92Y's Read By: Recent Episodes
92Y Unterberg Poetry Center
A new podcast where today’s finest writers read the work that matters to them—from their homes, to yours. Produced and commissioned by the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center, a home for live readings of literature for over 80 years.
Sophie Herron on their selection:
Last July, I read John McPhee’s Basin and Range for the first time and was immediately captured by the slim volume—its structure, its fluid sentences, the breadth and depth of its probity and its wry and ever-present humor. The titular basin and range is an area between Utah and California, but the book is as much about geology itself, both the movement of rock and the movement of minds that have studied it. In 1785, a Scottish geologist, James Hutton, presented to the Royal Society a new theory: that landmasses were formed over an indescribable amount of time, and that the evidence of these changes were in the different formations of rocks—where one era of rock met another. I’ve chosen to read McPhee’s accounting of Hutton’s search for this geological evidence; a narrative in which McPhee coins the term “deep time,”—a piece of history writing which, it seems to me, enfolds the transcendent experience of humanity’s tiny place in time and, concurrently, love for the work of discovery, communication, and of changing minds. It has stayed with me in the moments of excruciating ephemerality and eternity in the past year. Sometimes both at once. I hope, as a final episode for Read By, it serves for you, also, as a microscope that explodes.
Basin and Range, by John McPhee
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Kenzie Allen on her selection:
Growing up, I spent precious time each summer on a fire lookout, Sand Mountain, in the Oregon Cascades, and I still return there to volunteer with my father, as happened just last week. Each time I read “deer crowd up to see the lamp,” and “pancakes every morning of the world,” I’m transported back to the mountains, even (and especially) when I’m sitting on the fire lookout itself. For Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and for me, these places invite philosophy and meditation, and an openness to wonder, which I hope Whalen’s “Sourdough Mountain Lookout” can inspire for others.
"Sourdough Mountain Lookout," by Philip Whalen
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Alexandra Zuckerman on her selection:
In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, it is as if, in Elaine Scarry’s view, the external world has the power to tumultuously expose to us our errors of judgment; wrong beliefs cannot merely be held. Her small anecdote about a palm tree that compels her to experience “being in error” about beauty has stayed with me through the years. She argues that such small experiences guide our instinct to be just. Her palm, its leaves “barely moving, just opening and closing slightly as though breathing,” reveals to her its true beauty. She had denied it even the right to be a tree. On Beauty and Being Just is grounding and gives me hope when it is hard to see where true change comes from.
On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Mag Gabbert on her selection:
I read Kathryn Nuernberger's essay "A Thin Blue Line," which comes from her wonderful collection of essayettes, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. I return to these pieces often because they give me new ideas about limits—what can happen to a poem if it's allowed just a little more room to breathe, if those braces or splints that keep it packed into tight lines and stanzas are taken off? And: what happens to prose when it's distilled down to marrow? "A Thin Blue Line" somehow accomplishes both of these, and it does so while weaving Nuernberger's personal narrative together with bits of research material and shreds of fairy tale. To me, this piece strikes the perfect note between genres; it isn't hybrid in the sense that it checks none of the boxes, but because it checks all of them. And this is the kind of work I turn to when I need to reimagine the boundaries of my own relationship with language, to see how I might shape it differently and ask it to function in new ways.
Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, by Kathryn Nuernberger
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Ina Cariño on her selection:
Aracelis Girmay’s “You are Who I Love,” first published in 2017, is still so, so needed today. The repetition of the title throughout the poem gives it a musicality that mimics the chants of those who march in the streets. I chose this poem because it calls to and speaks for all of us: those who fight for what is dear to them, those who heal and need healing, and those who give and give even when no one is looking. It’s my hope that this poem and poems like this can be not just rallying cries for social justice, but also love songs to ourselves and to each other.
the black maria, by Aracelis Girmay:
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Tracie Morris on her selection:
I have the great pleasure of sharing small excerpts from Brent Hayes Edwards’ wonderful book, Epistrophies. In it, I repeat a quote from the legendary Mary Lou Williams to introduce Edward’s commentary on Sun Ra at the dawn of the Space Age.
Epistrophies, by Brent Hayes Edwards
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Rowan Ricardo Phillips on his selection:
The poem "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison'' was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the summer of 1797. He had been set to journey the Quantocks with a group of friends but burned his foot in an accident and thus was left behind, under a lime tree in the garden of a friend's home, while others––including William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb (to whom the poem is addressed)––embarked on the anticipated journey without him. Coleridge's poem nevertheless travels with them ("Beneath the wide wide Heaven") and in doing so makes something from nothing, pleasure from pain, and love from loneliness. I love the poem's own subtle journey from day to night unbowed by the encroaching dark. In light of recent times, Coleridge's dream of social connection from his position of isolation feels fitting and is a beautiful example of poetry's unique imaginative power.
“This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Sheila Heti on her selection:
I chose a chapter from Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which he wrote between 1934 and 1941. It is one of the most fascinating and vivid descriptions I have ever read—not only of what Victorian manners and morals were like, but what it feels like to have lived through history, in particular the great political and social upheavals that occurred between his birth in Vienna in 1881 and his death in 1942. He gave his publisher the typewritten manuscript of this memoir the day before he and his wife died, by suicide. Zwieg grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, and this is the world he is writing about. I found in these pages one of the greatest and most fascinating and sensitive eyewitness accounts of history I have ever read. I love the details. I love the feeling that I am seeing the truth about another world with such intimacy. This chapter has stayed with me since I first encountered it years ago. I am at about the age he was when he wrote it, and though I don’t think the changes I have witnessed have been as dramatic, I feel I know what it’s like to remember a lost world, and to set now against then and to weigh all of it up.
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Hi! Read By is taking a vacation this month. We'll be back in July with more episodes, from more great writers. Thanks for your support and see you soon! Stay safe.
Tobias Wolff on his selection:
I read three poems, two by my longtime friend and colleague, Eavan Boland, who died last year, a loss that I feel still. There is a tradition in Irish poetry, inflected by the long Independence movement and a certain kind of heroic poetry, that Boland confronts. The third poem is one by John N. Morris, a poem I have carried in my mind since the mid-70s, that has gathered meaning for me as I had my own children, and now grandchildren: the heroism of learning to let go.
New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
The Life Beside This One by John N. Morris
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Howard Norman on his selection:
I read two diary entries by the iconic haiku master, Masaoka Shiki, which I translated with Kazumi Tanaka while in Japan in 2007. Shiki was often confined by his lifelong illness to his bed; a recurring image is a parade of the tops of black umbrellas seen just over the top of a wall.
Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems, trans. Burton Watson
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Chris Kraus on her selection:
A friend recommended The Executioner’s Song to me when I started researching a book set on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Mailer wrote it in 1979 based on events that occurred in Utah between 1976-1977. The culture described in the book feels close to the world I observed on the Range a half century later … different drugs, different guns and vehicle models, but the values and mindset are remarkably similar. Mailer’s book could not be more prescient.
The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Paul Tran on their selection:
The handprint is one of the earliest examples of self-representation. I can hardly imagine what it was like, thousands and thousands of years ago, to seek shelter in a cave; to find others had been there; to see the animals they painted; and then to join the animals by leaving their handprint on the wall. Maybe the word for it is hope. Maybe it’s realizing I’m not alone. I’m here, still.
“Between Darkness and Light,” Paul Tran, Shantell Martin and Shamel Pitts (TRIBE)
“The Cave,” by Paul Tran
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Valzhyna Mort on her selection:
On April 26th, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. I am reading from Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger and uncertainty that they still live with.
Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Keith Gessen
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Paisley Rekdal on her selection:
Charming may not be a word commonly associated with Alexander Pope, but for me, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation” may be one of the most charming poems I know. Pope, famous for “The Rape of the Lock,” and his exhaustingly didactic essay “A Man,” delights with this epistolary poem—brief, by Popian standards—full of wit and life. Like all his poems, it displays a beautiful facility with rhyme and meter, (Pope was a master of the heroic couplet), and a beautiful sense of compassion to the young woman to whom it is addressed. In his poem, Miss Blount is subject to all sorts of whims and institutions—mother, aunt, the church, the squire. There are so many daydreams and visions enclosed inside “Epistle” that by the end of the poem, I’m almost lost inside its spell. Like Pope, I’m regretfully startled awake from this enchanting picture of Miss Blount, and want to return immediately to the poem’s beginning: to relive once more the few, evanescent moments in which Miss Blount is again young, willful, alive—a product both of Pope’s attentive admiration, and mine.
Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation”
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Jane Hirshfield on her selection:
“The Lives of the Poets”
Poems are about our human lives--their knowing by stories, language, feelings, comprehensions, perplexities, musics. Because the lives of poets include the making of poetry, some poems are about that. I've chosen a half-dozen, from a range of persons, places, and directions, from a folder I’ve long been keeping that I think of as “The Lives of the Poets.” Because this selection is for the 92nd St Y, a place where people have long come, and will come again, to hear poems said by their makers, and because we’ve all been through a year now of pandemic uncertainties, I begin with two that show the other side of the fabric of public readings.
Anna Swir: “Poetry Reading” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082
Lucille Clifton: “After the Reading” https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142
Han Shan: “Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars” (translated by Burton Watson) https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500
Yannis Ritsos: “Necessary Explanation” (translated by Kimon Friar) https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670
Adrienne Rich: “XIII (Dedication),” final section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World” https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310
Frank O'Hara: “Autobiographia Litteraria” https://bookshop.org/books/frank-o-hara-selected-poems/9780375711480
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Stacy Schiff on her selection:
In a contest between the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, I will opt for Howard every time -- with an exception made for Amis’s 1954 Lucky Jim. As laughter seems in short supply these days, I offer up this favorite Amis set-piece, arguably among the funniest pages of 20th century English literature not written by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m going to do my best to get through them with a straight face, but know that I never have before. Our hero, who is not much of a hero, is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in medieval history at a provincial British university. He is the houseguest of his department chair, who holds Dixon’s fledgling career in his hands. You needn’t worry about the minor characters who flitter by, all of them peripheral to the central drama here, which is Dixon’s climbing into bed and out of it, many hours, several surprises, and one epic hangover later.
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Notes on the selections:
It’s been a year. That’s been the chorus for the past couple of weeks, and we're here, saying it too; it feels too notable, too hard-won, too full of loss, too much not to note. This episode is a compilation of some of the poems recorded over 62 episodes: a selection of poems that seem to speak to the intensely individual and communal experiences of grief and hope, of outrage and awe in the past year. Links to the poems and the original episodes below.
From “Read By: Terrance Hayes” - “Things No One Knows,” by Wanda Coleman
From “Read By: Louise Erdrich” - “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word,” by Natalie Diaz
From “Read By: Douglas Kearney” - “Big Thicket, Pastoral,” by Douglas Kearney
From “Read By: Ada Limón” - “From the Other Side” and “The Dwelling Places” by Alejandra Pizarnik
From “Read By: Tina Chang” - “Things I Didn't Know I Loved,” by Nâzım Hikmet
Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Producer's note: We return this week to Diana Khoi Nguyen's reading of poems from Asian poets in diaspora. Please support your local Asian diaspora and anti-racist community organizing, as you can. In particular, Nguyen recommends donations to Stop AAPI Hate's fund: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate
Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection:
In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel. In a sense, I am able to be with these writers, and now enable for them to be with you--by facilitating an encounter between them and you in this intimate aural space. For this recording, I read the follow poems from the following writers:
Jane Wong, "Everything"
Dao Strom, excerpt from "Self-Travelogue/s (Endemism)”
Mary-Kim Arnold, "American Girlhood”
Vaan Nguyen, "Mekong River"
Christine Shan Shan Hou "Amanuensis"
Yesenia Montilla on her selections:
It seems truly unbelievable that we are coming on a year of this pandemic and I have been like so many: just trying my hardest to survive. How I have survived is by slipping into poetry; my own and others. What deeply moves me about the four poems I chose are their honesty and their surprise, their tenacity and how they unravel a kind of ethos for us all within every line. The words have carried me through even though to me all four seem to work as elegies in a lot of ways; the elegy often times can be the beginning not the end. In this time, right now, I am craving beginning and cursing all the ends that we have suffered and maybe that is why the elegy calls to me. The four poems I am reading for you today are "temporary statement" by Sheila Maldonado; "Vita Nuova" by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado; "This Moment/Right Now" by Roberto Carlos Garcia and "Our Last Summer Together" by Cheryl Boyce Taylor. I hope they strike and move, create fire, or bring peace.
That’s What You Get by Sheila Maldonado
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
[elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia
Mama Phife Represents by Cheryl Boyce Taylor
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Raquel Salas Rivera with coquíes in background:
“ataúd abierto para un obituario puertorriqueño” // “open casket for a puerto rican obituary”
This poem responds to Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” by expanding it to include those Puerto Ricans that still live in Puerto Rico, recontextualizing the imagined return in contemporary Puerto Rico. It is both an homage and answer to Pietri’s poem. I am constantly searching for ways to capture what it is like to live in Puerto Rico. This poem is the closest I’ve come to that description.
lo terciario / the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Monique Truong on her selection:
On March 5, 2020, mere days before COVID-19 would change our day-to-day existence, I attended a crowded bookstore reading here in NYC, where Yoko Tawada and her friend Bettina Brandt read from Tawada's novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear. They sat side-by-side, each wearing one white glove, and occasionally they held over their respective faces a hand-drawn polar bear mask, made for the occasion by Tawada. I couldn’t make up such delights. Here’s the photographic proof. Now, when I revisit the off-kilter originality of Tawada’s novel, featuring not one but three polar bear narrators, it brings me right back to that reading, which seems to belong to another lifetime or to a parallel reality, which is apropos as the novel itself so deftly evokes the warp and weft of another way of existing, achingly familiar yet different and strange.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
A.E. Stallings on her selection:
Matthew Prior (1664 – 1721) rose from humble beginnings--he was the nephew of a tavern owner--to be one of the most important poets of his day, and to serve as a diplomat in the Hague and Paris. He is known now for his satirical poems and vers de société. "Jinny the Just" is an elegy for a real person: Jane Ansley, a widow from Flanders, who served as Prior's housekeeper, and was also his mistress. (Prior never married.) Poem-as-portrait is a relatively rare genre. (Not many other good examples spring to my mind--Brooks' "Rites for Cousin Vit" is one.) I like that this isn't about an idealized young woman, but a capable middle-aged woman who rules her domestic sphere, and whom we really get to know. I love the deep affection and gentle humor in the poem, which somehow makes it all the more affecting.
