February 2012
31 posts
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Kenneth Koch's Birthday
Is today, apparently.
Koch with Frank O’Hara
Here’s an interview between Koch and John Ashbery that’s worth reading if your browser can handle the holocaust of links and images clogging the site’s right rail.
K/A also spend a bit of time talking about “forgetting” in their writing process:
KK: Could you go back now and explain what you felt when you...
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Failure
Jennifer Moore considers “poetry and failure” in the works of Tao Lin, Dorothea Lasky and others, while using the criticism of Christian Bök - specifically his wonderful “Writing and Failure” essay - to prop up her academic exercizing.
Thus, Christian Bök in “Writing and Failure” discusses what sorts of possibilities are left for innovative poets presented with what...
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"I love my wife. My wife is dead"
From Letters of Note, Richard Feynman’s letter to his wife, Arline Greenbaum, who passed away at 25 years old from tuberculosis.
The letter wasn’t opened until after Feynman died in 1988. I feel no compunction about quoting this in its entirety.
October 17, 1946 D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you...
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And they played ping pong to while away the...
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Andrew Lytle's House
Lytle, to the far left. Eudora Welty sits beside him.
So The Paris Review is quite good about leaving up pieces in their entirety.
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s piece about his time spent lodging with perhaps the last living link to the Confederacy, writer and Agrarian-er Andrew Lytle appears here.
TheSouth . . . I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can. Merely to hear...
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Polish Poets
Or, at least three of them — Milosz, Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska are considered in this New Republic piece following the Szymborska’s death:
But communism alone cannot explain this poetic flowering. With the possible exception of the Soviet Union (with a population at least five times greater than Poland’s), no other Eastern bloc country produced a similar body of literature....
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John Jeremiah Sullivan
Considered in the LARB.
Yes, I know. You can’t escape someone on the internet having something laudatory to say about John Jeremiah Sullivan John Jeremiah Sullivan John Jeremiah Sullivan, but it’s nice because the author, Michael Goetzman, actually goes to the trouble to read Sullivan’s first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriters Son —
There, he offers up a...
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The King Of Marvin Gardens
“Tell me what you’re so upset about. I’ll tell you whether or not it’s real”
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Dora Malech
“Here Name Your”
My friend spends all summer mending fence for the elk to blunder back down and the cows to drag the wires and the snow to sit and sag on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle. The next year he picks up his pliers and fixes the odds all over again. There are no grownups, and I think that all of us children...
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Ben Gazzara
Has passed on.
Here he is “siding with the money” on a particularly weird and raucous Dick Cavett episode.
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Denis Johnson
Denis Jonhson’s notes forTrain Dreams.
Via this fantastic site, which I’ll no doubt be reblogging ad nauseum.
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Afterschool
Afterschool, Antonio Campos, 2008.