:
Hebdomeros
by Giorgio de Chirico; introduction by John Ashbery (1992 edition)
Exact Change | 258 pp | £14.93 $17.95
.
Tales I Told My Mother
by Robert Nye
Calder and Boyars, 1969; republished by Marion Boyars, 1992 | 172pp | £5.21 $13.48
.
Dandy Bogan
by Nick Ascroft
Boatwhistle 2018 | 96pp | $6.17 £8.19
.
Footnotes
by C. Perricone
Boatwhistle 2018 | 144pp | $5.75 £5.51
.
Apropos Jimmy Inkling
by Brian Marley
GrandIOTA, UK, 2019 | 320 pp | $13.20 £2.05
.
Wild Metrics
by Ken Edwards
GrandIOTA, UK, 2019| 246pp | $7.30 £5.69
.
Sarong Party Girls
by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
William Morrow/Allen and Unwin, 2019 | 320pp | $9.66 £3.42
.
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
It’s forever enigmatic, the attempt to differentiate between prose and poetry, especially in an age when prose poetry is as common as it is today.
Another difference which affects both prose and poetry is that of containedness – as opposed to spillage.
Another difference which affects both prose and poetry is that of containedness – as opposed to spillage. There’s the courtly sonnet of Petrarch, a perfectly tied-up little package, a gem, if you like, and then there’s Rabelais: immaculate get-up versus loosened stays or breeches. The notion of waywardness, digression and delay as a literary tradition is well expressed by Ross Chambers in his book Loiterature. You could think of this style as ‘free-wheeling’. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne is a free-wheeler, so is Pound in the Pisan Cantos. But aristocratic lacing reasserts itself in the books of Raymond Roussel, where the sentence beginning any one chapter will rhyme from capital letter to full-stop with every syllable of that chapter’s concluding sentence. I lean towards containment and like to think of my books of fictive prose as jig-saw puzzles, which may seemingly begin as a pile of dislocated fragments, but, eventually, the last piece fits exactly into place. What I don’t feel is the need to read only such books as I might have been pleased to have written. F.T Prince had difficulty explaining to his West Indian students that just because he happened to be a Roman Catholic, he was not obliged to stick to a diet of religious literature. For him, literature emancipated him from his own preoccupations.
De Chirico’s ‘long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration…’
Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico; introduction by John Ashbery (1992 edition). Exact Change | 258 pp | £14.93 $17.95

But now, though, I’m obliged to admit that this is likely to be a freewheeling article, reviewing books written ages ago and works which have recently come out, and delving into poetry as well as prose, prose by poets, fiction as well as autobiography, and considering publishing houses as well as their books. You could think of it as a compendium of ‘summer reading’ – except that it has taken me so long to read all the books to be discussed the summer is almost over. I’ll begin by considering where I first became acquainted with freewheeling literature, and I think it was when John Ashbery introduced me to Hebdomeros – a surreal novel by Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the metaphysical art movement and an artist who fell out with Andre Breton. This novel is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes, said to be reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction to the 1992 edition published by Exact Change, Ashbery calls the book ‘the finest work of Surrealist fiction’, noting that de Chirico ‘invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality.’ Personally, I find de Chirico’s paintings very distinct – with each object clearly differentiated from another and from its background. In the novel, however, events get mixed up, and one adventure merges with another. His book wanders more than his paintings tend to do, yet as I reader I found myself enthralled, and happy to wander from dream to dream. In this edition, Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron’s Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel, here translated by Ashbery.
