-
-
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
-
Contact the Editors here.
-
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.
.
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.
Subscribe
0 Comments
To Field Flowers.
A Tribute to Philippe Jaccottet.
By JOHN TAYLOR.
.
“Once approached—not even in the reality of a March day, but in a mere daydream—[the peonies] go before you, pushing open leafy doors, almost invisible barriers. . .” (“The Peonies,” After Many Years, 1994)
FOR DECADES NOW I have loved searching for, and admiring, wildflowers in mountain pastures. Blue gentian flowers along a path so high that the last vegetation is ending. Cotton grass in a drizzle, on an Alpine marsh. . .
All that, well before I discovered Philippe Jaccottet’s oeuvre and translated several of his books.
Then his poems and especially his poetic prose texts, beginning with Notebook of Greenery, helped me to deepen this fascination. Suddenly before me is a yarrow plant barely three inches in height; I had never noticed this species. Here is some campion with its minute moons—or are they little bundles of clothes? And this bit of moss whose name I don’t know. It is somehow the most mysterious. . .
So many “things seen” (as he would say)—a robin, a shade of color. . . Whenever walking down a path, I think of him with gratitude.
I stop without knowing why. It seems that there has been a “call,” but already this word seems too strong: it has come to me too quickly. I stop. It is now only mentally that I can come closer to this clover or to this great masterwort; perhaps I should say “only in sensibility.” Or some other word. I close my pocket notebook. When we try to formulate what seems to be happening inside us, outside us, we can already have taken a step backwards, or several steps. Then we move forward once again. Perhaps we even sense a kind of ephemeral certitude that we have fully experienced something; that we have seen that small, beautiful, ordinary thing; that we have suddenly and very briefly inhabited Being, in another way. Is this experience “metaphysical”? I don’t know.
Thanks to Philippe Jaccottet, thanks to his books that I have translated and to all the other books by him that I have read and reread, I have gained confidence in this lack of confidence, this plenitude of doubts that can even sometimes crush us when we face the enigmas of the world. His kinds of questioning and those doubts that he confronted probably with an inner turmoil that he sometimes greatly struggled to master (yet he managed to do so) make up the essence of our human condition in front of so many thresholds: a bit of lichen, a scabious flower, and then death. His writings show us how to invert our hesitations, our trembling, our distress into worthy, beneficial sources that can open once again like a flower after the night, after the early morning frost.
“So I will begin again because it has begun all over again: the wonder, the astonishment, the bewilderment; the gratitude as well.” (“To Field Bindweed,” And, Nonetheless, 2001)
♦
John Taylor initially wrote this text in French for a special feature, in tribute to Philippe Jaccottet, which will appear in the online magazine Poezibao. He has also translated Philippe Jaccottet’s Truinas, his memoir of his friendship with the poet André du Bouchet, published by Odd Volumes for The Fortnightly Review. Taylor’s other translations of Jaccottet’s work include And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry 1990-2009 (Chelsea Editions), The Pilgrim’s Bowl: Giorgio Morandi (Seagull Books), A Calm Fire and other Travel Writings (Seagull Books), Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow (Seagull Books), and Ponge, Pastures, Prairies (Black Square Editions)
Related
Publication: Tuesday, 2 March 2021, at 13:46.
Options: Archive for John Taylor. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.