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James Fenton

April 13, 2023

This article is about the poet writing in standard English. For the poet writing in Ulster Scots, see James Fenton (Ulster Scots poet). For others, see James Fenton (disambiguation).

James Martin Fenton FRSL FRSA (born 25 April 1949) is an English poet, journalist and literary critic.[1] He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.

James Fenton
Born (1949-04-25) 25 April 1949 (age 73)
Lincoln, England
Alma materMagdalen College, Oxford
Occupation(s)Poet, journalist, literary critic
PartnerDarryl Pinckney
ParentJohn Fenton

Life and career

Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a biblical scholar.[2] He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. in 1970.[3]

While at school Fenton acquired an enthusiasm for the work of W. H. Auden. At Oxford John Fuller, who happened to be writing A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became perhaps the most significant single influence on Fenton's own work.

In his first year at university, Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture.[3] Later published by Fuller's Sycamore Press, it largely concerns the cultural collision in the 19th century between the United States and Japan. It displays in embryo many of the characteristics that define Fenton's later work: technical mastery combined with a fascination with issues that arise from the Western interaction with other cultures. Our Western Furniture was followed by Exempla, notable for its frequent use of unfamiliar words, as well as commonplace words employed in an unfamiliar manner.

While studying at Oxford, Fenton became a close friend of Christopher Hitchens, whose memoir Hitch-22 is dedicated to Fenton and has a chapter on their friendship. Hitchens praised Fenton's extraordinary talent, stating that he too believed him to be the greatest poet of his generation. He also expounded on Fenton's modesty, describing him as infinitely more mature than himself and Martin Amis. Fenton and Hitchens shared a house together in their third year, and continued to be close friends until Hitchens's death. Fenton read his poem 'For Andrew Wood' at the Vanity Fair Hitchens memorial service.

His first collection, Terminal Moraine (1972) won a Gregory Award.[3] With the proceeds he traveled to East Asia, where he wrote of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia, which presaged the rise of Pol Pot. The Memory of War (1982) ensured his reputation as one of the greatest war poets of his time.[3]

Fenton returned to London in 1976. He was political correspondent of the New Statesman, where he worked alongside Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis.[3] He became the Assistant Literary Editor in 1971, and Editorial Assistant in 1972.[4] Earlier in his journalistic career, like Hitchens, he had written for Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of the British trotskyist group then known as the International Socialists.[5] Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places (1988).[6][7][8] The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton's second thoughts about revolutionary socialism.[9]

In 1983, Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O'Hanlon to Borneo. A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo.

Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984. He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994, a post he held till 1999.[4] He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007. The American composer Charles Wuorinen set several of his poems to music, and Fenton served as librettist for Wuorinen's opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2001, premiered in 2004), based on Salman Rushdie's novel.

Fenton has said: "The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." In response to criticisms of his comparatively slim Selected Poems (2006), he warned against the notion of poets churning out poetry in a regular, automated fashion.

Fenton has been a frequent contributor to The Guardian,[10] The Independent and The New York Review of Books.[11] He also writes the head column in the editorials of each Friday's Evening Standard.[12] In 2007, he appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday.[13]

Fenton's partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992).[14]

In February 2019, The Guardian published an article[15] criticising Fenton for his earlier stance on the conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually abusing five minors.[16] The 2019 article was by one of the victims of King's repeated abuse; Fenton's earlier article concentrated entirely on the 'professional catastrophe' that King and to a lesser extent his record label would suffer, and made no mention of the harm to the boys, who were talented musicians being mentored by King.[17]

Musical theatre influence

Fenton has been influenced in his writing by musical theatre, as evidenced in "Here Come the Drum Majorettes" from Out of Danger:

"Gleb meet Glubb.
Glubb meet Glob.
God that's glum, that glib Glob dig.
'Dig that bog!'
'Frag that frog.'
Stap that chap, he snuck that cig.'"[18]

