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Poetry and Possibility: A Conversation with Tracy K. Smith
“A poem isn’t just an expression of all these things that you’re feeling. But it’s a set of choices that you’re making in language. So every description, every question, every statement, every turn, is a choice that opens up or closes off certain possibilities.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S.Read More
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Delicious Advice for Aspiring Poets
From the inimitable Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who produced a column for a newspaper called Literary Life. She answered letters from everyday people who wanted to write poetry—a sort of “Dear Wisława” relationship that she handled with intelligence, humor, and care. Here are a few selections from her column, translated by Clare Cavanagh and courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.Read More
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Putting the House in Order
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Cult of the Fragment
The final chapter of A. Alvarez‘s thoughtful short book, The Writer’s Voice, is titled “The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist,” and in it he argues that we have become more interested in the lives of artists than in their work because we have a lost any stable idea of what a “good work” is. In fact, the chief feature of postmodernism—the dominant “ism” of our moment—is its resistance to the very idea of value, which is considered an elitist cultural construct.Read More