Letters & Essays of the Day
Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof
By Joy Katz
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
In Manhattan, in the lower right-hand corner, I had found a place in which to write, a room near the river, within sight of the cathedral piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was on Peck Slip, a broad street near the fish market, strewn with paper and ripped wood by the time I arrived each morning, but quiet with the work of the day by then over. I wrote in this room with its bare wooden floor and ruined sills for a year—it was 1958—struggling with pages that turned bad overnight.
Gabriele d’Annunzio was born in 1863 in Pescara, a town in the Abruzzi. He died in a villa overlooking Lake Garda in 1938. Ariel. A name he called himself and often signed, sometimes as Gabriel Ariel. In every poet, to some degree, there is this lyric angel and the sheer beauty of words is his domain.
In Bertolt Brecht’s diaries he writes about such things as the essence of art, which he describes as “simplicity, grandeur, and sensitivity,” and its form, coolness.
Looking through the journals that I kept through the heart, so to speak, of my writing life, from 1962 on, I don’t find much of this sort of conclusion.
What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.
There is no use pretending it has been a brilliant season. It hasn’t, and no amount of sentimental recall can disguise the fact. During the holidays there was some glitter in the pale winter sun, but on closer examination it proved to be only the tinsel on a forest of Christmas trees. Not that there haven’t been moments; quite the contrary.
One of the earliest and most informed young opponents of the Vietnam War (The Village of Ben Sue was published in 1967 when he was twenty-three), Jonathan Schell wrote strongly worded articles week after week, year after year, in the “Notes and Comments" section of The New Yorker. His moral but never preachy tone as well as his grasp of the philosophical and historical aspects of political-military conflicts immediately attracted Niccold Tucci, who recognized a kindred spirit.
In bohemian postwar Manhattan, poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) naturally gravitated to painters (Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers) whose work they appreciated on its own terms. Certain poets were lauded for their perceptive, unbiased eye; some painters instinctively sensed a resonant poem. Painter Helen Frankenthaler and poet James Schuyler had such a mutual appreciation. Their run-in during the 1954 Venice Biennale was memorable enough to open Schuyler’s poem “Torcello” (they must have met previously to have recognized each other, though it is unclear when). In any case, they kept circling: Schuyler reviewed Frankenthaler’s shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1957 and at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1960.
I do not know if you intend to pay any attention to unsolicited contributions to New Directions, but I think the enclosed pieces are the kind of work you want for your anthology. If I am wrong, forgive me,
I have this story from the artist Tracy Hicks about his former father-in-law who had a 1960s pickup he’d restored and customized—spent years on the project, loved this truck like nothing else—until one day he backed it over one of his kittens in the driveway. Killed the kitten. Sold the pickup truck. Like that.