He was the original English librettist for the musical of Les Misérables but Cameron Mackintosh, finding his lyrics uninvolving, replaced him with Herbert Kretzmer; Kretzmer credited Fenton with creating the general structure of the adaptation.[19] He nonetheless received credit for "additional lyrics" and considerable royalties.[20]

Awards and honours

Books

  • 1968: Our Western Furniture, poetry[4]
  • 1969: Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle, poetry[4]
  • 1972: Terminal Moraine[4]
  • 1978: A Vacant Possession, TNR Publications[4]
  • 1980: A German Requiem: A Poem, Salamander Press, a pamphlet[4]
  • 1981: Dead Soldiers, Sycamore Press[4]
  • 1982: The Memory of War: Poems 1968–1982, Salamander Press, 1982, ISBN 978-0-907540-39-7[4]
  • 1984: Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 Random House, 1984, ISBN 978-0-394-53360-5 These poems combined with those from The Memory of War made up the Penguin volume, The Memory of War and Children in Exile; published in the United States as Children in Exile; Salamander Press
  • 1983: You Were Marvellous, selected theatre reviews published 1979–1981[4]
  • 1986: The Snap Revolution
  • 1987: Partingtime Hall, co-author with John Fuller, Viking / Salamander Press, comical poems[4]
  • 1988: All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim, reportage; Viking; Atlantic Monthly Press (1988); reissued with a new introduction by Granta (2005)[4]
  • 1989: Manila Envelope, self-published book of poems[4]
  • 1994: Out of Danger, Fenton considers this his second collection of poems. It contains Manila Envelope and later poems; Penguin; Farrar Straus Giroux; winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry[4]
  • 1998: Leonardo's Nephew, art essays from The New York Review of Books[4]
  • 2001: The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-19-818707-3[4]
  • 2001: A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed Viking / Farrar, Straus and Giroux[4]
  • 2002: (As editor) An introduction to English poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, ISBN 978-0-374-10464-1[4]
  • 2003: The Love Bomb, verse written as a libretto for a composer who rejected it; Penguin / Faber and Faber[4]
  • 2006: School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (2006), a history[4]
  • 2006: Selected Poems, Penguin[4]
  • 2006: (As editor) The New Faber Book of Love Poems
  • 2012: Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011
  • 2012: The Orphan of Zhao, adaptation of the classic Chinese play for the Royal Shakespeare Company

See also

References

  1. ^ Jenkins, David (18 November 2007). "James Fenton: 21st century renaissance man". The Telegraph. London. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  2. ^ "Canon John Fenton". The Telegraph. London. 8 January 2009. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Professor James Fenton". British Council Literature. British Council. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u "James Fenton Website: Books Written by James Fenton". Jamesfenton.com. 10 March 2012. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  5. ^ Campion, Peter. "James Fenton". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  6. ^ . Asiabythebook.thingsasian.com. 16 June 2008. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  7. ^ Barbara Korte Represented Reporters: Images of War Correspondents in Memoirs and ... 2009 - Page 17 "The poet James Fenton, for instance, was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the war. The reminiscences of his experiences in Vietnam, which form a part of All the Wrong Places, declare a literary intent that ..."
  8. ^ Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing, 2008, page 159 "... at the beginning of a journey that would take him to the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, James Fenton glanced at the ... Fenton in the summer of 1973 was setting out on a journey to see and write about a war in Asia.
  9. ^ The Listener - Volume 121 - 1989 Page 33 "As a revolutionary socialist, Fenton, in 1975, had no illusions about the Stalinist character of Vietnamese Communism but held the ... Am I wrong, or is All the Wrong Places also Fenton's journey to the end of the revolutionary socialist night"
  10. ^ "James Fenton". The Guardian. London. 11 June 2008. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  11. ^ "James Fenton". New York Review of Books.
  12. ^ . Thisislondon.co.uk. Archived from the original on 5 September 2011. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  13. ^ . London: News.independent.co.uk. 2 July 2006. Archived from the original on 7 January 2008. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  14. ^ David Jenkins 12:17AM GMT 18 November 2007 (18 November 2007). "James Fenton: 21st century renaissance man". The Telegraph. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
  15. ^ Yarwood, Tom (1 February 2019). "'I couldn't deal with it, it tore me apart': surviving child sexual abuse". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 1 February 2019.
  16. ^ Fenton, James (16 June 2007). "Facing the music". The Guardian. Retrieved 31 August 2016.
  17. ^ Westphal, Matthew (4 June 2007). "Conductor Robert King Convicted of Abusing Teenage Boys". Playbill Arts. Retrieved 21 February 2015.
  18. ^ Quoted in Neil Corcoran (ed.), Do You, Mr Jones? (2002), pp. 185–86.
  19. ^ Tims, Anna (19 February 2013). "How we made Les Misérables". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  20. ^ Murphy, Hayden. "Poet who banks on Les Miserables". The Herald. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  21. ^ Brown, Mark (June 2015). "Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi named co-winner of PEN Pinter prize". TheGuardian.com. Retrieved 16 June 2015.

