I searched everywhere for your letter
that I know says something like You’ve
got a special language
for poetry,
Robert, and I
haven’t. I haven't read all of issue 65 yet but it looks a bumper one, but I did espy this oddity from Andrew Duncan, reviewing Nathan Thompson, but writing about Harwood, in a way that touches on the opening of poem 3 quoted above: 'Lee always seemed to be wiping holes in a narrative he hadn't established, so that my attention wasn't seized and I didn't find an experience inside the poems, which were too nebulous. What he had, was a weak ego.' What on earth does that last sentence, with its rhetorical comma, mean?
Better William Rowe's remarks about ‘the use of speech materials in rhythmic units that fall outside of prosody ... In Harwood’s early work, it is a question … of how to let the plasticity of speech, its subtle rhythmic and tonal variations, build the poem, without subordination to other orders: i.e. speech as present event … rather than speech imitated ... For this, various conditions are necessary: incompletion, especially syntactic, but also semantic; and also a unit of rhythm that is both variable and shorter than the line.’
Issue 65 has a sea themed cover (see below; great image: could be the pier at Brighton referred to in one of my three sonnets) and is designed by Westow Cooper. We have poetry, prose poetry, fiction and flash fiction from Ian Seed, Michael Farrell, Louise Buchler, Joseph Minden, Kat Addis, Catherine Woodward, Lisa Kelly, Colin Sutherill, Anne Gorrick, David Harmer, John Seed, Valerie Bridge, Ann Matthews Martin Keaveney, Sarah Leavesley in Conversation with Mark Goodwin, Matt Bryden, Ingrid Jendrzejewski – Flash Fiction 1st Prize winner, Niamh MacCabe Flash Fiction 2nd Prize, Jackie Sullivan Flash Fiction 3rd Prize, James Bell, Laura Tansley, Anna Backman Rogers, Reuben Woolley, Peter J. King, Charles Wilkinson, Morag Kiziewicz, Dorothy Lehane, Sally Douglas, Rowan Evans, Jill Jones, Seán Street, Paul Matthews Vivian O’Shaughnessy, Lesley Burt, Sascha Akhtar, Carrie Etter, Kate Noakes, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Lucy Hamilton, Norman Jope, Annie Wright, Susie Campbell, Aidan Semmens, Simon Collings, Steve Spence, Vasiliki Albedo. And me.
The critical section features Alison Winch on Melissa Lee-Houghton, Kat Peddie – Claims on Spaces, Louise Buchler on Hera Lindsay Bird, Jeremy Reed on John Ashbery, Steve Spence on Denise Riley , John Freeman on Henry Lyman , Andrew Duncan on Nathan Thompson, Mark Goodwin , Mandy Pannett on Cora Greenhill, Seán Street , Joseph Persad on Sophie Seita , Duncan Mackay on J.H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats , Paul Matthews on Diamond Cutters, eds Andrew Harvey & Jay Ramsay, Peter Hughes on Simon Marsh , Colin Winborn on John Martone , Richard Foreman on Andrew Darlington , Morag Kiziewicz – Electric Blue, Notes on Contributors and David Caddy’s Afterword.
See here.
