The Distance Measured in Days by Anthony Howell – click this link – for some new comments and a video created by the author.
The Distance Measured in Days – New comments and a Video
Tag: Anthony Howell
Poems and Extracts from our Authors
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
My uncle lies on the roof
of the youth hostel in Athens
because all the rooms are full.
He cannot sleep. It’s not just the heat
or his grief at the death of his father
whose family he has come to find
but the singing, in French,
from the open air cinema;
Catherine Deneuve in a raincoat
her heart breaking, night after night,
But I’ll never be able to live
without you… Don’t go. I will die.
It is 1964. My uncle is 21.
No need to sleep, dear uncle,
hum along, count the stars.
There is separation and rain
and a remembrance. I open it again
like an umbrella.
Lorraine Mariner
From quintet 3
I
invoked
unattempted?
having complied ‘injurious’ anew remiss
an unaware loss
ah! what has mattered, ‘has silence
indicted Narcissus, dimpled with solace
unhappiest, wilful
dear ends
edged in sleety tenderness
II
being curbed in your resemblance – to its sluggish bounds
in the cloistral huddle
time forestalls
‘an unfinished sneer’s distraught laughter
in unfulfilled redemption – from our waney
likeness’
Iliassa Sequin
INDIRECTIONS
The telephone rang while I was washing my hair
and getting out of the bath I misjudged the height and fell
on my right side (not the side I sleep on, thank god!)
and thought I’d broken at least a hip
and lay there grunting to myself like a piece of bad rhetoric
or that whale the seventeenth-century Hollanders admired so much,
washed up on the beach at Scheveningen for all to see.
Nobody listens to rhetoric but you can’t ignore a whale
so I thought I’d make a poem of it, telling myself
beauty is truth but ugliness means well.
The phone stopped ringing and maybe I’d missed a date with love
and broken my right hip into the bargain
but it’s not the side I sleep on and there are other times
and if I’d got there with all that water on me
I’d probably have been electrocuted dead.
You learn to take things slowly or fall flat.
Donald Gardner
From THE DISTANCE MEASURED IN DAYS – a novel
And so we had driven to Kew. We parked Inge’s car and went in through the gates. It was winter. On the grass under a black tree I squatted down on my haunches.
Somehow this meant freedom. We could split up for good now. Not just as a gesture. It could mean complete freedom to be myself again, and for as long as I wanted – not just for a few bachelor days in a friend’s absented flat. Even in the cold, I then began to feel hot. How could I think this thought? Shouldn’t we immediately have another? Surely I had to offer that?
Inge had walked on through the bleak gardens. Now, slowly, she returned to where I squatted under the black tree. My hands were pushed into my pockets. I had not seen our daughter dead and blue. Inge had told me of this. She had turned blue. I had not seen her myself. I had not pushed through the double-doors to look. After Inge’s call, I had hurried over to the hospital in a taxi. Inge had met me outside. ‘Don’t go in,’ she had said. ‘It’s too late. You don’t need to see her.’ She had said it only to spare me the sight. But then my nerve had failed. I had simply nodded my head. I had not insisted. Did I want to see her dead and blue? My daughter? Well, I agreed to leave it, to leave her there unseen, behind the double-doors. We had gone home from the hospital in a taxi.
Anthony Howell
From The Cross of Carl – an allegory
At that Carl started back, and had just time to see a leg severed at the hip lying bloody-stumped apart from that other huddle on the crater’s edge, when he heard dimly a shout behind, and looking, saw the sergeant with revolver pointed at him coming up through the haze. He could hear nothing of the words flung at him but understood the menacing murder of that glance and that glin- ting barrel, and terror urged him forward.
He turned and plunged into the mist ahead, plugging the mud heavily, his rifle trailing, and a weakness in his knees, for death is not pretty, and he had not seen it near before. In front he saw the backs of his fellows jogging slowly forward, all moving one way, in twos and threes; here and there a single figure, and at intervals larger patches, where many shadows blurred to one mass.
Suddenly he found himself in a crowd. He saw two officers close to him. One seemed to be urging the men forward, the other hung upon the rear, moving this way and that, as a collie cuddles the rear of his flock. In his hand was an automatic. At that Carl spurted anew, and drew up into the middle of the crowd.