Tales I Told My Mother by Robert Nye. Marion Boyars, 1992 | 172pp | £5.21 $13.48
My next encounter with this open-ended way of writing was in Tales I told my Mother by Robert Nye (Calder and Boyars, 1969 – republished by Marion Boyars in paperback in 1992). The book is a collection of nine tales which contradict the notion that a tale will come up with an ending that terminates it with some absolute finality. This work is a neglected classic. It owes something to Isak Dinesen – but it’s as if she were having an affair with Leonora Carrington. As a critic for the Financial Times put it: ‘The nine stories …twist and coil in and out of one another (with) constant promise of images that are hard and bright.’ By turns fantastic, grotesque, hilarious and terrifying, the stories, each entire on their own, fit into each other like a jigsaw. Characters from one story may reappear in another. Also, fiction gets mixed up with dissertation: a love letter from Mary Murder, a heroine of one tale, exhorts her beloved to write her a love-poem — but then gets side-tracked into becoming a treatise on the difference between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, meanwhile a sea captain comes out in bruises whenever he listens to Schubert. Re-opening this book, after many years, I am honoured to see that one of the stories is entitled ‘Howell’.
I confess that Robert Nye was one of my champions, recommending my first book of poems to a publisher back in the sixties. This would be a digression perfectly in keeping with my topic, open-ended as it is; but still, I’ll press on and introduce a small press which has come to my attention: Boatwhistle Books. At 11×18 cm, the two books I’ll discuss are compact and very neatly designed, each with a cover by a twentieth century artist. They are both books of poetry.
Dandy Bogan by Nick Ascroft. Boatwhistle 2018|96pp|$6.17 £8.19
Nick Ascroft’s Dandy Bogan contains poems selected from three of the poet’s previous New Zealand collections as well as some more recent poems. The poems mediate between an inclination to meander and a sense of the need for some well-wrought finish. The work is only suggestively narrative without being out-and-out abstract — a fashionable place to be these days. Ascroft is a would-be freewheeler, but cannot let go of his fine ear and accomplished technique. He is also ambivalent, it seems, about metaphor, and therefore he uses simile to generate imagery, which is also a trend, but sometimes I fail to detect the similarity in the dissimilar things compared. He might retort that that is the point. Nevertheless, his poems often reward a re-reading, particularly those which purport to be telling a story which eventually proves elusive, or a story which uses uplift to let you down, as in the poem called ‘Misprescription’. He uses syntax and cadence with rare expertise. The reader is led on, but somehow the goal to which one is being led contrives to evaporate. I realise that in this paragraph, I seem to be saying things twice, but in different ways. I have caught the habit from Ascroft, I feel. He is creative with verbs, as in where on the forehead to fawn/the back of my hand. In addition, there’s an underlying menace, as in the poem where children are offered a ride on a horse with no legs. It’s a disquiet which makes the cover picture by Philip Guston, of a Ku Klux Klan member painting a self-portrait, entirely appropriate. Here is ‘It’s a Sad Place, the Country’:
Hugo Williams puts it this way, on the back cover: ‘I know what he’s talking about – the inexpressible stuff which fills your head with horror and joy, and doesn’t usually get talked about because it is dangerous. It lures you on like the promise of a better understanding if only you could find the words. Nick Ascroft finds the words.’
Footnotes by C. Perricone. Boatwhistle 2018 | 144pp | $5.75 £5.51
The second Boatwhistle book is Footnotes by C. Perricone, also published in 2018. Here digression is secured by the armature of the title. We loiter over footnotes. In verse which just manages to distinguish itself from cut-up prose, each poem either references a footnote or makes its own observation about some aspect of a book concerning ancient Rome. It might be an appreciation of the contents pages, how well-ordered these are; or an interpretation of some interpretation expressed in an aside, a comment on a blurb or a cover illustration, or an explanation of a common abbreviation such as op. cit.. Richard Scott observes that ‘Footnotes fizzes with nerdish beauty and is, at heart, a love letter to close reading.’ ‘Nerdish’ is appropriate; for this undertaking bears comparison with Alexander Lenard’s translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Many of these ‘footnotes’ constitute springboards for personal experiences, others are remorselessly erudite. Perricone’s little book is a study in style, and is in general entertaining. Here is a comparatively simple example – a comment on a poem by Martial:
I went to Loeb, Epigrams I – and I found the poem in Book 4. The prose translation of the entire little poem is adequate enough, and I am not sure how much Perricone has managed to add to it. Admittedly, the author encourages such niggles, and so, even more nerdishly perhaps, I’ll assert that I am unsure about this line in Footnote 3: Jupiter claimed that women come higher than men.
