21 SHORTLISTED POEMS FOR THE LATEST FORTNIGHT PRIZE

POETRY IS A KIND OF SUMMER PLAY

Here are the 21 shortlisted poems.  The winner will be announced no later than Monday 21st of August, before midnight GMT. The new contest begins tomorrow.

1. ALISON PALMER –‘Days Fallen Into’
2. AMY SONOUN – ‘The Death of Clive James Has Been Postponed Again’
3. ANDERS HOWERTON – ‘An Original Series’
4. ANNA LENA PHILLIPS BELL – ‘Qualifications for one to be Climbed by a Vine’
5. AUDREY MOLLOY – ‘On the Rocks’
6. BRIDGET SPROULS – ‘Chatter’
7. BURNSIDE SOLEIL – ‘Sundays’
8. COLIN DARDIS – Lost to the Night’
9. DAVID ADAMS – ‘Dominar’
10. EMILY OSBORNE –‘Diacritics’
11. ERIC SIGLER – ‘Celestial Probability’
12. HALEY KARIN – Cover Girl’
13. LOU HERON – ‘The Ant Under The Bar Stool’
14. MAUREEN MILLER – ‘Funeral for my Excuses’
15. MEG EDEN – ‘spirit houses’
16. MEGAN COLEMAN – ‘Licorice and the Underworld’
17. P.C. VANDALL –‘After a Poem by Leonard Cohen’
18. PAMELA JOHNSON PARKER – ‘Months Later, I Stand Here Ironing’
19. TOM DOLAN – ‘Surrounded’
20. WES LEE – ‘You Are The Envoy’
21. YESSICA KLEIN – ‘Let’s Do Some Work Then We’ll Make Love’

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN

 A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT

I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats, or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young.

Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan (Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture (Brando, Elvis, motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved.

Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin.

With Gunn, you dressed to have sex.

Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that identity, regardless of who I sleep with, when or why), was shy, and loved words, loved eloquence, and control, Gunn meant the world to me, and so I always gravitated to a sense of presentation that was formal, smart, and yet also, erotic, and aware of the real world of physical desire, music, actors, and what means something to people.

Clive Wilmer's new selection has a useful introduction, insightful notes, but is mainly invaluable in presenting handsomely most of Gunn's finest poems - his best poem was one of his last, about his mother's suicide.

Gunn was early associated, perhaps incorrectly, with the Plath generation, by Alvarez, and he made much of not liking that so much - though it did him no damage in terms of early fame.

His career had three or four stages - early meteoric success; then a disappearance and lonely years of general indifference; then a great return with the AIDs poems - and a final, valedictory sequence of solemn late poems.  Few poets get to write great poems across a whole lifetime - Gunn's youthful poems are among his best, and so are his last.

Like a less vast Yeats, he rang all the changes.

When Gunn died I was sad more fuss was not made.  In my world he was a poetic God. In many ways, my name, Todd Swift, was chosen (I dropped my first name in favour of my monosyllabic middle) in homage to Thom. Gunn, as the first and foremost gay poet of my lifetime (other than Ginsberg), moves me so much, allows me to be sane, in my rich imagination. But of course his work is inspiring to everyone who wants to write well, despite their desires.

One thing he gives us permission to do is to be elegant, stylish, formal, and traditional, but in non-boring, unsafe, risk-taking and surprising ways.

When I come to compile my final selection of the work I want to keep, of my poetry, I hope it will be read on the terms that Gunn's are here - as a folio of sustained excellence in individual, exceptionally-crafted but compassionate, wit-infused, tradition-drenched, body-aware, poems. Control, poise - the armature of poetic rhetoric deployed to keep us safe - is vital to my sanity. As it was to Eliot.

Gunn is a great poet, and this is a great book.

