All 51 entries tagged Poetry, George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

December 17, 2010

PN Review Launches Archive

Writing about web page http://www.pnreview.co.uk/

Received an email from Carcanet recently, announcing the launch of their digital archive. Forty years of magazines right there, for the eye.

Almost: it comes for a price, of course. While resources like the Poetry Library's Poetry Magazines website (incidentally, you can read PN Review's predecessor there, Poetry Nation) have relied on generosity and the basic assumption that poetry makes no money most of the time, PN Review and Carcanet are essentially commercial, though both the archive's creation and the publishing house are propped up substantially by the Arts Council and other funding. (Corona beer features on the back of every issue: "The drink of poets everywhere!") Let's not begrudge them, or anyone else, trying to survive and thrive off poetry; they've maintained a strong editorial line and excellent standards over the decades, under Michael Schmidt.

Yet the part of me that has got used to getting my poetry fix for free online still begrudges coming up against the firewall. I'm working on crossing these wires with the part of my brain that likes to fling money at charities via online payment systems.

They offer generous rates for students, you'll be relieved to hear: £18 for online access and 1 year/6 issues of the print journal. That's 50% off adult rates! As a resource for learning about contemporary poetry, especially of the high-modernist descent, it's excellent. The prose I've found to be rigorous in thought and intelligence, leaning towards academic style (I don't want to typecast the whole, as it's impossible to generalise with any magazine, but sometimes I've found parts a little dull-edged, while at others very vigorous), generous and quotable material for researchers. I think our university library still subscribes, and we've a handful of sample copies in the Writers' Room if you want to take a look.

You'll also find, if you visit the website and click the relevant subject headings, that there's a wealth of free sample material - hundreds of poems, and, at a quick glance, a good fifty each or so of interviews, articles and reviews, plus a selection of reports. For example, this wonderful discussion about the New York School and New York in general, between John Ashbery and John Ash:

I like some of the Language Poets though I've no idea what their movement is all about.

-- John Ashbery, 1985

Carcanet's Full press release follows:

PRESS RELEASE

16 December 2010

Last night in the centre of Manchester an unusual celebration took place: the magazine PN Review launched www.pnreview.co.uk, its complete digital archive, including more than 200 issues and four decades of literary writing.

The website, designed and implemented by WebGuild Media Ltd, the Cheshire-based web solutions company, makes more than seven thousand items – interviews, poems, essays, features and reviews – by 1625 contributors immediately available to subscribers, with much material open access, in an unprecedentedly easy-to-navigate and user-friendly form.

At the launch, surrounded by writers, subscribers and academic colleagues, Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL, editor of the magazine since its inception as Poetry Nation in 1973, said: ‘Considering what we have here, it feels as though we’ve achieved as much as a dozen magazines. The conversations with Isherwood, Genet, Beckett, Lennox Berkeley, four Ashbery and three Murray interviews, for example, the many now-famous poems first published here, a host of writers making their first appearances in our pages… modern literature has much to be thankful for, and it’s suddenly all here at our fingertips!’

Four years in the making and realised with assistance from Arts Council England, this major online resource reinforces the critics’ claims that PN Review is:

…the most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines. Simon Armitage

…the premier British poetry journal... Marjorie Perloff

...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world. John Ashbery

…quite remarkably good – it must have a claim to be the best anglophone literary magazine there is. Sir Frank Kermode

…the most incisive voice of a vision of poetry and the arts as central to national life. George Steiner

PNR is a journal in the tradition of Criterion and Scrutiny. It combines discovery and appraisal of new writing with reappraisals, celebrations and advocacies. It is committed to modernism and its aftermaths and sets vital, alternative agendas for modern poetry. PNR champions the work of the New York School; the Antipodeans (Les Murray, Judith Wright and Bill Manhire); it stands up for experiment and keeps a weather eye on the poetries of Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia. It is also a magazine of new writing: Andrew Motion, Blake Morrison, Sophie Hannah, Sujata Bhatt, Sinéad Morrissey and Jane Yeh are among those who published early in PNR. And it is a journal of re-discovery, in which W.S. Graham, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Laura Riding among many others have featured.

For further information about PN Review please contact:

Eleanor Crawforth at Carcanet on 0161 834 8730 extension 21

For further information about WebGuild Media Ltd please contact:

Angela Bent at WebGuild Media Ltd on 0161 428 1102

George Ttoouli : 17 Dec 2010 12:30 | Tags: Archive Pn Review Poetry Poetry Magazines | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

December 16, 2010

Villanelle exercise

Just a quick draft written during Can Sonmez's session in week 9.