Higher than what? Higher in the estimation of colleagues? Or…? The poem refers to an incident described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, and it concerns Tiresias and his judgement in favour of Jupiter over Juno – which caused Juno to render Tiresias blind. Hot on the scent now, I scuttle off for my Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology and Geography by Sir William Smith, D.C.L., LL.D. (revised throughout and in part rewritten by G. E. Marinden, M.A., formerly fellow of King’s College, Cambridge) – you see, we can all play this game – and it is as I thought: Tiresias is blinded because he agrees with Jupiter that women get more out of sex than men do, the implication being that Juno cannot give Jupiter as much pleasure as Jupiter gives her, which, naturally, she takes as an insult. Now, for me, ‘women come higher than men’ doesn’t quite deliver this sense because it suggests a comparative phrase, and this confers an almost feminist ambiguity which obscures the particular sense. ‘Women come harder than men’ might have worked, I suppose; and perhaps ‘higher’ has some accuracy in terms of actual translation, but if it’s the female orgasm that is being referred to, ‘higher’ doesn’t do it for me.
Apropos Jimmy Inkling by Brian Marley. GrandIOTA, UK, 2019 | 320 pp | $13.20 £2.05
AND NOW TO a new press which has just brought out its first two books, their production made possible with the help of individuals and organisations who subscribed in advance (of which I confess I was one). The press is GrandIOTA, and the books are identical in size, and designed with a cool minimalism while typeset in a very readable font. Both the books are prose, one fiction and one non-fiction, or perhaps apocryphal. The fiction is entitled Apropos Jimmy Inkling. Its author is Brian Marley. It is fiction which is happy to free-wheel, to swerve from this lane to that, get side-tracked, suddenly switch to the fast-lane, reverse and/or discover a circuitous route back to its starting point. The narrative is unapologetically self-indulgent, but again, this nevertheless requires an armature. Jimmy Inkling is some kind of shady character who is perhaps implicated in the neutering of a well-endowed but unsuitable suitor for some influential character’s daughter. In an Alice-like world, a café transforms itself into a court-room and a customer becomes the jury as a bevy of witnesses are assembled and interrogated as to the true nature of Inkling, who only got his name because he was a foundling and his finder hadn’t an inkling about from whence he hailed. I sense my own syntax turning arch here, in keeping with the mannered tone of this picaresque account. The book comes highly recommended by dead authors (Ballard, Spark and Burgess).
Marley’s maverick novel reminds me of Tales I Told My Mother. Its plot delights in tying itself in knots which it eventually unravels, only to finish in a bow (which can be said both ways). This prompts a reminder of an observation of my own – start with the knot: don’t allow yourself to hesitate until you have found some resolution. If you pause long enough to solve an enigma you may never engage in the writing itself. And again, in my days as a performance artist, I used to sermonise thus: don’t wriggle out of an impasse. After all, as Samuel Beckett understood, the impasse is the drama. This was a rule I once chose not to follow – and got roundly reprimanded by a student of mine at the time.
Wild Metrics by Ken Edwards. GrandIOTA, UK, 2019| 246pp | $7.30 £5.69
The apocryphal non-fiction is Wild Metrics by Ken Edwards.During the late ‘sixties and the ‘seventies, Edwards asserts that he kept a diary, while being heavily engaged at the time in the desire to free English writing from a dull insistence on the ‘communication’ that was promoted by Ian Hamilton and the Movement. This was an established bevy of poets endorsed by the establishment, whose verse harked back ‘to the Georgians, or the Edwardians or whatever, back to an imagined Golden Age of English Letters….’ Edwards derides ‘their fear of innovation and foreignness, and their ever so politely framed derision directed towards the different.’
