Edward Field dies at the age of 102

Posted on September 7, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

The poet of simply describing it as it is. One of my favourite writers.

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WORLD WAR 11

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It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane

just as we were dumping bombs on the already smoking city

on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.

The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst under us,

sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our fuselage.

It was pure chance

that none of us got ripped by those fragments.

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Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation right away,

losing speed and altitude,

and when I figured out our course with trembling hands on the instruments

(I was navigator)

we set out on the long trip home to England

alone, with two of our four engines gone

and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.

That morning at briefing

we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland,

partly liberated then by the Russians,

although later we learned that another crew in trouble

had landed there anyway,

and patching up their plane somehow,

returned gradually to England

roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.

But we chose England, and luckily

the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then,

for this was just before they developed their jet.

To lighten our load we threw out

guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk,

and made it over Holland with a few good-bye fireworks from the shore guns.

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Over the North Sea the third engine gave out

And we dropped low over the water.

The gas gauge read empty, but by keeping the nose down

a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward

and kept our single engine going.

High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in formation

– the raids had gone on for hours after us.

Did they see us down there in our trouble?

We radioed our final position for help to come

but had no idea if anyone

happened to be tuned in and heard us,

and we crouched together on the floor,

knees drawn up and head down

in regulation position for ditching,

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,

and we went down into the sea with a crash,

just like hitting a brick wall,

jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Who would ever think water could be so hard?

You black out, and then come to

with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.

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All ten of us started getting out of there fast:

there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,

one at a time. We stood in line,

water up to our thighs and rising.

The plane was supposed to float for twenty minutes,

but with all those flak holes

who could say how long it really would?

The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water,

but one of them only half inflated,

and the other couldn’t hold everyone,

although they all piled into it, except the pilot,

who got into the limp raft that just floated.

The radio operator and I, out last,

(Did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely to survive?)

we stood on the wing watching the two rafts

being swept off by waves in different directions.

We had to swim for it.

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Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane

broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them

for cutting them loose, for fear

that by waiting the plane would go down

and drag them with it.

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I headed for the overcrowded good raft

and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes

got there and hung onto the side.

The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft

where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,

but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on.

Being from the Great Plains,

his strong farmer’s body didn’t know

how to wallow through the water properly,

and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.

One minute we saw him on top of a swell

and perhaps we glanced away for a minute

but when we looked again he was gone

just as the plane went down sometime around then

when nobody was looking.

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It was midwinter and the waves were mountains

and the water ice water.

You could live in it twenty-five minutes,

the Ditching Survival Manual said.

Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft

I had to stay in the water hanging on.

My raft? It was their raft—they got there first so they would live.

Twenty-five minutes I had.

Live, live, I said to myself.

You’ve got to live.

There looked like plenty of room on the raft

from where I was and I said so, but they said no.

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When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up

and I was getting numb,

I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,

and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the gunners,

got into the icy water in my place,

and I got on the raft in his.

He insisted on taking off his flying clothes,

which was a fatal mistake because even wet clothes are protection,

and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all paddled,

to get to the other raft,

and we tied them together.

The gunner got in the raft with the pilot

and lay in the wet.

Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from his mouth-

maybe he was injured in the crash against the instruments—

and by the time we were rescued, he and the little gunner were both dead.

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That boy who took my place in the water,

who died instead of me,

I don’t remember his name even.

It was like those who survived the death camps

by letting others go into the ovens in their place.

It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.

I’m a good swimmer,

but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea

looking for the radio operator when he was washed away.

I suppose, then, once and for all,

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,

although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world,

even if, when opportunity knocked,

I instinctively chose survival.

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As evening fell the waves calmed down

and we spotted a boat, far off, and signaled with a flare gun,

hoping it was English not German.

The only two who cried on being found

were me and a gunner, the other gay member of the crew.

The rest kept straight faces.

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It was a British air-sea rescue boat:

they hoisted us up on deck,

dried off the living and gave us whiskey and put us to bed,

and rolled the dead up in blankets,

arid delivered us all to a hospital on shore

for treatment or disposal.

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This was a minor accident of war:

two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea

and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,

ready for combat again,

the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,

and went on hauling bombs over the continent of Europe,

destroying the Germans and their cities.

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Edward Field, from AFTER THE FALL, poems old and new, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

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CELEBRATING HIS ASS

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they try to block your dick

with their little pills

for blood pressure, prostate, heart

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they figure you’re an old guy

so what’s the difference

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and just to stay alive

you go along with it, take the goddam pills

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but how lucky I am

to live with an antidote to their poison

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whatever the depredations of age

he still has one goddam beautiful ass

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and just looking at it

I can’t stop pulling on my dick 

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I follow him around like a dog

drooling over the ballet of his movements

and can’t stop pulling on my dick 

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actually, anything he does

goes to my dick

and he’s walking around naked all the time

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I get to watch him putting on his clothes

watch the way he fills his underwear

and even better when he takes it off

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and when he does the dishes naked

each cheek as he moves

here and there at the sink

altering its shape, its roundness

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and I can’t stop pulling on my dick

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and when he bends over

I ‘m riveted by the beautiful

crack of his ass,  and can’t stop

pulling on my dick

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and when he does his daily exercises

I’m breathless, I’m breathing hard

I’m sipping the nectar of the gods

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oh lord, let me die looking at that ass

with my hand still pulling on my dick

x

****

Field was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Lynbrook, New York, and, being Jewish, he and his family faced antisemitism and discrimination. He played cello in the “Field Family Trio”, which had a weekly radio program on WGBB in Freeport.