A Year of Dry Seasons

The river's stones are piled bone dry
magnificent to look at, touch and climb.
Some seasons have no sense of country,

which is why the water's gone and why
the reeds are the spines of a broken comb.
The river's stones are piled bone dry

against the year's endless sunrise
and maybe tells us something of the times:
some seasons have no sense of country,

or its unlucky people's lives
and cloudless skies don't know to rhyme
the river's bone-dry stones

with the ruined fields, the brittle sties
a plywood bandage on the fences' lines.
The river's bones are piled stone-dry
by seasons with no sense of country.

George Ttoouli : 16 Dec 2010 19:14 | Tags: Poetry Pop10-11 | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

April 16, 2010

On the side of the Angels – Elytis on Greek Poetry and Light

Writing about Lorca: Theory and Play of the Duende from David Morley

In response to David Morley's post, Lorca on duende, I found this article (originally at Dragoncave, but I've now ordered Elytis' 'Open Papers' from Copper Canyon) by Odysseas Elytis:

It has been said that I am a Dionysian poet, particularly in my first poems. I do not think this is correct. I am for clarity. As I wrote in one of my poems, “I have sold myself for clearness.” I told you that I am critical of occidental rationalism, skeptical of its classicism, and that I feel the breach opened by surrealism was a real liberation of the senses and the imagination. Could one possibly conceive of a new classicism in the spirit of surrealism? Is this a contradiction in terms? Do you know the work of Hans Arp? There you have great simplicity! He is a classical sculptor, isn’t he? Yet he was a surrealist! In other words, the world of surrealism had its classicists and romanticists. Essentially, it was romantic movement. But Éluard, for example, I personally find more classical than romantic.

I never was a disciple of the Surrealist school. I found certain congenial elements there, as I have told you, which I adapted to the Greek light. There is another passage in my “Open Papers” where I say that Europeans and Westerners always find mystery in obscurity, in the night, while we Greeks find it in light, which is for us an absolute. To illustrate this I give three images. I tell how once, at high noon, I saw a lizard climb upon a stone (it was unafraid since I stood stock-still, ceasing even to breathe) and then, in broad daylight, commence a veritable dance, with a multitude of tiny movements, in honor of light. There and then I deeply sensed the mystery of light. At another time I experienced this mystery while at sea between the islands of Naxos and Paros. Suddenly in the distance I saw dolphins that approached and passed us, leaping above the water to the height of our deck. The final image is that of a young woman on whose naked breast a butterfly descended one day at noon while cicadas filled the air with their noise. This was for me another revelation of the mystery of light. It is a mystery which I think we Greeks can fully grasp and present. It may be something unique to this place. Perhaps it can be best understood here, and poetry can reveal it to the entire world. The mystery of light. When I speak of solar metaphysics, that’s exactly what I mean.

I am not for the clarity of the intelligence, that which the French call “la belle clarté.” No, I think that even the most irrational thing can be limpid. Limpidity is probably the one element which dominates my poetry at present. The critic Varonitis has perceived this. He says that in my book “The Light Tree” there is an astonishing limpidity. What I mean by limpidity is that behind a given thing something different can be seen and behind that still something else, and so on and so on. This kind of transparency is what I have attempted to achieve. It seems to me something essentially Greek. The limpidity which exists in nature from the physical point of view is transposed into poetry. However, as I told you, that which is limpid can at the same time be altogether irrational. My kind of clarity is not that of the ratio or of the intelligence, not clarté as the French and Westerners in general conceive it.

You always look somewhat puzzled, I notice, whenever I contrast Greeks with Westerners or Europeans. This is not a mistake on my part. We Greeks belong politically, of course, to the Occident. We are part of Europe, part of the Western world, but at the same time Greece was never only that. There was always the oriental side which occupied an important place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected. It is for this reason that I make the distinction.

Let me conclude by reading to you a concise statement I have prepared concerning the aims of my poetry:

I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanism leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood.