Walter Owen
Lorraine Mariner, Donald Gardner and Anthony Howell will be reading at our launch at The Rugby Tavern, Tuesday 22 March, 2022. Calliope Michail will read Iliassa Sequin. She is currently translating Sequin’s poems in Greek.
A Celebration of Grey Suit Editions – Tuesday 22 March
Please come to Grey Suit celebration!
Tuesday 22 March from 6.30 pm – with a reading at 7 pm. at The Rugby Tavern in Bloomsbury
Featuring the pamphlets and books we have published during lock-down
Lorraine Mariner’s fabulous chap-book Anchorage
Iliassa Sequin’s Collected Complete Poems
Donald Gardner’s New and Selected Poems
and my novel The Distance Measured in Days
All welcome. Please let friends know. There will be free wine and nibbles and all our publications will be for sale.
Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, WC1N 3ES
More details – 0208 801 8577
Anchorage – Lorraine Mariner was born in 1974 and lives in London where she works at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre. She has published two collections with Picador, Furniture (2009) and There Will Be No More Nonsense (2014) and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize twice, for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection, and for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize.
Review of Lorraine Mariner’s Anchorage – now in London Grip
Iliassa Sequin was born in 1940 on a small island in the Cyclades, where her father was a high school teacher. Soon after the family moved to Athens.
With musicality in language uppermost in her concerns she developed an original poetic style and this led to her being befriended by Odysseas Elytis (later a Nobel prize winner). Family opposition to her career as a writer and an actress prompted her to move to Germany. From then on she flitted between Germany, Italy, France and Sweden becoming a friend of Peter Weiss and Susan Sontag, Giuseppe Ungaretti, André du Bouchet and Paul Celan. John Ashbery published her work in the Partisan Review, and a sequence of her quintets was published by Peter Gizzi in O-blek Editions. Later she moved to Britain, and married the artist Ken Sequin. Her work is notable for its musical beauty, its distinct structure and particular typographical decisions. She died in the winter of 2019.
Donald Gardner was born in London, but has largely lived outside the UK, moving to the Netherlands in 1979. He began writing poetry in the early 1960s, when he was living in Bologna as a Prix de Rome historian. Later he spent some years in New York where he was a lecturer in English Literature at Pace College. His first live reading was at the Poetry Project on Saint Marks Place and in 1967, he took the stage at the East Village Theatre, in the company of Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others. On his return to London, his first collection, Peace Feelers, was published in 1969 by Café Books. A second collection followed in 1974, For the Flames (Fulcrum). Recent books are The Wolf Inside (Hearing Eye, 2014) and Early Morning (Grey Suit Editions 2017). Gardner has always been a literary translator, as well as poet, initially of Latin American writers: The Sun Stone by Octavio Paz and Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. He has also translated many Dutch and Flemish poets and in 2015 he won the Vondel Prize for his translations of Remco Campert (Shoestring Press). Now in his eighties, he continues to write poetry and to translate other poets and is an acclaimed reader of his own work.
Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. Another novel Oblivion has recently been published by Grey Suit editions. His Selected Poems came out from Anvil, and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge. His poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many journals and magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly, The London Magazine, and Harpers & Queen. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and his versions of the poems of Fawzi Karim were the Poetry Book Society Recommended translation for 2013.
The Distance Measured in Days – a novel by Anthony Howell
Single copies may be purchased on ebay – just click the word.
Comments:
“I have finished the novel and found it challenging, emotionally, because it defies the reader’s expectations, as its main characters are frustrating .The raw contradictions of the man’s response to his daughter’s death are complex, shocking and convincing ,but his solutions made me want to shake him . The leveret memories, which had nothing immediate, difficult or ambivalent attached, were too heartrending to read I ended up avoiding them. The distinction between the artistic and important non-fuckable friends and others made me laugh. I think like that sometimes. I can’t help thinking that Inge was within reach so many times, not just on the desert trip, but in London, that the man had resolved to pay lip service to the relationship, but knew it was neither the answer nor a source of solace, and turned away.
