PORTRAIT

marianne moore by George Platt Lynes Gelatin silver print, 1935 23.4cm × 19cm (93⁄16 " × 71⁄2 "), Image National Portrait Gallery,

Smithsonian Institution © Estate of George Platt Lynes NPG.89.89

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) Prior to Marianne Moore, women poets were outliers in the American poetical tradition. Emily Dickinson was too singular and hermetic – as well as unknown – to leave any traces. Poets such as H.D. were known and respected up to a point, but were still considered marginal or even anomalous by the literary establishment. Marianne Moore changed all that. She wrote poetry that was wholly original and could not be condescendingly damned with faint praise. And she influenced subsequent poets, especially Elizabeth Bishop. Poetically, she more than fulfilled Pound’s edict to ‘make it new’, concocting new verse forms – a line that seemed like prose but wasn’t, based, in part, on counting syllables – which she married to her close empirical observation. In her ‘manifesto’ poem, titled ‘Poetry’, she begins: ‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine’. She loved observing animals, especially at the zoo. And she was a devoted baseball fan, an unlikely afficion for a modernist poet. She also became a charismatic figure at readings and literary gatherings, standing out with her distinctive tricorne hat. But her influence as a writer made her a trailblazer both in and of herself and for what came after her, with the growing presence of women poets in American literature.

david c. ward CONTENTS

REPORTS

POEMS

ARTICLES

REVIEWS

Inside cover Portrait: David C. Ward on Marianne Moore

2 Editorial 3 News & Notes 5 Letter from Robert Griffiths(-Snook)

Neil Powell 6 Roy and Sandy Sam Adams 7 Letter from Wales Alice Wooledge Salmon 8 Paris Provocative

John Greening 10 What Should We Do with Andrew Young? Iain Bamforth 11 The Pitch Drop Experiment

Valentina Polukhina and Mariya Galina 13 Yury Gagarin in London

Frank Kuppner 13 xTC 1

John Ashbery 15 Seven Poems Gabriel Levin 27 The Hours a Traveller Measures Antonio Machado 31 Five Poems (translated by Nicholas Friedman)

Miklós Radnóti 32 Guard Me and Protect Me (translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri)

Clive Wilmer 33 Four Poems Ádám Nádasdy 34 Three Poems (translated by Christopher Whyte) Emily Grosholz 38 Four from the Berggarten, Hannover

Daryl Hine 39 Prothalamion, Epithalamion Diana Bridge 40 Four Poems

Ian Wedde 45 From The Lifeguard Ahren Warner 52 Poems Zoë Skoulding 57 The Man in the Moone

Bill Coyle 58 Three Poems Vona Groarke 59 The White Year Alistair Elliot 64 Three Poems

Marjorie Perloff 19 Towards a Conceptual Lyric Frederic Raphael 28 In Finesse of Fiddles

Iain Bamforth 35 Catchwords 13

Evan Jones 41 in conversation with Marius Kociejowski Henry King 49 Having Breakfast with Christopher Middleton Ian Brinton 54 Andrew Crozier, The English Intelligencer and The

Wivenhoe Park Review

Jeffrey Wainwright 60 In the Light: The Poetry of Robert Gray

Sandeep Parmar 66 on Mina Loy Rory Waterman 67 on Martin Amis’s Larkin James Sutherland-Smith 68 on Bernard Spencer

Gerry McGrath 69 on Natalya Gorbanevskaya

Ian Tromp 70 on Louise Glück Kevin Gardner 71 on Peter Scupham

Sam Adams 71 on Daniel Westover’s R.S. Thomas biography

73 Some Contributors

Cover image: John Ashbery, The Leisure Class, 2011, collage, 14 × 12 inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

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All rights reserved issn 0144-7076 isbn 978 1 84777 172 8

General Editor michael schmidt Co-ordinating Editor helen tookey News & Notes Editor eleanor crawforth editorial address: Michael Schmidt Department of English University of Glasgow 5 University Gardens

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