[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
poetry
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?
With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available. Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Thoughts on a Gentrifying San Francisco, In Honor of His 96th Birthday
Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry
How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry
How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A ’60s Poet, Mixing Images of Asia and Africa with Bohemian London
[Rosemary] Tonks’s first poetry collection, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, was published in 1963; her second and final one, Iliad of Broken Sentences, in 1967. She interweaves images of her years in Asia and Africa with snapshots of bohemian London: desert oases and mirages, jazz and cocktails. True to the first collection’s title, the poems carry a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Philip Levine’s Advice for ‘Making It’ as a Writer
“Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it?”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
How To Win a Million Dollars Writing Poetry in Abu Dhabi
As poetry readings go, the setting was unique. The Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi boasted light-up floors, backdrop projections and a light show of a kind that would be familiar to fans of Pop Idol, X Factor or America’s Got Talent. Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in […]