Photo: Photograph of Robert Pruitt, Cedric Angeles Gwendolyn B. Bennett To a Dark Girl I love you for your brownnessAnd the rounded darkness of your breastI love you for the breaking sadness in your voiceAnd shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest.Something of old forgotten queensLurks in the lithe abandon of your walkAnd something . . .
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Photo: Photograph of Jacob Lawrence, Carl Van Van Vechten, Courtesy of the Library of Congress In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington to draw attention to the exclusion of African Americans from positions in the national defense industry, . . .
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A Transnational View of Hong Kong Before I introduce our speaker this evening, I have a lot of thanks to give to those who supported and made this event possible. Thanks to Hampshire College Eqbal Ahmad Endowed Lecture Fund, the Ethics and Common Good Project, and the Creative Writing Program. Thanks to . . .
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“And there will be singing”: An Anthology of International WritingEdited by Jim Hicks, Ellen Doré Watson, and Q. M. Zhang 6×9 paper, 312 pages, $24.95, November 2019ISBN: : 978-1-943902-14-9 In celebration of our landmark 60th anniversary, the Massachusetts Review presents a collection of the best contemporary and emerging international writers and writers in translation, . . .
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Danilo De Marco is a photographer who still works with film, in black and white, and then goes into the darkroom to develop and print, under the glow of a red light bulb. He says digitalization erases the texture of his images. One of his recent exhibitions in Udine displayed a collection . . .
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For many of us with literary interests, the end of October’s first week coincides not only with the beginning of baseball playoffs but also with the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The weeks preceding the announcement see statements of preference and prediction, and the oddsmakers at Ladbroke’s even handicap the . . .
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Photo by Getty Images. Scientific American, December 2017. In the north the skies will start to close in. The clouds will thicken—a cover sealed shut. Even bombing won’t make them open. Daily temperatures will fall, the earth will freeze, become barren. The skies will be dark, even at noon during the summer solstice. Citicombs . . .
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Some unfortunates among you might know Robert Pinsky from one of two contexts. Perhaps you caught the Simpsons episode in which Lisa masquerades as a precocious college student, an episode in which Robert Pinsky, as “Robert Pinsky,” makes a memorable appearance. Where Jasper Johns, in his guest shot on the show, gets only the . . .
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Early on, in the 1985 film that arguably inaugurated Jean-Luc Godard’s late-period work, we watch, for much longer than we expect to, a single person on a crowded sidewalk. Our view, or that of the camera, is from a nearby rooftop—surveillance in an etymological sense. At a certain point as I recall, . . .
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Editor’s Note: This post inaugurates a new MR blog series, where we share online introductions given at guest appearances by some of our favorite speakers, writers, artists, and thinkers. Intros are, by definition, ephemeral, but that doesn’t mean they always should be. You’ve all heard great ones, the sort that don’t try to . . .
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