Random thoughts, Anthony. But it is significant perhaps that Inge’s response to adventures was a sharp “grow up” and stop smoking weed .Neither statement means much when two people are looking for different paths/forms of salvation. I spent eight days, with a Libyan man who spoke no English riding through the Sahara, accompanied by a boy .No saddle, no tent, just holding on to the camels neck with my feet and digging a hole to sleep at night.I picked up tics .I don’t think the desert is ideal for reflection. Too many corpses being eaten by crows, physical stress, numbing landscape. The spirit is an indulgence when you are struggling with the exhaustion of the body.
A final thought, when you become aware that cot death is central to the story, the reader is programmed to prepare a dose of empathy and wait for the right moment to spill it. You don’t provide the opportunity for that kind of mawkish sentimentality because the tensions of the parents’ relationship takes centre stage . I enjoyed it, Anthony, thank you for the copy, which I will read again.” Sylvia Mejri
“We hire camels and a guide, and later in the day we ride out of the village. Our camels dip and lurch along on their flat, cloven pads. Slowly we approach a sign – ‘Timbuctoo, 40 jours’. We come abreast of it, and then we plod past it…”
Harry Harker and his Norwegian wife Inge have come to Morocco in what we might call a grief holiday: a doomed attempt to escape the pain and guilt resulting from the unexpected death of their infant daughter. And soon we discover that a distance measured in days may also refer to the distance between people, even when they are sharing a bed and entwined in each other’s arms.
Anthony Howell: poet, essayist, dancer, choreographer, uncompromising political commentator. And if this CV weren’t intimidating enough already, we should add novelist to the list.
In his latest book, his text shifts so effortlessly between timelines, tenses and first and third-person narrative that, at least until one becomes accustomed to it, a sensation akin to faint giddiness is engendered.
We journey with Harry into his distant past, where he adopts an abandoned leveret, more recently as we follow his sexual gymnastics, then into the present in the ‘desert Sud’, and his sojourn in the Philippines as a guest of the Marcos family. But not in that order. Or anything like it.
There is no happy ending here, no meaningful conclusion. Just intelligent people struggling to lead their lives in a world without convenient meanings or conclusions.” Steve Glascoe, author of Operation Violet Oak, Seren 2022
Miscellaneous Publications
This is a list of earlier publications (all now available from GS Editions, 33 Holcombe Road, London N17 9AS UK):
Oblivion
217 pages, published in 2006
ISBN 1 903 006 02 3
Sonnets
47 pages, published in 1999
ISBN 1 903 006 00 7
Heron of Hawthornden
unpaged, published in 2020
ISBN 978 1 903006 18 4
We also publish publications by
Grey Suit Editions: Our books part 2 – Larger Publications
Click on each title for the link to more information!
Gertrude Mabel May – An ABC of Gertrude Stein’s Love Triangle – by Gwendolyn Leick.
Written by Mabel Haynes’s granddaughter following the fortuitous discovery of her grandmother’s connection to Stein, this is an innovative exploration of an intimate, complex relationship between three women.
While this book doesn’t follow a chronological form, its subject could be said to begin with Gertrude Stein’s first novel, Q.E.D., which was never published during her lifetime. Q.E.D. represents Stein’s attempt to deal with her first love affair with May Bookstaver, who was also the friend and lover of Mabel Haynes. All three were students at the same Boston medical school: “they came of age in the gilded age and were of a class that expected them to display themselves with the right cut of their garments, the right sort of bearing to carry it off.” While the impact and influence of these women on Stein’s writing has been examined, this is the first time the lives of the women themselves have been fully explored.
The Step is the Foot – Dance and its relationship to Poetry by Anthony Howell
This fascinating study into the relationship between dance and poetry – the “step” of dance, and the “foot” of verse – presents a complex, intricate interlacing of disciplines. Dappled with personal anecdotes alongside probing evolutionary questions, historical depth and contemporary insights, it is at once thought-provoking and engaging.
The author’s experience as both a dancer and poet inform his unique investigation. He ascribes his long-held passion for both to a deep-rooted childhood awareness of rhythm: “Rhythm is common to both pursuits. Increasingly I have come to feel that dance is a language and that language is a dance.”
Collected Complete Poems – by Iliassa Sequin
Iliassa Sequin was born in 1940 on a small island in the Cyclades, where her father was a high school teacher. Soon after the family moved to Athens.
