Skip to content

Index: Poetry & Fiction

Alistair Noon and the English sonnet.

Friday, 29 June 2012

Peter Riley: Noon brings this to poetry through his placement of the authorial self, you could say centrally but not subjectively – it is a perfectly objective attention to particulars as a means of attaching the whole (“the general makes me more specific” – Sonnet 1). Lyrical description is perhaps a good label for what Noon gets up to. The song qualities enhance the description and the description holds the singing to realities.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Poetry Notes | Tagged | Comments (0)

Poetry Parnassus 2012: a further note.

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Peter Riley: Some 10,000 poems on slips of card have been rained over London by helicopter. This enterprise was the work of Chileans, who last did it to celebrate the imprisonment of Pinochet. I could have thought of a number of politicians and newspaper moguls whose imprisonment could have been celebrated in this way but unfortunately they haven’t yet been caught.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events, Poetry Notes | | Comments (0)

Event: Poetry Parnassus. London 26 June – 1 July 2012.

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

The world’s most exciting poets, rappers, spoken word artists, singers and storytellers are gathering for this huge event that will make history as the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK. Including a sidebar on Hungarian poetry.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events | | Comments (0)

Mrs Dalloway. Episode two.

Monday, 25 June 2012

It is so nice to be out in the air. If I stand quite still, I can be a poplar tree in early dawn. Hyacinths, fawns. Running water and garden lilies. London is so dreary, compared with being in the country with my father and the dogs. I am a pirate, reckless, unscrupulous, riding on the omnibus up Whitehall, all sails spread. I am free…’

Also filed in Broadcasting, Dance & Performance, Drama, Film, Television, Video & Theatre | Tagged | Comments (0)

Dramatising Mrs Dalloway.

Monday, 25 June 2012

Michelene Wandor: One must engage with the rhythms and the style of the original, so that the dramatising process remains faithful to these, as well as to the more obvious issues of story, etc. The consummate dramatiser is also a consummate critical reader, for whom part of the dramatisation is the challenge of including not only elements within the prose, but also, in a sense, re-reading the imperfections, the contradictions, the lacunae, even, in the text. This is essential because, of course, one is reading from the present, with one’s critical insights, whatever they are.

Also filed in Broadcasting, Dance & Performance, Film, Television, Video & Theatre, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)

Quite frankly. A sequence.

Thursday, 31 May 2012

By Peter Hughes.  (Petrarch, Canzoniere 1-21)   1 if you can read in the afterglow of all the friction I connived in escaping to the fairground so very young & so variously insane I hope you’ll recognise a few shapes if only by the state of the trellis & that pain in the stomach which […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Clever! Relevant! Shallow! The stuff of poetry!

Thursday, 26 April 2012

Comparing memes to poetry is enough to make any poetry teacher cringe — a few of mine probably will, after reading this. Poetry is inherently deep and memes are inherently shallow! Right? But I think the reason we gravitate toward poetry and gravitate toward Internet memes is analogous.

Also filed in Currente Calamo | | Comments (0)

Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus.

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Peter Riley: ‘The judging criteria, being tied to a system of familiarity and recurrence, are inevitably subjective and inevitably self-propagating. What chance is there of objectivity in an art where there is no common agreement as to what constitutes its qualities?

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Poetry Notes, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (7)

Thomas Hardy: The Convergence of the Twain.

Saturday, 14 April 2012

Thomas Hardy: In a solitude of the sea / Deep from human vanity, / And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Also filed in Archived content, Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (1)

Event: Reading from translations in N17, on 24 March 2012.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

‘Anthony Howell at Home’ is the name of an afternoon performance of readings by Deborah Dawkin, Rosalind Harvey and Anthony Howell of work by Lars Ramslie, Juan Pablo Villa Lobos, and Fawzi Karim at The Room in London N17, on Saturday, 24 March 2012, from 3pm to 6pm.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events | | Comments (0)

To know Peter Porter was to ‘delight in his company’.

Friday, 2 March 2012

Somewhere, lost among the many disparate layers of time I myself was devoting to overlapping activities – teaching, writing, politics (somehow I’d been elected a borough councillor), was a stretch when I came to know Peter very well, to delight in his company, to like him greatly. He became the face it was extremely good news to see on entering any gathering.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

Every Eliot needs a ‘better craftsman’.

Monday, 20 February 2012

All the main poetry publishers – Faber, Picador, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – have practising poets as editors, and a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

‘Poetry is not fashion; it does not need to reinvent itself every five or ten years’.

Saturday, 28 January 2012

I believe that the excessive individualism concerning the means of expression, to which we were led during the 20th century, this constant and forced hunting of innovation that Ezra Pound called “Make it new!”, all this led contemporary poetry to a dead-end.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

The ‘pomenvylope no. 10’ by Nicholas Moore.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

THE ATTACHED IMAGES accompany The Fortnightly Review‘s article ‘A “pomenvylope” by Nicholas Moore‘ by Martin Sorrell. To return to the article, click here.

Also filed in | Tagged | Comments (0)

A ‘pomenvylope’ by Nicholas Moore.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Martin Sorrell: The type is blotchy, made worse by an expiring ribbon and a clutter of corrections hammered over the several typos. This ‘pomenvylope’, and the few others I’ve managed to read, speak to me of the frustration Moore lived with for the decades after brief fame had become neglect. They express the dogged endurance of a poet still possessed of a strong voice and the wish to have it heard.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, In Memoriam, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (2)
The Fortnightly Review