Sources

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to James Fenton.
  • Official website  
  • Poetry Foundation profile and poems
  • Professor James Fenton at British Council: Literature

April 13, 2023
james, fenton, this, article, about, poet, writing, standard, english, poet, writing, ulster, scots, ulster, scots, poet, others, disambiguation, james, martin, fenton, frsl, frsa, born, april, 1949, english, poet, journalist, literary, critic, former, oxford,. This article is about the poet writing in standard English For the poet writing in Ulster Scots see James Fenton Ulster Scots poet For others see James Fenton disambiguation James Martin Fenton FRSL FRSA born 25 April 1949 is an English poet journalist and literary critic 1 He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry James FentonBorn 1949 04 25 25 April 1949 age 73 Lincoln EnglandAlma materMagdalen College OxfordOccupation s Poet journalist literary criticPartnerDarryl PinckneyParentJohn Fenton Contents 1 Life and career 1 1 Musical theatre influence 2 Awards and honours 3 Books 4 See also 5 References 6 Sources 7 External linksLife and career EditBorn in Lincoln Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire the son of Canon John Fenton a biblical scholar 2 He was educated at the Durham Choristers School Repton and Magdalen College Oxford He graduated with a B A in 1970 3 While at school Fenton acquired an enthusiasm for the work of W H Auden At Oxford John Fuller who happened to be writing A Reader s Guide to W H Auden at the time further encouraged that enthusiasm Auden became perhaps the most significant single influence on Fenton s own work In his first year at university Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture 3 Later published by Fuller s Sycamore Press it largely concerns the cultural collision in the 19th century between the United States and Japan It displays in embryo many of the characteristics that define Fenton s later work technical mastery combined with a fascination with issues that arise from the Western interaction with other cultures Our Western Furniture was followed by Exempla notable for its frequent use of unfamiliar words as well as commonplace words employed in an unfamiliar manner While studying at Oxford Fenton became a close friend of Christopher Hitchens whose memoir Hitch 22 is dedicated to Fenton and has a chapter on their friendship Hitchens praised Fenton s extraordinary talent stating that he too believed him to be the greatest poet of his generation He also expounded on Fenton s modesty describing him as infinitely more mature than himself and Martin Amis Fenton and Hitchens shared a house together in their third year and continued to be close friends until Hitchens s death Fenton read his poem For Andrew Wood at the Vanity Fair Hitchens memorial service His first collection Terminal Moraine 1972 won a Gregory Award 3 With the proceeds he traveled to East Asia where he wrote of the U S withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia which presaged the rise of Pol Pot The Memory of War 1982 ensured his reputation as one of the greatest war poets of his time 3 Fenton returned to London in 1976 He was political correspondent of the New Statesman where he worked alongside Christopher Hitchens Julian Barnes and Martin Amis 3 He became the Assistant Literary Editor in 1971 and Editorial Assistant in 1972 4 Earlier in his journalistic career like Hitchens he had written for Socialist Worker the weekly paper of the British trotskyist group then known as the International Socialists 5 Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War which ended in 1975 His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places 1988 6 7 8 The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton s second thoughts about revolutionary socialism 9 In 1983 Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O Hanlon to Borneo A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile Poems 1968 1984 He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994 a post he held till 1999 4 He was awarded the Queen s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007 The American composer Charles Wuorinen set several of his poems to music and Fenton served as librettist for Wuorinen s opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories 2001 premiered in 2004 based on Salman Rushdie s novel Fenton has said The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft You compose first then you listen for the reverberation In response to criticisms of his comparatively slim Selected Poems 2006 he warned against the notion of poets churning out poetry in a regular automated fashion Fenton has been a frequent contributor to The Guardian 10 The Independent and The New York Review of Books 11 He also writes the head column in the editorials of each Friday s Evening Standard 12 In 2007 he appeared in a list of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain published by The Independent on Sunday 13 Fenton s partner is Darryl Pinckney the prize winning novelist playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton 1992 14 In February 2019 The Guardian published an article 15 criticising Fenton for his earlier stance on the conductor Robert King who was convicted of sexually abusing five minors 16 The 2019 article was by one of the victims of King s repeated abuse Fenton s earlier article concentrated entirely on the professional catastrophe that King and to a lesser extent his record label would suffer and made no mention of the harm to the boys who were talented musicians being mentored by King 17 Musical theatre influence Edit Fenton has been influenced in his writing by musical theatre as evidenced in Here Come the Drum Majorettes from Out of Danger Gleb meet Glubb Glubb meet Glob God that s glum that glib Glob dig Dig that bog Frag that frog Stap that chap he snuck that cig 18 He was the original English librettist for the musical of Les Miserables but Cameron Mackintosh finding his lyrics uninvolving replaced him with Herbert Kretzmer Kretzmer credited Fenton with creating the general structure of the adaptation 19 He nonetheless received credit for additional lyrics and considerable royalties 20 Awards and honours Edit1968 Newdigate Prize 1971 Eric Gregory Award 1981 Southern Arts Literature Award for Poetry 1983 Fellowship of The Royal Society of Literature 1984 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 1994 Oxford Professor of Poetry 1994 Whitbread Prize for Poetry for Out of Danger 1999 Honorary Fellowship of Magdalen College Oxford 2003 Fellowship of The Royal Society of Arts 2007 Queen s Gold Medal for Poetry 2015 PEN Pinter Prize Share With Raif Badawi 21 Books Edit1968 Our Western Furniture poetry 4 1969 Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle poetry 4 1972 Terminal Moraine 4 1978 A Vacant Possession TNR Publications 4 1980 A German Requiem A Poem Salamander Press a pamphlet 4 1981 Dead Soldiers Sycamore Press 4 1982 The Memory of War Poems 1968 1982 Salamander Press 1982 ISBN 978 0 907540 39 7 4 1984 Children in Exile Poems 1968 1984 Random House 1984 ISBN 978 0 394 53360 5 These poems combined with those from The Memory of War made up the Penguin volume The Memory of War and Children in Exile published in the United States as Children in Exile Salamander Press 1983 You Were Marvellous selected theatre reviews published 1979 1981 4 1986 The Snap Revolution 1987 Partingtime Hall co author with John Fuller Viking Salamander Press comical poems 4 1988 All the Wrong Places Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim reportage Viking Atlantic Monthly Press 1988 reissued with a new introduction by Granta 2005 4 1989 Manila Envelope self published book of poems 4 1994 Out of Danger Fenton considers this his second collection of poems It contains Manila Envelope and later poems Penguin Farrar Straus Giroux winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry 4 1998 Leonardo s Nephew art essays from The New York Review of Books 4 2001 The Strength of Poetry Oxford Lectures Oxford University Press 2001 ISBN 978 0 19 818707 3 4 2001 A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed Viking Farrar Straus and Giroux 4 2002 As editor An introduction to English poetry Farrar Straus and Giroux 2002 ISBN 978 0 374 10464 1 4 2003 The Love Bomb verse written as a libretto for a composer who rejected it