With musicality in language uppermost in her concerns she developed an original poetic style and this led to her being befriended by Odysseas Elytis (later a Nobel prize winner). Family opposition to her career as a writer and an actress prompted her to move to Germany. From then on she flitted between Germany, Italy, France and Sweden becoming a friend of Peter Weiss and Susan Sontag, Giuseppe Ungaretti, André du Bouchet and Paul Celan. John Ashbery published her work in the Partisan Review, and a sequence of her quintets was published by Peter Gizzi in O-blek Editions. Later she moved to Britain, and married the artist Ken Sequin. Her work is notable for its musical beauty, its distinct structure and particular typographical decisions. She died in the winter of 2019.
The Cross of Carl – An Allegory – by Walter Owen
First published in 1931, The Cross of Carl is a book describing trench warfare with a visionary intensity. It is a masterpiece of the imagination, and one of the most terrifying books you will ever read. The Times Literary Supplement review, on 16 July 1931, called the book “A war allegory” that, “brings back the ugly side of war psychology; it is a description of one of the ‘corpse factories’ of legend – an unbearably ghastly description… This record of what the author himself describes as “an abnormal pathological process” induced by the psychic perturbations of the War, is put forward in the belief that the experience may foreshadow some sort of development in the collective consciousness of mankind.” It was foresight, in a way, but of something more horrible, which would be the Nazi holocaust of World War II.
Grey Suit Editions: our books
The Chap-Books:
Just Visiting – Pamela Stewart lives on a farm in western Massachusetts with seven dogs and some other beings. Her most recent full-length book of poems is Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010). She expects, shortly, to arrange a small and delightful gathering of letters between the late poet Lee McCarthy and Guy Davenport. Published 2014 – ISBN 978-1-903006-06-1
ALMOST SINGING
Under her breath, she rummages for Christmas.
She pauses to watch the snow and thinks of sin and its wolf prints
on the slope back down to the barn. But that was then
yes, there’s always then and now and the snowscapes of in-between.
Her breath catches. Never bury a child far from the house. Smoothing
that red wool stocking stretched at the toe, she holds it to her cheek.
Never bury a child where she can’t hear you singing.
The Empty Quarter: poems by Fawzi Karim in versions by Anthony Howell after translations made by the Author. Born in Baghdad in 1945 and now living in London, Fawzi Karim is rapidly establishing a reputation as a major figure in contemporary poetry. Plague Lands, his first book of poems in translation was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for 2011. Anthony Howell’s first collection, Inside the Castle, was brought out in 1969. His most recent book of poems is The Ogre’s Wife, Anvil 2010. Published 2013 ISBN 978-1-903006-04-7
ON THE HIGHEST PEAK
On the highest peak,
The deer edge towards my retreat,
Soliciting a blessing
From the cradle of my newborn pain.
The deer kneel then turn away.
The eagle will not risk a restless wind.
Empty are the clouds that frequent my retreat,
Presenting fronts darkened by anxiety.
Passing through the clouds I peer down on the city.
Its roofs are stacked with the nests of storks
While its palms are fans for its siesta,
Lending it shade and a breeze for the streets.
There are boats unmoored on its timeless rivers,
But ages of sand drift across well known features,
And now it’s clear that the city looks more like a corpse
Hovered over by wings which end in claws.
Ice forms on my coat and freezes me to my seat.
The Wreckage – Born in Montreal, Kerry-Lee Powell has lived in Antigua, Australia and the United Kingdom, where she studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cardiff University. Her work has appeared in The Spectator, MAGMA and The Boston Review. A full collection of poetry will be published in Canada by Biblioasis Press in 2014. The lyric poems in this pamphlet were inspired by a shipwreck endured by Powell’s father during the Second World War, his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventual suicide. Published 2013 ISBN 978 -1-903006-05-4
THE WRECKAGE
If all is wrecked between us, it’s because
A pair of wing-tips on the other side of the world
Closed in prayer to make this small breath,
Like the breath of a child blowing a candle-wish,
That only gathered salt and squalls as it grew swift.
They say it often begins like this.
Now the ends of the earth are littered with our fragments
Like flocks of terns on an arctic ice-cliff,
Or like words on torn-up sheets of paper
In a language that I try not to remember,
Spelled out again like moths around the flicker
Of your face that often flares at me in strangers.
Look how I make the most of what’s at hand
Like a match-girl out for kindling in a windy land.
