3:AM Reloaded
What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently: Reviewed: Darran Anderson on Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi; Joe Kennedy on Andy Beckett’s When The Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies Poetry: In the sixth of his Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the English poet Tom Jenks; ‘From star’ by Tom Jenks Non-fiction: […]
The Missing Links
The Blank Generation documentary. * The New Yorker‘s Little Review blog. * Paul Morley meets up with Jerry Dammers. * A new light on Virginia Woolf. * Launch of the Rabbit Press on 6 April. * Historic sex toys sold at auction. * The Serpentine Gallery pavillions, plus a piece on Jean Nouvel. * Welcome […]
Errand into the Wilderness
Grandin writes that ‘Nineteenth- and early-twentieth century explorers and missionaries often portrayed the jungle either as evil inherent or as revealing the evil men carry inside’ and quotes the Anglican lay leader Kenneth Grubb, who declared that the forest brings out the ‘worst instincts of man, brutalises the affections, hardens the emotions, and draws out with malign and terrible intention every evil and sordid lust.’ Grandin contrasts the purple prose of the English with the ‘stubborn literalness’ of Ford’s colonists, who saw vultures and thought of Detroit pigeons.
Max Dunbar reviews Greg Grandin‘s Fordlandia.
Maintenant #7 – Jan Wagner
Anything can turn out to be a starting point for a poem, so rather than applying a certain methodology I try to stay as open-minded and receptive, as curious as possible. A poem may start with an image, yes, with a certain metaphor perhaps that may well be one of the rare gifts one is presented with all of a sudden… It may also start with a particular word or with a pair of words that arouses ones curiosity — say, with the similarity or almost anagrammatical qualities of the words “Beifall” (“applause”) and “Fallbeil” (“guillotine”) — and develop from there or, more often than not, with a scenery, a newspaper article, a historical or long forgotten figure… So yes, focusing on the specific, on the small and often neglected details may result in a density of imagery and language — and in a development of the poem which might surprise the author as well and take him to places he has not foreseen.
In the seventh of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the German poet Jan Wagner.
Two Poems
the veterans grow out of the grass
attired in emeritus uniforms;
their heavy buttons seem so matt
in the late sunlight — the brass glinting back.
they grow from the grass as in the myths
when an army was sowed with dragon’s teeth.
indeed the veterans bare their teeth
on photographs as brown as parched grass
in summer — more faded even than myths.
battle, said the greek, is where all forms
begin, to battle too all things lead back.
By Jan Wagner.