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Home , British poetry, English poetry, Maurice Riordan, Prose, Prose poetry, Roy Fisher

British Jane Monson Editor British

The Poems Without Lines Editor Jane Monson University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-77862-4 ISBN 978-3-319-77863-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940734

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018, corrected publication 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of , reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

In 2002, N. Santilli published the frst full-length critical study of the British prose poem with the telling title: Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English . Today, the book is still unique: although it is in good company with other exemplary critical texts on prose poetry— among the authors of which are Margueritte S. Murphy, Mary Ann Caws, Hermine Riffaterre, Stephen Fredman, Michel Delville, Tzvetan Todorov, Steven Monte, and Ron Silliman—it remains the only book that homes in on the prose poem in , rather than that of or America. Since Santilli’s publication, there has been an outpouring of British prose poetry in terms of creative texts, and solo collections alike, but a comparative dearth of critical material, especially collated, on the British prose poem. British Prose Poetry: Poems Without Lines is assembled to address this imbalance between critical material and the creative output/practice of the form, and to provide the frst single volume of essays on the form and , paying particular attention to its and role within (poetry and also prose) since the nineteenth century through to the twenty-frst. While the essays are predominantly critical, I have included a couple of more pedagogical and biographical essays as part of conveying a necessary and interdisciplinary story of the British prose poem. The fuid movement of the essays, and of the book as a whole, between , forms, research, theory, practice, pedagogy, methodology and experience, is fundamental to the unique approach of the essayists towards the topic. Indeed, these precise conversations and

v vi Preface conscious efforts to combine all of these disciplines are vital to under- standing the entire narrative of the British prose poem, and also the rea- son it has undergone a resurgence in British literature in recent decades. In keeping with the focus, each contributor to this book has been cho- sen for the signifcance of their critical and creative output towards the genre; they have all published leading articles and on the prose poem, edited anthologies, or had volumes of their own published by both mainstream and independent presses. This book of essays is an opportunity not only for the reader to understand more about the British prose poem—what it is, how it emerged, why its acceptance has fuctuated so much in the UK—but also to learn more about the story of the prose poem from its contro- versial beginnings in the nineteenth century to its notable burgeoning in the twenty-frst via ebbs and fows in the last century. In terms of the book’s focus on British prose poetry, there is a distinction to be made here between British and English literature. The background to this vol- ume’s understanding of the prose poem in Britain is the prose poem in English literature, which is prose poetry written in the English anywhere in the world. The prose poetry of the English Canon, in this respect, is represented in the translated and American examples that fea- ture in many of the essays. But what takes place once the historical over- view has been established is a dedicated study of prose poetry produced by both British and international based in the UK. It is this more recent interest, practice, production, teaching and performance of the prose poem in the UK itself that the essays individually and together seek to question and understand. Further to this, there are numerous and diverse examples of prose poetry in English and several other , but why in the UK is the recognition and acceptance of prose poetry so much more recent—and, yet more recent still, the public emergence of international UK-based prose ? This question is driven by an over- arching positive approach towards what is happening now—celebrating the augmentation of the contemporary British prose poem and the inter- national and global infuences that are an intrinsic part of its complex role and status. As part of a more general1 and academic recognition of the British prose poem, there have naturally been questions, conversations, debates

1By general, I mean that the prose poem is now being taken more seriously by main- stream publishers, as well as established independent presses. PREFACE vii and a variety of readers and writers doing their best to work out what it is, why it is, how it is and where it is. The ‘where’ of these questions is important and the one I want to address here, frst, while the others are examined in the rest of the volume. In his 2012 for A Companion to Poetic Genre, Andy Brown (one of this book’s contributors) begins the ‘where’ conversation by stating:

Work [has begun] on the widespread appearance of the prose poem in mainstream . Just as with the critical fxation on as the ‘originator’ of the form, I believe we need to move on from the avant-garde appropriation of the prose poem as a vehicle of ‘radi- cal’ expression—the appearance of prose poetry in mainstream British writ- ing is a welcome development of its traditions. In 1971 published Mercian Hymns, a book that has become, perhaps, the most celebrated example of the British prose poem. Shortly afterward published Stations, a series of autobio- graphical prose poems some of which are still included in his Selected and Collected Poems. In fact Heaney continues to write prose poetry, with sev- eral examples appearing in his recent collection District and Circle. Faber & Faber continue to champion the prose poem—from its early appear- ance in T. S. Eliot’s oeuvre (‘Hysteria’ in Prufrock) through to the work of Maurice Riordan (The Holy Land is comprised of over half prose poetry) and , whose acclaimed bookwork Dart blends prose, poetry, documentary, and interview into one of the most radical reworkings of poetry of place. We can clearly see that the ‘radical’ boundary is simply no longer helpful. Nor does it stop there. Mainstream British publishers Jonathan Cape champion the work of John Burnside; the editor at Cape, Robin Robertson, also writes and publishes prose poetry in his acclaimed books for Picador.2

This book supports Brown’s assertion and reviews the possibility that Britain, the very place that has had a nonplussed, hostile, question- ing and undiscerning view of the prose poem, is now potentially the very place where it will fourish. As part of this review, each here considers the broader context of literary traditions and rules, question- ing and probing the tradition of great English poets who have upheld

2Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2012), 327–328. viii Preface and exemplifed the time-honoured valued unit and basis of poetry, the —and, in turn, the break and the stanza. These writers ask directly and indirectly: what place is there for ‘poetry’ that refutes the line-break and takes in hand the sentence and, in turn, the paragraph? Is poetry still poetry when it uses the sentence, rather than the line, as its basic unit? In the twenty-frst century, what has been happening is that the practitioners themselves have long since started and continue to develop these conversations proactively in critical and pedagogical contexts, among them leading authors of the form: Carrie Etter, Ian Seed, Patricia Debney, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Rosen, Andy Brown, George Szirtes, Linda Black, Jeff Hilson, Luke Kennard, Geraldine Monk and Ágnes Lehóczky. In its embracing of both the practice and research of prose poetry, the book aims to appeal as much to Creative Writing students and research- ers as it does to dedicated practitioners of the prose poem wanting to understand more about the , theory and nature of the form. It will appeal to those asking questions about the British prose poem: its origins, infuences, impact and relationship with other similar genres or forms. This book aims not only to provide a useful single text to gain more insight and advance understanding of the topic—for both tutor and student, but also to provide the opportunity to enjoy the prose poem more widely while regarding its historical narrative, and consid- ering its relevance and possibilities in British literature today. It is not common knowledge that many of the writers explored here—T. S. Eliot, , , Seamus Heaney, and —produced prose poems, as well as wrote about this area. Neither is it common knowledge that their work on prose poetry and reconfgurations of the divide between poetry and prose continues to inform and inspire contemporary prose poets in Britain and all over the world. This volume aims to appeal to and encourage writers and readers of poetry, prose poetry and poetics who wish to understand, as well as to try out or continue to practice, this alluring and elusive thing called the prose poem. While this title is the frst of its kind, the long-term view of creative and critical conversations around the prose poem is quite the opposite—we look forward to starting some new discussions and contin- uing others.

Cambridge, UK Jane Monson The original version of the book was revised: For detailed informa- tion please see correction. The correction to the book is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_21 Acknowledgements

I would like to give my ongoing appreciation and gratitude to the ­following friends, family, peers and colleagues for their unwavering ­support. Invaluable suggestions, time, constructive advice, encourage- ment and clear perspectives throughout the years have been put into this volume by the following: Cassandra Atherton, Hugues Azérad, Kaddy Benyon, Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press Bookshop, Anthony Cummins, Patricia Debney, Jane de Lozey, Eileen Fursland, Lindsay Fursland, Michelle Golder, Una McCormack, the Monson family, Lilleith Morrison, Catherine Paterson, Nikki Santilli, the Sotudeh family, Ben Walker, Ann Walsh, Neil Wenborn and Anne Wilson. I extend particular thanks to Patricia Debney for her constant support, belief when momen- tum was a bit frayed and, as importantly, her dedicated fne-­tuning of the Introduction. Huge amounts of appreciation for the advice, and extra miles go to my editors at Palgrave: Allie Bochicchio, Rachel Jacobe, Emily Janakiram and, from the early days, Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis. Warm gratitude for the criticism, suggestions, belief and appreciation of every reader and peer reviewer. Particular and abso- lute admiration and heartfelt thanks go to all nineteen contributors for the steadfast ways—against quite a few odds—you’ve approached and connected with the whole project, as well as for your individual essays. I won’t forget your support and encouragement along the way, and I hope the next stage serves you all well. It’s been a journey of many tales and utterly motivating through some of the bleaker hours. Finally, and eternally, love and appreciation are extended to Niki Sotudeh

