Anthony Howell: ‘I am taken by the notion that the prose poem “forsakes the tool of the line break, just as blank verse forsakes rhyme, or free verse forsakes a standardised metre. Art seems to evolve, to grow, when some time honoured tenet is “let go of” – though this tendency to grow by relinquishment often offends pundits and traditionalists – who may accuse blank verse of “not rhyming”, for instance; ignoring the absurdity of their judgement.’
Anthony Howell: ‘It is evidence of a weakness in number. There aren’t that many conventional troops either, so the suicide bomber is called to put on a vest. Were this not the case, were there a glut of suicidal believers, surely there would have been 60 be-vested individuals engaged in the recent attacks, not six? The act may fill us with horror, but it’s nothing to the damage wreaked by Bomber Harris over Dresden, or to the damage, mainly collateral, caused by our jets, drones and missiles. We are dealing with gangs rather than armies, and we would be better served by treating eradication as a “police operation”, or a job for the commando elite of our armed forces.’
Anthony Howell: ‘[In Drummond] one senses an intellectual struggle, a willingness to attempt something new. Drummond should be recognised as a pioneer: a poet prepared to experiment in his day, who made the madrigal his own. He is far more than a footnote in criticism devoted to Milton or Jonson.’
Anthony Howell; ‘The organisers — Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly — have brought out a very useful programme and anthology that is well worth getting hold of since it lists all the publishers as well as providing a sample of what they print. The event was described as “an all-day bazaar, market, library, meeting place, performance venue, information resource and more, celebrating the vitality of contemporary poetry in the UK.”’
Anthony Howell: ‘Since its heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, satire as a poetic form has fallen out of fashion. Of course, in other fields, there are still plenty of satirists. Private Eye continues to mock the establishment and spill the beans on cheats. Stand-up comics ridicule our politicians and media stars. There are plenty of films, plays and musicals that deal in derision and the criticism of human pretensions, foibles and iniquity. The satirical vein is still very much in circulation. But poetry itself, the principle organ of mockery in Roman times, appears to have lost sight of this cutting tool with the advent of the romantics. Sincerity replaced wit as the yard stick in the nineteenth century, and resonance achieved through depth of feeling became a more urgent concern.’
Anthony Howell: ‘There is a lack of breadth that still dogs the selection process, I think as a direct result of prize-winners apotheosising into judges. In the end it all begins to feel samey. There are far too many “of”s – usually attached to death, love, or something equally gloomy, and so the poems not only feel samey, they feel doomy. Again and again we were urged to confront the death of a loved one or our own death. Surely there is more to poetry than a maudlin sense of nostalgia for those no longer with us?’
Anthony Howell: ‘I would identify this as “illuminated writing”. Readers may find it “over the top” (but that is what is being described). It’s as if Dylan Thomas were to find himself storming Hill 50. This might be thought an unfashionable, adjective-laden style these days, when writing such as Edith Sitwell’s is so often vilified (at least in “aware” poetry circles). But no one can take away from her poem “Still Falls the Rain” its right to be considered one of the great expressions about the suffering brought about by war (specifically the air raids of 1940). ‘
From ‘Silent Highway’: For ancient Britons, if they could be found,
For bird-watchers, for birds, for water-violets…
He liked to talk to herons, being tall,
And waded here, and further up, at Brentford
Composing poems as he strode or strove…
Anthony Howell: ‘What makes a poet readable? There cannot be a formulaic answer. This is the problem with the standard model so lauded by our Oxbridge elite – as anally compressed as Ian Hamilton, with a closed form, forever ruled by the dictates of significance and economy, and very tightly organised on the page. ‘
Anthony Howell: ‘For the poet, at least, Ashbery is the model of the art-critic. His manner is urbane, and he refers to Satie and to Wallace Stevens more often than to Cezanne. The melange of the arts evoked by his writing suggests a cafe-society sadly missing these days, now that art-mags are no longer modeled on the Paris Review but gleam at us from the racks, like trade-journals for the purveyance of some non-applied craft.’
Anthony Howell: ‘Both fetishism and the carnivalesque have a bearing on the nature of curios. Familiar objects that are invested with more than their due share of interest may have become fetishised and as fetishes they may well feature in cabinets of curiosity. The carnivalesque, that fascination with the world turned upside down may also contribute to the curious – silver plate photographs of Popes and bishops staring into the heavens through the powerful lenses of telescopes in the Vatican observatory induce a vertiginous sense of the topsy–turvy.’
Anthony Howell: ‘The cave paintings have a swift, improvisatory feel. Often they are superimposed, one on another. Very small tribes may have spoken different languages, but you needed a fair number of hunters for a mammoth hunt. What this tribe called a mammoth, another called a borogove. But if the hunters from several tribes came together in a cave, you could all agree on a drawing. What are we hunting? We are hunting that!’
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Anthony Howell: ‘My initial take, leafing through the large Norton publication which is the anthology, is that Americans go on too long. Endless, separated, hardly ever rhyming couplets, for instance, or very long lines indeed, and plenty of them. Some of the poems here get to be as expansive as a Morris Lewis! And these Norton anthologies never skimp on pages, so, inevitably, there is lots of stuff I like, some using narrative, others more abstract. I appreciate the breezy chatty poems of Albert Goldbarth, and a poem called ‘Impossible Blue’ by Ann Lauterbach, whom I associate with the London art scene and New York.’
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Anthony Howell: “Prince was a Catholic, but his commitment as a writer was primarily to literature. Having been invited to chair the English department of Kingston University in Jamaica, he grew exasperated when students handed him manuscripts avowing their religious zeal. He said to me once, ‘Literature allows one to become emancipated from oneself.’”
The prose poem.
Anthony Howell: ‘I am taken by the notion that the prose poem “forsakes the tool of the line break, just as blank verse forsakes rhyme, or free verse forsakes a standardised metre. Art seems to evolve, to grow, when some time honoured tenet is “let go of” – though this tendency to grow by relinquishment often offends pundits and traditionalists – who may accuse blank verse of “not rhyming”, for instance; ignoring the absurdity of their judgement.’