Field served in World War II with the Eighth Air Force in England and France as a navigator in heavy bombers, flying 25 missions over Germany. In February 1945, he took part in a raid on Berlin. His B-17 was crippled by flak and crash-landed in the North Sea. All ten crew members reached the life rafts, but only seven survived until rescued by a British air-sea vessel hours later.

In 1959, Field met Neil Derrick. As Field later recalled: “I was working in the typing pool of an advertising agency, and the supervisor assigned the typewriter next to me to a new temp, a terrific-looking young man from California named Neil Derrick. It was a case of immediate attraction between WASP and Jew.” In 1972, the couple moved to the nonprofit artists’ housing Westbeth Artists Community in New York City’s West Village. Derrick died on January 5, 2018. Field continued to reside at Westbeth and was regarded as one of the complex’s notable residents. Field died on September 6, 2026, at the age of 102.

The poet Edward Field in 2014. William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”Credit…Roger Netzer

NEW YORK TIMES had this to say in an obituary by Rebecca Chace:

“William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”

Edward Field, one of the most accomplished American poets of the postwar era, whose award-winning work — characterized by everyday language and an openly gay landscape — was forged by nearly a century of living in bohemian New York, died on Sunday at his home in the West Village section of Manhattan. He was 102.

The death was confirmed by Roger Netzer, his close friend for several decades.

Mr. Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry.

“I was on that train for three days,” he said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. “I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet.”

He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry or written a line. But he would go on to write 12 books of poetry and edit two anthologies, “A Geography of Poets” (1979) and “A New Geography of Poets” (1992), and receive, among other honors, the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the W.H. Auden Prize.

Diana Athill, the renowned British editor and writer, published “Letters to a Friend,” an epistolary chronicle of her 30-year friendship with Mr. Field, in 2011.

“The whole point of poetry for me is subject matter,” he told Ms. Athill. “Saying what I have to say, saying what has never been said before, what’s not polite to say.”

During the war, as an Army Air Corps navigator at the Grafton Underwood base in the English Midlands, Mr. Field met Coman Leavenworth, the first published poet he had encountered. Mr. Leavenworth introduced him to the work of contemporary poets who were writing about same-sex desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and most gay writing was coded or underground. Mr. Field, who had concealed his own homosexuality from his family and in his own writing, was shocked and thrilled.

By the time he published his debut collection, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963), he was a writer openly embracing his own sexuality.

In the poem Unwanted, he wrote:

It is perfectly obvious that he was not popular at school

No good at baseball, and wet his bed.

His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-for-nothing,

Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.

Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name,

Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.

Edward Field was born in Brooklyn on June 7, 1924, one of six children of Eastern European Jewish parents who were among a wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. After five years in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, Edward moved with his family to the Long Island town of Lynbrook in Nassau County, then a center for the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, a political organization for Americans of German descent that supported the rise of Hitler in the mid-1930s.

“I was beaten up every day after school,” Mr. Field said in 2022. His father, Louis Felscher, changed the family name to Field in an attempt to avoid antisemitism.

Home life was not easy either. Mr. Field described Louis, a commercial artist who designed movie posters for MGM, as tyrannical. But Mr. Field’s mother, Hilda (Taubman) Field, was musical with a streak of nonconformism, believing in the health benefits of nudism and eurhythmic dancing exercise.

All the children took music lessons. Edward, who played the cello, performed regularly with two of his siblings on a local radio show called “The Field Family Trio and Their Romantic Melodies.” The first in his family to go to college, Edward studied marketing at New York University at his father’s insistence but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army.

He was a decorated first lieutenant who navigated B-17 bombers, the aircraft known as the Flying Fortress, in 27 raids over Germany. He nearly died in February 1945, when his plane was hit by enemy fire and crash landed into the North Sea.

His poem about his survival, “World War II,” was made into an award-winning short animated film, “Minor Accident of War,” in 2019, by Mr. Field’s niece, Diane Weis, and Piotr Kabat, with Mr. Field narrating the text.

After the war, he returned to New York University on the G.I. Bill and met other ambitious young writers including Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Alfred Chester, a literary critic and novelist whose meteoric rise and tragic end had a profound effect on Mr. Field’s own life and work. Mr. Chester had struggled with depression, leading to drug-fueled psychotic breaks after he moved to Morocco to join the writer and composer Paul Bowles. After Mr. Chester died under mysterious circumstances in 1971, Mr. Field became the keeper of his legacy.

