Scully   •   John McAuliffe writes: Irish poet Maurice Scully died in Bolea, Spain on 5 March 2023.  Scully published pamphlets and extracts from serial work with a roll-call of small presses, including Raven Arts, Galloping Dog Press, etruscan books, Poetical Histories, Wild Honey Press, Pig Press, hardPressed poetry, Smithereens and Reality Street Editions, with larger collected editions published by Dedalus Press and most recently Shearsman, Things That Happen. Scully’s modernist, observational work was compared to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and often read alongside peers including Trevor Joyce, Catherine Walsh and Randolph Healy, poets who were also involved, as he was, in small press and magazine editing. In Ireland, he was awarded the Macaulay Fellowship in 1981 and Arts Council Bursaries in Literature in 1986 & 1988 along with the Katherine & Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2004. He was elected to the Irish state’s artists association, Aosdána, in 2009.


Verlaine   •   Martin Caseley writes: Tom Verlaine, who died in January aged seventy-three after a short illness, was one of a small group of young, bohemian performers who brought a new poetic sensibility into the world of rock music when new wave exploded in the mid-1970s. Together with his close friend – and former partner – Patti Smith, he expanded rock lyrics to include influences from the writers they loved, French symbolists Rimbaud and Verlaine, noir pulp novelists such as Raymond Chandler and Beat iconoclasts such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Primarily, however, Verlaine became known for his scorching, Coltrane-inspired, arpeggiated lead guitar playing, which could be tender, brutal and asymmetrical in turn. When Patti Smith moved from poetry readings into music, Verlaine’s guitar was all over her debut 1974 single Piss Factory/Hey Joe, on the latter song managing to make the listener forget all about Jimi Hendrix’s defining version. He was also involved in two of the most epochal albums of the 1970s, Patti Smith’s Horses (1975) and, two years later, his own band Television’s Marquee Moon, a record regularly cited as an instant classic, which became hugely influential on later bands such as REM. The lyrics for Television songs were opaque, stream-of-conscious screeds of symbols, memories, anecdotes and joky streetwise slang, often difficult to interpret due to Verlaine’s strange accentuation and idiosyncratic delivery. The song ‘Marquee Moon’, for example, begins ‘I remember how the darkness doubled/ I recall lightning struck itself’, staking out new territory in its self-cancelling metaphors. Lou Reed had used street slang in American rock before and Dylan had mixed influences from the Beats and Lenny Bruce into some of his crucial mid-60s songs, but Tom Verlaine made this approach vital and dynamic to a new generation of discerning listeners by allying it to a handful of superb songs, nearly all of which can be heard on Marquee Moon, sounding as vital, energised and powerful now as the day they were recorded.


‘Propaganda’   •   Christine Blackwell alerted us to the following from the Moscow Times of 10 January. Ordinary Russians are unable to access an increasingly broad range of literature as bookshops and libraries pull titles from their shelves amid a wartime crackdown on political dissent and a November law banning LGBT ‘propaganda’. In particular, failing to comply with the controversial — and vague — anti-LGBT law puts shops at risk of large fines or, at worst, closure.

‘We are actually afraid,’ said Lyubov Belyatskaya, co-owner of Vse Svobodny, an independent, liberal-leaning bookstore in St. Petersburg. The problems faced by bookshops and libraries, which were previously places less affected by Russia’s political repression, are a testament to the mounting pressure on the world of literature that is narrowing access to both fiction and non-fiction titles.

A lack of clarity about the anti-LGBT law signed by President Vladimir Putin late in 2022 — which outlaws public depictions of ‘non-traditional’ relationships — has created confusion among booksellers about which titles can now be legally displayed and sold.

‘Everyone started panicking,’ said the owner of another liberal-leaning bookstore in St. Petersburg who asked to remain anonymous. ‘Some of our vendors stopped supplying some books on their own initiative even though they weren’t really covered by the new law.’

Representatives from several retailers told the Moscow Times that they had received no information from the authorities about which books were prohibited. As a result, some shops are removing titles on their own initiative or in line with requests from publishers. Others are consulting with lawyers. […] Some businesses have taken a blanket approach, pulling books with even a passing mention of LGBT relationships or lifestyles. …

‘It’s very simple: we have a list coming from the city administration and we comply with it,” a shop administrator at the Bukvoyed bookstore in the center of St. Petersburg told a Moscow Times reporter on a recent visit. ‘It will work just like with forbidden literature, such as Mein Kampf.’ LitRes, Russia’s largest e-book seller, has even asked some authors to rewrite works to comply with the anti-LGBT law, the RBC news website reported in December.


Joan Margarit Award   •   In March the Spanish newspaper El Pais announced the birth of the new annual international Joan Margarit Award for Poetry, an initiative of the invaluable Instituto Cervantes and the publishing house La Cama Sol. The purse is a significant one in the poetry world, worth 7,000 Euros. Poets will be translated into Spanish, English and French. The eponymous poet wrote in Catalan and Spanish, and translated Hardy, Rilke and Elizabeth Bishop, among others, into his languages.


Bollingen Prize   •   Joy Harjo was awarded the 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The prize has honoured fifty-three poets, including Harjo, among them W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, Robert Frost, Susan Howe, Charles Wright, Louise Glück, Nathaniel Mackey, Jean Valentine, Charles Bernstein, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This year’s judges include Berssenbrugge, Natalie Diaz, and Ilya Kaminsky. The book they celebrate is entitled Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. In this case the purse is ample, $175,000. ‘Poetry has been my most challenging teacher and the most rewarding,’ Harjo declared with feeling. Among other honours, she has been poet laureate of the United States for three terms (2019–2022) and has received the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, a legacy of her poet laureate project. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board Chair of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and the first artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.

Poet of the Ordinary   •   The American poet Linda Pastan has died at the age of ninety. Reviewing her New and Selected Poems in these pages in 1999 (PNR 130), Ian Tromp wrote, ‘Carnival Evening gives a very good introduction to [her] work. She is an important poet; for the quiet precision of her voice alone, she deserves to be read. Some of her poems of domestic grief - even some of those of matrimonial grievance - are remarkably moving. In her most successful poems, Pastan’s delicate use of form and her careful attention to internal rhythm, her ear well tuned to sounds and to silence, ensure that “language does the best it can”.’ She was a ‘poet of the ordinary’ – and much more.


Neruda’s Death   •   The cause of Pablo Neruda’s death in 1973 was officially given as cancer. Suddenly he has had a second going, with long-familiar stories that he was in fact murdered re-surfacing and gaining some credence. The rumour began in 2011 when his quondam chauffeur alleged that he had been injected in the stomach shortly before he died. He was preparing to go into exile in Mexico, the left-wing government which he supported having been toppled a few days before.

Many men who suffer from prostate cancer have hormone injections in the stomach. This was not a sufficient explanation and the rumour gained traction. A decade-long investigation was initiated. At last, ‘a team of international forensic experts gave a Chilean judge their final report about their analysis of Mr. Neruda’s exhumed remains.’ The mystery remains intact: the forensic experts were not unanimous. Their verdict was ‘maybe, maybe not’.