January 2007

  • true
    • by Bud Parr on 01/31/07 (3 comments)
  • Ashbery
    • by Bud Parr on 01/19/07 (0 comments)
  • Finally
    • by Bud Parr on 01/18/07 (2 comments)
  • Stunning
    • by Bud Parr on 01/17/07 (0 comments)

On Deck +

Contributors +

I am absolutely loving Reginald Shepherd’s blog since discovering it only a few days ago. See today’s post on Alvin Feinman or the past couple of posts on “difficult poetry.”

Is Richard Nash the most interviewed guy in publishing? Here he is at 3A.M. Magazine. This is the sort of thing guidance counselors should give to kids searching for career direction. No, maybe not.

Anne says of Tan Dun’s opera The First Emperor: “By the end, I was totally moved.” What more do you need? How about this: “I did not fidget”



I once saw Tan Dun conduct his piece Snow in June, which he had written for friends who died in Tiananmen Square. That too was moving and I’ve been a fan since.

This event at Housing Works Used Book Cafe (via Lauren at Mauds): Anne Carson’s “Possesive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture on pronouns in the form of fifteen sonnets” This very special performance features Anne Carson reading her poetry, accompanied by choreography and dance by Julie Cunningham, Rashaun Mitchell and Andrea Weber, members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.” 7:00pm $10.

“There is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands…. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.”



Robert Frost quoted in “Dark Darker Darkest” The New Republic, Jan. 16

“To be poet laureate you have to have a program for spreading the word of poetry. I’m just willing to let it spread by itself.”

NYTimes

It seems POTUS has become a literary trendsetter: George Bush’s Savage War of Peace at NYR Books.

Jamelah at Litkicks has some things to say about the Zadie Smith essay in the Guardian last weekend. 

I love this sort of thing: Zadie Smith on the elusiveness of the great novel:

“A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar.”

Of Vikram Chandra’s just released “Sacred Games,” Bob Gray said “Then something magical happened. On my train ride home, I slipped the ARC out of its golden box and read a few pages. Then a few pages more…and I began to wonder if 900 pages would be enough.”



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