Early Morning – Donald Gardner has been writing poetry since the early 1960s. Recent collections include The Wolf Inside (2014) and The Glittering Sea (2006), both published by Hearing Eye. He is also a translator of poetry and his selection of Remco Campert’s poetry, In those Days (Shoestring 2014) was awarded the Vondel Prize for literary translation. Born in London, he divides his time between Amsterdam and Kildare. Many of these new poems started life in the early morning. First thing, before the mind steps in to remind you of more irksome issues, that’s when I usually write. ‘Early morning’ is not so much the theme of this book as the background music. Published 2017 ISBN 978-1-903006re10-8
SWEET MUSE OF POETRY
Muse of gentleness,
of gaiety and laughter. A small hint from your eyes,
was enough for me to fall for you,
like the tower of a child’s building blocks
that a tug at a carpet hem may bring down.
This is the tower, this early morning.
Nothing stirs in the house.
Outside there’s the thunder of Saturday’s garbage round;
otherwise the stillness is uncanny. It’s early
in January. The day
can’t make its mind up whether to begin.
Muse of my heartbroken heart:
I have no choice but to fall asleep again or write
and I can’t get back to sleep.
Dialysis Days – Hugo Williams was born in 1942. His latest book of poems is I Knew the Bride (Faber & Faber 2014). The next will be Lines Off, forthcoming in 2019. He wrote the Freelance column in The Times Literary Supplement for many years and lives in London. Published 2018 ISBN 978-1-903006-11-5
A BRILLIANT TRICK
Being well is such a brilliant trick
with all its happy healthy fun.
Nobody likes you when you’re sick.
They think you’re being melodramatic,
trying to divert attention
from their own favourite trick
of appearing busy and energetic
all the time, so that no one
suspects them of being sick.
They can’t imagine your own chronic
ill health and depression
is anything more than a cheap trick
to deceive anyone sympathetic
enough to your condition
to think you might be genuinely sick.
You end up having to mimic
the way healthy people carry on.
Being well is a useful trick.
Everyone hates you when you’re sick.
Paper-Money Lyrics – Alan Jenkins has published six volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are A Shorter Life (2005) and Revenants (2013). He edited the Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton (2009). White Nights, a volume of his translations from French, will appear in 2015. He has taught in Paris and the United States but has lived for most of his life in London, where he works as Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Published 2014 ISBN 978-1-903006-07-8
BACKWATER
Basking in the Mayfair afternoon, The Killer Whale,
The male. Undersea light filters through the fronds
Of sea-grass—urban ferns and hanging-basket leafage.
He has come to feed, he lunches on small fry and crustaceans
Which he crunches, on gilts and bonds, on something by Jeff Koons
And the woman’s cleavage. There is a need for overpowering
In his hands, which prod her here and there, feeling
For the soft spots, the intimate recesses where
He can deliver hurt—there is a need for devouring
In his playful excesses, sea-spurt and sea-squirt!
Such vagaries of appetite, and only the ocean
To nourish him…Why her stunned face, why that commotion
In the shallows, that wave of indignation on the shore?—
Unrest among the bottom-feeders, clicking of iPhones,
Writing of leaders. You can’t fuck with someone’s head
In peace, in public, any more. It’s outrageous. It’s a bore.
Sonnets from Elizabeth’s – after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Rosanne Wasserman’s poems can be found in print and online, in the Best American Poetry annual series, Ek-phra-sis, Conduit, Jacket 2, Maggy, How2 and elsewhere. Her books of poems include The Lacemakers (1992), No Archive on Earth (1995), and Other Selves (1999), as well as Place du Carousel (2001) and Psyche and Amor (2009), collaborations with her husband, the poet Eugene Richie, with whom she runs the Groundwater Press, a nonprofit poetry publisher. She has written on John Ashbery and Grace Paley for Massachusetts Review; on Pierre Martory James Schuyler and Ruth Stone for American Poetry Review; and on Marianne Moore, Dara Wier and others. She and Eugene Richie co-edited Ashbery’s Collected French Translations (2014). Published 2017 ISBN 978-1-903006-09-2
7.
What changes everything?
Sex, you say? Death sure doesn’t: life goes on
anyway, though you’ve got your toes on
a new front line, almost something
unexpectedly sweet, like swinging
chimes some wild wind blows on,
commuting the panic to marvel, an ozone
high. That’s why if anything
works for us, it’s us, and our lonesome past
points forward to each other,
as if it were a single crystal, orderly, fast
on its feet: and when what we call time’s over,
when we’re gone, they could cast
a model of how-to from us: friend and lover
Anchorage – Lorraine Mariner was born in 1974 and lives in London where she works at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre. She has published two collections with Picador, Furniture (2009) and There Will Be No More Nonsense (2014) and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize twice, for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection, and for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize.
Review of Lorraine Mariner’s Anchorage – now in London Grip
THE RESURRECTION, TARBERT
Cousin Christie asks me to confirm
some talk he recollects, that my grandfather
was buried at sea. Now that I have toured
the graveyards of Ballylongford, recited
the family names chiselled into the stones,
I share his unease. I used to believe
in cremation, scatter me, maybe, close to my
rented flat on the anonymous grass of Blackheath.
Standing in the graveyard of St. Mary’s, Tarbert,
my relations lying two or three in every row,
for the first time in my life I would have sworn I was home.
If we do rise, Stanley Spencer style,
heaving the lids off of our tombs, blinking
in the perfect light, our naked feet ecstatic
on the green green grass, I would put money aside
to have my body transported here from a far city,
as my great aunt and uncle have done.
But my grandmother is not here.
She is lost, like my grandfather, in a Garden
of Remembrance in Croydon and it would not
be the same without her to make the introductions.
* * *
Chap-books are £5 each post free in the UK from Books at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, London N17 9AS. Special deal – Three chap-books for the price of two – £10 post free in the UK from the same address. Include address to mail to and which chap-books you want.
Visit Grey Suit Editions UK for details about all our published books, or scroll down on our blog (Journal) – where they can be found as well.
Extracts from our first two publications!
You can now view an extract of Gertrude, Mabel May on Love Reading
And an extract from The Step is the Foot, also on Love Reading.
Launch for Grey Suit Editions: The Step is the Foot – Gertrude Mabel May
6.30 pm – 9.30 pm Friday 20th September 2019 – Free event
Upper Vestry Hall,
St George’s Bloomsbury
6-7 Little Russell St Bloomsbury WC1A 2HR
Do come and join us to celebrate the launching of our books: Special offer only at this event – buy both books for the price of one!
Entrance round the back of the Church. Refreshments.
This inquiry into the relationship between the “step” in dance and the “foot” in verse invites the reader into a tapestry woven by its crossed paths. A duel career as a dancer and as a poet allows the author to follow his interest in the dance origins of scansion and link it to how the foot connects lyric writing to an “exiled sense” through the felt tread of its rhythm. This is to rediscover the physical feeling of poetry; the fulcrum of a relationship that goes back to the Greek chorus, when every phrase was danced. The author shows how verse and the dance emerged together, as we initially developed bipedalism and speech.
Written is a discursive style which allows the author to wander whenever digression seems appropriate, the book offers the reader an entertaining compendium of anecdotes, notions and quotes concerning the relation between our words and our movements. Walking in itself may have ushered in predication – syntax – putting one word in front of another as one put one foot in front of another. Did song emerge separately from language and stimulate ritual dance among women who linked their steps to sounds? The link of speech with movement is explored in ancient art, in theatre and in military drill and psychoanalysis. From the ballet to performance art, the author traces the evolution of recent creativity – free verse finding a parallel in Mick Jagger dancing freely on his own in the ‘60s while performance artists used the freedom of conceptual art to explore “action phrases” linking task-orientated movement with verbal articulation.
A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell’s first collection, Inside the Castle, came out in 1969. In 1971 he was invited to participate in the Iowa International Writers Program. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award. His versions of the poems of Statius were well received and those of Fawzi Karim were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. He was the founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature. His most recent book of poems is From Inside, The High Window Press 2017.
*
Gertrude Stein’s first novel, one that was never published during her lifetime, was called Q.E.D. She wrote it to exorcise the experience of her first passionate love affair with the New Yorker May Bookstaver, the friend and lover of the Bostonian Mabel Haynes, a fellow student of Gertrude Stein’s at Johns Hopkins Medical School between 1898 and 1902. The impact of the complicated affair on Stein’s writing has attracted considerable attention but the subsequent lives of her two intimate friends have not been covered so far in any detailed way.