Mr. Field successfully lobbied publishers to reprint Mr. Chester’s work. He edited a collection of his short fiction called “Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953-1966” (1990) as well as a collection of his Moroccan letters, “Voyage to Destruction” (2021). He also paid homage to Mr. Chester in his own memoir of life in literary Greenwich Village, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era” (2005); the title story about a would-be Sontag spouse referred to Mr. Chester.

Mr. Field left N.Y.U. before graduating, and headed for Paris in 1948. There, he met other expatriate American writers, including James Baldwin and Robert Friend, and published work regularly in literary magazines. He eventually worked his way back to New York in 1950 as a deckhand on a freighter.

But America then was a chilly place for a young gay poet. The House Un-American Activities Committee swept up a broad swath of artists, many of them Jews and gay people.

Then, in the mid-1950s, Mr. Field met the poet Frank O’Hara. Their brief love affair altered the course of Mr. Field’s life and work. “Frank O’Hara showed me the way,” Mr. Field wrote for outhistory.org. Mr. O’Hara’s ability to write easily and unselfconsciously as a gay man gave Mr. Field the courage to follow his instincts and loosen up with his own writing. The result was a breakthrough in his poetry.

“Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963) received the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, though the book had been turned down by 24 publishers. Mr. Field’s colloquial language, emotionality and openly gay topics brought him widespread praise and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

As Mr. Field burst on the scene, the poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “I don’t know how the hell old you are or anything about you but I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”

Mr. Field was hired by Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant, to write the narration for a film at the company’s pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. The film won an Academy Award for best documentary short in 1966.

By the early 1970s, Mr. Field became that rare creature: a successful poet, able to support himself through public readings and freelance writing.

The love of his life was Neil Derrick, a novelist who published bodice-rippers such as “Sticky Fingers” (1970) under the pseudonyms Eleanor Bartlett and Bruce Elliot. They met in 1959, while they were both working in a typing pool at an advertising agency. “We started a nonstop conversation that led the supervisor to switch him to another typewriter, rows away from me,” Mr. Field recalled.

But in 1971, Mr. Derrick was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which left him blind. Mr. Field became his caregiver.

They continued to travel to Europe and collaborated on several Bruce Elliot novels, including “The Potency Clinic” (1978) and “Village” (published in 1982 and republished as “The Villagers” in 1999), which became an unexpected best seller.

The two were married in 2017. Mr. Derrick died the following year. Mr. Field leaves no immediate survivors. A longtime resident of Westbeth Artists Housing, a community for artists and arts organizations in Greenwich Village, Mr. Field continued to write and publish throughout his ninth decade. An anachronistic bohemian to the end, he shared an excerpt from one of his poems on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in 2006:

I am of another era, like the grizzled poet

who slept in Village doorways

and shows up at the Poetry Society

with his life work in a shopping bag

and read his poem, ‘Crows’:

Caw-caw, he cried as he jumped

off a table, flapping his arms.

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Metaphysical Sonnets by Arturo Nathan

Posted on August 29, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal
Arturo Nathan

Hugely pleased that these six metaphysical sonnets by Arturo Nathan have appeared in The Fortnightly Review

Intrigued to discover a metaphysical painter I had not heard about, I bought several catalogues of Arturo Nathan’s work. In one I found these “Six Metaphysical Sonnets”. I was excited to find examples of metaphysical writing – since I already knew the paintings of De Chirico, Carra, Morandi, Paul Nash, but I had not found much metaphysical writing.

I’m not referring to the metaphysical poets of 17th century Britain, but to the modernist metaphysical movement in painting. Of course I knew “Hebdomeros” – the novel by De Chirico – but I didn’t know of any poetry, apart from that of Quasimodo, whose earlier work may be considered metaphysical. So I was all the more intrigued to find a metaphysical painter who wrote what he considered to be a poetic equivalent to his visual preoccupation.

I was richly rewarded. Take this example – Sonnet 3 – it has an eerie sense about it of immutability. That, and a powerful “clunkiness”. It reminds me of the later paintings of Philip Guston:

Ancient convoy on an immense plain.

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An ancient train advances on its rails,

Indentured to an endless plain;

Its route’s forever straight, without a curve.

Strictly forbidden to venture anywhere else.

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Never a pause, a scene that cannot change.

Characteristic of that plain

Coated in dark slag, hard and red,

Is that it all seems motionless, eternal.

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An aged engine tugs this train along

On rusted wheels towards its destination.

Smoke trails from sturdy funnel.

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Rust-corroded carriages, most empty.

In one sits a sunburnt type.

Where’s he going? What if there’s no station?

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Is it Necessary to Get out of Equilibrium?

Posted on August 28, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

Is it necessary to get out of equilibrium?

This is a question asked, but never answered, by Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), the extraordinary Russian writer who is the master of the inconsequential. I don’t want to label him “absurd” as that would suggest that he was part of a school that would include Eugène Ionescu and his “Theatre of the Absurd” – whereas Kharms is an eccentric, an outlier; often writing simply for the drawer, as they say in Russia when they talk of someone who was deemed increasingly unpublishable – although, earlier, his children’s books were popular, and I believe they still are.