Edwards was a friend of others who wished to break free, such as Eric Mottram, Cris Cheek and the concrete poet Bob Cobbing. This diary now provides the matter for the first sections of the book, and since life itself is largely a matter of freewheeling (after all it has no plot and we can’t control its cliff-hangers), the writing meanders through housing projects in Notting Hill Gate and community living on the margins of South West London with an interlude in US hotels, accompanying a rock star whose daughter needs tutoring while the star takes his family with him on his tour.
Edwards distrusts metaphor:
To make his point, a page later, he rightly suggests that there is a welter of ‘deracinated’ similes in a lot of what is offered today as verse, and then gives us a passage which exemplifies the problem:
And so on. It’s for this reason that the main body of Wild Metrics – which are based on the diary entries — describe the daily vicissitudes of life lived in bohemian London back then in a simple, unadorned way which I find immensely readable and at the same time evocative. I don’t need similitude. The names of the streets create their own images for me. The incidents, the nouns – paraffin heater, offset litho, giro – the old vocabulary renews the memories. And then there are mattresses on the floor and bookcases put together out of planks and house-bricks, manic friends, the stapled-together pages of poetry magazines and Compendium and Bernard Stone’s Turret bookshop.
Edwards avers that his characters are fictional avatars of themselves, but throughout the book, names drop like windfalls…
Edwards avers that his characters are fictional avatars of themselves, but throughout the book, names drop like windfalls (I use the similitude without compunction). I found these earlier, diaristic sections fascinating, but felt myself to be wandering through the pages like some sad ghost whose fate is to be invisible – for I was there, living in bedsit in Westbourne Park Road, scoring dope, pouring wine out for visitors at Bernard’s bookshop in Kensington Church Walk (I was lousy at wrapping the international parcels which had to be open at both ends so that customs could ensure that they did indeed contain printed matter). I was there in the offices of the Transatlantic Review, working for Jo McKrindle, alongside Heathcote Williams. I guess I was one of the voices Edwards overheard engaged in gay banter downstairs in those basement offices as he rearranged books on shelves on the first floor. I didn’t happen to be gay, but I was very beautiful, and I knew the gay world well from my days in the Royal Ballet, and so I was a species of honorary gay (cooking for Jo and his guests – using skills I had picked up from artist friends in France while training in Cannes at the Centre pour la Danse Classique). Edwards mentions most if not all of the players in the alternative poetry scene back then, but avers that the crowd divided poets into those that were “interesting” and those who were “not interesting” – and perhaps I was grouped among the latter. But there is little clarification as to why this poet was interesting and that one not. While deploring the clique that Faber represented, each little crowd formed its own coterie, and thus it was then much as it is today.
I do get a mention, towards the end of the book, together with Fiona Templeton in reference to performance art and The Theatre of Mistakes, so I have no right to complain. And I’m not complaining. This book certainly took me back into the dingy magic of those days when the dole was our benefactor. And the section concerning the popstar and his daughter Buttercup is hilarious, in a bleak sort of way. Warmly recommended. (Full disclosure: I am also listed in the back of the book, along with many others, as a prepublication subscriber.)
Edwards, as I’ve pointed out, kept the diary, while being heavily engaged in the desire to free English writing from ‘the tyranny of Official British Verse, as typified by the poets of the Movement with their fetish of plain speech’, and Edwards is right to have questioned their dogged cult of ‘communication’. It is convenient for the Establishment to consider that art need amount to no more than craven illustration of whatever belief system happens to be in place at the time – a glorious evocation of the charge of the Light Brigade, a gilding of the message promoted by war propaganda that it is noble to die for one’s country – in the days when our empire was in its last throes – which has morphed, today, into an endorsement of esoteric LGBT rights and acceptance of the most marginal preferences of minorities in the name of democratic tolerance – all receiving the blessing of dinner table literature in Kentish Town this evening.
For a poem to communicate it must mean something, and that meaning is predicated on significance.