xi xii Acknowledgements and Sylvie Monson Sotudeh, whose calmness, wit and daily inspiration are essential to every one of my undertakings. To the readers of this book: thank you for every borrow, purchase, glance, dive, foray, discus- sion and prose poem these essays hope to inspire. Copyright Acknowledgements

With thanks to John Wiley & Sons Ltd for the use of excerpts taken from Andy Brown’s essay ‘The Emergent Prose Poem’, in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2012), 327– 328. This edition was frst published in 2012 (© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd). The right of Erik Martiny to be identifed as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. With thanks to David Caddy for permission to use ‘Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in ’, previously published in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins, 2010), 103–113. Permission by the author to use with any necessary editing has been granted. With thanks to Elisabeth Bletsoe for the use of the extract of ‘Heyrun, Heron (Ardea cinerea)’, in Birds of the Sherborne Missal, in Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman, 2008), and to Vahni Capildeo for use of the extract from ‘Person Animal Figure’, in Undraining Sea (Norwich: Egg Box, 2009). With thanks to Louis Armand and Clare Wallace for Michel Delville, ‘ and the Prose Poem’, which appeared as a much longer

xiii xiv Copyright Acknowledgements

(and alternative version) in Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other (eds. Louis Armand and Clare Wallace, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). This ver- sion is printed here with kind permission of Litteraria Pragensia. Thanks to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to use ‘Hysteria’, in T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002). With thanks also to Faber & Faber Ltd and Coffee House Press for permission to use ‘The Death of ’ by Mark Ford, in Six Children (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). With thanks to Ian Seed for ‘Nonsense and Wonder: The Prose Poems of Jeremy Over’, which appeared as a much shorter, earlier version in the journal Tears in the Fence, 63 (April 2016). Permission granted by the author, also the editor of Tears in the Fence. With thanks also to Carcanet Press for kind permission to use extracts from Jeremy Over’s frst collec- tion, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001) and Over’s second collection, Deceiving Wild Creatures (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009). With continued thanks to Carcanet for permission to use extracts from The Glacial Stairway, by Peter Riley (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011) in Owen Bullock’s essay. With thanks to the publisher at The Figures for permission to use ’s poem, ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’ in Tottering State: Selected and New Poems (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984). Thanks to the Estate of Roy Fisher and to Ltd for all primary materials cited in Peter Robinson’s essay ‘Roy Fisher’s Musicians’. Thanks also to Peter Robinson, Executor of the Fisher Estate. Contents

1 Introduction 1 Jane Monson

Part I The Story of the British Prose Poem

2 ‘Hidden’ Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry 19 David Caddy

3 The British Prose Poem and ‘Poetry’ in Early 29 Margueritte S. Murphy

4 The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and Britain 47 Robert Vas Dias

Part II The Early Narrators

5 The Marvellous Clouds: Refections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams 73 Michael O’Neill

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6 ‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry 91 Jane Goldman

7 James Joyce and the Prose Poem 117 Michel Delville

8 T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry) 133 Vidyan Ravinthiran

9 A Weakening Syntax: How It Is with Samuel Beckett’s Prose Poetry 149 Scott Annett

Part III By Name or by Nature?

