September 13, 2013 On the Shelf Tolstoy’s Instagram, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Princeton University library has digitized the manuscript of This Side of Paradise and made it available online. What if famous authors did have Instagram accounts? What indeed? Upon her death, an Ohio librarian quietly donated her life savings—one million dollars—to the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Annie Proulx is penning the libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain opera.
September 12, 2013 At Work Gathering the Poems Together: A Conversation with Gregory Orr By Alex Dueben Over four decades, Gregory Orr has established his reputation as a master of the lyric poem. Throughout his career, which also includes books of essays and criticism and an award-winning memoir, Orr has primarily written short free-verse poems, but in the past decade he has turned to writing long sequences comprising of short poems in such books as Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (2005) and How Beautiful the Beloved (2009). His newest, River Inside the River, consists of three such long sequences: “Eden and After” retells the story of Adam and Eve; “The City of Poetry” explores a place “where every poem / Is a house; / And every house, a poem”; and the third, titular sequence explores redemption and language. All are themes that have been present in his work from the beginning. Orr and I spoke recently about the changes in his work. You said that your newest books have been “a pivot toward something,” which is a phrase I like. How would you characterize the shifts in your work since Orpheus and Eurydice (2001)? The first thing that persists is being a lyric poet—that’s going to persist across any change. For me, that means concentration of language in a given moment of time. What I’ve always been interested in is getting the emotional, imaginative, linguistic intensity of lyric but also getting the scope of narrative. There are two phrases that work as central nodes for my imagination. The first one is “gathering the bones together.” That came from a poem in my second book, The Red House (1975), when I was still working on personal material but working in a way that made my poetry less accessible than I might have hoped. The phrase comes from a seven-part sequence that concerns my brother’s death in a hunting accident and my responsibility for it. I was trying to use imagination and language to engage that story, but the central phrase was this kid wandering in a field gathering bones. That’s a pretty grim image. Read More
September 12, 2013 Look This Is Just to Say By Sadie Stein What if William Carlos Williams wrote passive-aggressive notes in your office?
September 12, 2013 In Memoriam Driving Mr. Murray By Tony Scherman The author Albert Murray died, on August 18, after a long illness. He was ninety-seven. Among Murray’s eleven books are the essay collection The Omni-Americans, which infuriated the African-American intellectual establishment in the early seventies; the novel Train Whistle Guitar, likely headed for a classic’s long life; the essay South to a Very Old Place, not just as funny as anything written in last century’s second half, but a searching investigation of black-and-white relations; the jazz treatise Stomping the Blues, another probable classic and a life-changing text for musicians, and The Hero and The Blues, Murray’s bracing exposition of his aesthetic. In the mid to late nineties, writer Tony Scherman spent a good deal of time with Murray; these memories are drawn from that period. In 1996, having read most of Albert Murray’s published books, I decided to write about him. We spoke once or twice to arrange a meeting, and I drove in from the country to the middle-class Harlem apartment complex at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue where Murray, his wife Mozelle, and their daughter, Michelle, had lived since 1962. Ringing the doorbell, I got no response. Finally the chain was unfastened, the door swung open, and it was plain right away why it had taken Albert Murray so long to get to the door; he could hardly walk. Two spinal operations and severe arthritis had cruelly reduced his mobility. He inched along, entirely focused on the task at hand: reaching his destination. His condition must have been maddening, but in my three-hour visit, he never complained. Yet when his speech grew querulous and his patience short, I’m sure that such behavior came not merely from impatience with interlocutors who didn’t think as speedily as he did, but from being in permanent pain. I came to see his big, handsome grin as something designed to show that bad luck and trouble would never set him back. Read More
September 12, 2013 On the Shelf Ye Olde Grease Lightning, and Other News By Sadie Stein San Francisco-based Arion Press—the last full-service letterpress in America—is in pursuit of the perfect book. “Think of such trends in titles as the publishing industry’s version of ombré hair or white Chuck Taylors.” The word land in titles is all the rage for F/W. Let the record show: say syllabuses, not syllabi. “Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago.” Political turmoil has given birth to a new wave of Syrian poetry. In which college students act out scenes from Grease in Old English.
September 11, 2013 Bulletin The Best of Everything By Sadie Stein Every year, the Rona Jaffe Awards recognize the contributions of women writers. This year’s honorees are Tiffany Briere, Ashlee Crews, Margaree Little, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jill Sisson Quinn, and Paris Review contributor Kristin Dombek. Hearty congratulations to all! Read Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg,” from issue 205, here.