Kharms believed that a poem should be so made that if flung against a window-pane that pane would be shattered. For this to be the case, the poem had to become an object created so thoroughly out of words that all significance, all reference to the normal meaning of those words, had to be removed. Here is ‘An Evil Gathering of Infidels’ (1930):

Not I, Lord, is it? – thought the apostles.

Here are the signs:

a face like a mouse,

a wing like a knife,

a little steamship foot,

a house like a family,

a rope-ladder bridge,

a robe like atlas’ brow.

And only one’s a genius. Yes, but which?

One’s smart, another is a dullard, the third is a dolt.

But who’s the genius? Oh Lordy, Lordy!

All people are poor. I am a sheepskin coat.

This defies any attempt to discover what it signifies. It exists solely as an object made out of words. That is why it can shatter the window-pane. Read a conversation from “Party Going” by Henry Green. Consider the “plot” of “Two Serious Ladies” by Jane Bowles. One realises that an absence of significance is as crucial to the advanced art of the twentieth century as abstraction: it allowed for a modernism that could even be achieved in a perfectly narrative or figurative way. Italo Svevo’s writing is another example. These days, artist Michael Crowther makes objects out of paint, and I am going to let his images accompany this text:

Silly Quid, Nov ‘24, Michael Crowther

But I’ve turned my back on modernism, or so I say to myself. The idea of Mondrian beginning with an apple tree and gradually abstracting from it in order to derive a set of lines and coloured blocks; that no longer has any appeal. Art is not necessarily concerned with truth, so however true this felt for Mondrian, for me, today, it has become a cliché – and the cliché is anathema in both art and literature.

Instead, I am investing in Deep Art. What is Deep Art?  Look at the visual work of Victor Hugo or Alexander Cozens. I call what they do, and what I attempt to do, Deep Art. To some extent Deep Art has been anticipated by the surrealists, though it is actually earlier than surrealism. Basically it is going in the opposite direction to modernism – begins with some involuntary chaotic action, splotches, blots, found chaos, even a confused photograph, then works into that chaos to attempt to get somewhere – to create a work that has presence. Not necessarily to achieve a figurative result (Cozens goes too far in this regard) but to a feeling of resolution in the artist’s mind.

Off, July ‘23

Deep Art is a departure. It is alchemy. Its primary aim is for the artist to lose consciousness of the self in the engrossment of making art. This also reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s advice: to look at a wall – at its blotches and imperfections, and see what image you might discover there. Deep Art is done as a form of personal meditation. This is the only response to an “artworld” flooded by ambitious practitioners.

So Deep Art emerges from chaos. Happy with this mantra, I set out. But as is often the case when intuition wears off, doubt sullenly emerges. I cannot help but ask, are there a variety of forms of chaos?  “Forms of Chaos” – there’s an irony. No chaos should be the same as another. If two sorts of chaos were the same, they would be considered a pair, and not chaos therefore. Repetition is order. It turns out that chaos is not that easy to generate.

Harthope, May ‘26

I would like to start in chaos and arrive somewhere. Achieve a goal, when, at the start, I had no goal. Actually, I do not need to arrive anywhere. I don’t have to have a goal. I would like to start in chaos and achieve presence.

Presence is what I find in the paintings of Michael Crowther. They are done on wood. They make a nice clunk when set onto the pins which place them on the wall.  If you threw one at a window, it would definitely shatter the pane.

Bollihope May’25

Throughout history, each independent mind struggles to emancipate itself from the fixed ideas it has inherited. For artists of Crowther’s generation and my own, abstraction was very much the order of the day. For a host of non-practioners, modern art looked abstract or surreal. Even more naively (and this is particularly true of British pundits) art had to be significant, resolved: it had to accomplish its meaning. Take Peter Fuller in art, and F.R. Leavis in literature. The one expressed admiration for the aesthetic principles of John Ruskin, the other championed seriousness and moral depth in literature. Their naivety would have appalled Schopenhauer. But for pundits such as this unremarkable twain, only through significance could art achieve its true equilibrium – which brings us, at last, back to Kharms.

Bollihope,’24

Yes, it is necessary to get out of equilibrium. Because there is so much art that is resolved, very much so, but in ways which are trite: it’s art that’s too easily read, whereas I struggle with the paintings of Michael Crowther. I am told that they are figurative. But they are not like anything I’ve seen. At the same time, abstraction isn’t a term that I would apply to them. These paintings are elsewhere. An object is suggested, in the foreground. This is the case because there is clearly a background. But as to what that object is, or what is in the background… There I have to use guesswork, and this only helps a little bit. If these works are figurative, what they figure ought to be my prerogative. Thus I am led into each one by hint and by intuition. That could be a distant clump of trees, that could be one of those barns you see on farms with open sides, that could be a barbecue set up on spindly legs, but it might not be, it might be a creature with spindly legs. 

