The Best American Poetry

William McPherson’s "Testing the Current" Takes an Encore [Terence Winch]

It was something of a surprise to the literary world when William McPherson published his first novel, Testing the Current, in 1984. Not that Bill was exactly an unknown—a former book editor at Morrow in NYC,  founding editor of The Washington Post’s Book World section (and later a Post columnist), and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1977, Bill seemed to know everyone on the East Coast who had ever written a noteworthy paragraph. At Book World, he opened the doors to coverage of contemporary poetry and even recruited people like me, Michael Lally, and Doug Lang as frequent reviewers. His creative and generous spirit really set him apart from other members of the literary establishment. Though he’d published some poems in The New Yorker and elsewhere, Testing the Current was to be a turning point in his life. He would, eventually, permanently leave the reviewing stand for the stage itself. (above: William McPherson, 1987. Photo (c) Nancy Crampton)

Maybe if the book had bombed, Bill would have remained primarily a journalist, but Testing the Current was met with the kind of reception writers fantasize about. In my copy of the original, I stuck three of the reviews that  greeted the novel’s appearance. Russell Banks, in the NY Times, opens his piece with this: “William McPherson’s first novel is an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.”  People proclaims that Testing the Current  is “a beautiful first novel that provides a sharp, glowing portrait of a Midwestern town on the eve of World War II. McPherson’s loving attention to detail and the ... funny, moving point of view keep the writing constantly fresh and involving.” USA Today says the novel  “...is brilliant. In places it is absolutely breathtaking.”  Testing the Current tells the story of a boy of around eight years old named Tommy MacAllister. Bill followed up on Tommy’s story three years later with To the Sargasso Sea, also well-received.

Ever the adventurer, Bill headed to Europe in 1989 to witness firsthand the fall of the Communist empire, winding up on and off for most of the next six years in Rumania, where he became something of a national celebrity. While that intriguing and amazing sharp turn resulted in some first-rate reporting for several journals, it left his readers still awaiting the third novel in the MacAllister saga. What’s more, the first two novels had long been out of print. (right: Michael Dirda & William McPherson, Politics & Prose Bookstore, DC, 26 Jan 2012)

But, now, thanks to New York Review Books and D.T. Max (who wrote the Afterword), Testing the Current, originally published by Simon & Schuster, is back in print.  And last night at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., a multitude of Bill’s friends and fans turned out for a Q&A between Bill and the eminent writer and critic Michael Dirda, all to mark this significant comeback of an American classic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill McPherson signs a book for DC artist Susan Campbell, Politics & Prose, 26 Jan 2012.

Games Poets Play [by Heather Christle]

This evening I was reading this post on The Hairpin, all about "low-effort toddler games" like "Do You Like My Hat?" and "Hide Things in Your Clothes," and it reminded me of a passage from the children's book Pinky Pye, wherein a cat types up a list of suggested games:

 

The very clever cat then goes on to explain more complicated games, which you might enjoy reading (beginning on page 118).

And this led me to thinking of all the games I've played with poet friends, which now I will tell you how to play, in case you find yourself with guests or selves to entertain this weekend.

1. Game of First Lines

This is just like Balderdash, only instead of inventing definitions for obscure words, you invent first lines for titles. Pull a literary journal off the shelf, open to the first poem, read the title aloud, and then have your friends write down a convincing option for a first line, while you write down the actual one. Gather them all together, read them out loud, and have everyone guess which is real. Points to anyone who guesses right, or whose line manages to fool someone. Or don't keep track of points. Then pass the journal to the next person, so you get a chance to invent.

2. Game of Following the Rules of Vasko Popa's Game Poems

I just made this up, but I think it would end in tears. Here is how you play "Seducer"

One caresses the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And motions him coyly with her leg

Another kisses the keyhole
Keeps kissing it and how 
Until the keyhole returns the kiss

A third one stands to the side
Watches the other two
And shakes and shakes his head

Until his head drops off

3. Game of Not Listening

When you are stuck in an audience listening to someone who is dull or going on for too long, write down words and phrases she says, in order, but very selectively, so that by the time she finishes you have a much better speech she could have made had she only known how to edit herself. Extra points if you arrange her own words into an entirely different subject.

