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| A Century of Poetry Review Blake Morrison celebrates the ups and downs of the Poetry Society and its journal's centenaryWith the handover of the laureateship, the Oxford poetry professorship debacle, the 30th anniversary of Radio 4's Poetry Please and a major promotion on BBC television, poetry has been much in the news this year. But one event to pass almost unnoticed is the centenary of the Poetry Society and of its house magazine, the Poetry Review. In their early, genteel days the former was known as the Poetry Recital Society and the latter as the Poetical Gazette. But any impression of calm gentility is misleading. Both have provoked a level of antagonism that to anyone unversed in the ways of poets would seem extraordinary.In gathering up the best of 100 years of poetry and debate for this anthology, Fiona Sampson, the current editor of the Poetry Review, doesn't dwell on the duels and hissy fits. But neither does she pretend that schisms didn't, or don't, exist. The first few pieces map out the war zone. On one side, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" by Rupert Brooke ("And is there honey still for tea?") and Henry Newbolt on why Robert Bridges is the greatest poet of the age ("The joy that abounds from these poems is from a bluer heaven than any other that has shone over England"). On the other side, Marinetti's manifesto for futurism and Ezra Pound on his hopes for the poetry of the next decade ("It will be as much like granite as it can be . . . austere, direct, free from emotional slither"). It's the old guard versus Modernists, with manifestos flying like grenades.There are several more manifestos in the anthology – rallying cries for (among other things) poetical drama, dialect, political commitment, translation and eco-mindedness. At worst, they amount to a coercive narcissism: everyone else should be writing the poetry that I write. But TS Eliot, in an interview, refuses to lay down the law: "I don't think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form," he says. There's also James Fenton's "Manifesto Against Manifestos", from 1983, in which he questions the whole business of opposing schools (the Martians versus the narrative poets, for example) and confesses: "I do not know to which camp I belong."Most poets feel the same. But the Poetry Society, as the institutional heart of British verse, has always been a site of fierce contention. One of the magazine's first editors was Harold Monro, who transformed it from a members' newsletter into a platform for Pound and imagism – or would have done, if he hadn't been ousted after a year. Muriel Spark suffered a similar fate after taking over from the American Galloway Kyle in 1947 on a salary of £30 a month. Her innovations, which included actually paying contributors, were long overdue. But, as an attractive young divorcee, she incited lust, gossip and jealousy, and was forced out after a smear campaign in which Marie Stopes played a leading part. Controversy also surrounded Eric Mottram in the 1970s, with his radical Anglo-American poetics. But Spark remains the most celebrated and colourful of the magazine's editors – which makes it baffling (was there a copyright issue?) that none of her poems, reviews and editorials is included in this anthology.For an editor caught between the tastes of an ageing membership and the practice of young poets, running the show was (as Sampson puts it) "a bit like curating Tate Modern with the Cheltenham Watercolour Society in mind". For that reason, the Poetry Review has generally lacked the strong personality of magazines such as Ian Hamilton's Review, Michael Schmidt's PN Review, Jon Silkin's Stand and William Cookson's Agenda. Certainly few celebrated 20th-century poems first appeared in its pages – to judge by this selection, only Larkin's "MCMXIV", Paul Muldoon's "Why Brownlee Left", a Peter Porter elegy for his wife and one of Carol Ann Duffy's fables from The World's Wife. What it does boast are some surprising contributors. Who'd expect to find a former prime minister weighing the benefits of telegraphic concentration in Pope, Dryden and Browning, as AJ Balfour does here in 1914, a few years before becoming foreign secretary and issuing his famous declaration in support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine?There are other entertaining oddities: Dame Edith Evans telling members of the society how poor their verse-speaking is ("You have a great love of your poems but you love them so much that you gloat over them"); Diana Athill in her heyday as an editor at André Deutsch on the problems of pricing a book of poetry, when teenagers will "buy 35-shilling gramophone records without turning a hair"; Robert Graves on how John Masefield, the poet laureate, sent his verses on royal occasions to the Times and always included a stamped, self-addressed envelope in case of rejection. Even the more expected pieces are never routine, whether Larkin on Plath, Anne Ridler on her time as TS Eliot's secretary or Don Paterson on working as a poetry editor ("One of those hellish things you learn after 10 years . . . is that you can hold a poem a yard away and, without having read a word, know there's a 99% chance that you won't like it").Several editors of the Poetry Review, including Mottram and later Peter Forbes, strenuously avoided little-Englandism, and there's a reasonable showing of Americans and Europeans here, including Brodsky, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Primo Levi. One particularly revealing essay comes from Miroslav Holub, on the challenge of finding a voice when the only admissible form in the Soviet Union was socialist realism: "We entered literature by shutting up. By complete silence. By a complete distrust of everybody. It was a perfect lesson in creative non-writing."It's a pity that Fiona Sampson's anthology is so tilted towards the present day: we are already on to the 1960s by page 60 (with the poem Robert Frost read at JF Kennedy's inauguration), and less space is given to the first half of the 20th century than to the first eight years of the 21st. It's a fascinating collection, nevertheless, and proof, should anyone require it, that British poetry is alive and kicking – with most of the kicks aimed at rival poets, needless to say.Blake Morrison's new novel The Last Weekend will be published by Chatto & Windus next spring.PoetryBlake Morrisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Present-Day Soapbox for Voices of the Past (With a Web Site) Lewis H. Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s magazine, takes on a new market and business model with his eponymous journal. feeds.nytimes.com |
