The Best American Poetry

And the Gold Goes to . . .

If Olympic medals were awarded for anthology making, this year's gold would surely go to Mark Ford, whose London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press) has hit UK bookstores and will soon be available in the US. 

Here's what The Economist says:

NO OTHER city so inspires and infuriates poets like London. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, an early 19th-century romantic, “Hell is a city much like London.” A century before, Alexander Pope was similarly grim, writing from the safety of leafy Twickenham: “Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell!” William Wordsworth once marvelled of the view from Westminster Bridge, “Earth has not anything to show more fair.” But he was also baffled that in London “next-door neighbours” can be “yet still/Strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.”

Despite such complaints, London hooks the imagination, as can be seen in “London: A History in Verse”. Spanning seven centuries, this fascinating new collection features Wordsworth and Pope alongside lesser-known and even anonymous poets, all of them moved by the city’s labyrinthine streets and smells, sounds and textures.  The volume includes an outbreak of plague, the Great Fire, the deposition of Charles I, the crowning of Charles II, two world wars and the introduction of the London Underground, all of it conveyed through the prism of poetry. It makes for a thrilling read. Continue reading here.

Read Mark Ford's BAP blog posts here.

Find out more about and order London: A History in Verse here.

-- sdh

 

Three Extracts by Mark Ford

(Ed. note:  We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.  You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here. )

The first two extracts are footnotes from Canto IV. There are 98 lines of the main text in this canto, and 134 in footnotes! The first footnote is on the general theme of ambition, and the second on pride, and the fact that animals and birds (apart from the peacock) don’t have it, despite their various accomplishments. The third extract is from the enormous list in Canto II in which Roussel presents 207 examples of things that are visually similar but of different sizes.

1

There is no one who does not cherish an ambitious dream; 
The worker believes he will see himself dictating, at the time of a strike
(These days people use their reason, and each, with their eye on the goal
((We all have one: as long as the nape of his neck,
Laid bare for the blade of the guillotine,
Remains for a quarter of an hour longer connected to his spine,
Thinking: “Letting one's prey slip occurs — often — even
To someone who holds it most securely” (((and indeed, the imbecile
Escapes from his padded cell, the prisoner in solitary confinement from his jail,
The cheese from the beak of the duped crow;
— On some occasions keeping silent is the best option;))),
The murderer has only one aim: escape;)),
Whatever his or her ideal is: to earn a large salary,
To give birth to children, to see the threshing floor overflowing with his grain
Or to make his pulse rate slow and settle down,
Feel that, to succeed, it is better to think and act
Than to make — jobbing worker, infertile wife,
Harvester or invalid — a wish in the moment
That a shooting star leaves its shining trail;),
Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink
(It is often for Peter that Paul suffers and works;
Vespucci exploited Columbus’s discovery;
And it is to furnish a pearl for some finger or waistcoat
That an oyster spends its life labouring;), laws to his boss;
The slut in her attic dreams of living in style;
And to see his hands adorned with amethysts and holding a crozier
Is a fantasy dear to each fledgeling priest.

2

If human excellence drives out modesty
As much as Monday does the ardour of workers
(One gets used to leisure; the soul and the heart elsewhere,
The lycée pupil is sombre when he returns in October;),
And insanity, in the case of a criminal, the shame of his crime,
And an unsnowy winter high prices for road salt,
Yet pride is not a universal vice;
Leaving aside the peacock, it steers clear of beasts:
The swallow, despite its ability to predict tempests;
The ram, although it is the emblem of the order of the Grand Cross
(Everyone is familiar with the Golden Fleece); the cat,
Although it can work out its bearings at midnight without a candle,
Although it knows how to predict — just like the swallow,
But not so accurately or publicly —
By the static its fur gives off
The anger lurking in a sky that feigns calm,
Although it allows spinsters to enjoy a sweet old age
And can walk in silence even when not on a carpet;
The wolf, although a she-wolf had famous dugs;
The he-goat, although his skin furnishes humans with water-bottles;
Despite the high price currently demanded for his skin, the otter;
Although his name designates a fabric, the alpaca.