4. Game of Constant Similes

Pretend that every time someone says "like" as filler (of the "um" variety) he is embarking on making a simile it is your job to understand.

5. Game of Stacking Books

This game I borrowed from Matthea Harvey, who borrowed it from the artist Nina Katchadourian. Go to a place full of books. Find titles you'd like to arrange into a poem. Stack them in an order that pleases you. Depending on whether or not you think the place is trying to keep the books in a different order, you might consider leaving them there for someone to discover. Or take a picture.

6. Game of "Life of Game"

Listen to Loren Goodman.

7. Game of Thinking of Something

Think of something. Tell your friends you are thinking of something. See if they can guess what it is. If you are not with friends, try just thinking of something.

Those are all of the games I know. I'm lying. Those are half of them, but I am trying to raise my level of mysteriousness, which is part of a game I'm not telling you about.

--Heather Christle

 

What I'm Reading Now: An Excerpt (by Stacey Harwood)

When I was about eleven, my job was to grade the eggs with my step-mother when I came home from school.  We worked in the basement, grading each egg separately on a small hand scale, brushing the dirty ones by hand with a sandpaper brush.  Hilda sat on a low box in front of an upturned crate which held the scale.  We both pushed a case of graded eggs away; periodically my father would appear and stack the crates one on top of another, labeling them with his co-op number so that they could be identified and he would get paid.  From sitting thus for years, bent over the hand egg scale, my stepmother's shoulders got so round that she appeared to have a hump.  One of the last modern machines to come onto our farm was an automatic egg-grader.  It was then possible to stand and put dozens of eggs on the scale at the same time. But it was too late for Hilda's back to straighten out. 

. . .

All the farm women and girls I knew packed eggs and did other chores on the farm.  Some of the women worked right alongside their husbands, cleaning out chicken coops, preparing the outdoor ranges for the chickens, doing the same heavy manual work as the men.  These were the women who peopled my world.  I looked at them, at their work-worn hands and faces, their rough clothing, indistinguishable from the men's and I resolved never to live on a farm or have anything to do with a farm when I grew up.

-- from The Land Was Theirs:  Jewish Farmers in the Garden State by Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky (University of Alabama Press, 1992)

This Just In: Available for Pre-Order!

Luke Hankins, who guest blogged here a few weeks ago, writes to tell us that his anthology, Poems of Devotion, will be released on November 30th and is available for pre-order at 20% off the cover price.  You can place your order here.

If you place your order now, you might have your book in time for the launch reading at Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville, NC, on Sunday, Dec. 9, 5:00-6:30 (). Several contributors will be reading, including Richard Jackson, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Richard Chess, Morri Creech, Malaika King Albrecht, and Daniel Westover. Reception to follow at the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar.

Extreme Elegies [by Michael Schiavo]

 

Michael Gizzi (1949-2010)

Morgan Lucas Schuldt passed away on January 30 due to complications from cystic fibrosis. I wanted to sketch a portrait of Morgan for this blog, wanted to write about not only his extraordinary life, but the love supreme that his poetry embodied. His death, though, is still too close, and it will take me just a little more time.

I attended his memorial services in Tucson, where he lived for much of the last decade of his life. Like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg before him, Morgan was a thoroughly Jersey boy, but he found a home in Tucson. He found Mark Horosky and Adam Chiles. He found Stephanie Balzer and Barbara Cully. He found Boyer Rickel.

The climate change from Vermont to Arizona—I mean going from unseasonable April warmth in New England to anomalous frosty weather in the Southwest—the mourning at various memorials those few days—as well as the bourbon that occasionally accompanies said grief—fused with passing a year earlier of Paul Violi—another friend and mentor—all this left me tattered. I returned to work at The Bookstore physically twitchy, emotionally worse.

