PORTRAIT

Walt Whitman 1819–1892 Walt Whitman was one of the first Americans to recognise the power of photography to shape a reputation. Photography’s ability to project multiple, diverse personas to the public was naturally appealing to a poet celebrating his, and each of our, multiple selves. This double image of Whitman was for use in a stereoscope, a hand-held viewing machine that created the illusion of depth and presence, an attribute that was key to Whitman’s exploitation of photography to keep himself before his audience. Photography was a way of marking his career – keeping ‘tally’, as he would have put it – as it progressed from vigorous youth to bardic old age. And Whitman, in go-getting American fashion, was not unaware that photography was a way of advertising his self, selling not only books but the idea of himself as the great poet of the American idea. Ezra Pound’s modernist diktat ‘Make it new!’ had been prefigured by Whitman himself as he kicked down the door and jambs of an inherited Anglo-American gentility, pursuing his great reinvention of America that required a reinvention of poetics itself. One wonders if Pound was so hostile to his precursor because Whitman was so vulgar and excessive (so apparently unlettered!) – or because Whitman got there first? Whitman can be exhausting and exasperating in his omnivorous attempt to channel all of America through himself and walt whitman by G. Frank E. Pearsall 1872 Albumen silver print National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Charles Feinberg into the successive editions of Leaves of Grass. The idea that he was undisciplined is belied by his careful, indeed obsessive editing and rewriting of his work. His tendency to list, categorise or catalogue was a legacy of the Enlightenment. Yet his commitment to human perfectibility through selfexpression – his amoralism, his joyful earthiness – was a far cry from the cool rationalism of the discourses of Jefferson or Montesquieu. And where his contemporaries, especially Hawthorne and Melville, recoiled from the unfixed and unmoored nature of American society, Whitman alone vaulted into the future, not simply walking on the open road but building it as he went along. Everywhere and nowhere, that is the paradox of Walt Whitman. In all of his taxonomic chanting, he still has time to sum himself up in a way that endures: ‘I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. // I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) …’

david c. ward CONTENTS

REPORTS

Inside cover Portrait: David C. Ward on Walt Whitman

2 Editorial

Michael Schmidt 3 For Charles Tomlinson

4 News & Notes 6 Letters from John Lucas, Marilyn Hacker, Sam Doland

Neil Powell 7 The End Crowns All C.E.J. Simons 8 A Letter from Tokyo

Sam Adams 9 Letter from Wales Frank Kuppner 11 Over There Too! Tom Lowenstein 12 Roger Langley 23 October 1938 – 25 January 2011

POEMS

Jeffrey Wainwright 14 Beyond Enigma

Oli Hazzard 17 Three Poems Robert Desnos 24 Six Poems (translated from the French by Timothy Adès)

Jeremy Over 29 Three Poems Fatima Naoot 33 Four Poems (translated from the Arabic by Robert Minhinnick)

Darius Snieckus 34 Three Poems

Tara Bergin 38 Three Poems Jaya Savige 39 Three Poems Will Eaves 43 Four Poems Jason Guriel 48 Three Poems Roger Waterfield 53 Three Poems

Sheenagh Pugh 58 Walsingham’s Men Sophie Hannah 63 Four Poems

ARTICLES

Alberto Manguel 16 A Note on Change

David Herman 19 ‘I don’t know what sort of a genre this is’ Michael Glover 27 John Ashbery Goes to the Movies Marsha Pomerantz 30 Touches bloquées Gabriel Josipovici 35 How to Make a Square Move

Iain Bamforth 40 Smell and the Moral Sentiments Robin Maconie 44 A Metaphrase of Gertrude Stein Vidyan Ravinthiran 49 Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker

Angela Leighton 54 ‘Only practising how to speak to speak’ Frederic Raphael 60 Taste of Treason Marius Kociejowski 65 The Soul of Things: Mary Harman and her Art

REVIEWS

Yasmine Shamma 73 on Ted Berrigan Marjorie Perloff 75 on Christian Hawkey

Sophie Hannah 76 on Wendy Cope

Ben Hickman 77 on Simon Smith David Kinloch 78 on David C. Ward Rachel Redford 78 on Chris Preddle

Evan Jones 79 on Suzanne Buffam, Elisabeth Harvor, Steven Heighton,

Jena Schmitt and Richard Teleky

Alison Brackenbury 81 Faber New Poets 1–8

Ruth Hawthorn 82 on American Poets of World War II

84 Some Contributors

Cover image: When the Circus Leaves Town © Mary Harman 2010

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