Search Results for: poetry

Yes, All Women: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

This week, a lot happened. A misogynist went on a violent rampage. #YesAllWomen took off on Twitter. Dr. Maya Angelou, feminist author and all-around genius (and don’t get me started on her doctor honorary), died at 86 years old. This week, I present a long list of essays, articles and interviews written by women. Many are about women, too. Some are lighthearted; others reflect on the events of the past week. I included a variety of subjects to honor those who might be triggered by the deadly violence of last week’s shooting, because women do not only write in the wake of tragedy—we write, we exist, for all time. So in this list there is reflection and humor; there are books and music and religion; there are all kinds of stories, fiction and non. Read what you need. Engage or escape.

1. “Summer in the City.” (Emma Aylor, May 2014)

Aylor, author of Twos, uses #YesAllWomen to write about about the sexual harassment she experienced as she researched her dissertation on the work of Wallace Stevens.

2. “In Relief of Silence and Burden.” (Roxane Gay, May 2014)

The author of An Untamed State and critically acclaimed badass gives her “testimony … so we can relieve ourselves of silence and burden” in the vein of #YesAllWomen, sharing stories of harassment, abuse and more.

3. “Not All Women: A Reflection on Being a Musician and Female.” (Allison Crutchfield, Impose Magazine, May 2014)

A wide range of female musicians react to a depressingly misogynistic article in Noisey about how to tour in a dude-dominated band. They share what they’ve learned on the road, emphasizing self-care, communication with bandmates, and doing what you need to do to feel safe and be your best self.

Read more…

On the Great Silk Road

Longreads Pick

Wracked with survivor’s guilt after a tragic car accident, a young woman finds herself looking for meaning in Uzbekistan:

One of the few Peace Corps pamphlets I ever read came to my home in Arizona about three weeks before my departure to Uzbekistan. I don’t think I read all the way through, but it told me that I should only bring what I could carry, so I arrived in Philadelphia for a three-day staging event before I would leave the country for two years with relatively few belongings. “What You Should Know About Uzbekistan” said that Uzbekistan got very cold in the winter, it being one of two doubly landlocked countries, the other being Liechtenstein, causing the seasons to be very extreme, with winters often below freezing and summers exceeding 100 degrees. But the hot Arizona summer of 2003 made me regard the prospect of cold weather as a down-right lie: I didn’t bring boots, nor a hat nor a scarf. I didn’t even bring a pair of jeans because the pamphlet said that Uzbek women wore skirts for daily attire, and I wanted to be just like the Uzbeks. I did, however, bring a laptop computer to document bits and pieces of my life (which I didn’t use until I got over my fear of electrical surges about four months into my service). Besides that, I had one traveling backpack and one suitcase, half of which contained books, mostly poetry books: Dunn’s Between Angels, Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda, and the 5 pound, 2000 page Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Source: The Smart Set
Published: Jul 2, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,626 words)

The 2014 National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

The American Society of Magazine Editors handed out its 2014 National Magazine Awards Thursday night, with Fast CompanyNew York magazine, Inc., Poetry magazine and Modern Farmer all taking home trophies. Boston Magazine’s stirring cover image (above) following the Boston Marathon bombings was named ASME’s Cover of the Year.

Below is a reading list featuring some of the stories honored Thursday night. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Jazz's Influence on the Beat Generation

These principal writers in various ways all tried to capture something of the flavor of jazz. Certainly Ginsberg and Kerouac. Kerouac wanted to write lines of prose or poetry that captured something of, say, the saxophonist art. He was interested in extemporization; he was interested in improvisation. And when he heard figures like Lester Young, Thelonius Monk, and so on, he had this idea that if he could write lines that felt like the one long breath of an improvising saxophonist, he was capturing something very special.

Beat scholar Simon Warner on WBEZ’s Sound Opinions podcast, talking about jazz’s influence on the writers of the Beat Generation. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: exquisitur, Flickr

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Will You Love Me Forever?

I left that place still believing in pleasure, but where love was concerned, I had become as atheistic as a mathematician. Two months later, I was sitting alongside that exquisite woman, in her boudoir, on her divan. I held one of her hands clasped in my own, and such lovely hands they were; we were scaling the Alps of emotion, picking the prettiest flowers, pulling the petals from daisies (one always ends up pulling the petals from daisies, even in a drawing room, without a daisy in sight). At the peak of tenderness, when one is most in love, love is so aware of its fleetingness that each lover feels an imperious need to ask, ‘Do you love me? Will you love me forever?’ I seized that elegiac moment, so warm, so florid, so radiant, to make her tell her most wonderful lies, in that glittering language of exquisite poetry and purple prose peculiar to love.

—From The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Jordan Stump. Read more fiction.

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Photo: 63794459@N07, Flickr

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In Her Own Words: Being Maxine Kumin

I was a closet poet always. I didn’t stop writing poetry just because Wallace Stegner told me I was a terrible poet. I went underground.

I had exempted English A at Harvard, which was a big mistake. Everybody should take it. They bucked me up to a high-level class in creative writing. It was all juniors and seniors, and I was the only freshman. I was 17 and Wallace Stegner was maybe all of 23 when I gave him a sheaf of poems. They were sonnets, all in iambic pentameter, but they were terribly sentimental and romantic. And he wrote at the top, “Say it with flowers, but for God sakes don’t write any more poems about it.”

After that, I was writing serious poems in the closet, but I was writing light verse for the slicks. For $3.95 I bought this book by Richard Armour called Writing Light Verse. I took it all very seriously, and by golly I started selling all over the place – Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Baby Talk, New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, even the Wall Street Journal. I learned some things writing light verse. I learned how important closure is, and that has guided me ever since.

Maxine Kumin (1925-2014), as quoted in the Concord Monitor. Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 and  served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1981-1982. She passed away Thursday, at the age of 88. Some of Kumin’s work can be found at the Poetry Foundation. For further reading from the Longreads archive: 5 Great Stories on the Lives of the Poets.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

Why Teenage Girls Still Love Sylvia Plath

Longreads Pick

Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry:

Twenty-first-century teens’ belief that they’ve found a kindred outsider in Plath is evident in the thousands of Internet sites and Web logs that now celebrate the poet. Some girls dub their journals “bell jar” or “ladylazarus.” On plathonline.com, girls with e-mail addresses like sylviaaplath, plath2002 and LuvlySylviaPlath feel that the poet speaks the truth and speaks it only to them.

Published: Nov 1, 2003
Length: 7 minutes (1,770 words)

Karma Bum

Longreads Pick

What It’s Like To Be 9 Years Old and Playing Video Games with Allen Ginsberg:

The following night, after Ginsberg’s poetry reading (why would I want to go to that?) a group of students eager for him to impart morsels of omniscience were forced to wait outside my room while we played video games on my Atari 2600—I destroyed Ginsberg at Frogger, but he eviscerated me on Combat. In a lame attempt at armistice he explained something about angles of trajectory and mathematics, but I went supervoid. He said he’d never played Combat before, but nobody is above suspicion.

Published: Jan 4, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,674 words)