After catching up with Matt on what I’d missed—including a poetry reading by Clampitt House fellow Bruce Snider—I was presented with a stiff manila envelope. Scrawled on the front was a signed note from the poet Barry Sternlieb: “For / Michael Schiavo / a few from the zen master. / (one just a proof, / the other a signed + / numbered edition— / primitive, but still / packing a punch!)”

I slowly unsealed the envelope. After removing one of the cardboard flats, I gently untaped the fine paper therein to reveal broadsides of Michael Gizzi’s “Extreme Elegy” and “Second Extreme Elegy” that Barry had printed in the mid-’80s. At one point, after a few months of employment at The Bookstore, Matt had informed me that I was only the second poet he’s ever hired. The first was Michael Gizzi.

A Tonic, A Ton

 

Barry is a wonderful guy. We would talk whenever he’d stop by the store, and I know we talked about Michael Gizzi, but I can’t remember as I ever told him just how much I loved his work, how much it had, at one point, intimidated me, and then later enthused me with its familiarity. I’m sure I never told him that one of my favorite Gizzi books is Continental Harmony. And I’m positive I never told him that “Extreme Elegy” is one of my favorite poems not just in that book, not just of Gizzi’s, but of all time.

What I wonder is if Barry will ever fully understand what he did for me this past spring, even when he reads this. In that one moment, through that unassuming act, those poetic powers that I felt closest to, that I felt were forsaking me through the deaths of those whom I most loved and respected (M. Gizzi himself passed away in 2010), all at once, those powers announced their presence.

I wept.

Not out of grief, no, but filled—and not of a sudden—with the consolation of the universe.

—

EXTREME ELEGY

Michael Gizzi

 

                                   after Ives

 

The Last Rites, man

3 helpings! Extreme

Triadic Unction a -bury

a -port a -ton, troughwater

with shadowbarn

                                   like mausoleum

deathward we glide, our viscera

slung The pitch

of New England the mind of an ear

shockt into blooming a -shire

a -vale a –wick     oaken

lid going to sleep

near still-

ness of my life—America,

un

writable love

of foliage in voice

          beside an axe

                    ’til evening

Canvas in moonlight an oversight

comin’ up backstream But only

          a rheumy cache

                                        of russet spittle

like oaken funk, New England, a tonic

 

                    a ton

 

A Sign of the Times: More Powerful than Dynamite. Book review by Joe Lehman

Thai Jones’ More Powerful than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York City’s Year of Anarchy (Walker & Company, April 2012) is literary proof that history authenticates our age. Reading it, one is seized with a feeling of bewilderment at the absence of this chapter from public schools’ core history curriculum. This bewilderment is followed by a sense of annoyance, perhaps even outrage at academia’s neglect of America’s radical past in the early twentieth century. The book is about a New York City mass movement that preceded that of Occupy Wall Street by nearly a century. But it is clear from reading Dynamite that OWS is not a resurgence of the aroused sleeping lion that is the American radical spirit; it is merely its extension. Or in the words of latter day political prisoner Tom Manning, "Revolution is never begun anew, only continued where others left off."

    Readers will surmise from the book’s title (taken from a quote by Walter Lippmann) that its content involves a radical theme. It is centered on several coinciding factions of a progressive political movement. The time is 1914. New York City serves as a microcosm of America as a whole. The most prominent factions are the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, represented by William “Big Bill” Haywood and John Reed; and the Anarchists, represented by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Intertwined, and not without competition, are the liberal, progressive, and socialist factions. These elements converge on the streets of New York, challenging the status quo of class inequality and the oppression of labor.  It is a panorama of demonstrations, violence, and reform. Jones succeeds in painting a picture where these forces of change can be viewed from afar as a citywide conflagration, while at the same time highlighting the differences between them. Jones’s sympathies clearly lie with the Anarchist movement. The most radical actors figuring in the book decry the ineffectiveness of mainstream liberals and socialists, and it is not difficult to envision Jones arguing the same points on his own.