Here is the poem I wrote on his death, in April 2004:

Elegy for Thom Gunn

 

You moved between worlds,

As a god does to men, who

Puts on the used-clothes of

A swan, to beat about girls;

 

Crossed channels, a motion

In the very style you took on;

Became a pop star of form,

Reformed the common, into

 

Something rare.  Jacketed

Muscle and passion, a uniform

Uniquely yours.  Revved

Engines, made language

 

A throttle that could roar

With poise and sexuality

And remorse, for loss.  Tossed

Love and its deadliness out

 

As the first ball of the game;

In and out of season, came

And then were able to write

About it, with ease, intellect,

 

Control, but freely, like a stone

That takes, as it rolls, moss

And other earthly bric-a-

Brac with it, to compose

 

A song in the movement of

Its going; hurtled most, talent

Calm, loins ruffled, Fulke

Greville like a sock in your jeans;

 

Tested the means, renamed

The terms, conditions, of renewal.

Became a sort of rocket fuel

For poems that, changed, from sea

 

To sea, from Atlantic to Pacific,

Shone with American grandeur,

Retained British propriety – hard

To do when boss of desire’s realm;

 

When speeding down lines

Wearing flesh’s delicate helmet

For radical protection.  Fallen,

As all captains are, sadly, last-reel

 

Come up on the high screen, at

The drive-in where your Wild Ones

Would have been, acting out,

Tough and languorous with beauty

 

Only men under twenty-five can

Display – you are, with precision,

Forever as alive as Whitman, Gray:

One of those who mastered the elegy

 

And the ecstasy of living, in one pose;

Like any lover in a battle who knows

Survival is a craft as well as an art;

To keep the spear and arrow off

 

The ever-beaten, ever-won heart.

 

 

London, April 28, 2004

Charlottesville One Week On - Guest Article by Sarah Burk

DARKNESS VISIBLE: THE RISING TIDE OF HATE IN MY TIME

BY SARAH BURK, AMERICAN EDITOR AT EYEWEAR PUBLISHING

 

This past Saturday, a week ago (it seems longer) the quiet college town of Charlottesville, VA became the site of violence and vitriol as white supremacists and neo-Nazis rallied to “Unite the Right” against the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, clashing with counter-demonstrators.

This scene turned tragic when a man drove a car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one and injuring 19. He had earlier been seen marching with the symbols of far-right extremist group Vanguard America, though according to the group, he was not an official member.

As physical confrontations erupted between protesters, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and law enforcement officers attempted to stop the rally under orders that it was an unlawful assembly. However, the damage had already been done.

Indeed, it seems there is a state of emergency in the United States. This is not the first rally of its kind to be held in Charlottesville this summer, and there have been several others across the nation. It remains personally shocking to me that such philosophies remain so rampant, as demonstrated by the near-historic number of far-right groups and individuals that gathered in Charlottesville this past weekend.

I first learned of the events in Charlottesville when my phone alerted me that #Charlottesville was trending on Twitter. Without comment or conscience, my phone arbitrarily decided which information would be important to me. Perhaps it is telling that breaking news reached me through a social media site, but it is also important in demonstrating its scale. In this instance, the algorithm for Twitter’s in-app notification accurately identified a story that was relevant not just to me, but to the entirety of our society.

As a white American attending university in the South, this incident strikes close to home, both figuratively and literally. I grew up in Virginia, and my university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, bears a striking resemblance to the community in Charlottesville. In fact, a statue of a Confederate soldier remains on my campus, and has been the subject of numerous debates throughout history.

It is all too easy to treat my nation’s history as exactly that: history. In our high schools, the American Civil War is discussed as an isolated set of events whose aftershocks contributed to the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century, but rarely is history contextualized for the modern era in any meaningful way. However, when I see rallies like the one held in Charlottesville, it is hard to believe over 150 years have passed since the end of the war that these statues commemorate. When I hear alternating cries of “You/Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” it’s hard for me to believe that we have learned anything from the systematic genocide of Hitler’s regime.

While Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here, has already been revived in the post-Trump era, the sentiment echoes in my mind. Continually, I am proven wrong. It can happen here, as the violence this weekend has shown. Many of my classmates attend the University of Virginia or live in Charlottesville, and just as easily as they could have been involved in the violence this past weekend, a similar event could have occurred at my own university and might still.