Matthew Prior at the Poetry Foundation
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection:
In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel. In a sense, I am able to be with these writers, and now enable for them to be with you--by facilitating an encounter between them and you in this intimate aural space. For this recording, I read the follow poems from the following writers:
Jane Wong, "Everything"
Dao Strom, excerpt from "Self-Travelogue/s (Endemism)”
Mary-Kim Arnold, "American Girlhood”
Vaan Nguyen, "Mekong River"
Christine Shan Shan Hou, "Amanuensis"
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Quan Barry on her selection:
There are two books lying on an end table in my living room that I like to keep out should any visitor to my home feel inclined to pick them up. One is called How to Be a Villain, and the other is Gary Soto’s What Poets Are Like. I decided there’s enough villainy going around these days, so rather than perfect the fine art of being an arch nemesis, here’s a brief reading from one of Soto’s delightful essays on these crazy beings we call poets.
What Poets Are Like, by Gary Soto
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Ruth Franklin on her selection:
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is deservedly famous for suspenseful fiction like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. During her lifetime, though, she was equally well known for the humorous stories she wrote about her absent-minded-professor husband and their four children, published in popular women’s magazines of the era and collected in two best-selling memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. “Charles,” the story I’ve chosen to read, is her first family story and perhaps the funniest, capped by a perfect punchline.
Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
T.C. Boyle on his selection:
It was Donald Barthelme, along with Robert Coover, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar and Flannery O’Conner who spurred me to be in writing myself. Barthelme is best known for his abstract stories, like “Indian Uprising,” a story I cherish, but I’ve chosen “The School” for this program because of its tight comedic narrative and its presentation as a dramatic monologue. It works by escalation, as much of our humor does. The line, “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy” always brings down the house. Of course, at its core, the story questions what education--knowledge itself--can do to ease the souls of a species, burdened with the foreknowledge of its own death.
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Jenny Xie on her selection:
Rich’s words are ones I’ve revisited, during this time of intersecting and unfurling crises, to help me think through the efficacy of the arts—particularly poetry—to respond to the clamor, the turmoil, and the extraordinary pressures of this moment. What civic responsibility do artists and writers bear? And what does it mean to write and read poetry that attempts to make sense of what’s at stake in our time? The moral clarity of Rich’s rhetoric is bracing. Her words offer a resolute commitment and a summons, along with a necessary reminder of what revolutionary power lies in hearing differently, speaking differently, imagining differently—in that hard labor of committed attention.
Poetry and Commitment: An Essay, by Adrienne Rich
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Catherine Barnett on her selections:
Because there are so many texts I love and because of the radical adjustments we’ve had to make in the space-time continuum, I chose to curate a small collection of poems and prose excerpts, each of which takes notice of, or is somehow guided by, time. I’ve included the following poems and excerpts; a collection I’m calling “On the Specious Present and the So-Called Obvious Past.”
Philip Larkin, "Days"
From Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing, #3"
Dominique Bechard, "Half a Party"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "An Aspect of Love: Alive in the Fire and Ice"
Guillaume Apollinaire, “There Is” or "Il y a"
Claudia Rankine, "Weather"
John Berger, from "Paul Strand"
Saskia Hamilton, “On. On. Stop. Stop.”
Wislawa Szymborska, "May 16, 1973"
Yiyun Li, from "Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life"
Jean Valentine, “For Love”
Rick Barot, “The Galleons 4”
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Storm"
Paul Celan, "So many constellations" (trans. Michael Hamburger)
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
"How savage our moments of live, how sacred."A special re-issue for the end of 2020. We'll be back on Jan. 10!
Luis Alberto Urrea on his selection:
Annie Dillard’s books came to me in one of those writerly seasons of transition. I could dip into any of her first volumes and get lost. It’s the way she conflates what some people call “nature writing” with philosophical depths at play, with sudden bursts of homespun vernacular and finally what can only be a kind of theological verve. She is one of the masters who pushes me into a new way of seeing.
In "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard is telling us how savage and sacred our moments of life, how fleeting. She is reminding us to live all of our moments ferociously. I think that is the perfect message for all of us right now.
This episode was first released on May 18, 2020.
Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org
"Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Joseph O’Neill on his selection:
I chose to read from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pnin, a book I turn to very often when I need a tonic.
Pnin at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Alice Oswald on her selection:
John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (written between 1832 and 1837) are designed as astonishments rather than thoughts... Fourteen lines, ordered into separable couplets, each couplet containing a different moment - these poems are like portable fresh air and I have been reading them every day since moving to the city.
Northborough Sonnets at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Hanif Abdurraqib on his selection:
This poem is an interesting choice for me, as someone who is always too anxious to engage in the act of singing at any karaoke night, but there is something I love about being present during a karaoke night. And what I think I love about seeing the kind of excitement that fans through a room or that fans through one of my friends when they’re on stage, singing a song that they know they know, is that karaoke is in some ways the height of the communal exercise of enjoying music. There is no real hierarchy; the person who is singing on the stage is not the profession who wrote the song; it almost in someways does not matter if they sing the song well. What matters is that they sing the song with a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that can tremor through a crowd and get that crowd to also tilt towards a type of ecstasy, knowing that they know a song too. It is this really, to me, fascinating mold of music and music enjoyment. So watching a friend of mine transform into someone entirely different onstage, and through that transformation, this grand excitement—it allows me to hear a song differently. And I think this poem encompasses that. And I think this poem celebrates a moment of loving music in a way that feels familiar to me—the interior love of a song—where a song becomes more what we need it to be, more than what it might have been.
All Heathens at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Alan Hollinghurst on his selection:
I read “September 1, 1939,” the date being that of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which marks the start of the Second World War. It’s a poem Auden himself was dissatisfied with, he cut it, changed some important wording, and later refused to reprint it, feeling it was intellectually dishonest. Nonetheless, in its magnificent rhetoric and its address to issues which continue to press upon us, it retains a power to move, to frighten and to reassure. It’s a poem which comes often to my mind these days, as so many things around us get worse and worse, faster and faster, and the good things that happen take on an ever greater freight of hope.
“September 1, 1939” at Poets.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Miller Wolf Oberman on his selection:
I will not try to introduce Anne Carson here. If you are one of the several people who do not know the work of this poet, essayist, and classicist, I will just say I envy you your impending discovery. One of the great joys, for me, of her work is that I am never certain what I’ll find. A scholarly translation of an ancient Greek play? A collaborative reinvention of an ancient text into a graphic novel? A poetry collection? A combination of these things that pours out of a box in a literal accordion, connecting a single, brief lament in Latin to contemporary grief, because what is time? In Carson’s “The Life of Towns,” which comprises one section of her 1995 collection of poems and essays, Plainwater, each line is end stopped, disrupting the sentence as a unit entirely, and interrupting our desire to see a sentence as something whole.
Plainwater at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado on his selections: What could we say to them, those we love, those we’ve lost, our beloveds, now eight months into a pandemic? What kind of vow could make ourselves legible to them and therefore to ourselves? It's been 229 days since I left the Upper East Side and opened shop in Brooklyn, where I spend most of my days at work. These three poems, I feel, make me believe that we can find a way to make the world bearable for each other—the strength and power we desperately need comes from new contract for life and for each other.
The Carrying by Ada Limón at Bookshop.org
The Pink Box by Yesenia Montilla at Bookshop.org
Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill at Thriftbooks.com
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Juan Gabriel Vásquez on his selection:
My choice is one of my favorite passages in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, the book that we Spanish speakers think of as the place where the novel was born. Along with Shakespeare and Montaigne, Cervantes, with this book, invented the modern man; and, as I intend to prove or suggest, he also anticipated the modern woman. In this passage, written sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, a young man by the name Grisóstomo has killed himself after being rejected by the beautiful shepherdess Marcela. His friends, who blame Marcela for his suicide, are out to bury him when she suddenly appears. One of the friends asks her if she has come to see if with her presence blood spurts from the wounds of the dead man, or to gloat over the cruelties of her nature, or to tread on this unfortunate corpse. This is her answer, which I will read first in Edith Grossman’s great translation, and then in the Spanish original.
Don Quixote trans. Edith Grossman at Bookshop.org
Don Quijote de la Mancha at Bookshop.org
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Dunya Mikhail on her selection:
My translation of this poem by Louise Glück, the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is part of my continuous work to translate contemporary American poetry into Arabic. Like the rest of Louise Glück’s poetry, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” makes us contemplate how a personal narrative informs a universal truth.
This poem was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The American Scholar.
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Tina Chang on her selection:
I chose to read "Things I Didn't Know I Loved," by Nâzım Hikmet and translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, from the collection, Poems of Nâzım Hikmet. Hikmet is one of Turkey's most foremost poets and recognized as one of the world's most influential poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1902, he was a prolific writer and wrote plays, poems, novels, and collaborated on librettos. He spent thirteen years in jail as a political prisoner for his "radical acts." "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" was written by Hikmet after being released from prison and, in it, I recognize the almost childlike appreciation for sky, earth, and the cosmos, after spending a long time in solitude. During the pandemic, I am deeply comforted by the appreciation of simple things. When I walk outside, I breathe in and am grateful that all I remembered is still intact. During this most complex year, this poem has been my constant companion.
Poems of Nâzım Hikmet at Persea Books
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Tessa Hadley on her selection:
Deidre Madden is an Irish novelist whose books I love. Her writing has a beautiful lucidity and simplicity of style, free of all affectation; her stories begin so naturally and easily, and yet can take the reader down into the deepest - and sometimes the darkest - places. The lovely conceit of her novel Molly Fox's Birthday is that the writer has swapped homes, for a few weeks, with her best friend Molly Fox, a successful actor. What a brilliant invention - and yet so inevitable, now that Madden has thought of it! So the narrator, who is herself a playwright, wakes up on this first morning in the other woman's house in her absence: among her things, inside the shape of her life - and also inevitably, as time passes, among Molly's friends too, and caught up in the complex net of Molly's relations. It's such a richly intriguing way of exploring a life and telling a life-story.
Molly Fox’s Birthday at Bookshop.org
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Yiyun Li on her selection:
Some writers are good to be read in one mood but not another, some are good during one specific period but not another. The writers one can read at any moment are those who refuse to have a simplified relationship with their time. James Alan McPherson is one of them. I often return to his work for clarity; few writers' words can always do the work of mental Visine as well as his. What he wrote in this essay—"In my private view, some things were of greater importance than others...I wanted to do something for myself, outside of any group involvement, something private but also right according to my own scale of values"—has always been a guidance for my own writing.
A Region Not Home
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Eileen Myles on their selection:
I picked this book off a shelf in a small place I was staying in Provincetown this summer. I'd never read Victor Hugo and found his writing so painterly and lush and philosophical and yet confoundingly graphic. A shipwreck felt so culturally apt too. I think we are at sea.
The Man Who Laughs at Bookshop.org
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Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection:
Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a century after his death. He is also, in my eyes, the great poet of agency, and of promise: "there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest," he writes in Return to My Native Land. "We know now... that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth without limit." Exit old ghosts.
Return to My Native Land, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger at Archipelago Books
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Isabella Hammad on her selection:
Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet’s strange, recursive, resistant chronicle of the time he spent in the early 1970s with the Palestinian fedayeen in the refugee camps in Jordan. Edward Said called it “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden.” Throughout the book Genet meditates on the Black Panthers, whom he had visited in March 1970, just a few months prior to joining the Palestinians. In each context he describes feeling like a “dreamer inside a dream"; in each context he felt at home. He considers the similarities of the movements--both peoples are deprived of territory from which to launch their revolutions, and therefore rely on spectacle to assert themselves. But spectacle is transitory, and sometimes shades into illusion. Spectacle, says Genet, is “the product of despair.”
Prisoner of Love at Bookshop.org
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Ada Limón on her selection:
I chose to read poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, from her book Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, who has done a marvelous job. I believe Pizarnik, an Argentinian author who died in 1972 at the young age of thirty-six, is largely not well-known in the United States—I highly recommend looking her up and spending time with her. During this pandemic, I have found a lot of grace—and despair—in her poems. I find them very helpful, and very beautiful.
Extracting the Stone of Madness at Bookshop.org
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Francisco Goldman on his selection:
My reading is from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pnin. Timofey Pnin, Russian emigre professor at Wainsdell College somewhere in the Northeast, has belatedly just learned to drive, and has undertaken the drive to the summer house of the wealthy emigre Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov, otherwise known as Al Cook. There other emigre intellectuals, artists, liberals, etc, are gathered. Lonely Pnin, often a figure of fun, has sat down to relax a bit after trouncing his competitors in croquet, when he experiences one of those episodes of nervous or even cardiac unease that in this novel signals a dissolving of the separation of past and present. This passage is about how those we've lost return; how in an idyllic-seeming present, the monstrousness of the past can still, at least momentarily, grip our hearts again; how loss and the past, both monstrous and sweet, permeate the present.
Pnin at Bookshop.org
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Elizabeth Strout on her selection:
William Trevor is brilliant at capturing the nuances of many people's perspectives, all in one story, as he does in this story of a young woman is who just reaching adulthood. We see her sorrows, confusions, and the poignancy of all the characters involved. Trevor is a wonder in his ability to portray characters without his own judgment ever intervening, he just tells us what we need to know—and then we can weep as well.
A Bit on the Side at Bookshop.org
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Geoff Dyer on his selection:
I've chosen two passages, both about place. The first is from the start of D. H. Lawrence’s essay, "Taos," published in 1923. Lawrence had arrived in New Mexico with his wife Frieda at the invitation of Mabel Dodge in September the previous year. As was his way, Lawrence began making pronouncements about the place almost from the moment he arrived. The second passage is from "The Country and the City" by Raymond Williams, published fifty years later, in 1973. It’s from the chapter where Williams discusses the magnificent country houses or stately homes that are such beautiful—and persistently alluring—features of the English countryside.
The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence, edited by Geoff Dyer at Bookshop.org
The Country and the City by Raymond Williams at Bookshop.org
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Jennifer Egan on her selection:
The House of Mirth was the first literary classic that I picked up entirely on my own, without prodding from a teacher or a parent, and adored. I read it as a teenager, during a stifling summer visit to my grandparents, when my literary tastes were unsophisticated (Archie comics were high on my list). I recall the experience as my coming-of-age as a reader—when I learned, years before discovering that I wanted to write, what transformative power a work of fiction can have. Because my attachment to The House of Mirth is so personal, I tend to reread it with slight trepidation that the magic may have fled. But each time, I find the novel’s tragic power intact, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift—from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world toward women (young adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult readings) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artifact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies. All of which moves me to assert that Edith Wharton’s second novel is a masterpiece, a pinnacle of American letters that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st Century.
The House of Mirth with an introduction by Jennifer Egan at Bookshop.org
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Anne Carson on her selection:
Edwin Denby is a pleasure and an education to read. He lived from 1903 to 1983 and wrote dance criticism, more general cultural criticism, and poetry. His observation of what happens on stage is so punctilious, his way of telling you about it so simple and clear, his manner of telling so gracious. He was friends with magical people like Alice B. Toklas and Frank O'Hara and seems to have been a bucket of fun. His critical writing achieves a standard rarely seen anymore.
Dance Writings and Poetry at Bookshop.org
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Leslie Jamison on her selection:
More than anything, I love Brian Doyle for his awe. It's not a blinding or a blunting awe, the kind of awe that scours away the grit and grain and difficulty of things -- it's more like supple attention, an awe not just for hummingbird hearts the size of pencil erasers or whale hearts with valves like swinging saloon doors, but for a mother's papery hand in the thicket of her son's hair -- for the way that tenderness and mortality live side by side, proximity and loss are never far apart. It's an awe for the infinitudes that live in the daily and the ordinary, because what else do we have? It's an awe that gulps the little things the way a hummingbird heart gulps oxygen. It's an awe that knows we're all going to die. It's an awe that knows we'll never be known as fully as we dream of being known. It's an awe that keeps looking anyway, keeps knowing anyway. I've used Doyle as ammunition to fuel reckless love affairs; I've read him to my toddler daughter. His voice feels like an invitation to be baffled by the world, and stunned by it.
One Long River at Bookshop.org
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Asa Drake on her selections:
I read two poems by Ai, "Cuba, 1962" and "Guadalajara Cemetery." I found her book Vice when I started working for the public library. I don't know how this book found its way into Central Florida, but her poems made me feel at home again in the South, where everything outside of me is beautiful and violent, and somehow means more work.
Luther Hughes on his selections:
For the last several years, I have suffered from depression. It kind of hit me out of nowhere. I've attempted suicide and contemplated it more than several times. "Ice Storm" by Robert Hayden is a poem I love because it exemplifies moments in my life where anything, even nature, will make you question not only beauty, but a higher power--God, really. "The Worst Thing" by Sharon Olds, even though this poem is about her divorce, reminds me of this, too, but it also pushes me to say "the worst thing." To face it with my whole heart. "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton and "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limon remind me to keep pushing. To breathe. To live.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer on her selections:
In Nicole Cecilia Delgado's collection, Apenas un cántaro, a graffiti credited to "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" reads: "Vivir es despedirse." To live is to say goodbye. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about departures, leave-takings, distance, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and (extra)exacerbated political crisis came into view. The poems "In Exodus I Love You More," by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah), and "Lamento Borincano," by Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado, seemed like appropriately heart-wrenching reads during moments in which goodbyes (those said, unsaid, feared, postponed, awaited, stolen, uncertain) permeate so much of our linguistic and emotional landscapes, and as we contemplate distance as a political condition. Finally, as a Puerto Rican poet and organizer of profound decolonial conviction myself, it seemed so fitting to read the work of a Palestinian and a Puerto Rican poet, side by side, both places of shared struggles, fighting against colonialism and occupation, and as voices for this meditation and moment.
En la colección,Apenas un cántaro, de Nicole Cecilia Delgado, un grafiti acreditado a "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" lee: "Vivir es despedirse." He pasado mucho tiempo pensando en las despedidas, los adioses, la distancia, incluso antes de que la pandemia del Covid-19 y la crisis política (extra)exacerbada se volvieran realidad. Los poemas "In Exodus I Love You More", por el poeta Palestino Mahmoud Darwish (traducido por Fady Joudah), y "Lamento Borincano", por la poeta Puertorriqueña Nicole Cecilia Delgado, me parecieron lecturas apropiadamente desgarradoras para momentos en los cuales las despedidas (aquellas dichas, no dichas, temidas, pospuestas, esperadas, robadas, inciertas) forman gran parte de nuestras esferas lingüísticas y emocionales, y mientras contemplamos la distancia como condición política. Finalmente, como poeta y organizadora Puertorriqueña de profunda convicción decolonial, me pareció oportuno leer el trabajo de un poeta Palestino y una poeta Puertorriqueña, lado a lado, ambxs siendo lugares de luchas compartidas, batallando contra el colonialismo y la ocupación, y como voces para esta meditación y momento.
Daniella Toosie-Watson on her selections:
I don’t know how to write love poems. At least when I’ve tried, it’s been wildly challenging. I’m learning how to write intimacy and tenderness, and when I first read this poem by Ilya Kaminsky I thought it was just the perfect way to write those things. I aspire to write and craft love with this kind of subtlety and care. I chose to read the Carl Phillips poem because it articulates my feelings around sex that I’ve never been able to put to words: “into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be, that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming.” When I first read that line it was a punch to the gut. You know those poems that you wish you wrote? This is one of those poems for me.
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From Douglas Kearney's "Playing the Changing Same:"
There’s a saying that goes, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” It’s worn, maybe, but not played out. More than whatever truth it holds, I’ve been drawn to the maxim’s symmetry and paradox, something I might describe to my students as holding a contradiction in its hands.
Yet, it does make an argument. If I take the saying and break it down, as a philosopher might have once suggested, to its very last compound, I find myself at: “change/same.” In this, I see the formula for “pattern”: a structure that requires—and amplifies—the simultaneous presence of change and sameness. In full, the adage includes “more things,” and this, I think is important to remember. In “more things”—imprecise and multiplicitous—we have the opportunity for variation, difference, changes on the changes. These should not, however, distract us from recognizing the big pattern, the changing same at the saying’s bottom. And that big pattern? It stays happening despite the differences playing over its surface.
To read the full essay, visit 92y.org/ReadBy
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Roxane Gay on her selection:
There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
Drawn from Gay's editor's introduction to The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, forthcoming this fall. Pre-order at Bookshop.org.
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Caryl Phillips on his selection:
It’s over thirty years since I first came upon the work of C.P. Cavafy. A friend of mine, a Polish poet, had recommended Cavafy’s Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. I worried a little that, not being a poet, there would not be any real point of connection. However, from the first page I recognized something in Cavafy’s work that struck a chord with me. Cavafy lived between two worlds—the Egyptian and the Greek—and had a complex relationship to the word “home.” He underpinned his work with historical detail and had little interest in the world of publishing. His was an essentially reflective, and reclusive, muse—looking back at time past and wondering about what lay ahead. This seems to be exactly what many of us are now doing. Taking this time to think about how to stitch together our past and present so that when we return to “normal” we might have a more balanced, and purposeful, sense of what we should do with the rest of our lives.
Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. Keeley and Sherrard at Bookshop.org
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Rivka Galchen on her selection:
I chose this story because it deals with anxieties both rational and irrational. I love the way the narrator of this story works so hard to be cheerful. We see the labor, sometimes absurd, sometimes heroic, that goes into feeling okay with the basics of the world: that time moves, that calamities happen, that our hearts are unreasonable and panicked. Also Cheever describes California palm trees as "disheveled and expatriated" and like "rank upon rank of wet mops"—those incidental accuracies and pleasures are (for me) sunshine. I admire the story for offering a moment of grace—an almost silly one—that I can believe in. At least briefly.
The Stories of John Cheever at Bookshop.org
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Claudia Rankine on her selection:
This untitled poem, by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, was written in November of 1937. He was living in Paris, having traveled back from Spain, and he was working on what would become the posthumous poems. He worked between September and December of that year and then fell ill and died in March of 1938.
The Complete Posthumous Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia
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David Mitchell on his selection:
I hope you’re well, whoever you are, wherever you are. If my readings were songs on a playlist, I’d call it "A Winter, Some Ghosts and The Summer." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to revisit New York soon.
1) John Connolly is a contemporary Irish crime writer and fantasist. This is my favourite very short ghost story. Thanks to John for letting me read it here.
2) Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, translator and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This cool shot of vodka of a poem is translated here by Joanna Trzeciak.
3) Henry Cecil was a lawyer and writer from the mid-20th century, mostly forgotten now. This story came from a spooky anthology I owned as a kid, called The House of Nightmare. It has a killer ending...
4) Edward Thomas died in the trenches in 1917. The poem evokes a ‘before the war’ moment, when a golden peace was on borrowed time. The train platform in the poem strikes me as a liminal space between life and death.
5) The Country Child is another book from my childhood about a childhood. I love the animism of the trees in this passage. Alison Uttley also wrote A Traveller in Time. She had a historian’s eye and a poet’s ear.
6) “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” William Wordsworth at his shortest. Having to learn ‘the one about the daffodils’ at school bleached Wordsworth for my generation. Discovering this poem, a few years later, put the colour back in.
7) I found James Wright’s collection The Branch Will Not Break in Auckland, NZ on my first visit to the country as a published author. I loved it then and I love it now. On the face of it, the final line from “Lying in a Hammock…” is a downer: why do I find it so uplifting?
8) Ursula K. Le Guin woke up my hunger to write narrative, and to (try to) make other people feel what this novel made me feel. Most hungers consume, but the writing-hunger sustains. I didn’t know Ursula well, but we emailed occasionally. She was sharp, funny and gracious, and the world is a little less magical now she’s no longer in it. Luckily, we still have her writing to make the world more magical than it otherwise would be. This exquisite passage from A Wizard of Earthsea, written (so she told me) on her kitchen table at night after she had put her kids to bed, doubles as a metaphor for the whole, glorious, transformative Wow of Art.
Nocturnes at Bookshop.org
“A Word on Statistics” at Poetry Foundation
“Adlestrop” at Poetry Foundation
The Country Child at Penguin UK
“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” at Poetry Foundation
The Branch Will Not Break at Bookshop.org
A Wizard of Earthsea at Bookshop.org
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Luis Alberto Urrea on his selection:
Annie Dillard’s books came to me in one of those writerly seasons of transition. I could dip into any of her first volumes and get lost. It’s the way she conflates what some people call “nature writing” with philosophical depths at play, with sudden bursts of homespun vernacular and finally what can only be a kind of theological verve. She is one of the masters who pushes me into a new way of seeing.
In "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard is telling us how savage and sacred our moments of life, how fleeting. She is reminding us to live all of our moments ferociously. I think that is the perfect message for all of us right now.
Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org
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Garth Greenwell on his selection:
This essay is a marvel. From the tiniest, the most banal drama—a writer is distracted from her book by the fluttering of a moth at the window—Virginia Woolf distills one of the most penetrating explorations I know of the eternal questions: What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? Woolf’s sentences are glorious, ostentatious, baroque, austere. How can an essay on death be finally so profound and joyful an affirmation of life? The essay is three or four pages long. It's one of the grandest things I know in literature.
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays at Bookshop.org
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Roxane Gay on her selection:
There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
Drawn from her editor's introduction to The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, forthcoming this fall. Pre-order at Bookshop.org.
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On Adam Gopnik's selection:
“'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation."
- from "On Living in an Atomic Age," by C. S. Lewis, anthologized in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays.
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Meg Wolitzer on her selection:
I chose this story because it’s such an intuitive and ruefully funny close-up of a marriage. My mother, Hilma Wolitzer, looks at the often desperate ways that partners keep each other going; this can be a lifelong work. The characters’ dream of moving from the congested city to the seemingly peaceful suburbs remains alive yet unrealized, a shared fantasy that almost drives them apart. I love “Sundays” for how slyly subversive and honest it is.
"Sundays" at Esquire
An Available Man at Bookshop.org
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"Once upon a time, you say, there were germs with horns. They lived in the toilet and could only be defeated by gallons and gallons of bleach. You could commit suicide by drinking this bleach, and some women did."
Margaret Atwood reads "Our Cat Enters Heaven," "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" and "Winter's Tales" from her collection of modern fables, The Tent.
The Tent at Bookshop.org
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Elif Batuman on her selection:
I chose to read from Epictetus because he has always made me feel better at times when I have felt anxious about things outside of my control. Basically, Epictetus transforms “things out of my control” from something I have to worry extra about, into something I get to be proud of myself for not worrying about at all! For Epictetus, freeing ourselves from worry is a heroic feat, like being in the Olympics. I wrote about him once here.
Discourses and Selected Writings at Bookshop.org
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Louise Erdrich on her selections:
We have become isolated and strangely passive in many ways during this pandemic. These poems shake the reader into clarity and reassure us that our true natures, our most elegant passions, will one day again be called into the world.
“Manhattan is a Lenape Word” and “If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert,” by Natalie Diaz
“Praise the Rain,” by Joy Harjo
“The Museum of Stones" and “Letter to a City Under Siege,” by Carolyn Forché
“A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function” and “Loving that Land O’Lakes Girl,” by Eric Gansworth
“Public Grief” and “The Coldness Was Coldness,” by Heid E. Erdrich
Neil Gaiman on his selection:
I chose this story because I cannot get it out of my head. Sometimes it feels like every argument we have, every discussion, every idea, is about balancing joy and misery. Omelas is a utopia for thousands built on the misery, and the knowledge of the misery, of one. It is an exercise in complicity: Le Guin makes us create her joyous city with her. We build it in our head.
And then it destroys us, and she destroys us, and we are forced to think about what we made in our heads, and how it stacks up against the imperfect world we live in.
Let us all march to a place that may not be there at all.
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories at IndieBound
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Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on their selections:
Chekhov’s story “The Beggar” was written in 1887, when Chekhov was 27. This was the moment in his life when he was turning from his early comic sketches to something a bit more serious. But the comedy is still there, of course. We chose it because it is essentially a dialogue between a successful, well-off lawyer and a ne’er-do-well. It has a delightful surprise ending.
For our second text, we’ve chosen two passages from “The Pearl Necklace” by Nikolai Leskov. Leskov is one of the great masters of Russian storytelling, from the generation between Tolstoy/Dostoevsky and Chekhov. In fact, Chekhov was introduced to him in Moscow in 1883, and they got along well, though Leskov could be difficult. Chekhov has even been called Leskov’s successor.
Again, we’ve chosen passages that are dialogues—this time, even more appropriately, between a husband and wife.
Fifty-Two Stories at IndieBound
The Enchanted Wanderer at IndieBound
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Hisham Matar on his selection:
In 2016, when I finished writing my book, The Return, which chronicles my return to Libya after 33 years of not being able to go there for political reasons, and my failed search for my father, a Libyan political dissident who was imprisoned and made to disappear by the Qaddafi dictatorship, I went to Siena. I spent a month in that Tuscan city looking at paintings from the Sienese School, which covers the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. These paintings have interested me ever since I had first encountered them at the National Gallery in London, some quarter of a century before, when I was nineteen, the year my father was abducted. The time spent in Siena produced my latest book, A Month in Siena, which is a record of my looking at the paintings, but also a mediation on loss, love, intimacy and art. It is also a book about solitude and its surprises. I wanted to read to you from a section that expresses this as well as the joys of the accidental social encounter. In a time where we are isolated and told, for good reasons, to be wary of the possibility of being contaminated by one another, I thought it fitting to share with you some of those common old joys of spontaneous and unexpected human encounters. And finally, because we are barred from travel, I wanted to take you away, to go travelling in the imagination together.
A Month in Siena at IndieBound
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Nicole Cecilia Delgado on her selection:
Conocí a Ámbar Past hace más o menos diez años en San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, en donde me quedé a vivir dos años. Fue una maestra esencial, no solo de cómo hacer libros de poesía, sino de cómo vivir con poco, en aislamiento, en contacto con la Naturaleza y en libertad. Vuelvo a su poesía cada vez que tengo que reconectar con la Animala, la Loba y la Huracana. Me prepara para estar sola y me enseña a sobrevivir. Estos poemas están publicados en el libro Huracana, una antología que reúne varios libros que fueron originalmente publicados en pequeñas ediciones de artista.
I met Ámbar Past about ten years ago in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, where I lived for two years. She was an essential teacher, not only on how to make books of poetry, but how to live with little, in isolation, in contact with Nature and freedom. I return to her poetry every time I need to reconnect with la Animala, la Loba and la Huracana. Her work prepares me to be by myself and teaches me how to survive. These poems were published in her book Huracana, an anthology that brings together several books originally published in small artist editions.
Huracana at Casa del Libro
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Michael Chabon on his selection:
Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man” for the first time—around the age of ten or eleven—was the first time I realized that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. Not words, not turns of phrase, but imagery and patterns of metaphor. “The Rocket Man” unfolds to its melancholy conclusion in a series of haunting images of light and dark, machinery and biology, power and fragility. Bradbury, at his best—as here—was one of our best.
The Illustrated Man at Indiebound
Intro and outro from "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Nicole Krauss on her selection:
I recently finished a collection of short stories, and while writing it I sometimes turned to Leonard Michaels to remember what's possible in the form, and to rest in his fluency. “Isaac” is from Michaels’s first collection, Going Places, published in 1969. I chose it because… why did I choose it? Because it’s New York City. A hospital. Incomprehension in the face of the things that befall us. And because its language—bright, sharp, funny—is live-wire alive in the face of it all.
The Collected Stories at Indiebound
This story contains language which may not be suitable for children.
Jonathan Franzen on his selection:
Vasily Grossman's towering achievement, Life and Fate, is a product of his unique access to every aspect of the Soviet society during the Second World War. Though he would soon fall out of favor with Stalin and would fare no better under Krushchev, he was a valued member of the Soviet intelligentsia, survived the purges of 1937, (he had friends and family who didn't), and was the country's leading war reporter. He published the first authoritative, eyewitness accounts of the Nazi death camps—his imagined account of his mother's last days in a Ukrainian Jewish ghetto, an early chapter in Life and Fate, is a cornerstone of the literature of the Shoah—and he had an unparalleled grasp of Soviet military life; the novel is necessary reading for its Stalingrad battle scenes alone. The chapter I've selected to read, which consists mostly of the writing of a religious kook imprisoned by the Nazis, is probably the least representative chapter, but it's arguably the most central. It feels spoken to me directly by an author caught between the great evil of Hitler and the slightly less great evil of Stalin and struggling to find something in humanity worth believing in.
Life and Fate at Indiebound
Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg:
Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines, the syntax, the rhythm, tone, tempo. This is the sign of tremendous formal skill—that one controls the audible voice of the poem right down to its minutest modulations. This is also the signature of a poem which is a lived experience—not the record of one, or the report of one. If there ever were, as Stevens puts it in “On Modern Poetry,” those urgent poems “of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice” they are the adamant, fierce, brave, poems of Linda Gregg. It is hard to describe poems which appear to carry true visionary experience in their marrow. They are, to a certain extent, disincarnate, icy, terse, as-if-dictated. Vision uses abstraction as if it were its natural integument. Vision would seem to use the poet, the poet’s body and voice, as a vessel to get itself expressed, forcibly pressed from the invisible into the visible, from the unknowable into the knowable or the transmittable. And these are certainly characteristics of Gregg’s poems. And yet they are also so deeply poems of the body’s unique knowledge—its intimations, forebodings, fears, lusts and loves. Her poems seem to do it all. It would appear quite impossible for the incarnate to shine so visibly carnate before us—and in so few words. But there she is, as Gregg would say, seeing the vision stand before her. Finally her poems exhibit a fearlessness, a recklessness which seems to be shared by both a way of living and a way of writing—a numinous incandescence, which has to do with searching for the limits of not just what life can be, but also of what language can hold—which might indeed be Too Bright To See. Not any self-indulgent or thrill-seeking recklessness, but recklessness in the name of a deeper reckoning. Until indeed, here she is, always blazing, always alive, Linda Gregg.
Robert Hass on Linda Gregg:
The first poem of Linda's that I read was "We Manage Most When We Manage Small." I think I read it twice. A couple of days later I realized that I had it more or less memorized, from that startling first line—"What things are steadfast? Not the birds." Her music certainly had to do with the way she used questions and declarative sentences and her feel for the relation of sentence to line, which is very strong and very often very simple. She wanted to make poems that were plain and radiant like the chunks of thousand-year-old marble she would occasionally turn up on the island of Santorini when, as a young woman, she was living there with Jack Gilbert and learning to write. Her aesthetic, I noticed, when I came to know her, was frugal and like the way she lived the practical parts of life. I remember her describing her relation to shopping and to the objects of desire in a consumer culture. She said she liked to go downtown, to Union Square in San Francisco or uptown to Madison Avenue in New York and hunt down the very best and most beautiful version of the thing she had desired and study it for a while and walk away. It reminded me of Richard Wilbur's wonderful phrase about Emily Dickinson's poetry. He said she traded in "sumptuous destitution." Something like that seems to account for the light Linda's poems give off.
"We Manage Most When We Manage Small"
"The Poet Goes About Her Business"
"Eurydice"
"The Girl I Call Alma"
"Too Bright to See"
"The Apparent"
"There She Is"
Terrance Hayes on his selection:
I'm reading two poems by Wanda Coleman to celebrate the April publication of her selected poems, Wicked Enchantment: “Things No One Knows” and “American Sonnet #54.” I’m also reading two of my poems in conversation with her work: “The Things-No-One-Knows Blues,” from my sophomore collection, Hip Logic, and an unpublished American Sonnet. She was a guiding light for me even before she became a friend. I was honored to edit her selected poems.
Lauren Groff on her selection:
I've long loved "Sredni Vashtar" for its fury and wildness, and for its profound understanding of the human needs for religious reverence, ceremony, and vengeance. Poor sickly Conradin is a full, complete, utterly ghastly child whose cold final act, of simply making toast, shakes me every time.
The Chronicles of Clovis at IndieBound
Colm Tóibín on his selection:
When W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory met at the end of the nineteenth century, she, thirteen years his senior, had published very little. She was a widow living in a large house called Coole Park in County Galway in West Ireland. He was every inch the young poet. She had one son, Robert, who spent most of his time in London. Until his marriage in 1917, Yeats spent many summers at Coole. He and Lady Gregory collaborated on many projects, including plays and the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1918, after Robert Gregory was killed in the First World War, Yeats came to Coole, joining Lady Gregory and her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Yeats there wrote his two great elegies for Robert: “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” a public poem remembering a hero, and the other, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in a more hushed tone, written for a ghostly voice, attempting to offer his old friend comfort by finding a new context for his death, suggesting balance and completion for the dead airman rather than strife or tragedy.
These poems were written in a time of loss, in a place where no visitors came, when the house was isolated so that the poet could work.
Billy Collins on his selection:
I chose poems from William Matthews (1942-1997) and Thomas Lux (1946-2017) because I wanted to honor two fallen soldiers who fought for an increase of beauty and truth in the world, who also knew that a good poem must at least be a series of good lines—that is, they found their way to the end of a poem one line at a time. In their own different ways and with highly different voices, they both understood the importance of broad humor and subtle ironies in freeing a poem from the claustrophobia of purely autobiographical designs. All poems are autobiographical in that it takes a human being to write one. But these two faced the world, not the mirror, when they wrote, and thus followed the advice that “poems should at least be interesting.” Plus, it’s no secret that they were both irreplaceable pals of mine—as well as teachers by the distinctive example of their best work.
Rachel Cusk on her selection:
Tennyson’s In Memoriam crops up in the dullest Victorian stretches of an English Literature degree, and so the glimmering self-utterance that stutters into life across its (intimidating) number of lyric sequences has the impact - for the browbeaten student - of the birth of modernity. I read it then, and picked it up again much later in life, in a time whose trials and revelations it seemed almost to have prophesied. If this is the most one can expect literature to do, it does it. The lyrics I’ve chosen are the two in which I find the most sustenance, partly for the contrast offered by their two very different readings of the process and moral structure of change.
In Memoriam 95 [By night we linger'd] at The Poetry Foundation
In Memoriam 106 [Ring out, wild bells] at The Poetry Foundation
George Saunders on his selection:
There are a few passages in literature that I go back to whenever I’m feeling out of touch with something I know to be true, namely that the whole point of life (even, and especially, during, a pandemic) is to get more loving, more tender. As Tolstoy wrote, “Men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances…If you feel no love, sit still. Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.” One my favorite “tenderizing” passages is from Gogol’s great story, “The Overcoat,” and it describes the life of one Akakii Akakievich, a lowly St. Petersburg functionary.
"The Overcoat," at IndieBound
Gary Shteyngart on his selection:
Nothing has ever made me happier than reading Mo Willems to my kid. In these troubled times, when we can no longer see our friends, we need more of Gerald and Piggy and their incredible pachyderm-porcine friendship.
There Is a Bird on Your Head! at IndieBound
Ann Patchett on her selection:
I picked this story when I was the editor of Best American Short Stories in 2006. Katrina Kenison, who was the series editor, was a huge Edith Pearlman fan and gave me a lot of choices. The hardest part was choosing just one. When the book came out we picked three stories to read at the launch party and hired three actors, but the day before the woman who was supposed to read "Self-Reliance" had to cancel. It was my big break. I sat in my hotel room in Boston and read the story twenty times. I have never enjoyed a reading so much. Because of that I became very bonded to Edith and her work. I wrote an introduction to her new and selected stories Binocular Vision and promoted it hugely. The book went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. I don't think anything in my life has ever made me so happy.
James Shapiro on his selection:
A few years ago, I spent many months researching plague in Shakespeare’s London—how it was misunderstood, the terrible toll it took on the population (wiping our nearly a sixth of Londoners in 1593, and again in 1603), and especially its impact on Shakespeare and on the public theaters, which were ordered closed when weekly plague deaths rose above thirty. I published what I learned in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. This week I’ve reread those pages, heartbroken. It’s no longer Elizabethan playwrights and actors whose lives and livelihood are endangered, but my close friends in the theater, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve consulted on a half-dozen productions set to air this spring and summer; none of them now will, a devastating loss at a time that we need theater most.