3

              the candle end of a miser,
For a flat-headed drawing pin on its own
With its point in the air; — in Switzerland, at the bazaar, for an eyelash,
Curved escapee from a soft eye, the black horn
Of a chamois; — a warming pan after it’s been hung on its nail,
For a motionless pendulum, called back to life;
— In a rickshaw just as it's being readied,
The puller’s degrading harness, for a pair of braces;
— At a lewd woman's house, a pleasant lace-fringed pillow,
For an unused pincushion with a merry flounce;
— A mask put aside by a tired fencer,
For an eye protector to be placed over the glasses
Of a stonebreaker; — the clearly wrinkled temple
Of an old man, for the upper part of the underside of a fist;
— For the hair-touselling black cloth of a photographer,
That with which, generating a breeze, four people cover
A coffin; — an album of portraits, if, to open it,
You have to overcome one or two fasteners, for a parish register;
— For a lowly button hook, the hook, almost a part of his body,
Whose noble fate is to stand in for the five fingers of an armless man;
— An arm sling, for the scarf in which a much enlarged
Cheek is hidden on a day when it's inflamed;
— When he's making iron hot enough to be bent,
For a pair of hearth bellows, the bellows used in a forge;
— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat-doctor,
An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
With a solitary stalactite; — a lake of blood that appears
In a dangerous district, for the treacherous spittle
Of a consumptive; — at a saddler’s, the tether
From which an empty stirrup gleams, for the broken fastener
Of a yellow umbrella; — for the perfidious, sworn-at bit of shot
That an eater of game spits aside, cursing it to the devil,
A cannonball cleaving the air…

The Star in the Forehead by Mark Ford

(Ed. note:  We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.  You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here. )

Towards the end of Canto IV of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, Roussel includes in a list of fires that go out, that of ‘le saint feu du génie’, the holy fire of genius, which is extinguished when age renders its possessor gaga. A five-bracketed disruption on the holy fire of genius adds that it often makes the elect possessor of it ‘so vain / That he finds the real stars in the sky pitiful / In comparison with the new star that shines on his forehead…’ From the moment when he was seized by a conviction of his own genius and the glory for which he was destined while at work on his first long poem, La Doublure, when he was only nineteen, Roussel was sure that he would himself be recognized as one of those who carried the blazing evidence of his genius on his brow. This is how he described his sense of his own literary greatness to the psychologist Pierre Janet, who wrote up Roussel’s case in De l’angoisse à l’extase (1926):

I shall reach immense heights, and am destined for blazing glory… This glory will be evident in every one of my works, and will reflect on all the acts of my life; people will research the way I played prisoners’ base. No author has been,or ever can be greater than I, although no one is aware of this yet today. Well, what can you expect – there are some shells which explode with great difficulty, but when they do     explode!... Whatever you may think, there are some who are predestined!

Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light; I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world. To leave these papers lying about would have sent out rays of light as far as China, and the desperate crowd would have flung themselves upon my house. But it was in vain I took such precautions, for rays of light were streaming from me and through the walls, I was carrying the sun within myself and could do nothing to impede the tremendous light I was radiating. Each line was repeated in thousands of copies, and I wrote with a thousand flaming pen-nibs. Without a doubt, when the volume appeared, this blinding furnace would be revealed and would illuminate the entire universe, but what no one would believe was that I was carrying it all along within myself.

He even told Janet he felt he was the ‘equal of Shakespeare and Dante’. Needless to say, Roussel was not mobbed on the street on the day of the publication of La Doublure, which attracted almost no attention. Instead, he ‘plummeted to earth from the prodigious heights of glory’, and the depression this caused led him – or, more likely, his mother – to seek Janet’s help.

One of the mysteries of Roussel’s career is his steady belief that his books were likely to become as popular as those of his two great heroes, Jules Verne and Pierre Loti. Even Nouvelles Impressions, a poem unlikely to figure in any bestseller lists, was launched with a well-funded publicity campaign. The Surrealists thought it was great – Dalì called it the ‘most ungraspably poetic’ work of the era, but commercial sales were not strong. Robert Desnos, one of Roussel’s most ardent champions, warned him that these poems ‘sont faits pour l’éternité plus que pour la popularité’. Certainly the demands they make on the reader are considerable, but I can confidently assert that they really do offer a challenge and an experience unique in literature. Although only 59 pages long, they seem to compress an entire lifetime’s involvement in the bizarre and banal ways of the world, and a vast selection of the things, natural and artificial, that make it up, and the different media through which they impinge on us, into an all-accommodating, yet rigorously conceived and executed poetic symphony. They are beautiful, weird, and hilarious, at once a vast casse-tête, or brain-teaser, and an epic journey into the heart of a land where logic and illogic are indistinguishable. One feels, on completing them, rather as one does on completing A la recherche du temps perdu: life is simply not quite the same.