But the “Unite the Right” rally isn’t terrifying because it’s close to me or people I know. The idea that such white supremacist, far-right groups still find footholds in society is abhorrent to me, as are their philosophies. Honestly, I feel rather ashamed of my own relative ignorance in this way, and I am made ever more aware of the privilege that allows me to be so unaware. However, I don’t believe this is a problem I alone encounter. Too many times do riots and rallies spread across social media feeds like wildfire only to largely die down among the mainstream focus. We cannot let Charlottesville become another such instance. It shouldn’t take mass casualty or a declaration of war to capture an attention span longer than it takes to read a 140-character message.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of social media for information and advocacy, but we must avoid remaining isolated in the echo chambers they create. Events like this must force us to recognize the existence of such hate-groups that congregated in Charlottesville, now emboldened by a president who seems reluctant to condemn them. Globally, we are a people of diverse backgrounds, passions, and interests, a fact that should be celebrated, not reviled. As we take care of the injured and move forward in an ever-evolving belligerent environment, recall the words of Maya Angelou: “Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”

 

Sarah Burk works for Eyewear and is based in the American South, where she studies.

A GHOST WITHIN A GHOST: REVIEW OF JEZ BUTTERWORTH'S THE FERRYMAN

SPOILER WARNING:

Almost the last line of the play - in a shocking shit-fan whirlwind - gives it away - "what will we do"? Far from being merely a stereotypically Irish problem play in the shadow of the gunman, or the ploughman and the stars, Jez Butterworth's bizarre post-modern masterplay directed by Bond helmer Sam Mendes, is all about stories, and how they are told - often very badly.

This is a play of half-remembered poems, dementia-fuelled fairy stories, and lies and demi-lies, all spoken in the name of attempting to find a strand of sense and narrative in the melee of time and history - we are reminded that even Darius interrupted war to let the harvest come in, so potent was the symbolism of that ritual.

There is the harvest story, and the boys' stories, and the story of Jesus on the cross, and the stories of love at the GPO... all the stories in the play end badly, or are told badly. Of course, it is also about feast and famine, sowing what you reap, and ghosts becoming visible...

But mainly, it is a pastiche of poetry and poetical tropes. It is astonishing how many references, indeed shaping measures, within the play, take their bearings directly from the great poets of The Troubles.

Firstly, the victim found in the bog, perfectly, preserved, is pure Seamus Heaney - and the victim's name is: Seamus. And who is the man who comes after? Why, Mr Muldoon... That's not all - the title is based on a reading from Virgil... which is actually reminiscent of Heaney's poetry and  classical focus on the dead, and burial (such as at Thebes).

Even Tom Kettle recites a poem - ironically by Sir Walter Raleigh, a British imperialist. But Kettle's name comes from a mostly-forgotten Irish poet. Moreover, the mother's ghostly presence and absence and name exactly mirrors that figure in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night - whose structure this play emulates, and whose echoes of ghosts and fog and the past heaving into view are endemic here. Yeats' poems and songs are referenced throughout...

In fact, watching this play one becomes incredulous, excited or enraged, at the multiple acts of homage/pastiche that riddles the text like bullet-fire.

Surely, this is intentional - surely, what is at hand is a rough Ur-text, a big shambling beast with the spoor of the Yeti, screaming - all your stories of empire and Ireland are just that - stories - show me where the bodies are buried, and dispense with the story-telling... words have never solved a thing in Ireland... nor love, nor violence... so - what do we do?

IN PRAISE OF ELISABETH MOSS

 

21ST CENTURY TV ICON

Elisabeth Moss - mostly a TV actor so far - is perhaps the televisual equivalent of Kristen Stewart (who she appeared with in On The Road) at this stage in time - the world's most enthralling and important young female icon in their medium - she is acting's Taylor Swift, as it were. Or, this generation's Gillian Anderson, perhaps.

Moss has an impeccable TV resume - as a young person she appeared in two major shows - Picket Fences and The West Wing - both considered key to their periods. More recently, she was central to Mad Men, along with The Wire, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, the most significant TV series of the past two decades.

Meanwhile she is brilliant and again central in two vitally important more recent feminist TV shows - Top of the Lake and The Handmaid's Tale - each superbly-made.

Her characters Peggy Olson, Offred and Robin Griffin are as important to this century as any we can think of. That's what being an icon is. And she inspires more than young women. She is a stunning actor, and only the fact she espouses an eccentric religious view gives one pause at all.