Here's my own take on this:

Greek Fire

My most unnoticed acts
and my most veiled writings—
only from these will they know me.
—‘Hidden Things’, K. P. Kavafis

the mountains and the buried light
                 where goats ritualise the thistle
fire’s demesne in stasis
                 irrigated with root and sediment
whetted firestones underfoot
                 signified by hesperidins
and bronze fruit chipped by the flint
                 in these things she activates
apollo’s chariot unhorsed
                 leaf’s citrus in barium blazes
canopies pipetted with sparks
                 crows harlequins, magnesium flaring
the smokestone skies, no green
                 in the abattoir light where remorse
usurps every abscess that remains.

George Ttoouli : 16 Apr 2010 09:00 | Tags: Duende Lorca Picasso Poetry The Practice Of Poetry | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 31, 2010

Third and Final Warning

Writing about web page http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/?p=605

in case of accident

Yaba

Crusht yelo

crystals tunga fiz

4 a cut, ntry in2

yr blud:

BeamEye God; b

my subtxt; tear

my Sol on the

whook by the

d(t)or

(Maid of Yelo

Crystals.)

(from 'Three Warnings', Static Exile)

George Ttoouli : 31 Mar 2010 10:00 | Tags: Photography Poetry Politics | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 30, 2010

Second Warning

Writing about web page http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/?p=605

secondwarning

Daisy Cutter

A

starling’s

batch

of iceblu

mints

1/2 smasht

on the sidewalk of yr tung.

(from 'Three Warnings', Static Exile)

George Ttoouli : 30 Mar 2010 10:00 | Tags: Photography Poetry Politics | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 29, 2010

First Warning

Writing about web page http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/?p=605

warning

May Day

Let there b riots

o pls

4 there is sunshine

like paperwork

everywhere

& I’ve deadlines

o, somebody

pls hurl a brick

(from 'Three Warnings', Static Exile)

George Ttoouli : 29 Mar 2010 10:00 | Tags: Photography Poetry Politics | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 24, 2010

Taylor Mali, 'What Teachers Make'

Writing about web page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU

George Ttoouli : 24 Mar 2010 10:00 | Tags: Poetry Poetry Is The Opposite Of Money Slam | Comments (1) | Close comments | Report a problem

December 03, 2009

My Mother Reading Homer

During the 1950s my mother had to learn Ancient Greek in high school, in the small mountain village of Meskla, in western Crete. The classes would collectively chant lines of poetry to memorise the work. One of the key aspects to pronunciation was that every vowel should be pronounced distinctly, whereas modern Greek (specifically demotic, not katharevousa, or 'high Greek') is full of diphthongs and elisions.

This pronunciation lends the rhythm to the language. Not just the syllables, but the vowel lengths are counted - so each line will have a consistent number of long and short vowels in a particular pattern.The rhythm is still audible in Greek Orthodox churches, where the litany is sung in a rising and falling lilt, often in a two part harmony, or catechism.

I know nada about Ancient Greek myself, but as an undergraduate I tried writing in English to see if I could translate the metrical and vowel effects across, choosing long and short vowels to chime with lines from the Iliad. It was bloody hard. One advantage of Ancient Greek is that you can move sentence elements around, or change the syllable counts and vowel sounds of the epithets by attaching them to the end of pronouns. So 'Hera of the calf-eyes' and 'calf-eyed Hera' (as a random example) had metrical differences that allowed the lines to fit into the hexameter of epic poetry. The rhythm aided memory for rhapsodists (public reciters of other people's verse - they weren't poets themselves); they would instinctively know which epithet to use when and how because the rhythm of the language provided the structure of the words.

For a small, poor village, I was always impressed by the range and depth of the education, the importance of learning Greek as a language that included 2700 year old words alongside contemporary dialects, village dialects, officialese (katharevousa was the dominant public dialect until modernist poets like George Seferis effectively created a demotic Greek language revolution, from around 1920s). Greek is one language, three millennia old, with many instances all co-existing; you can still hear peasants with the thickest of accents dropping ancient words or phrases into sentences, over tsikoudia in the cafeneios.

CP Cavafy was the master of this, a late-19thC outsider-poet, a big influence on the later modernists (and championed by TS Eliot) who used to juxtapose a range of dictions in single poems. One of his anecdotes was about how he used to find words that he really wanted to use in a poem, and to test his audience's familiarity with these words, he'd drop them into conversations when he was out socialising in Alexandria. If the people he was with looked puzzled, he'd go back and find another word.

Anyway, here is my mother reading out the opening 42 lines of The Iliad.

Download

George Ttoouli : 03 Dec 2009 21:18 | Tags: Homer Iliad Poetry | Comments (1) | Close comments | Report a problem