    Jones is clever in his blending of mainstream political history with the radical alternative. He gives us an overview of domestic social conditions intersecting with international crises. As World War I erupts, tensions mount with Mexico, then in the midst of revolution. Both major political parties have embraced the language of progressive reform. (This is one area where 1914 largely differs from 2012: numerous politicians today have eschewed progressivism for austerity measures.) Both President Woodrow Wilson and New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel have been elected on progressive platforms. The events covered in Dynamite illustrate how radical organizing and street demonstration challenged the grip of these mainstream liberal authorities and of the reactionary forces of such capitalist titans as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

    Dynamite is not a romantic narrative of World War One-era New York City radicalism in the mold of Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians or the epic 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds. Far from romantic, Dynamite is a close examination of an environment that has become sadly familiar. The title of the second chapter -- “The Jobless Man and the Manless Job” -- sums up the feelings of hardship, hopelessness, and despair that are tangible in the present day Great Recession.  We encounter starving families and a city unable to cope with the influx of the homeless and unemployed crowding the streets and overflowing the shelters. In the midst of this turmoil an unsung hero emerges; teenager Frank Tannenbaum, an out-of-work dishwasher and devotee of the IWW cause. Young Tennenbaum’s story is one of countless prisoners of politics and principle. He is arrested for leading a throng of homeless citizens into a church for the purpose of claiming shelter. Charged with incitement to riot, he is railroaded through a trial, denounced for leading a “mob,” and sentenced to a year at the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Tennenbaum would later graduate from Columbia University to become a distinguished labor historian. In what can only be described as a clear example of historical whitewash, his 1969 New York Times obituary makes scant reference to his radical early life.

Don Share, the Antidote to SCRIPTORCONVENTUSPHOBIA by John Hennessy

There ought to be a name for it, the apprehension we feel before meeting for the first time a poet or writer whose work we’ve long known and loved—what if the wit who’s soothed our deepest anxieties or kept us up laughing all night turns out to be a joyless curmudgeon, a strident piss-ant, in person? Or what if they’re great to everyone else, but they just don’t like you? There should be a term derived from Greek or Latin for this fear: poetametus, maybe, or scriptorconventusphobia. There’s even a kind of event-planner’s shit-list of authors—an informal collection kept up by word of mouth, from reading to reading, of writers who are notorious for their shocking rudeness, bad behavior—people that you only invite to your campus, conference, library, or book store if you’re feeling brave. (You know who/what I mean.)

Earlier this week I wrote about how I learned this anxiety the hard way, by dating the daughter of my then-favorite poet. Today, though, I’d like to turn to Don Share, a poet whose work I’d known and long admired before we met, and who, in person, turned out to be true to his words: funny, generous, witty, well read, well spoken, able to engage virtually anyone in a sincere exchange.  Don Share may be the nicest guy in poetry—just ask anyone who’s met him or worked with him as an editor. He’s been around in that capacity for years, logging time as poetry editor at Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, and Harvard Review before becoming senior editor at Poetry in 2008.

Don taught me long ago that editors who write poetry can have it rough: just think of all the people—many of them first-rate poets—you’ve said no to. How excited to read your book are they going to be, and if they do, in what spirit will they read it? I suggest you read Share’s new book, Wishbone, just out from Black Sparrow, with an open mind, sense of humor near to hand. The mixed presence of the elegiac and the comic, in evidence in his new poems, may well be Share’s trademark and unifies the poems of his fine breakout book, Squandermania (2007, Salt Books).

Squandermania has three epigraphs by Isaac Singer, references to Samuel Beckett, Paul Tillich, William James, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, even Gary Becker’s Rotten Kid Theorem, and it’s eponymous poem is subtitled “Falling Asleep Over Delmore Schwarz”; as these allusions suggest, the mood here is equal parts terror and redemptive—or at least extenuating—comedy. “Meaning,” the second poem in the book, begins, “It don’t mean a thing/ if it don’t mean a thing,” and this warning note to self launches Share’s attempt to make meaning or sense—and, alternately, to challenge meaning, risk non-sense—of language, family life, and the politics of a dishonest government perpetually bringing the world to war.