Farmer’s Boy 2024

Getting out of equilibrium, getting out of a comfily resolved idea of what art might be. Going off at a tangent, as in this essay. Getting away from some received idea about what art is supposed to be. Somehow Philip Guston achieved this, when he broke with abstraction. Michael Crowther achieves it in these small intense paintings shown by Benjamin Rhodes at his gallery in Old Nichol street. They provoke uncertainty and achieve presence. And what do I mean by presence? That is for you to decide.

Anthony Howell, 28/08/2026

***

“Crowther’s book-sized panels are imbued with thinking about painting, writing, history and landscape, each its own work of visual poetry – we continue from his brilliant solo-installation of last year: Bollihope and Others which loudly declared an integrated vision at home in an enigmatic and painterly strangeness.”

Benjamin Rhodes

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Three Pessimistic Poems

Posted on August 22, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal
Arthur Schopenhauer

GROUNDING YOUR STANCE

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Thought emerges out of a blur of language. It may be

Not quite a thought, or a wrong thought like the picture

Which doesn’t match the pieces in your puzzle.

You tug at the thought, it remains weighted down

As if by a stone. At best, you dredge up technologies:

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Craft from the past. The making of querns

Or flint-knapping skills. Esoteric and of a relevance

That is less than marginal, merely a means by which

To blunt those narratives of sickening atrocity, so as not

To realise the reality on the ground where the chosen ones

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Enact their cherem upon the Philistines

Whose objects and whose people are to be removed completely.

An entire population gone. Your own tired brain

Weighted down by a stone. You must remember

To remain sardonic. This is what it means to be deadpan.

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AN ETERNAL NOON

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Lit up by their faith in war, the agitators

Party together. In their enlightenment is our despair.

For greybeards bless their sect

Although it is younger than they are.

These pundits wear their age as if it were a mask

Some hood would slip over his head

To rob a vault. Those who are not of their faith

Are cattle to be slaughtered. This is a sacred task:

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A task that reaps immeasurable rewards.

The rats are confused, they are swimming towards

A sinking ship. No use telling them not to.

The longer anyone persists on a mistaken path,

The harder it proves to turn back.

All our received ideas are splitting at the seams,

While decent countries contract

Diseases from insane regimes.

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The world takes a turn for the worse.

But let’s continue optimistic,

Elevate Hope, for Hope is our holy grail

Even though the harvests fail

And murrain fells the herds.

Naivety at this late hour

Would surely horrify Schopenhauer.

He’d be at a loss for words.

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REINCARNATION

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I longed to come back as Nacho Vidal,

Wished I could be the seat of a lady’s bicycle.

But I endured, and saw that under the sun,

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,

But time and chance happeneth to them all.

We’re born again to no avail.

For time and chance, they’re in free fall,

And that rebirth for which we long

May not entail a better run.

To come back as a moron or a tricycle

Is not a feat deserving of a medal. 

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Arthur Schopenhauer als jun­ger Mann, porträtiert 1815 von Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl

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Slide Shows and Videos on YouTube

Posted on August 21, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

Click on my YouTube Channel Link

It takes you to several performance art videos and videos of the slideshows I made a few years ago – many drawn with the eyes closed. There are also slideshows which accompany readings and videos of my poems.

Other videos can be found on my Website Link

Posted in art, Brazil, Dance, Key Links, Music, Performance Art, Poetry, war | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Self-Portrait in a Drought

Posted on August 9, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

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I am a persona, I would say; a caricature by Cruikshank

Of myself. Like a comedian, I’ve contrived my role.

So I am not aiming for authenticity, more, exaggeration.

Braggadocio. Something out of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Made partly from my own clay, but shaped by imagination;

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Blessed as well with the gift of multitasking, from the mouse

And the keyboard to the kitchen and the cutting-board,

I am a Jack-of-all-Trades – and there’s a good and a bad side

To that, as with many things in life. It’s good to have

An array of skills, a habit of rotation:

x

It gives you the advantage of replenishment.

Rotation, from an artist’s point-of-view, allows one

Aspect of the work to lie fallow for a spell.

So my persona manifests a medley of accomplishments

Proving multi-sided, like some cubist picture may.

x

I am a persona drained of energy however, withering, I feel,

Like the sad sunflower whose roots can find no wet.

Age is not to blame, though it may be a contributing factor.

I am a persona, but the drought, the drought is

Having an effect now that the hosepipe ban has come in.

x

Cracks in hardened fields threaten the wheat.

Anything left out goes off. I find it hard to keep awake

In the day, but have to endure a wakeful night.

Skinny and stand-offish clouds dawdle across the sky.

It’s baking hot between the shadows of walls or trees.

x

The parks have gone yellow. It is even worse in Africa

Or anywhere further South. This drought has gone on for so long

That the situation is somehow drained of suspense.

One might expect an absence of rain maybe every third year,

But now it’s so dry it has to be the Rothschilds messing us up

x

So as to take advantage of the desiccated result.

Don’t they cause an eruption here, engineer a tsunami somewhere else,

Because all they think of is the profit to be had from a catastrophe?

Capital encourages expertise in this one-track pony vein.