How three wise men and a tube helped us find our place in the universe | Science Book Club As the International Year of Astronomy draws to a close, Tim Radford nominates Seeing and Believing by Richard Panek as the definitive guide to the revolution wrought by the telescopeThe telescope changed our lives, and this book is about how it happened. Seeing and Believing tells only a fraction of a 400-year-story, and – since it was written in 1998 – it cannot even hint at the last decade of eye-opening discoveries. It is furthermore a very short book, so its scope is constrained. If you want to know how to design, fabricate and use your own telescope, this book will be no help.But Seeing and Believing is still my candidate for the best introduction to this founding instrument of the scientific revolution. The key words in the subtitle are "how we found our place in the universe", and Panek's account reminds us in short and vivid ways of the disorderly progress of scientific discovery. For instance, we learn that Galileo did not "invent" the telescope in 1609, as is popularly supposed, nor was he even the first to think of using it for scientific exploration. Roger Bacon had predicted the "wonders of refracted vision" in 1267 and, more than three decades before Galileo, at least two writers had described peering into the distance with the aid of lenses.Nor was Galileo the first to look at the heavens through a spyglass: the Englishman Thomas Harriot beat him to it by months, but failed to tell anybody. But in November 1609 Galileo began to use two lenses in a cylinder to look at the moon, Jupiter and the sun, and recognised the significance of what he saw. He saw that the moon's topography was Earth-like, that Jupiter had moons and that the sun had spots.This was all very unorthodox and heretical, and Panek offers a vivid snapshot of the medieval cosmology that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo between them overturned: the celestial order in which an imperfect Earth was the centre of the universe, and the moon, sun and stars revolved about it, set in perfect, crystalline spheres of increasing moral excellence.The planets – the "wanderers" – required a bit of explaining, which is why the story starts with them. And if the moon had mountains and seas, like Earth, then it wasn't as "heavenly" as had been supposed. If Jupiter had moons revolving about it, then it had something in common with Earth: they were both planets. And the "wandering" of the planets made geometrical sense if the Sun was the centre of creation, rather than the Earth.Why should we believe long-dead authorities such as Aristotle and Ptolemy when our eyes tell us something different? Why rely on ancient authors when we can open the book of nature and read a different and better story?The revolution proceeded erratically, but within two generations amazing things had happened. The first telescopes presented problems of focal length, chromatic aberration, narrow field of view and so on. You could see planetary furniture that you had never seen before, but the stars remained enigmatic points of light. Galileo, with a smugness that his contemporaries must have found ever so annoying, was convinced he had discovered almost all there was to discover: "It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else."Some people, including Christopher Wren, believed him. Some people continued to believe that the naked eye was a better instrument than two lumps of glass in a tube. But the new community of lens-grinding astronomers got on with the challenge. If the sun was the centre of our world, how far away was it? If light was the agency of discovery, was it instantaneous, or did it move? If so, how fast did it move?In 1676, less than one lifetime on from Galileo, the Danish astronomer Ole Romer predicted an eclipse of a Jovian moon, and having calculated the changing orbital locations of the Earth and Jupiter at that time, boldly claimed that the eclipse would be visible 10 minutes later than expected. He was dead right, and he used the result to settle the matter: light moved, at a speed of 140,000 miles a second. Given the quality of the clocks and observing instruments of the day, that was pretty close to the true figure.To make such a calculation, he and other astronomers had to have an idea of the diameter of the Earth's orbit, and they got a good ballpark figure in the same decade. By 1728, the English astronomer James Bradley had used this value for the Earth's orbital journey to try to calculate the distance to a star by observing from two separate points. Look at something first with one eye covered, and then the other, and see how the observed object seems to move. The apparent shift in position is called the parallax, and the nearer the object the bigger will be the parallax.From his standpoint on the Earth in orbit, Bradley tried to measure the stellar distance by making observations six months and therefore (we now know) 186 million miles apart. He could detect no apparent movement, but he used this negative result to calculate that, because he could observe no parallax, therefore the nearest star (apart from the sun) must be at least 36 trillion miles away.So, in less than two lifetimes, astronomers already had a grasp of the depth of space. Heaven wasn't a "vault", it was somewhere that went on and on. They also rather gave up on the stars until the Hanoverian William Herschel came along and with the innocence of the amateur, built better telescopes and looked at the whole sky, spotted Uranus, discovered infra-red radiation and formulated in a sentence the