Share is equally adept at the long free-verse poem, the jeremiad, the sonnet, mock-heroic couplets, puns, and epigrams. His lyric hero hasn’t followed Philip Larkin’s commandment in “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”): he has become a father, and now he faces the consequences. “On Court St. I am innocent/ on Highland I take the high road/ on Ames I am aimless again”—all life and all landmarks have become “alike as eternity!” The book progresses backward in time, with Share implicitly comparing his experience as a father and husband to the experience of his parents, the mode of family life in his childhood to his present family life. “Honi soit…” offers a surprising response to his father’s use of corporal punishment and complicates one of the book’s central questions: can we escape the routines and mistakes of our parents, and, better, do we even want to?

APOLLONIA, Greetings from Sifnos #3: OEDIPUS SORTED by John Hennessy

Sifnos Monastery from Apokofto(c)Ian MacLellan

My father, the author of the name that stands in ironic counterpoint to my olive-skinned, decidedly Mediterranean face, the Hennessy in all of my colonial and cosmological confusion and a devout non-believer himself, was studying psychology through out my childhood. By the time he got his Ph.D., just as I was leaving for college, my mother had also taken up the couch and eventually they were both studying down in the mines at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. The complete works of Sigmund Freud, and next to them the complete works of daughter Anna, occupied the most prominent spot in the house, the mantel over a useless fireplace. We all grew up knowing very well how we "felt" about everything—even before we actually felt it. There was no way we could march unconsciously through all of those Oedipal dramas, my four sisters—each an Electra—and I. We were steeped in myth.

Your ancestors may not have spent time on quite the same merry-go-round of religious belief as my Sicilian forebears (see yesterday’s post,The Moody Temple), but we’ve all grown up with Freud on the mantel. Oedipal is prominent in our lexicon.

My favorite character from mythology is Pan, the Falstaff of the ancient world. Despite his great comic timing, you could say that Pan was a bit of an Oedipal wreck. Funny, though, to say that Pan had Oedipal problems: Oedipal, that is, in the contemporary shorthand. But he didn’t want to kill his father, Hermes, and there was no danger of his sleeping with his mother, Dryope—she wouldn’t let him anywhere near her.

Sifnos - Cow's Head (c) Ian MacLellan

Hermes had tricked the mortal shepherdess Dryope into marrying him: after she refused him when he came to her as a god, he transformed himself into a goatherd and seduced her that way. Pan’s “birth-defects,” the goat-legs, wonky ears, and horns, were a cosmic joke—retribution for Hermes’ cunning. Pan had a face that even a mother couldn’t love, and Dryope skipped out, furious at Hermes, disgusted by her son. If nothing else, Hermes had a sense of humor. He found the baby Pan delightful. He gave the boy music lessons and launched his career as a solo artist.

So why call Pan’s problems Oedipal?

According to Freud, “(Oedipus’) destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.  It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.  Our dreams convince us that that is so” (4:262; Vol. 4 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press). But Freud butchers the myth of Oedipus here. This wasn’t Oedipus’s fate at all. Even my father the Freudian would agree.

About ten years ago he and I had an interesting conversation.  I was teaching a class called “Metamorphoses: Myths and Modern Literature” at Boston University; the next day I was going to begin our discussion comparing Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Greek, a late-twentieth century revision by the playwright Steven Berkoff. At the end of Berkoff’s version, full of wild and ranting Cockney logomania, Eddy and Wife (Jocasta) decide to stay together. As for blinding and exiling himself, Eddy says, “Bollocks to all that. I’d rather run all the way back and pull back the sheets, witness my golden-bodied wife and climb into her sanctuary, climb all the way in right up to my head…”

Dad clucked at that, calling it the obvious irony.