Still, a more mixed portfolio like mine

x

Has both its advantages and its drawbacks, I maintain,

Not so much in the master-of-none variety.

That juggling can all be going smoothly. It is just that

There are too many aspects to me, too many

Nooks and arbours, all of them equally thirsty.

x

Out of our clay the drought is making stone.

What leaves there are prove small and hard.

I am becoming gnarled, even my stomach which

Is overlarge will end up shrunk eventually:

A bright side to the business as without a stitch

x

I’m ashamed to look in the glass. Caricature by Cruikshank,

I now appear more Jewish than my grandpa.

Portly, to put it mildly. Bald, but with a weathered look

Hopefully, from soaking up the D blazing down on me,

As I ration out one or two cans to a thirsty plot

x

While cruising away at the housework as well

And keeping abreast of the hoovering and all. However,

Frittered-away resolve disintegrates into there being

Too many tasks to give any one of them its due attention.

Being a dilettante should sanction that variety

x

Which one may need to experience deeply within

In order to renew oneself, but now it feels as if

Too little time’s left to keep up this hopping about,

While the springs of my inspiration seem to have dried up.

So that I am reduced to searching among old scraps

x

Being as long in the tooth as I am, while data banks go on

Eating up trillions of acres and billions in cash

And water in gallons and gallons, weakening our taps,

Just so as we can all stash away our overstated opinions

On Facebook or X. But at what cost, we now begin to ask.

x

Summer should be our reward, not a visitation

By the Lord of His wrath, ironically applied –

Or is this just the Almighty’s idea of a joke?

Three drops and after that, nothing. The rain withheld

As events turn into myth, but weren’t they myth from the start?

x

I am a montage masquerading as a harlequin,

A patchwork quilt my everyday attire

Which tells you nowt about the state of my underwear.

I seek out statues isolated on their plinths

In drought-hardened parks, presiding over our despair.

x

All they are good for now is their shadows

These may well offer respite at least from the sun

Which grudges us the few drops morning tried to squeeze

From a view of tantalizing cloud.

What can you do or say to an obstinate shroud?

x

But the worst of it is, the drought gets all the way

Into you, and ideation dries up too.

Thoughts evaporate. Who would have thought

That you needed to refrigerate thought?

Each glazed eye stares at the screened panorama

x

Of palace intrigues, predictable drama

Of politics, catastrophes happening elsewhere,

While less and less is left in the reservoir.

Migrants flooding in, just about the wettest thing

Suggested underneath remorseless blue.

x

Because of the ban I must water one can at a time,

Birds croak as if they were thirsty. The plants are parched,

And the soul, the soul is parched as well.

But mention the soul and you enter some balderdash

And twaddle territory. Let’s get back to the pragmatic sphere.

x

I am a persona, if you chance upon me lounging here,

Louche as they come, witnessing the enfeeblement of an empire

While trying to inject a little humour into the situation,

I will tell you that I got here on my own dime.

I want to teeter between nonsense and presence.

x

Balancing these on my scales. That place in between

Abstraction and figuration, chance and deliberation,

Where you are not quite sure just why you got here.

That place is for me. I’ll wobble on one leg.

A harlequin who’s balanced on a powder-keg:

x

Restless even while I dream, never quite settling down

To a single way of going about things; colourful, to be fair,

Amid the crass conformity stereotypical of our time,

Caps or hoodies, sneakers and a drab but casual look

As commonplace today as top hats and umbrellas were

x

To yesterday’s impressionists. Meanwhile our world

Gets more and more like a real life gangster movie

Watched in a curtained room in the afternoon

Because it’s just too hot to set off down the street:

A pavement baking white stretching ahead like a threat.

x

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The Lost Child in Kensington Gardens

Posted on August 5, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal
Peter Pan

The French invented impressionism and modernism: the British invented children’s literature and nonsense poetry. Zola’s Nana can say, Fuck me! to a young man paying her a surprise visit. For a British writer of the same period, that is quite impossible to say. In Britain, women do not have bottoms, they have bustles. They do not give birth, according to J.M. Barrie: babies are birds. Other birds hatch them, and they fly off to mothers and become children. France and Britain have a relationship which is similar to a difficult marriage. The two countries are very close, and many British people aspire to speak French, far more than aspire to speak Spanish and more also than aspire to speak German, though German is also fairly popular. However, in my own schools, only Latin and French were taught. Like husband and wife, we are familiar with each other’s ways, but the husband’s way is not the wife’s and vice versa.

The French woman is the comrade of the French man, thanks to their revolutions, though the man can be a brute and beat the woman savagely, and the wife can be a whore or a courtesan. I am speaking in the language of generalisations here, because in what we call “The Victorian Age” such generalisations seem to have affected the production of literature, though George Meredith can be pretty direct, as in his novel The Difficult Marriage. The British paid little heed to the realism promoted by French writers. More often, appalled by the promiscuity of the Georgians who dressed in full fig and fucked everything above and below stairs, the staid, mercantile Victorians reinvented womanhood as a sexless willow, wearily drooping, or faintly floating away like Ophelia on some water-lily stream. Famously, it was Ruskin who was appalled to discover that his wife had pubic hair. The Edwardian reaction was savage. People have been justifying our new terrorist laws designed to suppress protests against weapons factories by citing the demonstrations of the suffragettes as if these were genteel. This is false history. The suffragettes were genuine revolutionaries. They had to be. In Great Britain and Ireland, between the years 1912 and 1914, the suffragettes orchestrated a violent bombing, assassination and arson campaign.