significance of a finite value for the speed of light: "A telescope with the power of penetrating into space, has also, it may be called, a power of penetrating into time past."By 1859, someone had used a spectroscope to identify the elemental make-up of the sun; by 1888, a camera fitted to a telescope had collected enough light to discern the spiral structure of Andromeda; and within another lifetime, Edwin Hubble had confirmed that the Milky Way galaxy wasn't the beginning and the end of the universe, it was just a speck of matter in the enormity of everything.The story goes on, and Panek's version of it reminds us that such revolutionary discoveries arose from a worldwide, non-stop, free-for-all of competing, collaborating and communicating enthusiasts, who often bickered, but also generously exchanged their data, their ideas, and their techniques.We have an "exaltation" of larks and a "charm" of finches, but what's the right collective noun for a bunch of astronomers? How about a focus group?In the querulous crossfire that followed last month's book on race, IQ and dubious anthropology, @EndPseudoscience suggested that club members might look at a book by Jared Diamond which "explains this subject very well." Thanks, EP, the club will be back in February and the next book is indeed Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared DiamondAstronomySpacePeople in scienceScience and natureTim Radfordguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
CES 2010: The ebook revolution The tech industry is trying to push traditional publishers to electronic booksA tidal wave of next-generation ebook readers is being unleashed at this week's Consumer Electronics Show.Following the success of Amazon's Kindle, which sold an estimated 500,000 units worldwide in 2009, a slew of companies of all sizes are trying to push traditional publishers towards the ebook revolution.Dozens of new ebooks have been announced at the show, coming from electronics giants like Samsung and Sony, as well as smaller businesses that are trying to establish themselves as ebook pioneers. That group includes British company Plastic Logic, which announced the debut of its electronic reader – known as the Que – on Thursday.Despite its hefty price tag of up to $800 (£500), the device – which is available only in the US for the time being – garnered positive reviews. One website called it the "slickest and most versatile" e-reader, while the company said that its crisp electronic ink screen, annotation system and touch-sensitive display is essential for those who need to read for work."As technology improves, and as our plastic electronics technology improves, we'll look at ways to make it better still," Plastic Logic's senior director, Steven Glass, told the Guardian. "I think we're just at the very beginning."The company, founded 10 years ago by two Cambridge University professors, has won support from publishers including Dow Jones and the US bookseller Barnes & Noble – but others remain wary of being forced into digital distribution.Major groups including Simon & Schuster and Hachette have said they will delay the release of the electronic versions of their books, while publishers and retailers remained deeply ambivalent about the prospects for digital success in a survey conducted last month by the Bookseller.More than half of respondents thought that Apple, which already dominates digital music, would also become the prevailing company in the ebooks market – despite the fact that the company has not released a dedicated reader.According to Matt Egan, the editor of PC Advisor magazine, that is because a strong, multipurpose ebook reader could leave the competition struggling to stay relevant."Do you see [people] using these things on the street? Absolutely. When I get my train to work, plenty of people are reading ebooks," he said. "But to me it feels a little bit like an in-between technology: I think if you get any piece of hardware that does only one thing, it's got a relatively short shelf life."The lack of enthusiasm among some elements of the industry is not necessarily reflected at all levels.Many best-selling authors, keenly aware of the commercial potential of new technologies, have been ardent supporters of the idea. At last year's CES, Dan Brown took the stage to trumpet the ebook concept on behalf of Sony, while Amazon has signed up Stephen King as an envoy for the Kindle. Business author Stephen Covey, meanwhile, caused uproar when he signed an exclusive with Amazon that left his publisher entirely out of the loop.And while many believe that it will be technology companies that emerge victorious, not all publishers are sitting on the sidelines. Hearst – the US media giant that owns British magazines including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping – used CES to unveil its own gadget, known as the Skiff Reader.With a display that is larger than anything else on the market, the Skiff is clearly targeted at a future generation of magazine readership. But the company has refused to answer crucial questions, such as the cost of the device, leaving its chances of success unclear.Plastic Logic's Steven Glass said that it was crucial for companies of all stripes to avoid getting sucked into a war with hi-tech big guns like Amazon and Apple."I think the first thing we have to do to make sure that we stay relevant is to focus on our customer," he said. "We chose to target the business user in a way that I don't think anyone else does – we've tried to define a different category. By being different, we feel that we have a place to be for a long time."But even if some do manage to stand against the major technology corporations for now, others believe it could already be too late to turn the tide back completely. PC Advisor's Egan questioned whether it was simply a matter of time before the book industry and ebooks themselves were overrun by the unstoppable expansion of computers and mobile phones."I wonder if when the screens are right, and when it's comfortable to read a book on a laptop, will people still need to buy an ebook reader?"Consumer Electronics Show (CES)EbooksAmazon.comSonyPublishingBobbie Johnsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Penguin authors name Orwell as their favourite stablemate George Orwell emerges as the Penguin author most beloved by authors writing for the publisher todaySixty years after his death, George Orwell has emerged as the favourite Penguin author of current Penguin authors, after 50 writers including Will Self, David Lodge and Naomi Klein were asked to pick their favourite title to celebrate the publisher's 75th anniversary.Four of the 50 books chosen were by Orwell – more than by any other writer. Paul Theroux picked his novel about the last days of British imperialism, Burmese Days, which he felt helped him "understand how [he] might write about Africa and South East Asia", James Lovelock plumped for his dystopian allegory Animal Farm ("the evergreen guide book for dystopia"), Catherine O'Flynn chose his vision of a totalitarian future, 1984, and Norman Stone went for his essay, Shooting an Elephant.The four Orwell titles, along with the 46 other Penguin books selected by Penguin authors, will be featured as part of a promotion at Waterstone's. "George Orwell was a master of social and political commentary," said the bookseller's fiction buyer Janine Cook. "It's no surprise he's the most chosen author from within the Penguin ranks. He is one of the most powerful voices in 20th century literature. His work is as relevant now as it was when it was written."Nick Hornby and Claire Tomalin are the only two authors both to have chosen books for the promotion and to have been selected themselves. Elizabeth Buchan picked Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, saying that the "passionate, radical, brave, and sometimes difficult" subject "could not have wished for a more empathetic and brilliantly skilled biographer", while chick-lit author Catherine Alliott selected Hornby's High Fidelity, calling it "the ultimate modern classic [with] so much insight into the male psyche it should be required reading".Hornby himself chose Geoffrey Willans's much-loved schoolboy tale, Molesworth, while Tomalin plumped for an older choice: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Hugh Sebag-Montefiore also picked a Tolstoy novel – War and Peace – while novelist Evelyn Waugh was also chosen twice, for Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited.Penguin was set up in 1935 by Allen Lane with the aim of making quality fiction available at a reasonable price. The first Penguin paperbacks, by the likes of Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway, cost just sixpence; Orwell said at the time that "the Penguin Books are splendid value ... so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them".The Penguin authors' Penguin selections in full1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - Claire Tomalin2. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh - David Lodge3. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin - Elizabeth Buchan4. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - Lynn Barber5. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis - Harry Sidebottom6. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca - Nicolas Nassim Taleb7. Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd - Steven Pinker8. Love by Stendhal - Alain de Botton9. The Go-Between by LP Hartley - Ali Smith10. The Collected Works of Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker - Elizabeth Noble11. Burmese Days by George Orwell - Paul Theroux12. Couples by John Updike - Helen Dunmore13. Regeneration by Pat Barker - Marina Lewycka14. A Legacy by Sybille Bedford - Zoë Heller15. The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze - Antony Beevor16. The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe - Naomi Alderman17. 1984 by George Orwell - Catherine O'Flynn18. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey - Iain Sinclair19. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Roger McGough20. The Fall by Albert Camus - Mohsin Hamid21. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides - Andrew Roberts22. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - Ian Kershaw23. Ways of Seeing by John Berger - Naomi Klein24. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - Jonathan Coe25. Americana by Don Dellilo - Joshua Ferris26. War of the Worlds by HG Wells - Will Self27. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend - Marian Keyes28. Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans - Nick Hornby29. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford - Jane Green30. Animal Farm by George Orwell - James Lovelock31. The Tale Of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter - John Nichol32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - Mark Bostridge33. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - Jane Fallon34. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby - Catherine Alliott35. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol - John Lanchester36. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - Lesley Pearse37. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - Hugh Sebag-Montefiore38. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Nicci French39. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar AllenPoe - Dick and Felix Francis40. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell - Norman Stone41. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - William Boyd42. A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine - Sophie Hannah43. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins - Andrew Taylor44. The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor - Saul David45. Collapse by Jared Diamond - Tristram Stuart46. Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys - David Thomson47. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - Chris Patten48. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - Patrick Hennessey49. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - John Gray50. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope - Robin Lane FoxGeorge OrwellPublishingAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |