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Winter–Spring 2024 Special Issue: The Fortnightly Review Continues -
Between the Dog & the Wolf and four more poems
Jane SatterfieldIntercontinental and two more poems
Clive WatkinsThe Crossable
John Taylor with paintings by Marc FeldABC and four more poems
Linda BlackHoly Ghosts and four more poems
Marc VincenzCocoon and two more poems
Kitty HawkinsBashshayt
Michelene WandorTwo Sonnets
Richard BerengartenSelections from Baudelaire
translated by Will StoneAnd more…
Five Tanka Manipulating Form
Lucian Staiano-Daniels -
John Wilkinson’s
Adages for Poetry StudentsChris Miller reviews Chaos and the Clean Line by Stephen Romer
AND Two Essays
by Alan WallSee also Garin Cycholl’s new review of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard
Departments
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Contact the Editors here.
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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.
Comte at 212.
19 JANUARY 2010 – Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1798, of Auguste Comte. Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was a class of British “higher” journalists, led by Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence. And he is still in the news today.
A. Comte
James W. Ceaser, in the Weekly Standard, finds Barack Obama is the unlikely “savior” of Comte’s “Religion of Humanity”:
“The 2008 campaign was an event that unfolded on an entirely different plane from ordinary politics. It signaled the emergence on a worldwide scale of the ‘Religion of Humanity,’ for which Obama became the symbol. What Americans have discovered is that being the representative of this transpolitical movement does not fit easily, if it fits at all, with serving as president of the United States…”
Comte’s “religion” was his undoing, at least in the minds of those who had first supported him so eagerly, especially John Morley, an early editor of the Fortnightly. Advocating an intellectual primacy of place for science was one thing, but building a cult around his personal obsessions was something else. Besides, many mainstream Christian “sects” would find their own means of achieving irrelevance without Comte, his religion, his peculiar calendar, and his veneration of his dream-girl, Clothilde de Vaux.
How far the parallel between Obama and Comte goes remains to be seen. Comte is now nearly forgotten. Many of the ideas he championed still survive and, in some forms, even flourish. Others now seem just trivial.
The answer may be more clear when Comte turns 214. And 2012, of course, is an American election year.