Now John Ashbery always said that he preferred the byways of literature to its highways, and I have tended to agree with him. Indeed, I enjoy the ultra-esoteric. You could say I like to follow some goat track of literature. It’s fun to explore wherever such a track may lead. Being the only person on the planet to be reading a particular book is to me a greater pleasure than that of reading a best seller. It makes me feel unique. Recently I began painting water-colours of London’s statues, and visited Kensington Gardens, where Peter Pan stands on top of a magical tree-stump piping to the fairies who clamber up to listen to his piping (and to peep under his smock). The statue is placed on the very spot where Peter landed in his mud-lined thrushes nest on his first excursion from Bird Island. In the way of quantum connections, this led me to recall a book I had seen in my childhood but never read. I managed to find a copy, and found myself alone on a goat-track.

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is to my mind an eccentric masterpiece. The writing is just different to anything I have ever read – it’s a grown up book for a child or vice versa. There is great sadness too, although it can be very funny. But in those days, children often died, and parents and siblings were often traumatised. Barrie is no exception. His mother was clearly traumatised.

Illustration for the First edition of Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens, 1906.

The question is, Who is a children’s book written for? It is easy to respond, For the child. But if the book is being read to the child by the parent, or the uncle or the nurse, especially in those Victorian times, such a response is suspect. Books for children which are expected to be read by children are one thing – Treasure Island and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were written to be read by children. I grew up reading Puffin Books, some of which were quite haunting and politically questionable – A Moor of Spain; the Story of a Rogue being one (written by Richard Parker in 1953 – who seems to have written no other book).

So there is already a split between books written for children who cannot yet read and books written for children who can. The books written for children who cannot yet read are actually being written for the reader who is a grown-up, and this is the case, I believe with Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

Peter is of course the archetype of the lost child, and that child is epitomised in the book with this title, which, though published later, must have preceded Barrie’s popular West End play featuring Wendy, Captain Hook and Neverland. This earlier version is a far more surreal story, tragic, and hauntingly written, and with the strangest of all Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to accompany the writing. The tale is a creation engendered by the Victorian unsayable, as is the case with Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies.,

If I shut my eyes, you’re not there. While the Victorians could deny the existence of sex (which never stopped boys getting erections or girls going about their explorations), what they could not do was to deny the existence of death, and we remember death. When I was seven I recall that our school library had a bookshelf dedicated to a boy called Peter, who had died. A few years later, a boy I knew died of leukaemia. Deaths in childhood were far more common in the nineteenth century than in my own time or now.

According to Andrew Birkin’s J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan published in 2003:

‘When James Barrie was six years old, his elder brother David (their mother’s favourite) died in an ice-skating accident on the day before his 14th birthday. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David’s place in his mother’s attentions, even wearing David’s clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time, Barrie entered her room and heard her say, “Is that you?” “I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to”, wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother Margaret Ogilvy (1896) “and I said in a little lonely voice, ‘’No, it’s not him, it’s just me.’” Barrie’s mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.’

At the beginning of the book under discussion, the original story of Peter Pan, we are given a tour of Kensington Gardens as the author, who is the narrator, takes David, a toddler, and one of the sons of Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, for a stroll around them:

We are now in the Broad Walk, and it is as much bigger than the other walks as your father is bigger than you. David won­dered if it began little, and grew and grew, until it was quite grown up, and whether the other walks are its babies, and he drew a picture, which diverted him very much, of the Broad Walk giving a tiny walk an airing in a perambulator. In the Broad Walk you meet all the people who are worth knowing, and there is usually a grown-up with them to prevent them going on the damp grass, and to make them stand disgraced at the corner of a seat if they have been mad-dog or Mary-Annish. To be Mary-Annish is to behave like a girl, whimpering because nurse won’t carry you, or simpering with your thumb in your mouth, and it is a hateful quality; but to be mad-dog is to kick out at everything, and there is some satisfaction in that.

The tone may appear somewhat arch to us now, but the matter of the book is very particular: there is use of the sort of private language that families use among themselves, particularly with children. I am reminded of the “personism” manifesto put forward by Frank O’Hara – which stated that one should write a poem as if writing a letter to an intimate friend, where references that may not be available to the reader are simply communicated because the person to whom you are writing understands. The text is also, like Alice in Wonderland, a fusion of nonsense and children’s book – which is as near as the Victorians ever got to the surreal.

