You are unwilling to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
She is a male who has just won a woman’s swimming-competition.
Is Hunter’s laptop his confession?
The trees have started losing their confetti.
Terrific article in Artsy about this restless sitter by Alina Cohen
Click the link for a Celebration of Grey Suit Editions UK
Grey Suit celebration!
Tuesday 22 March from 6.30 pm – with a reading at 7 pm. at The Rugby Tavern in Bloomsbury
All welcome. Please let friends know. There will be free wine and nibbles.
Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, WC1N 3ES
Here are examples of the work of the authors
More details – 0208 801 8577
Please come to Grey Suit celebration! Lorraine Mariner, Donald Gardner and Anthony Howell will be reading, and Callie Michail will read some poems by Iliassa Sequin.
Featuring the pamphlets and books we have published during lock-down
Lorraine Mariner’s fabulous chap-book Anchorage
Iliassa Sequin’s Collected Complete Poems
Donald Gardner’s New and Selected Poems
and my novel The Distance Measured in Days
All welcome. Please let friends know. There will be free wine and nibbles and all our publications will be for sale.
Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, WC1N 3ES
More details – 0208 801 8577
Lorraine Mariner was born in 1974 and lives in London where she works at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre. She has published two collections with Picador, Furniture (2009) and There Will Be No More Nonsense (2014) and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize twice, for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection, and for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize.Review of Lorraine Mariner’s Anchorage – now in London Grip
Iliassa Sequin was born in 1940 on a small island in the Cyclades, where her father was a high school teacher. Soon after the family moved to Athens. With musicality in language uppermost in her concerns she developed an original poetic style and this led to her being befriended by Odysseas Elytis (later a Nobel prize winner). Family opposition to her career as a writer and an actress prompted her to move to Germany. From then on she flitted between Germany, Italy, France and Sweden becoming a friend of Peter Weiss and Susan Sontag, Giuseppe Ungaretti, André du Bouchet and Paul Celan. John Ashbery published her work in the Partisan Review, and a sequence of her quintets was published by Peter Gizzi in O-blek Editions. Later she moved to Britain, and married the artist Ken Sequin. Her work is notable for its musical beauty, its distinct structure and particular typographical decisions. She died in the winter of 2019.
Donald Gardner was born in London, but has largely lived outside the UK, moving to the Netherlands in 1979. He began writing poetry in the early 1960s, when he was living in Bologna as a Prix de Rome historian. Later he spent some years in New York where he was a lecturer in English Literature at Pace College. His first live reading was at the Poetry Project on Saint Marks Place and in 1967, he took the stage at the East Village Theatre, in the company of Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others. On his return to London, his first collection, Peace Feelers, was published in 1969 by Café Books. A second collection followed in 1974, For the Flames (Fulcrum). Recent books are The Wolf Inside (Hearing Eye, 2014) and Early Morning (Grey Suit Editions 2017). Gardner has always been a literary translator, as well as poet, initially of Latin American writers: The Sun Stone by Octavio Paz and Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. He has also translated many Dutch and Flemish poets and in 2015 he won the Vondel Prize for his translations of Remco Campert (Shoestring Press). Now in his eighties, he continues to write poetry and to translate other poets and is an acclaimed reader of his own work.
Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. Another novel Oblivion has recently been published by Grey Suit editions. His Selected Poems came out from Anvil, and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge. His poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many journals and magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly, The London Magazine, and Harpers & Queen. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and his versions of the poems of Fawzi Karim were the Poetry Book Society Recommended translation for 2013.
I found this perception @Robert-Self
I thought it made two stunning points to consider.
Also this was what Kim Iverson found.
This article by Anja Konig expresses a lot of my own misgivings about poetry as a competing profession.
I love Russia. Wonderful people, wonderful dancers, wonderful minds. I am sickened by Western hate-propaganda instigated by the mass media and by our corrupt leaders. I recall with huge fondness my one performance in Russia:
Homage to the Horses of Saint Petersburg. Please click the link for the video of this performance.
Everyone was so helpful, even the police. When I initially suggested that I wanted to bring horses into the Imperial Riding School for the first time since the Revolution, the police, who administered the building said No. When I said we would take the shoes off the horses so as not to damage the marble floor, they said Yes.
When I informed the police that later we would be naked while leading the horses around the columns of the facade, they said No. Public nudity had been disallowed by a law that came in after Glasnost! When I said, well, technically under the facade, according to classical law, we were within the precincts of the building, they said Yes!
Reason thus prevailed. Imagine if that had been the UK police or the US police.
My new article on toughs in literature is now published by the Fortnightly review.
Featuring a grumpy old git’s thoughts on what we can and what we cannot say, as well as the writing of Stewart Home, Mr Fish, Dana Gillespie, Catherine Millet, Takako Arai, Holly Howitt, Elizabeth Jenkins, Tom Bland and Joelle Taylor.
I am an admirer of good abstract poetry, and yet I felt drawn to satire after teaching in jails for several years. Now I find the tension between intention and unintentionality something that can provoke strong satirical writing. Ultimately even writing critical of society must be free to veer off in any direction – with verve! This is well demonstrated in Richard Lovelace’s “On Sanazar’s Being Honoured” – the most devastating satire on poetry competitions ever written. The full title is “On Sanazar’s being honoured with six hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice, for composing an Eligiack Hexastick of The City“. Here is the link.
Lovelace has always been one of my favourite poets, and he knew just what jail was!
His favourite trope is the oxymoron. I wrote an epigram in his honour:
OXYMORON
It was this device
Which appealed to Lovelace
Ruined by war.
Everything blown.
x
Finding the topsy-turvy
Through his syntax,
He juggled with a world
Turned upside down.
*
Some of my own satirical poetry can be found here at this link – Dick – and here at this link – Diatribe. More of my own satirical writing can be found in From Inside, published by the High Window Press.
And Statius, Dante’s guide through Purgatory, deftly juggles flattery and satire. Here is the link to a selection of his Silvae.
See also Satire for the Millennium.
Great to see a review of The Cross of Carl in the current edition of the HIGH WINDOW
Thank you Michael Crowley!
Click WALTER OWEN here – for details about the book.
anthonyhowelljournal 