Olga Tokarczuk: The Tender Narrator (Nobel Lecture)
I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.
Doug Anderson: One More Morning
Let me say that love will not
let me alone. If it has let you alone, go back
and find it where you hid it under a scrim
of scar-tissue.
Charlotte Turner Smith: Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex
She saw herself as a poet first and foremost, poetry at that period being considered the most exalted form of literature. Scholars now credit her with transforming the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment. Although an important writer and poet, Smith had a difficult family life and died in poverty, largely forgotten.
Michael Simms: Re-reading Christina Rossetti's 'In an Artist's Studio'
The value of Rossetti’s poem lies in both the expert use of the Petrarchan sonnet, a particularly challenging form to master in English, and in the poet’s complex stance on the role of art in creating and re-enforcing images of women.
Jose Padua: Prelude to a Highly Personal Confabulation of Zen and the Art of War
how I could one day live in New York City
with half my mind in a flame-like state
of absolute intensity
S. B. Merrow: A Becoming Place
A pop-up wilderness west of the Piedmont,
folded land of sudden impediments
scored by creeks and runs
Baruch November: Dream 12
They tell me it is okay to dance
to this music as we all should
be very modern religious Jews
who need to bust the most modern moves.
Marco North: After the Circus Left Town
There is nothing like the righteous anger of a true New Yorker.
Sandra McPherson: Richard Milhous
He was ill-favored and uncraved and yet had we known
his secret life we would have perceived his lyingas a form of gentleness…
Video: The Moon’s Milk
Narrated by Tom Waits, the film chronicles the last expedition of Captain Millipede and his crew to harvest the milk seeping from the moon’s craters. (13 minutes)
Michael Simms: The end of civilization as we know it
I want to apologize for walking in
When the dog was licking
Your bald head as you lay
On the couch drinking rum
Straight from the bottle…
Louise Bogan: Musician
Now with great ease, and slow,
The thumb, the finger, the strong
Delicate hand plucks the long
String it was born to know.
Sydney Lea: Passing the Arts and Crafts Fair
There aren’t many like him anymore, the handy, soft-spoken old ones, who still know how to farm, how to raise up a house you can live in, how to still-hunt a whitetail.
Louie Skipper: The Beginning
I keep trying to persuade my father
into a better opinion of me now that he is dead.