Moreover, the book is not as misogynist as this passage above suggests. One girl defeats an entire cricket team of boys with her unassailable Yorkers. However, the personism is so intense that I get the feeling that I am reading a work of outsider literature (“outsider art” being a term for art made by clinically obsessed or unhinged types). Such art is often naïve, but not always. Richard Dadd, the artist who murdered his father, was technically accomplished as a painter (and as obsessed by fairies as Barrie and his illustrator Arthur Rackham). Obsessive writing can be powerful and frightening and is often recognised as being great literature. Kafka comes to mind as an example. In Kafka, very often, a paragraph will begin with optimism, only to conclude in disappointment. A piece of obsessive “outsider” writing which has had a strong influence on my own work is Nijinsky’s diary – written as he descended into catatonic silence. When speaking of his feelings, Nijinsky can contradict himself in the same paragraph. This has always impressed me. I guess my feelings are often like that.

Peter lives on Bird Island at the far end of the Serpentine. He flew there when he was a week old, and could still remember how to fly. When he gets there, the birds point out that he wearing a nightgown and has therefore become a boy. This awareness destroys Peter’s ability to fly. And so he is stuck among the birds on the island. The story of how he manages to visit the distant shore of the Serpentine beyond the bridge, and therefore continue to play in Kensington Gardens, and the poignant story of the two times when he manages to visit his mother make up a large part of the matter of the book.

Kensington Gardens is portrayed as a place of delight during the day. At night, after the gates are closed, it becomes a dark and deadly location infested by fairies. Traditionally, from Elizabethan times, fairies have been small; usually no larger than one’s thumb. Shakespeare lied about them, when he made Titania large enough to embrace Bottom with his ass’s head – but this was dramatic licence. Michael Drayton’s wonderful poem Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy is a far more accurate account of their nature. For instance, the chariot of the Queen of the fairies is a “snail’s fine shell”, the seat “the soft wool of the bee”, the wheels “composed of crickets’ bones.” Drayton also points out that fairies tend to be malicious:

These, when a child haps to be got,

Which after proves an idiot,

When folks perceive it thriveth not,

          The fault therein to smother:

Some silly doating brainless calf,

That understands things by the half,

Say that the fairy left this aulf,

          And took away the other.

Barrie’s fairies in Kensington Gardens are no less dangerous, and no child should venture into the gardens, or stay in them after dark, when the gates are shut. So now it should be clear that the delightful Tinkerbell is simply a light cast around the stage and no real fairy, and that Neverland never existed. Kensington Gardens is the true repository of ominous secrets and these gardens can tell us all there is to know about the dangers surrounding childhood.

Anthony Howell, 30/06/26

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Some Days

Posted on July 18, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

x

Some days I am charged with an idea. Other days,

There’s nothing there, that is, the mind’s so filled with self

There’s room for little else. I need to walk away,

Free the mind of me. Trouble is, at the same time,

I don’t want to do anything. Not in the mood

x

For a walk. Not in the mood for a wank. Not in the mood

To go shopping.  Not in the mood to pick up the phone

Since I’ve got nothing to say. I’m just thinking about

Me all the time, about how sick of it all I am, how everyone

Seems sick of me. How sick I am of being me.

x

It’s not a good state to be in. It’s got a French name.

Philosophers are partial to it, seek to provide us

With remedies which only help when the sufferer

Wants to be cured. I’m not in the mood to be.

My grandmother would tease and say, Actually, you’re bored.

x

She was right. It’s not just a grown up disease.

Children succumb to it easily. Because there are some days

When you just want to loaf around, perfectly sure

That there is nothing to do, and it’s true.

There really is nothing to do. The mind’s so full of you.

x

x

Sickert – a preparatory sketch for Ennui.

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Fauve Warfare

Posted on July 11, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

x

He ran majestically for the bus. However he was beaten to it

By an unfortunate Bugatti. Andre Derain was afforded a week in London

Charged with painting Westminster in his demented colours.

Inappropriate modifiers might be how verse gets this done.

x

Anything paint can do, words can do better!

Boris Johnson trumps us all by elevating Shakespeare.

A turned-up perspective curls towards the sky

As cartridges of dynamite blow the view to smithereens

x

Just to promote the hysterical myth of machines

Pressing for D-Notices to be despatched on a warning spree

Forbidding porridge – wars demand economy.

He paints the world in a way that makes it all his own:

x

The verdigris of roads, the red shreds of foliage

Unlike Le Pecq – or London come to that. Things do not have to be shown

The way they are, where drone waiters hover by your plate

Stressing in an acidic way that cash is not acceptable

x

To drone accountants – as is made explicit in The Book of Drones.

An artist is a general without an army – her applied intuition

Makes for a dynamic canvas – while a dynamic battlefield

Looks ugly good on the screen but leaves behind a heap of bones.

x

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Chanting – a Truly Brave Poetry

Posted on July 6, 2026 by anthonyhowelljournal

These brilliant chant-leaders inspired my full-throated responses outside the Old Bailey today, demonstrating for true justice for the Filton 25. I have to say this chanting at demonstrations has become a new sort of poetry, and these young people led us into chanting encouragement for those arrested in a truly wonderful way. The chants are important, because those facing years of imprisonment can hear us. It matters.

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