Penguin Faber and Faber 4 2006 School of Genius A History of the Royal Academy of Arts 2006 a history 4 2006 Selected Poems Penguin 4 2006 As editor The New Faber Book of Love Poems 2012 Yellow Tulips Poems 1968 2011 2012 The Orphan of Zhao adaptation of the classic Chinese play for the Royal Shakespeare CompanySee also EditAndrew Motion Al Alvarez Beat poet Cole Porter Ira GershwinReferences Edit Jenkins David 18 November 2007 James Fenton 21st century renaissance man The Telegraph London Retrieved 29 November 2013 Canon John Fenton The Telegraph London 8 January 2009 Retrieved 29 November 2013 a b c d e Professor James Fenton British Council Literature British Council Retrieved 14 January 2016 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u James Fenton Website Books Written by James Fenton Jamesfenton com 10 March 2012 Retrieved 14 January 2016 Campion Peter James Fenton The Poetry Foundation Retrieved 29 November 2013 All the Wrong Places Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim by James Fenton Atlantic Monthly Press Asia by the Book Asiabythebook thingsasian com 16 June 2008 Archived from the original on 4 October 2013 Retrieved 29 November 2013 Barbara Korte Represented Reporters Images of War Correspondents in Memoirs and 2009 Page 17 The poet James Fenton for instance was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the war The reminiscences of his experiences in Vietnam which form a part of All the Wrong Places declare a literary intent that Douglas Kerr Eastern Figures Orient and Empire in British Writing 2008 page 159 at the beginning of a journey that would take him to the war in Vietnam and Cambodia James Fenton glanced at the Fenton in the summer of 1973 was setting out on a journey to see and write about a war in Asia The Listener Volume 121 1989 Page 33 As a revolutionary socialist Fenton in 1975 had no illusions about the Stalinist character of Vietnamese Communism but held the Am I wrong or is All the Wrong Places also Fenton s journey to the end of the revolutionary socialist night James Fenton The Guardian London 11 June 2008 Retrieved 29 November 2013 James Fenton New York Review of Books James Fenton London Evening Standard Thisislondon co uk Archived from the original on 5 September 2011 Retrieved 29 November 2013 Gay Power The pink list This Britain UK The Independent London News independent co uk 2 July 2006 Archived from the original on 7 January 2008 Retrieved 29 November 2013 David Jenkins 12 17AM GMT 18 November 2007 18 November 2007 James Fenton 21st century renaissance man The Telegraph Retrieved 9 December 2016 Yarwood Tom 1 February 2019 I couldn t deal with it it tore me apart surviving child sexual abuse The Guardian ISSN 0261 3077 Retrieved 1 February 2019 Fenton James 16 June 2007 Facing the music The Guardian Retrieved 31 August 2016 Westphal Matthew 4 June 2007 Conductor Robert King Convicted of Abusing Teenage Boys Playbill Arts Retrieved 21 February 2015 Quoted in Neil Corcoran ed Do You Mr Jones 2002 pp 185 86 Tims Anna 19 February 2013 How we made Les Miserables The Guardian Retrieved 13 June 2017 Murphy Hayden Poet who banks on Les Miserables The Herald Retrieved 13 June 2017 Brown Mark June 2015 Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi named co winner of PEN Pinter prize TheGuardian com Retrieved 16 June 2015 Sources EditCreswell Robyn Autumn 2012 James Fenton The Art of Poetry No 96 The Paris Review Fall 2012 202 Gioia Dana The Rise of James Fenton Archived 5 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine The Dark Horse No 8 Autumn 1999 Hulse Michael The Poetry of James Fenton The Antigonish Review Vol 58 pp 93 102 1984 Kerr Douglas Orientations James Fenton and Indochina Contemporary Literature Vol 35 No 3 Autumn 1994 pp 476 91External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to James Fenton Official website Poetry Foundation profile and poems Professor James Fenton at British Council Literature The Poetry Archive Profile and poems written and audio Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title James Fenton amp oldid 1148997525, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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