The Great Zo by Mark Ford

(Ed. note: We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here. Find Ford's new translation here.)

Raymond Roussel began work on Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique in 1915, that is a year into World War I. He was at the time serving near the front in the Vincennes artillery regiment, and would regularly dispatch copies of work-in-progress back to his business manager, Eugène Leiris (father or Michel), for safekeeping. Did the war play a part in the disruptive poetics of parentheses that he evolved for Nouvelles Impressions? Michel Leiris has described the poem’s use of brackets ‘as a means of making language disintegrate,’ which perhaps encourages us to view it as an experiment comparable to that of, say, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; that is as reflecting the break up of long-held certainties under the onslaught of the savageries of modernity, and in particular modern warfare. There are even a couple of references to scenes of war – two to a blindfolded army emissary, and one to a machine gun, whose bullets a horse will nobly brave, while a donkey is wounded merely by its packsaddle.

Seventeen years were to elapse, however, between these first drafts of Canto I sent back to Eugène Leiris and the book’s publication in 1932, the year before Roussel died of a drug overdose in a hotel in Palermo at the age of 56. And yet at the end of these seventeen years of steady industry, Nouvelles Impressions ran to only 59 pages, and was therefore less than one eighth the length of its predecessor, in name at least, Impressions d’Afrique, published in 1910 (a new version of which, translated by Mark Polizzotti, is promised from Dalkey Archive later this year).

Roussel, therefore, came up with three ways of fattening up this book, the last he would personally see through the press:

1) He decided to print as a kind of coda a poem he had published in Le Gaulois in 1897, called ‘Mon Ame’ (My Soul). ‘Mon Ame’ is basically about what a great poet Roussel is going to be, and how his work will inspire fanatical devotion from an enormous throng of followers – his Roussellâtres – who will thing of him as like a god. These predictions had, however, proved spectacularly and consistently misguided, for none of  Roussel’s books had had anything like the impact or success for which he’d hoped. So he decided to reprint this poem as ‘L’Ame de Victor Hugo’, and claimed in a prefatory note that he’d had a dream in which he saw Victor Hugo writing at his desk, and then read over his shoulder the poem in question. Traces of the original poem, however, remained: he couldn’t bring himself to change a reference to his roussellâtres to hugoâtres, leaving instead a blank followed by lâtres, (‘Sans souci de ces       lâtres / Qui me mettent au rang des dieux’); and the poem’s penultimate verse claims:

A cette explosion voisine
De mon génie universel
Je vois le monde qui s’incline
Devant ce nom: Victor Hugo.

At the explosion deriving
From my universal genius
I see the world bow
Before this name: Victor Hugo.

Does Victor Hugo rhyme with universel? No, but it’s not hard to think of a name that does.

2) He decided to leave every verso in the book blank!

3) He commissioned a hack artist called Henri Achille Zo to furnish him with 59 illustrations, one for each page of Nouvelles Impressions. Each of these illustrations relates to a line from the preceding page of poetry, although Zo wasn’t to know this, or even – though he had fulfilled a commission for Roussel before – the name of his employer. Instead he received, via a detective agency called Agence Goron, a set of 59 ‘indications’ or instructions for 59 drawings. These instructions are not to be thought of as captions, for they were not included in the original Lemerre edition, and only came to light after Roussel’s death.

When Zo eventually found out the name of his employer, he at once fired off a letter of remonstrance:

Please allow me to tell you that I bitterly regret the fact you wanted this collaboration to be shrouded in such an impenetrable mystery. These are not the pictures I would have made if I had known I was illustrating Raymond Roussel!

In this letter he also complains that the precision of the instructions he received meant his drawings ‘manquent de liberté, de fantasie’, and he goes on to wish that Roussel had agreed to engage with him in a genuine collaboration: ‘my illustrations... would have been more in harmony with your work if I’d been able to read the text, or had the honour of knowing the personality of the poet.’

Clearly it was the prospect of just this sort of collaboration that Roussel went to such lengths to avoid!

Such Also Wonder by Mark Ford

(Ed. note: We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here.)

Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is largely made up of lists. Most of Canto II, for instance, is taken up by a list of 207 examples of things of things that might be mistaken for smaller things with which they have a visual similarity. The first of these is a lightning conductor, which is (much) bigger than, but looks like, a grey thread being passed through the eye of a needle; the last is a spider in a fisherman’s net, which looks like, but is (a bit) bigger than a louse in a hairnet. Some of Roussel’s examples in this list amply demonstrate why his writing was so popular with the Surrealists – though the compliment wasn’t returned; he said he found their work ‘un pur obscur’.            

                   — for a single fried egg, on its own,
         With a vigorously salted yolk, the skull, bent in prayer,
         Of an old priest with jaundice;

 

         — For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat doctor, [ie. an
inflamed uvula]
         An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
         With a solitary stalactite;

All of these lists are introduced by a sort of ‘hook’. The ‘hook’ introducing this particular one is an eavesdropper overhearing a conversation about himself; our vanity is such, Roussel goes on to note, that even when we hear our large faults enumerated, it’s as if we fall under a spell that that makes us likely to mistake big things for little things: a porthole for a monocle; a guillotine for a cigar-cutter; an alligator by a sun-umbrella for a lizard by a mushroom. And so on. And so on.

There is no real reason why any of these lists should ever end. In Canto I the dominant list is introduced by someone having his photo taken, who wonders if, even if he keeps as still as he can, he will end up coming out blurred. At this Roussel breaks in:  ‘((((Tels se demandent: - / ((((Such also wonder: -’, and we get 54 instances of people – and things – in comparable states of wondering; a lamppost if the three-headed dog Cerberus would sniff it with all three of its noses before urinating on it; a wall being battered by a loose shutter during a storm, what it is being punished for; an animal-tamer being eaten by a wild beast if his mourning widow will still be strictly in black (sans gris ni mauve) a year on; hot milk that has been left in the pot, if it will be poured with or without its skin.

It occurred to me that that Roussel’s lists, though undoubtedly the product of a very singular imagination, could actually also be the basis for quite useful and interesting writing school exercises. Just as Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’ format is widely employed to stimulate autobiographical prose pieces, wouldn’t the ‘Such Also Wonder’, say, work as an inspiring format? Such also wonder:

         the bic pen-cap, how often it will be used
         to clean the writer’s ear; the child’s tooth
         under the pillow, if fairies really exist…

Like ‘le très special procédé  (the very special method) that he used to write his novels and plays and posthumously explained in the essay ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (see the note on p. 233 of this edition of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique), the special methods Roussel developed in this, his final poem, might also, or so it seems to me, prove useful for later writers.

Translating Roussel: How It Can Damage Your Health by Mark Ford

A few years ago I signed up to do a translation of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) for Princeton University Press. I’d never done a translation before, but, well, I’d written a biography of Roussel so knew his oeuvre pretty thoroughly, and had read Nouvelles Impressions a number of times … How hard could it be?

To the translator the poem presents certain obvious difficulties. The least of these is in fact the most obvious: the poem is written in a very peculiar way, for it makes extensive, very extensive, use of brackets and footnotes. The main text of each of its four cantos is conceived as one gigantic sentence, with a single main verb. The opening lines of these cantos look innocent enough: in each case they set about describing some site in Egypt, but before long Roussel has interrupted this description with a parenthetical thought, and this parenthetical thought is itself then interrupted by another, and then comes a footnote, which will have its own sets of parentheses… Therefore, to figure out its opening syntactic unit you have to turn forward to the lines that succeed the canto’s final closing bracket, that is to the canto’s closing lines, then do the same for the lines introduced by the first bracket and that are picked up between its second last and last bracket, and so on, flipping backwards and forwards, gradually working your way into its middle.

It’s a weird way of constructing a poem, and means it certainly doesn’t look like any other poem ever written on the page. By line 21 of Canto I, for instance, one is up to 5 brackets and the first footnote:

 

                                    (((((parfois une étincelle,
L’entourant de pompiers qui grimpent à l’échelle,
Fait d’un paisible immeuble un cratère qui bout¹))))),

                                    (((((sometimes a spark,
Causing firemen, climbing ladders, to surround it,
Makes of a peaceful block of flats a boiling crater¹))))),

 

The footnote then tells us that what we really need when a fire breaks out is a giant like Gulliver, who puts out a fire in the Royal Apartments in Lilliput by peeing on them.

