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Auden Changes His Mind [by David Lehman]
Here it is again: September 1, 1939, eighty years later. Can you picture Auden at that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked…
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“September 1, 1939” [by W. H. Auden]
September 1, 1939 I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing…
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For Summer: Florida Poets: Adrian Castro [by Emma Trelles]
The Sound Of One Immigrant Clappingafter Czeslaw Miloszby Adrian CastroLet's say he actually did not arrive on a boat– that the relentless colonel never found his subtle throat hidden under the trance of the…
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Whom do you write your poems for? [by Katha Pollitt]
It’s easy to describe the readers I have in mind when I write my column in The Nation: the 185,000 Nation subscribers, who are mostly liberals, progressives and leftists of various sorts, college-educated, over thirty,…
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“Coat of Arms” [by Joanne Dominique Dwyer]
I don’t believe desire is the root of all suffering,though it’s better to pull up the rootsof the weeds you desire to be rid of,rather than poison them. For nothingwill grow again in that dirt.I never read philosophy. It hurtsthe…
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Squibs 322-326 [by Alan Ziegler]
322: Footnote to “A Note on Memory in ‘On the Road with Phil Freshman’ When I visited the former boarding house known as Dixieland in Look Homeward Angel—now officially the Thomas Wolfe Memorial—I took…