But for the nihilistic anti-hero Eddy, buzzing and fucking his way through working-class London, that ending is inevitable.

Preview from Paris: Michael Gorra's "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece" (by Alice Kaplan)

Last week I was wandering around the giant warehouse of a bookstore on the rue de Rennes called the FNAC, and in a fit of nostalgia I found myself  face- to-face with the “Literary Criticism” section.  It was a sad moment.  On a whole floor bursting at the seams with novels from every continent, histories of every century, sociology, religion, political theory, and you-name-it---and in the country that has inspired countless budding literary critics the world around….Literary Criticism got two small book cases. They looked embarrassed, those two minuscule towers wedged between two other bookcases labeled “Biography” and “Literary History” (and literary history turned out to mean textbooks designed to prepare French students for their various state exams).  This Literary Criticism section was nothing to shout about.  It had some recent editions of Blanchot, a translation of David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction; books by the 17^th century scholar Marc Fumaroli, and almost everything by Antoine Compagnon, a brilliant writer, but alone on that shelf in thinking about how criticism has evolved and what it might mean today.  Also, mis -shelved but inviting, Eric Fottorino’s exposé of his years as writer and editor in chief at Le Monde:  Mon tour du "Monde".  Some good books, some great books, some enervating books, but they added up to nothing-- no sense of a movement, no collective energy.

All of which made me reflect on the state of literary criticism in general.  The last big thing in France, before cognitive science at least,  was called “genetic criticism.”  By comparing manuscript variants of masterpieces on their way to being published, genetic critics hoped to discover something really interesting about literary creation.  These genetic critics had the following intuition:  Maybe what the French theorists meant in the 1970s when they announced the death of the author was not so much that the author was dead but that the book was alive!  And if you could get as close as possible to whatever set of choices constituted the making of a book, you would have committed an essential act of criticism—and gone one better than interpretation.

You have to be a pretty serious nerd to love genetic criticism. Whereas Michael Gorra has taken the same insights as the genetic critics, the same scholarly finesse,  and created a book that is an adventure from beginning to end. His meditative and deeply pleasurable Portrait of a Novel : Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece cured my melancholy over the state of criticism by page xxiv—and I hadn’t even started the first chapter. I’m reading galleys, and his book is going to be published at the end of August.  Dear Reader, order it!   

Gorra has invented a genre that ought to catch on among literary critics in search of a method:  the biography of the novel.  It’s not obvious what the biography of a novel  should entail,  but the first thing Gorra does is to show us James’ Portrait of a Lady as it has always been for him—a living, breathing miracle.  There are the essential things, beautifully done…. Where James was when he wrote Portrait of a Lady, his state of mind, his family and friendships, the places he traveled and how they expanded his vision, his drive, his talent, his limits and his secrets. He revisits the trampled ground of James’ “sources,”  rejecting the literal-minded source hunting that made people like Barthes and Blanchot want to kill off author studies in the first place. 

Here’s one of a thousand sentences I love in Portrait of a Novel;  it’s about the way James  channels his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Venice suicide into  a rush of short stories--  “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,”  “The Jolly Corner, and “The Friends of the Friends.” :  

A solitary man, a sympathetic woman:  it’s as though James were shaking the dice of character, and       rolling them again and again;  different combinations of the same two pieces, chronicles of  could-haves and should-haves and even second chances.

Gorra has found a tantalizing structure that allows him to go back and forth between James’ life, the scenes of his writing, and the development of his characters-- especially Isabel, the centerpiece--who all emerge here as they should:  more real than their sources.  There are places in Portrait of a Novel where Gorra gets so close to the making of Portrait of a Lady, he actually crosses over from literary history into the interior of James’s consciousness.  The interior world that Gorra imagines, and that we come to inhabit,  is so plausible, so true to life,  that his Portrait of a Novel becomes a novel—a masterpiece of critical imagination. 

 

 

 Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel:  Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. 384 pages.   W.W. Norton. August 2012.

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