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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 RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
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
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
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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A prevailing darkness.
A Fortnightly Review.
Selected Poems
by Jean-Paul Auxeméry,
translated from the French by Nathaniel Tarn.
World Poetry Books 978-0-9992613-9-2| 280 pp. | $16.00
By JOHN TAYLOR.
Jean-Paul Auxeméry (b. 1947) stands apart in contemporary French poetry. One reason is biographical: he often lived outside of France during his formative years (when he was in his mid-twenties until his mid-thirties), departing for long stays in Africa (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Morocco), Mexico, and Central America (Honduras, Guatemala, Belize).
Auxeméry has assimilated and then developed in his own manner a poetics which—at least in my reading and translating experience—is far removed from many postwar French poetic itineraries.
Secondly, and more importantly, as one of the most active translators of American poetry (to mention only a few names: H.D., Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, Clayton Eschleman, and the poetry of his own translator, Nathaniel Tarn), he has assimilated and then developed in his own manner a poetics which—at least in my reading and translating experience—is far removed from many postwar French poetic itineraries.
The differences are visible in his uses of history, autobiography, narrative, and the long-poem form (as opposed to long sequences of interconnected short pieces). And special attention must be paid to his imagery which, in its realist propensities (with respect to the more symbolic or semantically polysemic orientations of other French poets) and in its fragmentary flashes nonetheless suggesting an underlying story or—perhaps more accurately— subterranean layers of relics and remants, sometimes recalls the kind of imagism that Pound employs, especially in The Cantos. Take these opening lines from “Brandberg,” in Tarn’s translation:
As is already evident in the above passage, the kind of inserted citation through which Pound juxtaposes mythology, historical facts, precise personal memories, and foreign words, expressions or place names, also comes to mind. Here is a second passage from the same long-poem:
In such long pieces, the reader will perhaps apply him- or herself to extrapolating trying to trying to extrapolate a pellucid “whole” from the shards and shadows—one again thinks of Pound and his anxiety about “coherence”—yet it seems to me that Auxeméry has constituted a poetics in which such a goal would be inappropriate. Surely mysterious, intriguing, vivid vestiges are excavated and brought to the light of the printed page, but equally visible, as it were, remains the prevailing darkness. “The point of application of poetic speech,” he writes toward the end of “Brandberg,” “follows the sense line of bodies involved / in reading the world’s accidents: / scars signed by human time / on stone lips and grass plains / I shall never be more than this shadow speaking / in places exposed to the acid salts of the real.” In another long-poem, “Al Kemit,” Auxeméry offers this insight into the difficulties of “naming”—the poetic act par excellence—amid inevitable darkness, what he calls “l’obscur de l’obscur” with its double meaning of “darkness” and “obscurity”:
It must be said that in this same poem, Auxeméry also inserts a distich in the form of a question, which, arguably, nears him to the ontological explorations of a Bonnefoy or a Jaccottet, with Hölderlin (or perhaps Nietzsche) as the probable presiding spirit: “and how is it that you only frequent / places where gods became silent?” But here the similarities end, even as Auxeméry’s poetry of movement and displacement (on several levels) starkly contrasts with, say, Bonnefoy’s much more succinct meditations, often on a handful of recurrent symbolic objects and themes, or Jaccottet’s at once pensive and contemplative strolls in the post-1990 prose pieces he published in Notebook of Greenery and subsequent volumes. From this common necessity to confront a landscape from which the gods have withdrawn, Auxeméry takes a different path and discovers other possibilities.
This generous Selected Poems displays the disparities with such postwar poets from the preceding generation, given the formal expansiveness, multi-layeredness, exoticness, and narrative impetus in Auxeméry’s oeuvre. All these qualities participate in the poet’s vision, both in its particularisms and in its effort to make very specific personal perceptions and memories stand for our own multifaceted adventures, however more geographically constrained ours probably are. We are all engaged, as the poet puts it finely in “Stem,” with “l’ouvrage de vivre,” a transposition of the title of Cesare Pavese’s journal Il mestiere di vivere and rendered by Tarn as “working at life.” Finally, in a short piece, “Salt of the Real,” he offers this admirable guiding principle, which sums up well his poetic oeuvre, now welcomely available in English for the first time: “aimons notre naufrage,” “let’s love our shipwreck.”
♦
JOHN TAYLOR is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. His most recent translations include Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery (The Bitter Oleander Press), José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes (The MadHat Press), and Philippe Jaccottet’s La Clarté Notre-Dame & The Last Book of the Madrigals (Seagull Books).
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Publication: Sunday, 11 December 2022, at 23:26.
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