For a poem to communicate it must mean something, and that meaning is predicated on significance. Its matter must be worth saying – thus clinging to a Leavisite insistence on the moral worth of what the poem is seeking to get across. For unlike Wittgenstein, for whom ‘ethics is aesthetics’, this crew, which has dominated English Literature for most of my lifetime, sees these two principles as separate entities. In order to communicate a work of literature must mean something ethically significant. But Edwards and his experimental friends were right to question ‘the meaning of meaning’. Party Going by Henry Greene is a masterpiece of literature that eschews significance in favour of a glittering superficiality, a musical superficiality. Art need not concern deeply meaningful subjects. Ashbery and Schuyler follow up on Greene with A Nest of Ninnies – a novel of quips and gossip, largely drawn from dinner-table chat in the Hamptons.
Another aspect of the release of effort exemplified by freewheeling is to let go of significance: as important an aspect of modernism as any enquiry into abstraction.
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. William Morrow (US)/Allen and Unwin, 2019 | 320pp | $9.66 £3.42
So another aspect of the release of effort exemplified by freewheeling is to let go of significance: as important an aspect of modernism as any enquiry into abstraction. It’s what makes Italo Svevo just as important an innovator as Joyce in the annals of modernism (in The Confessions of Zeno, for instance, Svevo’s novel about giving up smoking, if it’s actually “about” anything other than the superficialities of daily existence). And so it is very good to find Allen and Unwin bringing out Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. The discipline, which is adhered to here, in keeping the tone resolutely superficial, is remarkable, and initially it makes for a puzzling read, can this book really be about nothing but clubbing?
Written in an accessible patois called Singlish, the book transports us into the life of Jazzy, a twenty-and-a-bit-more-than-something hottie on a mission in Singapore. Her aim is to secure for herself a Western husband, and she and her closest friends have sworn allegiance to the success of this mission, in each of their cases, and a consequent uptown ex-pat life of their own, a life of two-car leisure and Chanel babies in Baltimore or wherever, anywhere, out of Singapore. To this end, her leggy clique haunts the bars and clubs of the city, careful to befriend powerful allies who can get them past the VIP bouncer and supply free Chivas and Cliquot through the evening as they decorate the table and project allure at each and every Brit or American. As fierce as the rivalry between London gangs in different postal districts or estates is that between the Singapore girls and the Chinese, Korean or Japanese harpies invading their patch. A girl in their clique who marries a local lad and secures a flat in which to set up home is roundly denounced as a traitor.
Soon we become immersed in Jazzy’s utterly shallow mode, which is brilliantly brought to life by the author, and nothing in particular seems to happen to lift the book into anything beyond the meaninglessness of this commercialised Orient, with its neon and its glitz, and how this contrasts to the drab existences that are actually in the background in the homes of parents or aunties. But life moves on; every day Jazzy gets older, and the stakes get higher – you’re definitely on the shelf by thirty – and meanwhile, beneath the glam world offered to their blooming youth, a world of designer labels and shopping malls that constitute Meccas for these girls, and exclusive bars with their racy chat opening the hotel door to intermittent fucking that might actually lead to a carat wedding-ring, beneath it all there’s a professional world, of lap-dancing and KTV lounges where the hostesses get paid to do whatever they are told to do with their clients.
Could Jazzy fall into this darker level of the Singapore nightlife’s various layers, as her search for her western sugar daddy grows more desperate? By now, I am two thirds of my way through an enthralling account, and I realise that its free-wheeling is only how it seems. This is a well-constructed paradigm of the dilemma that is Singapore. I think back to an earlier London, so well described by Ken Edwards. How New York was Mecca for an epoch that turned us from mods into hippies, and finally, in some search for our roots, into punks. I’m reminded how corporate globalisation has swallowed Covent Garden as well as Boat Quay in Singapore.
All this is done in a scintillating Singlish one soon falls into and enjoys, and the author’s eye for detail and sense of the swing of levity in a conversation is a genuine delight. I loved reading this book, and I shall read it again.
♦
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Publication: Monday, 2 September 2019, at 13:04.
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