Jim, I expect you would be surprised that your death affected me so much, that I spoke at two services for you, that I am writing about you now. We were friends, but we had not stayed in touch. So, it surprises me too. But you were a friend to me during . . .
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(Photo: Adam Zagajewski, New York Times, 03/25/2021, Alamy) Adam Zagajewski, the great Polish poet and essayist, who died on March 21, wasn’t aloof, as some tried to paint him, especially in Poland, where he had many detractors in the poetry world; he was kind and generous with his time and advice. Was he . . .
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It is Friday, August 7th, and I just finished reading in the New York Times the major, generous, and informative obituary of Eric Bentley, written largely by the late editor of the Times Book Review Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. It was deeply moving to me. For more than sixty years I knew Bentley and much of his major . . .
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Melanerpes carolinus. Photo: Toni Herkalokoch, for the Audobon Society To capture a life in words is not possible, especially when words were—more than anything thing else—the very stuff of that life. It seems to me, then, that only one way could pass for close to adequate in remembering the journalist, translator, and . . .
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These uncertain, unprecedented times have given us all pause, so to speak. Even those of us who have the immense privilege of secure jobs, the relative safety of seclusion, and work that is, as we have recently learned to call it, non-essential, still have reason to wonder whether anything will ever again . . .
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Photo: Prine in 1975. Tom Hill/Wireimage Like a lot of folks since the news came in, I’ve been listening again to John Prine. Among his fans, though, I suspect I was the only one to be reminded of a class in Paris with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a few days after . . .
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I first met Sterling Stuckey in Chicago fifty-five years ago. In the spring of 1963, Sterling and a group of high school teachers—graduate students at the University of Chicago—were in the process of forming a community-based organization to address the “lack of a proper consideration of the role of the Negro in . . .
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It’s right there in the title of the New York Times obituary: John Ashbery’s work is not only “celebrated,” but it is also “challenging.” PBS calls the poems “enigmatic,” while for NPR they are “confounding.” The more knowing and admiring pieces by poets or critics (sometimes the same people) nuance the point, while still emphasizing difficulty. Mark Ford’s sympathetic . . .
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Editor’s Note: There are many rewards in working for a literary magazine that has lasted nearly six decades. None greater, though, than the chance to receive messages of the sort that came in just the other day, when we heard from Dr. Cynthia Haft, a former student of the French scholar and . . .
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To me, a young American in the ‘50s and ‘60s with a strong anti-Establishment streak and a poetry bent, Yevgenii Yevtushenko was a magnetic figure. After my six-month sojourn in the Soviet Union as a student learning Russian, his work appealed to me even more. I met him only a few times . . .
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