However, putting that aside, since we are not the arbiters of the soul, she is a great cultural figure of our moment, and we must wish her well and hope Moss keeps applying her intelligence and emotional complexity to more excellent projects in the years ahead.

ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

NOT ONE OF THESE BESPECTACLED MEN WOULD APPROVE OF TRUMP

August was once (still is?) called the Silly Season, because less news happened then. Indeed, Malcolm Bradbury's classic novel of the 70s, The History Man, opens with a page on the subject. Ironic, because more than one war has started in August - no month is ahistorical, apolitical. Even the name August refers to an imperial figure. Our editor went away for a fortnight to relax, and like the rest of the world, has witnessed one of the least pleasant August's in living memory, in terms at any rate, of the news.

No point in rehearsing the obvious: Donald Trump and his administration are the worst since Nixon's, and may well be worse. Nixon himself toyed with using nukes in Asia, and harboured hard-hatted rednecks as allies. But the refusal over the weekend to properly condemn extreme-right actions is breathtakingly un-American and unsettling. America has not been as unwelcoming to non-whites since Reagan - probably since the end of Jim Crow.

A tweet the other day was shocking, and informative - from a conservative poet, who must be right-wing, given his comment, it said - "why should I mourn the death of a left-wing protester?" - trying to be clever with the allusion to the Dylan Thomas poem, presumably. But again, where did this permission come from, if not Trump, to be so heartless, cruel and sharp in public statements?

My God. Any death is to be mourned, but more to the point the young woman killed in the car attack was murdered by a terrorising figure - she was innocent - and brave - and good. The person who could not imagine shedding a tear for such a person must be very supremacist, indeed.

America is riven, as it has been before, during the Nam protests, and before then in the Civil War. Some surrounding Trump crave a truly apoplectic apocalyptic schism between Before Trump and After Trump - they are as celebratory of violence and fascism as the Futurists of 100 years ago. This is a horrible time in America. The whole world is seeing a relative decline in good governance, not very good even at the best of times.

There will likely not be nuclear war before the summer ends. But already there is an awful sense that the worst is coming with regards to the Trump world view.

DUNKIRK MORE SPOCK - review of Nolan's new major film

SPOILER ALERT

SOLDIERS NOT BATHING

Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan (not the 1958 film with John Mills and Richard Attenborough) may well be the summer movie event of 2017, just as Saving Private Ryan was the autumn event of roughly 20 years ago (the same year Nolan's Following debuted). However, whereas the earlier WW2 classic featured a bravura beach invasion of Europe scene unrivalled in contemporary film, and was directed by the leading blockbuster film-maker of our time, Spielberg, this new movie features death on a beach where the soldiery are seeking to escape the beachhead and the seabed, equally, and exit Europe (at least mainland). It was the first Brexit, as it were, and as endless pundits are muttering, and that forsaken politics does shade some of the gung-ho little England flag-waving at the end.

More pointedly, the new film is an attempt to outdo Spielberg, but also Kubrick, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott, potential rivals to Nolan, whose immaculate, precise, and intelligent space, comic book, and fantasy thrillers, share many elements with these other masters of the film arts. Christopher Nolan, famously, divides most fans and critics, though more are on than against his side. I remain agnostic. I think Memento is a great film, and Inception nearly is; and the three Batman films extraordinarily competent, with genuinely eccentric performances; The Prestige is deeply haunting. Interstellar is a failure of considerable interest with moments of greatness. Dunkirk has been positioned as his most serious, large-canvas work to date, a truly prestige vehicle, that should win him many Oscars. It is a bridge too far.

I dislike critics calling ambitious works failures. Hamlet and The Bridge by Crane are often called failures, but they have too much genius not to be successes as well. Dunkirk is like this sort of failure. It is riddled with the style and vision of the achieved auteur - Nolan is that sort of film-maker. However, since the film is mounted and presented as a major human experience, it cannot but fall a bit on the portentousness of its presentation, form, plot and ideas.

