Click on ANGER – my new video on Youtube. But remember to open a vigorous track by Fourplay before you press play on my link.
Almost all my slide-shows can be found on Youtube @theanthonyhowell here
There is also STENCIL ART – which has content Youtube might consider inappropriate – so it’s on vimeo.
I don’t usually add a soundtrack. Anyone who needs a soundtrack can open some accompaniment that’s of their own choosing. But sometimes I make suggestions – as I do above. Some people prefer watching without sound.
I did make a slide-show to accompany my introductory reading of an excerpt from my novel The Distance Measured in Days
The slide-show extends the tradition of contending with the portrayal of time in visual art, which can be seen in the procession taking place on the frieze of the Parthenon. As we walk along its length in the British Museum, we imagine we are standing still and the procession is passing in front of our eyes, and then there are the narratives Sassetta portrayed: three incidents in the life of some early Christian saint shown happening in a single picture. And then, as we move nearer to today, there are comics and animation. So for me, it was rewarding to hit upon the slide-show as a way to narrate a visual poem.
MUAMMAR GADDAFI’S SON SAIF AL-ISLAM GADDAFI ASSASSINATED
Who did it? Sources on the ground in Libya suspect that British intelligence used local proxies to assassinate the man seen by many as the one who could reunite Libya, 15 years after NATO bombed Libya into a failed state during their campaign to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa. It had a fully-functioning welfare state, and people could not leave its shores to get to Europe in dinghies.
France could also be implicated. It has deep motives in Libya, and we know from Wikileaks cables that France wanted a ‘greater share in Libya’s oil production’ in 2011, and Sarkozy was negotiating to reserve as much as 35% of Libya’s oil production.
We know that the US, UK, and France feared Muammar Gaddafi’s plan for a pan-African Gold Dinar currency, as well as his promoting of pan-African unity, a legacy inherited by Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi.
Saif was a Libyan political figure. He was the second son of the late Libyan leader and his second wife Safia Farkash. He was a part of his father’s inner circle, performing public relations and diplomatic roles on his behalf. He publicly turned down his father’s offer of the country’s second highest post and held no official government position. According to United States Department of State officials in Tripoli, during his father’s reign, he was the second most widely recognized person in Libya, being at times the de facto prime minister, and was mentioned as a possible successor,
Libyan news outlet Fawasel Media cited Othman as saying that armed men killed Gaddafi in his home in the town of Zintan, some 136km (85 miles) southwest of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
Gaddafi’s political team later released a statement, saying that “four masked men” stormed his house and killed him in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination”.
The statement said that he clashed with the assailants, who closed the security cameras at the house “in a desperate attempt to conceal traces of their heinous crimes”.
Khaled al-Mishri, the former head of the Tripoli-based High State Council, an internationally recognised government body, called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into the killing in a social media post.
The Vintage to the Dungeon – a poem by Richard Lovelace
I.
Sing out, pent soules, sing cheerefully!
Care shackles you in liberty:
Mirth frees you in captivity.
Would you double fetters adde?
Else why so sadde?
Chorus
Besides your pinion’d armes youl finde
Griefe too can manakell the minde.
II.
Live then, pris’ners, uncontrol’d;
Drink oth’ strong, the rich, the old,
Till wine too hath your wits in hold;
Then if still your jollitie
And throats are free-
Chorus
Tryumph in your bonds and paines,
And daunce to the music of your chaines.
x
Lovelace is perceptive. As a poet, it is no good just protesting about your grievance. However horrific the abuse you may be wishing to tell us about, there has to be a music to the telling.
Nicholas Lafitte committed suicide at 27 after a long battle with schizophrenia. Arguably this highly gifted poet threw away, along with his life, a greater literary legacy. It’s probably best however to refrain from such speculations and resist the temptation to billet Lafitte with the likes of Douglas, Keyes et al. Anyhow, he did live and write for at least three years longer.
Lafitte is more of an obsessional than confessional poet; more a Plath than a Lowell, with the odd lyrical smatter of Lorca. His poetry swings between polarities of stark intellectualism and morbid religiosity reminiscent of the ‘mania’ of Christopher Smart (the title ‘The Madman Compares God To A Great Light’ says it all). It would be shallow to put this down to schizophrenia; there’s evidence of deep ontological concerns which are perfectly rational, if a little obsessive.
Lafitte’s style can be stream-of-consciousness:
It is the leopard-coloured sand You see, supine beneath these, ultimate Fins of the sea-scales I lie On the sea’s edge, a heavy sand to be squeezed As who would squeeze a flannel with my one Eye against the sun I see the sheer Rock face soars up unperspective- Wise to where trees shatter the sky
(‘This, Is The Sea’).
It can be casual and direct like the Roman love poets:
Love is not loving or being good or kind, is rather a sort of shared disturbance in the emptiness, ripple in a pool of bleakness. To say I love you as you once said to me does not demand a gesture like, say, a valentine or kiss. Love is.
It can be supremely descriptive: ‘the damson twilight, half creamed clouds/Of smoke hung like laundered sheets from the beamed/Roof tree’ (‘Evening Over Malta’); ‘the trees scorched ochre, chrome yellow’ (‘And the blue grass taut and dry’). It can be succinct and evocative: ‘men,/with freckled hands sip beer in silence’ (‘To A Sicillian Prostitute’).