But these brackets and footnotes don’t in themselves present a particular problem to the translator. You’ll have noticed from the extract from the French above that the poem rhymes étincelle and échelle, and, being the methodical man he was, the bout after which we get the footnote Roussel then rhymes with the first line of that footnote. Like most of his earlier long poems, Nouvelles Impressions is written in rhyming alexandrines that alternate masculine and feminine rhymes (ie. rhymes ending in a mute e). But I very quickly decided I wouldn’t be emulating these rhymes. Two earlier distinguished translators, Kenneth Koch (whose version of Canto III was published in 1964) and Ian Monk (whose version in pentameter couplets of the whole thing was published in 2004) had amply demonstrated what really extreme feats of ingenuity and invention use of corresponding rhymes could result in, but my primary aim was to make the French comprehensible.

I started off trying to do it all as literally as possible. I’ve just been reading the great translations of Rilke made by Ruth Speirs in Cairo in the 1940s; in a Note she writes: ‘What I have aimed to do is give as exact a translation of Rilke as is humanly possible.’ I suppose that’s what every translator wants, though no doubt their own personality creeps in insidiously.

As a neophyte to the translating business, what most amazed me was how much it resembled, emotionally, what I imagined it felt like to be chained to a corpse! Not that I didn’t enjoy it, in a peculiar sort of way, but I found the lack of freedom translating entails quite mind-bending. You have to turn into English what he or she has written in French, German, Serbo-Croat, Japanese, whatever. How different this was from fooling around creating ‘versions’, as Pound had done with Fenollosa’s notes for his Cathay poems, as I’d done myself with bits of Apuleius and Ronsard and Boethius and Tacitus and Lucretius and Pliny. Here you had to get it right.

It’s made me feel enormous but unenvying admiration for translators, and led me to abandon earlier plans to translate more Roussel, namely his Textes-genèse (one of which, ‘Parmi les noirs’, has been brilliantly Englished by Ron Padgett), and his fragmentary L’Allée aux lucioles. As I neared the end of Canto IV, sleep deserted me night after night. I found it hard to think of anything else; to breathe; translator’s claustrophobia – is there such a condition?

Now I hold the finished book in my hand, it all of course seems ‘worth it’, though that ‘it’ still lurks in a secret strata of my consciousness, warning me not, at least in the foreseeable future, to try ‘it’ again.

Mark Ford, Guest Blogger April 18 - 22

This week we welcome Mark Ford as our guest blogger.  Mark teaches in the English Department at University College London. He has recently published a new translation of Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa  (Princeton University Press).  He is the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams and the poetry collections Landlocked, Soft Sift, and Six Children. He has also published two volumes of essays, A Driftwood Altar and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Here is John Ashbery on Ford's translation of Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique:   "That anyone could translate Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique at all is unlikely, but that it could be done with such sparkle and brio seems downright mysterious. This version rescues Roussel's bizarre masterpiece from its status as an intriguing rumor and turns it into a valuable resource for contemporary English-speaking readers. Poets especially will be in Mark Ford's debt." 

We were lucky to spend a few hours with Mark during our visit to London in March.  He is pictured above with David Lehman.  

Welcome, Mark.

We've created a tribute blog where you can post your thoughts and memories of Paul Violi, who died on April 2.  Please visit Remembering Paul Violi.

-- sdh

The New York School 24/ 7 on Cable TV

Last week in London I met with Mark Ford and concurred enthusiastically when he said that a cable TV station dedicated to the New York School would be a good idea. Jenny Quilter would serve as anchor at NYS headquarters and would moderate "Breakfast with James Schuyler" among other shows.

Some programs immediately come to mind as ideal for their time slots. "Lunch Walk" with Frank O'Hara (theme music from Poulenc's "Perpetual Motion"), "Happy Hour" with John Ashbery (theme music from Elliott Carter), and the aforementioned "Breakfast with James Schuyler" with Guests such as Barbara brought to you by Tiptree Gooseberry Preserve. Lewis Saul will compose music specially for the opening and closing credits weaving in fragments from JS's poem "June 30, 1974." Also, we plan to air  "Gardening with Jimmy," at 3:30, hosted by Susan Baran and Marc Cohen with visits by C. North, E. Myles, et al, "Morning Prayer" with Anne Porter daily at 7 in lush interiors depicted by her husband, and "Fairfield's Opinions," Sundays at 11 AM, in which, against a backdrop of incredible seascapes, the painter airs his views on subjects ranging from cancer cures to risk-averse investment strategies. Maureen Owen will host "Telephone," with each show devoted to a phone call of note. Bonus feature: the poets' answering machine announcements and selected messages.

