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Index: Poetry & Fiction

Logue: the very master of a modern martial metaphor.

I stayed in touch with Logue for a while after our meeting. I received a couple of beautiful hand-written cards and spoke on the phone a few times, but I got the impression he was already bored of me. Then one afternoon a postman knocked at my door with a large brown tube. I opened it and inside was one of Logue’s poster poems from the 1960s, with a note of thanks inside.

Poetry of ‘a detailed curiosity’.

Alan Wall: Although radically different books, both Michelene Wandor’s writing and Myra Sklarew’s exhibit a detailed curiosity regarding the minutiae of existence, whether itemising seventeenth-century trade or arachnid encounters. The threads that tie dissimilarities together, whether gossamer or memories of Lithuania, hold the poems together with an alert gracefulness.

Tennyson’s ‘Tears’ and ‘the lyric modality of suffering’.

The voice in “Tears, Idle Tears” on the one hand plays with the sense of the voice as an authentic expression of personal loss, the lyric modality of pain and suffering. And yet, on the other, the poem is supremely secondary, mediated and belated…

Some belated gratitude for Ruth Stone.

THE BUSINESS OF LIVING early and working late seems like a New England virtue. Certainly, it is one that Ruth Stone, a Yankee poet, mastered perfectly. It’s not surprising that for a poet whose work – and not her celebrity – makes her “major”, it took most of us a lifetime to catch up to […]

Mapping fiction: the work of a make-believe city father.

At some point I thought about how cool it might be to climb into Neil’s head, to get an idea of what he sees when he looks at his maps. Point to any area or intersection and Neil will seamlessly delve into the history of that block, that neighborhood, that business district, etc. It’s really amazing.

Dulce et Decorum Est.

Owen: In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Ah Dieu! Apollinaire. 9 November 1918.

Martin Sorrell: So was Apollinaire the lone innovator? Was there anyone comparable writing in English? As Tim Kendall points out, it took David Jones, who’d served in that war, nearly twenty years to produce work such as “In Parenthesis”. Apollinaire, on the other hand, wrote both spontaneously and experimentally, out of the here and now. Take “Flare”, a poem of erotic charge – even yearning.

• The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.

I had read the obituary notice which I have been quoting, quite by chance, along with a great many others of the same period. It had excited some little speculation in my mind, but, beyond thinking that, if I ever had an opportunity of examining the local records of the period indicated, I would try to remember Dr. Haynes, I made no effort to pursue his case.

Coleridge as a poet.

Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.

A Voice from the Nile.

By James Thomson [B.V.]. I COME FROM mountains under other stars Than those reflected in my waters here; Athwart broad realms, beneath large skies, I flow, Between the Libyan and Arabian hills, And merge at last into the great Mid-Sea; And make this land of Egypt.

On Brownjohn Land.

Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’

• Waking, with Tranströmer, from a ‘dream of life’…

Transtromer’s subjects often feel that they have woken from the dream of life. The constant inversion of dream time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical worlds, are abiding themes for this writer, a psychologist by profession who has worked principally with those deemed to be outcasts from society.

• Yvor Winters and ‘Poetry’ – before it had ‘editorial brains’.

Winters could be brutal. As I write this now I’m looking at an unpublished letter from the Poetry Magazine archives — from William Pillin (a poet known as a left-winger in the 1930s) to then-editor Hayden Carruth: ”Dear Mr. Carruth: / Will someone tell Mr. Winters to get off my toes? / His rude designation of my craft as a refuge to ‘fairies and fantasists’ is insulting and untrue.”

• Event: Poetry reading at The Room, London N17, 17 September 2011.

A poetry reading, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Abstraction’, will be staged at The Room, London N17, at 7:30pm on 17 September 2011. The poets reading: Vincent Dachy, Fiona Templeton, and Anthony Howell. The exhibition includes work by Bonvin/Eden, Anthony McCall, Stephen Mallaghan, Yuko Shiraishi, Paul Sibbering, Amikam Toren, Gera Urkom and Mark Williams.

• Rimbaud: ‘present at the hatching’.

Rimbaud suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind.