Who’d known about soybean stew or what
A camshaft did or how asparagus grew?
Even the much-mowed grass was new to those
Who’d wandered once where easy-listening remotely
Shilled the subconscious, floors were buffed daily,
And clerks grimaced their way to coffee breaks.
The precise anonymity of affluence seemed,
If not deadly, then less-than-alive.
A new age was wanted—being an old age most
Were glad to see go by—yet a new age now.
If it had been, as the grandfolks recalled, too cruel,
Yet that had been its beauty too.
If such a life were now not necessity
But something freely fashioned, perhaps
Such freedom could stanch aggrievement and seed
The ultimate back-to-the-land conspiracy.
Off they went—emboldened, generous, and unversed.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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