Gwendolyn Leick is the granddaughter of Mabel Haynes, who moved to Austria-Hungary in 1905. She began writing this book, after the chance discovery of her grandmother’s part in Gertrude Stein’s life some six years ago, in order to do justice to these remarkable women. The method of writing lays out the things, the notions and ideas, the people (friends, relatives, lovers, husbands), in the form of associative ‘entries’, woven around Gertrude Stein’s texts, as much as on private letters, photographs and other found objects. It is an encyclopaedic enterprise, rather than a chronologically ordered biographical account. The character and the lives of the three protagonists and the times they lived in emerge through the kaleidoscope of the accumulated vignettes.
GWENDOLYN LEICK (1951) studied Assyriology in Graz, Austria. She is the author of many historical works on Mesopotamia published by Routledge, and of Mesopotamia — The Invention of the City (Penguin). She taught Anthropology in Wales and History of Architecture in London. Her lastest book, Tombs of Great Leaders, was published by Reaktion Books in 2013.
The Step is the Foot
Interesting review by Alan Price in the Fortnightly. And now another great review – In SANGLAP – Indian literary magazine – written by Swati Joshi.
Anthony Howell interviewed by Scott Thurston – Stride Magazine
Scroll down for more info and other reviews and comments.
Dance and its relationship to poetry
Very nice review at LOVEREADING
Love Reading’s review of THE STEP IS THE FOOT: DANCE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO POETRY
This consummately fascinating study into the relationship between dance and poetry – the “step” of dance, and the “foot” of verse – presents a complex, intricate interlacing of disciplines. Dappled with personal anecdotes alongside probing evolutionary questions, historical depth and contemporary insights, it is at once thought-provoking and engaging.
The author’s experience as both a dancer and poet inform his unique investigation. He ascribes his long-held passion for both to a deep-rooted childhood awareness of rhythm: “Rhythm is common to both pursuits. Increasingly I have come to feel that dance is a language and that language is a dance.” I found the “Which Came First?” chapter especially compelling. The author’s exploration of humankind’s transition to bipedalism and language takes in fascinating linguistic and archaeological theories, and links the shift to bipedalism to the development of reflective thought, and to walking as an expressive activity.
Suffused in spirited intellectualism and a global perspective, this is a must-read for anyone interested in poetry, dance and exploring the history of humanity through the lens of the arts.
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Dear Anthony,
My initial enthusiasm was not misplaced. Your book falls into my ideal category of the “unpublishable”. (I have one such in my bottom drawer). What I’m saying is that there is not a single commercial publisher that would touch this book and for this alone it is commendable. I don’t always share your viewpoints, and sometimes not your enthusiasms either. I remember going to see an exhibition of ice age objects at the British Museum and feeling troubled by some of the descriptions saying this or that object was probably used for purposes of performance art. I don’t think one can convincingly apply that label. It is just too modern a notion and carries too much baggage for it to ever feel true for me. Ritual, yes, certainly and of course ritual has its aesthetic. Also I’m afraid I have virtually no sympathy for Freud who falsified so much in order to demonstrate his various theories. Years ago, I began to write about this but found the subject too depressing to be able to continue. The essays on art and literature are absolutely riddled with untruths and I don’t think they were innocently applied.
This said … this said … I think The Step is the Foot is an incredible achievement, full of insight and never less than fascinating; it is also a window into your creative world. Beautifully written, it is revelatory in so many ways that I felt myself continually pushed in one direction and then another. It is provocative in the best sense of the word while at the same time generous in its inclusiveness. I simply loved the section on the threshing floor dance, which can be so easily translated to the tammurriata as performed at the religious festas on the slopes of Vesuvius and which has it origins in Dionysian rites. And your words on the tango are beautifully expressed. A couple of years ago I read an academic book on the history of the tango which, although informative, doesn’t come close to what you manage to say in a few paragraphs. It is, and will remain, one of my “secret” books, and certainly one of the best I’ve read in ages. Once again, thank you for this wonderful and important gift.
As ever,
Marius Kociejowski
There is also an interesting article on Nietzche’s interest in dance
This touches on some of the same notions that engage The Step is the Foot.
Grey Suit Editions UK 