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2 E d i t o r i a l Plus ça change. But, no: there are radical changes to acknowledge. News & Notes in this issue, twenty-two years on, is quiet. The burning issues of the new centur y appear to have been displaced by a sad necropolis. An abundance of death notices. Poets do grow old and prove their mortality, but so many… Contemporary issues affecting writers are as numerous and challenging as they were in 2002. But they are toxic and divisive in a different way. PNR has grown circumspect, cautioned by its public patrons, at times cajoled by its allies. Indirection becomes the indicated route. Not a comfortable route. The universal mantras of inclusion can feel, can be hostile to an insistence on editorial selectivity and the judgement of relative value implicit in making choices. The request that performance poetr y exist also as compelling and coherent text might find itself dismissed as elitist. Specialists and learned readers are stigmatised for their knowledge, however generous they are in sharing it. In a radio inter view not long ago I was asked for an ‘expert opinion’ on a piece of popular verse: then the presenter said, ‘We’ve heard what the Professor has to say – what do you think?’ to my eager fellow contributor. The word ‘Professor’ carried at least six sibilants, like the serpent in the garden. It can feel like a time of devaluation, dismantling, demolition, a privileging of ‘the other’ even when its otherness is not understood. A time of forked tongues, not always the serpent’s. Amazing how much mud sticks to one’s boots after twenty-two years. Leaving the Corn Exchange was much easier, barefoot. Letters to the Editor Mark Dow writes: So me readers might be interested in this footnote on prosody. In our 2021 inter view (PNR 263), Nigel Fabb and I briefly discussed T.S. Omond’s A Study of Metre (1903) and its attempt to replace scansion by syllables with scansion by ‘time-spaces’. I asked Fabb if Omond’s book is much discussed by linguists, and he replied, ‘I cannot think of anyone referring to it.’ I have since come across a discussion of Omond by Catherine Ing in her Elizabethan Lyrics: A Study of the Development of English Metres and their Relation to Poetic Effect (1951). Ing explains that Omond’s ‘isochronous periods’ are what we typically call feet, and she writes: ‘I believe that Omond’s ‘syllabic variety with temporal uniformity’ is a true and illuminating suggestion if we interpret it elastically: if we substitute for ‘uniformity’ some word like ‘balance’ or ‘proportion’; and if we look for this balance or proportion in units larger than that of the foot.’ Mark Haworth-Booth writes: I was ver y interested by the letter from Dave Wynne-Jones on ‘Political Content, and Discontent’ in issue 277. He noted that ‘even though some Palestinian poets are being featured online, where else is the political poetr y about the catastrophe in Gaza?’ He added that ‘Within my workshop group, poets seem to be struggling with the enormity of what is happening, but the performance poetr y circuit could have been expected to have more nimbleness and resilience in its responses. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a marked lack of engagement there too.’ I am chair of the North Devon branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. We have held Gaza vigils in Barnstaple High Street since October. Each week several people will read out texts – which are often poems and often by Palestinian writers. The poem ‘If I must die’ by Refaat Alareer (assassinated by the Israeli militar y on 6 December) has been read on many occasions. Kites have been made, inscribed with words from the poem, and brought to our vigils. We have heard poems by Abdelfattah Abusrour, Mahmoud Darwish, Suheir Hammad, Aurora Levins Morales, Michael Rosen, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and many others. I wonder how widely this has been replicated around the countr y. I have never known so much poetr y to be recited in our streets and listened to so intently by gatherings ranging from twenty to forty people. Local poets have read their own efforts too, often written in response to the latest news. Since October, I have found it difficult to write about anything other than Gaza. Years ago an article in the TLS referred to the ‘crowd poets’ of ancient Greece. I’ve always thought Adrian Mitchell was a fine modern example of this, especially when I heard him belt out ‘To Whom It May Concern’ (‘Tell me lies about Viet Nam’). Perhaps some of mine are ‘crowd’ or street poems, especially the one involving call-and-response with those present. I’ve read others to poetr y groups away from the streets and been touched by the applause that followed each Gaza poem: people seem to need to hear Gaza poems and to acknowledge them.
page 5