10 Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns 167 Alan Wall

11 ‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating Seamus Heaney’s Stations 177 Andy Brown

12 The Letter-Poem and Its Literary Affect: Mark Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ 193 Anthony Caleshu

13 ‘Immeasurable as One’: Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics 211 Jeremy Noel-Tod

14 The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind Its Name 227 Owen Bullock CONTENTS xvii

Part IV Other Voices, Other Forms

15 ‘Man and Nature In and Out of Order’: The Surrealist Prose Poetry of David Gascoyne 249 Luke Kennard

16 Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over 265 Ian Seed

17 Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz 279 N. Santilli

18 Roy Fisher’s Musicians 299 Peter Robinson

Part V Thinking Back, Writing Forward

19 Wrestling with Angels: The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem 319 Patricia Debney

20 Life, Death and the Prose Poem 331 Michael Rosen

Correction to: British Prose Poetry E1 Jane Monson

Index 337 Notes on Contributors

Scott Annett is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He has recently completed a project on Samuel Beckett’s poetic experimentation, attending to Beckett’s read- ings of Dante’s Commedia. Annett has also written on Dante’s poetry, including his Eclogues. He teaches regularly for the Faculty of English, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, and the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is currently working on and transitions between Virgilian ‘pietas’, Dantean ‘pietà’ and Chaucerian ‘pitee’ in the Medieval period. Andy Brown is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Exeter University. He recently co-edited A Body of Work: An of Poetry and Medicine, with Corinna Wagner (Bloomsbury, 2016). He also edited and contributed to the critical book of essays and interviews The Writing Occurs as Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2014). His many poetry books include Medicine to the Dead (Worple, 2018); Watersong (Shearsman, 2016); Exurbia (Worple, 2015), The Fool and the Physician (Salt, 2014), Goose Music (with John Burnside) (Salt, 2008) and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996–2006 (Salt, 2006). Owen Bullock has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Canberra, where he currently teaches, and is a member of the Prose Poetry Project, hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute. His research interests are semiotics and poetry, prose poetry, collaboration and haikai literature. His scholarly work has appeared in Antipodes, Axon:

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Creative Explorations, Journal of , Ka Mate Ka Ora, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry and TEXT. His creative publi- cations include Semi (2017), River’s Edge (2016) and A Cornish Story (2010). He has edited a number of journals and anthologies, including Poetry New Zealand. David Caddy is a critically acclaimed British , essayist, critic and literary sociologist. He has edited the international and independent literary journal Tears in the Fence since 1984, and directs the Tears in the Fence annual poetry festival. Caddy founded and organised the East Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001, and directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001. He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and edited scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, arti- cles and reviews to books and journals. Anthony Caleshu is Professor of Poetry at University of Plymouth. He is the author of three books of poetry—most recently, The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and three books of criticism—most recently as edi- tor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). Patricia Debney is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her most recent collection, Baby (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016), moves between prose poem and free , while two earlier collections, Littoral (Shearsman Books, 2013), and How to Be a Dragonfy (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005) consist entirely of prose poems. Other recent work includes Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014), and she has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Best British Poetry 2015, The Forward Book of Poetry 2014 and The Sunday Times. She has also published a (bluechrome, 2007) and written libretti for opera, chamber groups and solo voices. Michel Delville teaches English literature, and at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author of The American Prose Poem (1998), J. G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (with Pierre Michel) (2001), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris) (2005), Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (2009), Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film and Beyond (2013), The Politics of Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xxi

Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (with Andrew Norris) (2016) and Si4+ ⇋ Al3+ Art (with Mary Ann Caws) (2017). He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics. Jane Goldman Reader in English at Glasgow University, is a General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Her books include The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006), and ‘With You in the Hebrides’: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013). She is also a poet, pub- lished in Gutter, Blackbox Manifold, Tender and elsewhere. Her frst volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014), ‘a little theat- rical box of spectacle and light […] the living underworld of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera translated into raucous girlish post-war wayward ways’ (Hix Eros). Luke Kennard is a poet, novelist and academic who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Exeter and lectures English and Creative Writing at the . His latest collection of poetry, Cain (Penned in the Margins, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize and his frst novel, The Transition (4th Estate, 2017), was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fction. Jane Monson is a poet and academic based in Cambridge. She works as a Mentor at the University of Cambridge and was Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She edited the frst anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry, This Line is Not for Turning (Cinnamon Press, 2011), praised by Pascale Petit as ‘neces- sary and ground-breaking’, and has two collections of prose poetry Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press, 2010) and The Shared Surface (Cinnamon Press, 2013). Her Ph.D., Crossed Tongues: The Crisis of Speech in the Prose Poems of Francis Ponge (Cardiff University, 2008), focused on Modernism and the French prose poem. Margueritte S. Murphy Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA, is author of Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of (2012) and A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (1992), and co-editor (with Samir Dayal) of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization (2007). She has pub- lished broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and fction, xxii Notes on Contributors on literature and economics, and most recently on community-based learning. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she currently serves as advisor/faculty liaison to the Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning. Jeremy Noel-Tod is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia . His poetry criti- cism has been widely published and, since 2013, he has been the poetry critic for The Sunday Times. His publications as an editor are The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2nd edn, 2013), the Complete Poems of R. F. Langley (2015) and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. Recent books include (with Madeleine Callaghan) The Handbook (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) and, as editor, in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His third volume of poetry, Gangs of Shadow, was published by Arc in 2014 and Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018). Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at Birmingham University. He is the author of Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), shortlisted for several frst collection prizes, including the Forward; and Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for . He is an editor at Prac Crit and also an author of fction, represented by the Wylie Agency. His lit- erary journalism has appeared in Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, an award-winning poet, writer, trans- lator from the Italian, and literary editor for Two Rivers Press. His recent publications include The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), winner of the John Florio Prize; The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (2013); The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and (2013, paperback 2016); and September in the Rain: A Novel (2016). His Collected Poems 1976–2016 appeared in 2017. Michael Rosen is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s, London, and a former Children’s Laureate. He went to state primary and grammar schools, tried doing Medicine for two years before stud- ying English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford. Rosen worked at the BBC and since then as a freelance writer, performer and broadcaster. Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

He wrote We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (with Helen Oxenbury), Quick Let’s Get Out of Here and Sad Book (both with Quentin Blake). His prose poetry memoirs include Carrying the Elephant (Penguin, 2002) and In the Colonie (Penguin, 2005). He presents the BBC 4 Radio programme Word of Mouth. N. Santilli was awarded a Ph.D. (Kings College London) for her research on the prose poem. Subsequently published as Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (2003), it remains the only full-length treatment of the subject. She was invited to edit collections of contemporary British prose poems by ‘SENTENCE’ (2005) and Poetry International (2006). Nikki is an independent scholar and vernac- ular jazz dancer/teacher in London, with a rich, eclectic, portfolio from scriptwriting to electronic text editing and dancing to poetry. Ian Seed is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Chester and author. Seed’s books of prose poems include Identity Papers (2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), both pub- lished by Shearsman. They were featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He translated The Thief of Talant (2016), the frst translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s innovative Le Voleur de Talan (Wakefeld Press). Robert Vas Dias is a tutor at the Poetry School, London, and has published ffteen collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of which are a collaborative artist’s book with the Portuguese artist Teresa Gonçalves Lobo, Unstill/Inquieto (Permanent, 2017), Black Book, with Julia Farrer (Shearsman, 2016) and Arrivals & Departures: Prose Poems (Shearsman, 2014): ‘necessary reading for anyone following contempo- rary developments in the prose poem’ (David Caddy). His poetry and criticism have appeared in over one hundred magazines, journals, and anthologies in both countries. He was General Secretary of The Poetry Society in the mid-1970s. Alan Wall is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester and RLF Co-ordinator. He is the author of , poetry and books of essays, and his work has been translated into ten languages. His most recent novel was Badmouth (Harbour Books, 2014), and his most recent book of essays was Labyrinths and Clues (Fortnightly Review, 2014). Wall’s book Jacob, written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and Endtimes (Shearsman, 2013) was launched at Swedenborg House in London to considerable acclaim. He was elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2012. List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Virginia Woolf, ‘BLUE & GREEN.’, Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth, 1921) 101 Fig. 16.1 From ‘Wunderkammern’ 275

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