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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter Robinson -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Ruinad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
Departments
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | 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, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
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.
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
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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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.
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Keeping in step.
A Fortnightly Review.
The Step Is the Foot: Dance and its relationship to poetry.
by Anthony Howell (Grey Suit Editions) 2019
By ALAN PRICE.
THIS IS A fascinating book. This is a frustrating book. An absorbing read. A maddening read. Perceptive and insightful. But opaque and meandering. In short, it’s a book I ended up loving and yet despairing of. Yet what is irrefutable about The Step is the Foot is the authority of Anthony Howell’s vision of dance and poetry. A lifetime of experience as a poet, teacher and innovative dancer has been documented. This is not a work of academic scrutiny (Although it’s scholarly in a wayward manner) but a project of physical practice and theoretical speculation: what works and what fails in any collaboration of dance and poetry. And more than that, The Step Is the Foot bravely attempts to decipher the body and mind as it tries to keep in step with one another, in time to words and actions.
In the opening chapter, titled “The Gait of the Lizard”, Howell explores what we mean by walking and talking:
“The threshing floor” is a potent image signifying the separating of the grain from the chaff discovering what’s edible (workable) and worth storing (remembering.) Now threshing (or editing) is what most good artists, poets and dancers do. Poetry, initially an oral tradition followed by dance, in Ancient Greek theatre, makes possible so much of our art today (I recently watched again Wim Wenders’s film Pina, about Pina Bausch’s dance company, to appreciate what emerged from “threshing” and the fact that Werner Herzog once said that all filmmakers should first of all be poets.) Howell has only a brief reference to film in the 1960s/’70’s – an unexplored area in his book, for what about the balletic style of Chaplin or angular choreography of Bob Fosse?
But let’s stick with the book we have and not what it might have been included. And here Howell is most resonant on Greek and Roman Classical culture, the concept of mimesis and how the arts once aspired (still do?) to be “knitted together.” Of course twenty-first-century culture is eclectic but that eclecticism (for me and maybe for Howell) somehow lost its power of ritual and therefore daring synthesis. In dance you can be free to let things go and experiment. However tradition has had a deadening effect on poetry. Here I agree with Howell that a great deal of British poetry (post-WW2) hasn’t experimented with form, layout and typography enough. It may be free verse now – ‘liberated’ from cloying Victorian rhyming but it hardly ever frees itself to move on and across the white page. It sits or stands there when you want it to clap its hands, sing and dance.
Howell’s rich experience of working with the Royal Ballet, his involvement with performance art and teaching comes vividly through The Step Is the Foot.
Howell’s rich experience of working with the Royal Ballet, his involvement with performance art and teaching comes vividly through The Step Is the Foot. He directed a group called “The Theatre of Mistakes” and was very influenced by Bruce Chatwin’s Song Lines – a description of the ancient tracks in Australia:
It was the autobiographical element of The Step Is the Foot that I found most persuasive. You read of earlier decades when cultural boundaries and political freedoms were not so rigidly set. As a contemporary of Howell I appreciated this Apollonian/Dynosian cusp of risk and adventure that we once took for granted.
The most popular manifestation of this was the dancing of Mick Jagger (a Howell favourite.) His gyrations proclaimed an anarchic individuality to which we gave our sensual consent. Yet what matters to Howell (and to me) is a sense of focus and discipline, being aware of a violent muddle of creative choices and decisions.
Anthony Howell has chosen to write in a deliberately discursive style –he says so on the book’s back cover. Yet I did feel that his own “omelette” contained an excess of ingredients. The book begins to develop itchy feet. There are just too many references, quotes and inferences thrown up, all leading to a constant process of suggestion rather than a satisfying development and conclusion. I appreciate Howell has tackled an inexhaustible subject with potentially differing conclusions. But I would have liked some sense of summing up and attempt at ‘closure’.
I wanted a deeper reflection on a few core ideas not a free-wheeling multiplicity. Fewer examples of poetry and dance would have made this a stronger and more satisfying work. And what’s very noticeable in a book about dance (a great visual art) is a paucity of illustration. The book needs a lot more photographs and diagrams to make its case – especially in its technical dance instruction. It made me feel that there was a gripping TV documentary series, on dance and poetry, struggling inside The Step Is the Foot and wanting to get out.
So contrary reading impulses were fired up. Is this basically a book to occasionally dip into, skim, or attempt to read straight through in your own measured time? I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Yet The Step Is a Foot remains a perceptive and important book worth investigating by anyone who struggles to write or dance in a challenging manner, or just actively sit back to watch, listen and read the outcome.
♦
Alan Price lives in London. He’s a poet, scriptwriter, short story writer, book reviewer, film critic for the online Filmuforia and a blogger at alanprice69.wordpress.com. His short story collection The Other Side of the Mirror, an alternative take on vampirism, was published by Citron Press in 1999. A TV film, A Box of Swan, was broadcast on BBC 2 in 1990. Alan has scripted five short films. The last one, Pack of Pain (2010), won four international film festival awards. His debut collection of poetry, Outfoxing Hyenas, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012. A pamphlet of prose poems, Angels at the Edge (Tuba Press), appeared in 2016. The poetry chapbook, Mahler’s Hut was published in 2017 by Original Plus Books. His latest poetry book is Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady (The High Window Press, 2018). And in 2019, a collection of flash fiction and short stories called The Illiterate Ghost was published by Eibonvale Press. In early 2020 a short collection of more experimental poetry called Restless Voices will be published by Caparison Books. Alan is currently writing a novel and also working on a series of prose poems based on films, with the working title The Cinephile Poems.
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Publication: Sunday, 1 March 2020, at 18:46.
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