The key decision is to remove the "enemy" from view. They are not called Germans in the opening title card, and are faceless throughout. We only see the effects of their torpedoes, bombs, and bullets. We only see their planes. And, at the very end, a few faceless shadows. We are presented instead with a God's eye view of various aspects of the escape - a small civilian vessel captained by Mark Rylance, the best thing in the film; the soldiers on the beach waiting to escape, officer and lower rank; and Spitfire pilots chasing German planes seeking to inflict damage on the ships coming to rescue the over 300,000 stranded Brits. This is a terrible error, because the menace demanding escape is rendered far too philsopsophical and abstract - there is an idea of doom, but far too little sense of the guiding hand of real generals and officers, and fighting men, on the other side, driving the British into the sea.

At times, this faceless nemesis is awesome and strange, as when the choreographed masses of men huddled and bereft on the piers bow and fly as bombs loom, like cruel gods playing with flies. The attempt to establish that war is indifferent, cruel and random is successful, but given the humanity of the British characters, it is a bit rich to pretend the enemy is of another order.

More problematic is the impressively alienating score, by always-talented Hans Zimmer. The film is almost entirely wordless, filmed a bit like a Malickian reverie. It sounds like ragged claws scuttling across silent synthesisers. It is disturbing when not very loud. It makes the beach desolate and eerie, and sad. But it would have been, anyway. It plainly shouts serious trouble, and is a bit like an actor reading poetry, all inflection where nuance would be advised.

I say the film is more Spock than Kirk because wherever emotion is attempted, it is shoe-horned into a time scheme and three-part structure that, though at times a bit surprising and informative, is mostly baffling and unwanted. Logic takes precedence over feeling. This is a math-rock attempt at a Beatles album. We get the 'Penny Lane' stuff at the very end, when a few women are allowed to speak (almost all the nurses are there to hand out tea and bread and jam, then die, with almost nothing to say); and the many Mum and Dad boats come over the horizon, in a genuinely moving moment, only because it was an historically wonderful moment. Nolan misses the beat here, and it falters.

The very ending of the film is a reverse of a Kubrick moment.  Kubrick's most famous moments are about technology advancing to fail, or failing to advance properly - as in the bone to spacecraft, and then the dying insane computer. Nolan's film ends with a Spitfire's final astonishing resilience, coming into land at sunset, a requiem for impressive modern aircraft design and plucky cockpit derring-do, as if humanity can be summed up in that second when wheel touches sand. It felt more like an Apple ad frighteningly exaggerated. Nolan may well think this is an iconic image, and it might work as one for an Olympic opening ceremony or other second-tier propaganda, but it does not convince as deeply ethical or thought-out screen art.

The other faults with the film are astonishing. The great Sir Kenneth Branagh's thankless role may well be lampooned in future SNL skits - the stalwart naval commander who never does anything but stand stiffly and look astonished as bad things happen. He does nothing else, really, not even shout many orders or plan anything, except intone info-dumps, bland and over-written in a mostly worldess picture. At the end he stays to "help the French" - an unintentionally comical claim since he has helped no one yet. Worse is the downbeat and needless subplot of a 17-year-old boy with a wonderful sweater, who leaps onto Rylance's boat, and ends up blind then bled out, not from enemy fire but a shell-shocked seaman, rescued and then immediately, like some sort of Ancient Mariner, cursing his new ship. This is a cruel waste of a likeable character.

More comically-bad is the idea of having one character (The Mole) function like a slapstick silent movie comedian, literally shuttling from one frying pan to sinking frying pan to fiery frying pan, after another. No one was ever less or more lucky to be a key part of the plot. The whole film is like a documentary made by a very smart child with a slide-ruler, who thinks that people mostly die in battle by burning, or drowning, or being shot or blown up, by The Enemy, with no sense of history or context, but who perfectly models, on some remote and vast stage, the precise and accurate models of all the boats, and guns, and planes, as they once were, as if about to enter the realm of Time.

Beautiful, with brilliant editing and cinematography, and a few set pieces of genuine terror and wit (the stretcher bearer scene is a 10-minute-sequence of genius), Dunkirk is, after all, still Very Good: a four out of five star film that wants to be a ten star film. It will have to settle for less, and will likely end up being a superb Boxing Day staple of UK telly, at 4pm, where the ludicuous edge of importance will be worn off like a decal, letting the ageing model assume a passable likeness to the real thing, memorable after all.