The "Harry Mathews Wine Hour," "Looking at Lookiing" with Jane Freilicher, and "Looking at the Dance with Edwin Denby" (hosted by Anne Waldman) are in the works. I have not yet consulted with Ron Padgett to determine whether he will produce and star in "The Tennis Court Coach" in the pilot of which Ron explicates Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath in relation to the historical events preceding the actual tennis court oath in Paris in 1789.

For "Koch and his Circle," Kenneth Koch and friends will collaborate on poems and act in Koch's plays and skits such as "Keats and His Circle" set in Hampstead Heath in 1819. Harvard and Columbia students will receive course credit for regular viewing.

Larry Rivers and the Climax Band will play sets  on weekend evenings at 9:30, 11, and 1 AM. We have been encouraging David Shapiro to bring his violin, Charles North his clarinet, and Larry Fagin his expertise on great girl singers of the Big Band Era, such as Louanne Hogan.

Vincent Katz will host a weekly "Studio Visit"  featuring such painters, artists, and collage makers as Trevor Winkfield, Joe Brainard, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, the late Nell Blaine, the late George Schneeman, Jim Dine, Darragh Park. New work will be displayed by Star Black, David Shapiro, Susan Wheeler, Marjorie Welish, many others.

James Cummins will executive-produce and serve as chief writer on a brand new series of "PerryMason" courtroom dramas where everyone speaks only in sestinas.

Special consultant: Paul Violi (see his poem "Triptych"). Bureau chiefs: John Tranter in Sydney, Pyotr Sommer in Warsaw, Amy Gerstler in Los Angeles, David Trinidad in Chicago, Alice Notley in Paris, Terence Winch in DC, James Cummins in Cincinnati, Paul Hoover in San Francisco. Denise Duhamel wil report from Miami, Karin Roffman from West Point, Tony Towle from the taxi, and Nin Andrews from the AWP Conference. David Shapiro will be himself. These are just preliminary thoughts. More to come. This is as they say in French a "work in progress." (Like Finnegans Wake.) Suggestions welcome. -- DL

Our Romance . . . with London [by Stacey Harwood]

We returned from London last night, exhausted but exhilarated after David's successful lecture and readings.  He started at London's popular Jewish Book Week with a "conversation with musical illustrations" during which he was interviewed by writer and documentary filmmaker Naomi Gryn. Over 550 people packed the house.  One highlight of the lecture came early:  David's plan was to show film clips featuring songs from his book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters American Songs.  Up first was the lovely Kim Novak singing "My Funny Valentine" from the movie version of Pal Joey, but when the clip rolled, there was no sound! Without missing a beat, David burst into song, and the audience joined him in a magical spontaneous sing along.  You can listen to David's Jewish Book Week interview with Jason Solomon of the Guardian here (his portion begins at 20:00). 

 
^{_{Photo left: Rose Landowne;  Geralding D'Amico, director of Jewish Book Week; David Lehman; Morton Landowne, director of Nextbook; and Naomi Gryn.  Photo right:  The Guardian's Jason Solomon with David Lehman.}}

Still floating among the stars from Jewish Book Week, David, along with Mark Ford, Heather Phillipson, Emily Berry, Liz Berry, Kayo Chingonyi, and Luke Kennard, gave a reading at London's Marylebone branch of  Oxfam's bookshops.   Todd Swift organized and hosted the reading in connection with the recent release of Asking a Shadow to Dance: 35 Young British Poets for Oxfam.

Todd Swift, Mark Ford (center) and David Lehman after the Oxfam reading on Monday, March 1, 2010.

-- sdh

Mick Imlah, 1956-2009

On January 12, the English poet and editor Mick Imlah died at age 52. He was the author of two books, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008). After graduating from Oxford with a first (top grade) in 1979, Imlah helped revive Oxford Poetry.He became poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. As Mark Ford notes in his Guardian obituary, "Imlah was in fact blessed not only with astonishing literary talent, but with the looks of a movie star. He was, in addition, a formidable amateur rugby and cricket player; both sports feature often in his poems. For more of Ford's obituary read here.