News and Notes I’ll put you through to Biography • John McAuliffe writes: The Irish poet Gerald Dawe has died in Dublin, after a long illness. He was seventy-two. Known to all as Gerr y, he grew up in Belfast and attended the same school as his friend Van Morrison, then studying at the University of Ulster and at UCG, now the University of Galway, where he taught for a number of years. He moved to Dublin in 1992, taught at Trinity College, and co-founded and subsequently directed that University’s creative writing MA at The Oscar Wilde Centre. Gerr y is remembered by many as a great teacher. Enthusiasms and advocacy also marked his writing life. He founded and co-edited for many years the Irish literar y journal Krino, and also edited or introduced selections from poets as varied as Charlie Donnelly, Padraic Fiacc, Ethna McCarthy and Gerald Fanning, as well as the outstanding Earth Voices Whispering: An Antholog y of Irish War Poetr y 1914–1945. His Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (with Cambridge UP) was excoriated for its lack of women contributors and subjects, something Dawe sought to rectify by his support for Poetr y Ireland’s 2018 day conference Missing Voices: Irish Women Poets of the 18th-20th Centur y. A later poem, ‘The Lost’, is less sanguine about the effects of the associated social media campaigning: ‘After the denunciation they came piling in…’. Alongside his teaching and editorial work, he published nine books of poetr y with The Galler y Press. His last book, whose title nods to Auden, Another Time: Poems 1978–2023, has just been announced as the winner of the annual O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetr y. Reticent, wr y and acute, Dawe’s poems are often miniatures, occasionally stretching to sequences. They include recoveries of his Belfast childhood, or the kinds of encounter or shaded places which might have appealed to the Gaston Bachelard of Intuitions of the Instant or The Poetics of Space. A typically resonant poem from the ‘Resolution and Independence’ sequence runs in its entirety: ‘Qualm at Waterstone’s / Hold on, she said, / I’ll put you through to Biography / and they’ll look for you there .’ Vincent O’Sullivan, KNZM, 8 September 1937–28 April 2024 • Kirst y Gunn writes: The world turns, and in New Zealand it was already the next day when we heard news of the death of the New Zealand poet Vincent O’Sullivan. Immediately tributes started pouring in from across the international community of Katherine Mansfield scholars and writers which he had seemed, singlehandedly, to have established. His founding work on the short stor y writer – his scholarship and writing and the many editions of her fiction and nonfiction which he either compiled himself or inspired others to put together, including the vast project of The Collected Letters for Oxford University Press – established Mansfield as a serious modernist who had more than earned her place among Eliot, Woolf, Joyce and the rest. All of it has been achieved in a prose that is infused with his own poetic understanding and sense. Altogether there were twenty collections of O’Sullivan’s verse – the last of which, ‘As Is’, is published this June by Te Herenga Waka University Press. He was Poet Laureate of New Zealand from 2013–15 and knighted for ser vices to literature in 2021. I saw him towards the end of March at his home in Port Chalmers, the veranda outside the window of the light-filled sitting room in which we spoke a tumble of late white roses. It felt like summer, but in New Zealand it would be winter soon. He was funny and gracious and full of news of universities both here and there; Oxford and Otago and Edinburgh and Victoria University as it once was… These places were all walked through, doors opened and closed within them, gardens and common rooms traversed, conversations and debates and conversations listened into and appreciated – or abhorred. He was aghast, as are so many in New Zealand, to learn that Victoria University was to lose its chair in Shakespeare studies. ‘It takes only one generation not to be taught Shakespeare for the next never to have heard of him’, Vincent said. So yes, he was thinking about that sort of thing, along with the final edits on the new collection as well as wanting news of poetr y in Scotland. I had a pile of recent publications for him to go through, and we talked of them, and of ballads and of Burns Singer, and of the last poem for his new collection that he’d just finished. Not one of his beautifully modulated sentences, funny and thoughtful and self-deprecating and erudite, and all at once, was wasted on the subject of his own mortality – yet mortality rested there, as he spoke, quietly breathing. It was the same sound that we hear in so much of his work, poetr y and prose. As the poet and translator Michael Hulse has written, ‘Vincent’s voice is in my head’. 3 N e w s a n d N o t e s Different universes • Kate Farrell writes: The poet David Shapiro died on 4 May at the age of seventy-seven. Shapiro grew up in Deal, NJ, a violin prodig y in an artistic family. Deciding at ten to be a poet, he made a plan to read ever y book of poetr y in the Newark Public Librar y. He kept falling in love, he reported, with new poets without giving up the earlier ones: ‘a different poet would be a different universe’. The start, perhaps, of the openarmed, wide-minded pluralism that would buoy and energize his thought and writing. Shapiro himself was something of a walking, talking librar y; his conversation, a ‘tapestr y of quotes’, the poet-critic Don Share wrote, ‘profound and resounding… quirky and endlessly edifying’. At fifteen, Shapiro met Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashber y and the movement now known as the New York School – of which he would become in time a leading poet, exponent and scribe. He studied with Koch at Columbia University, as a freshman publishing Januar y, the first of eleven books of poetr y. After earning his MA at Clare College, Cambridge, he returned to Columbia for a PhD.