Typically of many mentally afflicted poets, Lafitte invests a neurotic animism in the anxiety-free natural world: ‘The old wasp/Sun stings the window pane’ (‘To A Sicillian Prostitute’); ‘the January sun/Must always dwarf the summer, see/How it stretches skies across the city’s black!’ (‘Poem For Robert’); where the evening is a yellow glass,/And battered crows comment scornfully’ (‘Seven Last Words’); ‘The pathology of autumn synchronises/ Breakdowns with the falling of the leaves./A neurotic sun travels round the sky’s rim’ (‘In The Clinic’); ‘Climate is mortality’ (‘Calvin’s God’).
Some phrases of Lafitte’s read like sections of Van Gogh’s paintings: ‘knives of rain’; or Max Beckmann’s: ‘oiled existence skins’.
‘In The Clinic’ is the accessible mental illness piece which had to be written, but still surprises metaphorically: ‘November is/The staff nurse with the clinical smile’. It includes the motif of the head as a helmet which crops up sporadically throughout the collection: ‘Schizophrenia’s/Worse, that’s when you wear a balaclava/Helmet in the summer’.
Lafitte’s introspection is limitless: ‘I am no macro-lover,/nor even very nice’ (‘If There’s God Above The Blood-Bathed Heavens’). It verges on the solipsistic: ‘I AM MY WORLD’ (‘Homage To Wallace Stevens’).
Lafitte is gripped in a morbid theology, a faithless faith blighted by a questioning intellect:
There is no final metaphor. Only this, Inevitable, fidget with the images. Canterbury carried by anthropomorphic Frenzy demands male ministers.
At the end of this piece Lafitte, as if exhausted with trying to sum up the ‘sensed otherness’ of spirituality, sighs a final metaphor: ‘men fumbling with matches in the night’ (‘Thoughts At Night’).
Some parts of this collection read like a philosophical self-help pamphlet getting in a bit of a tangle. Lafitte is a soldier of doubt who comes through the smoke of the battlefield in spite of himself, in spite of his final act. His mastery of poetic styles is breathtaking as is his descriptive inventiveness. He is only let down by occasional over-theologizing.
So is Lafitte’s philosophical epitaph to be: ‘My god has gone; we are all/alone now, each in our desperate bed’ (‘Letter from Mwanza’)? Powerfully typical of this poet’s gifted pessimism, but I prefer: ‘Yet shall/My love endure the summer of my strength’ (‘Seven Last Words’).
I remember him reading his elusive poems under a gnarled sycamore at the far end of a field on my mother’s Hampshire farm – Purdies Farm – that lovely summer when we held an arts festival there in the mid-seventies I guess. The horses cropping grass as they listened nearby. Amikam Toren did a ballet for cars. Susan Hiller and Susan Bonvin squabbled over encroachment of Susan Bonvin’s string piece into Susan Hiller’s dream field. The fledgling Theatre of Mistakes did a free session among the horses. David Coxhead philosophised under the corrugated awning attached to the barn as the sun set over the wooded heath. John was very much part of this mixed group of artists, which included Anthony McCall and Andrew Eden – all editors of Wallpaper magazine, which we found wallpaper covers for, from the ends of rolls, and it wasn’t a magazine with articles, it was a magazine with art-works and poems and musical scores and concepts, and each editor had a slot (there were twelve editors and John was one) – and other contributors could only get into the magazine if an editor gave up a slot to that contributor. We were all committed to a somewhat French notion of a café society, where visual artists exchanged ideas with poets and composers and this was in reaction to the over-rigorous demarcations of London culture, where poetry was remorselessly meaningful and poets like John and myself and Tom Lowenstein and Alan Fuchs all reacted to this, and joined forces with the French group Siècle a mains – writers living in exile from Paris in London at the time and championed by Anthony Rudolf. We had set up a writer’s workshop which took place in my wife Signe’s Hampstead flat where we were ruthless about our own poems and we talked enthusiastically about the New York Scene and John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge and Jimmy Schuyler. And this was because we wanted to engage with abstraction, as we saw the visual arts were doing, and at the time I took up a way of writing which was extremely abstract and systemic while John’s writing mediated between abstraction and meaning in a way which I was sometimes dismissive of back then; but John’s ineffable hovering has definitely stood the test of time, whereas I have moved on or away from my purist abstract outlook. So it was that we became writers. John went on to found Vanessa magazine, and also he started the Many Press. I feel that Winter’s Not Gone – the pamphlet of mine that he published – with design and wonderful cover illustration by Peter Tingey is the most handsome of any chap-book that has been done of my poetry. Most memorably, John also published Near Calvary by the immensely gifted poet Nick Lafitte, who committed suicide in his twenties, a collection I edited and wrote an introduction for. John has written poetry which will last, and I will also always appreciate his fine work as an editor and a publisher.
Italian-American photographer George Tatge studied English Literature at Beloit College, Wisconsin. Tatge moved to Italy in 1973 and began working as a freelance photographer and writer. He served as Director of Photography at the Alinari Archives between 1986 and 2003. Tatge was awarded the Premio Friuli Venezia Giulia Photography Prize in 2010. His work is represented in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montreal.
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