Skip to main content

summer reading


Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990
Herta Mueller, The Land of Green Plums
Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches
Albert Camus, The Plague
Don Delillo, White Noise
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected FictionsJohn Ashbery, Planisphere*
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air
Shakespeare, The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February, March, April reading

Crystallography , Christian Bok Glass, Irony, and God , Anne Carson The Dolphin  and Day by Day  (selections), Robert Lowell Dolls , Claire Millikin Burying the Mountain , Shangyang Fang In the Language of My Captor , Shane McCrae frank: sonnets , Diane Seuss All the Flowers Kneeling , Paul Tran Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream , Juan Felipe Herrera Ajax , Sophocles Trojan Women , Euripides The Bacchae , Euripides (from 2021; listed now) Iphigenia in Aulis , Euripides (from 2021; listed now) Orestes , Euripides Alceste , Euripides Macbeth , Shakespeare Coriolanus , Shakespeare (from 2021; listed now) Pericles , Shakespeare (from 2021; listed now)
Post a Comment
Read more

greatness

The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.) The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work
1 comment
Read more

summer reading (Richard Hugo)

Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road . I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks . I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.) Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars don't glitter, arrogant as moons. When did we start? Light-years ago. Why did we come? No matter. We are not returning to that world of ditch and strain, the research terms: cryogenic fuels, free radicals, plasma jets, coordinated fusion. Only the last, in all this void, applies. A universe is fusing in our eyes.
1 comment
Read more