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E d i t o r i a l

Plus ça change. But, no: there are radical changes to acknowledge. News & Notes in this issue, twenty-two years on, is quiet. The burning issues of the new centur y appear to have been displaced by a sad necropolis. An abundance of death notices. Poets do grow old and prove their mortality, but so many…

Contemporary issues affecting writers are as numerous and challenging as they were in 2002. But they are toxic and divisive in a different way. PNR has grown circumspect, cautioned by its public patrons, at times cajoled by its allies. Indirection becomes the indicated route.

Not a comfortable route. The universal mantras of inclusion can feel, can be hostile to an insistence on editorial selectivity and the judgement of relative value implicit in making choices. The request that performance poetr y exist also as compelling and coherent text might find itself dismissed as elitist. Specialists and learned readers are stigmatised for their knowledge, however generous they are in sharing it. In a radio inter view not long ago I was asked for an ‘expert opinion’ on a piece of popular verse: then the presenter said, ‘We’ve heard what the Professor has to say – what do you think?’ to my eager fellow contributor. The word ‘Professor’ carried at least six sibilants, like the serpent in the garden. It can feel like a time of devaluation, dismantling, demolition, a privileging of ‘the other’ even when its otherness is not understood. A time of forked tongues, not always the serpent’s.

Amazing how much mud sticks to one’s boots after twenty-two years. Leaving the Corn Exchange was much easier, barefoot.

Letters to the Editor

Mark Dow writes: So me readers might be interested in this footnote on prosody.

In our 2021 inter view (PNR 263), Nigel Fabb and I briefly discussed T.S. Omond’s A Study of Metre (1903) and its attempt to replace scansion by syllables with scansion by ‘time-spaces’. I asked Fabb if Omond’s book is much discussed by linguists, and he replied, ‘I cannot think of anyone referring to it.’

I have since come across a discussion of Omond by Catherine Ing in her Elizabethan Lyrics: A Study of the Development of English Metres and their Relation to Poetic Effect (1951). Ing explains that Omond’s ‘isochronous periods’ are what we typically call feet, and she writes: ‘I believe that Omond’s ‘syllabic variety with temporal uniformity’ is a true and illuminating suggestion if we interpret it elastically: if we substitute for ‘uniformity’ some word like ‘balance’ or ‘proportion’; and if we look for this balance or proportion in units larger than that of the foot.’

Mark Haworth-Booth writes: I was ver y interested by the letter from Dave Wynne-Jones on ‘Political Content, and Discontent’ in issue 277. He noted that ‘even though some Palestinian poets are being featured online, where else is the political poetr y about the catastrophe in Gaza?’ He added that ‘Within my workshop group, poets seem to be struggling with the enormity of what is happening, but the performance poetr y circuit could have been expected to have more nimbleness and resilience in its responses. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a marked lack of engagement there too.’

I am chair of the North Devon branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. We have held Gaza vigils in Barnstaple High Street since October. Each week several people will read out texts – which are often poems and often by Palestinian writers. The poem ‘If I must die’ by Refaat Alareer (assassinated by the Israeli militar y on 6 December) has been read on many occasions. Kites have been made, inscribed with words from the poem, and brought to our vigils. We have heard poems by Abdelfattah Abusrour, Mahmoud Darwish, Suheir Hammad, Aurora Levins Morales, Michael Rosen, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and many others. I wonder how widely this has been replicated around the countr y. I have never known so much poetr y to be recited in our streets and listened to so intently by gatherings ranging from twenty to forty people. Local poets have read their own efforts too, often written in response to the latest news. Since October, I have found it difficult to write about anything other than Gaza.

Years ago an article in the TLS referred to the ‘crowd poets’ of ancient Greece. I’ve always thought Adrian Mitchell was a fine modern example of this, especially when I heard him belt out ‘To Whom It May Concern’ (‘Tell me lies about Viet Nam’). Perhaps some of mine are ‘crowd’ or street poems, especially the one involving call-and-response with those present. I’ve read others to poetr y groups away from the streets and been touched by the applause that followed each Gaza poem: people seem to need to hear Gaza poems and to acknowledge them.

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