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Bringing Broken Things to the Dance [by Daniel Westover]
On Wednesday I quoted Elizabeth Bishop who, in a letter to Marianne Moore, describes her awareness of insistent, disparate objects. Unhappy with nearly everything she has written, Bishop despairs, but she finds reason to…
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“Posing Questions to the Universe” [by Tony Leuzzi]
<<In his redoubtable essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his…
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‘List, list, O, list!’ [by Daniel Westover]
Yesterday I mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins’s habit of making word lists, and this has got me thinking about poems that list and poems that are lists. There are, of course, those sweeping, anaphoric, Whitmanic…
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Tales of the Sixties: My Father Delivers [by Alan Ziegler]
In 1966, my father buys an Arnold bread route in Astoria. Technically, he is self-employed—he owns the truck and the territory, and he buys the bread from Arnold then resells it to the stores—which…
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Sleights of Word [by Daniel Westover]
You probably remember Mallarme’s response when Degas told him he had a great idea for a poem: ‘Alas, my dear, poems are made of words, not ideas.’ Of course there are ideas in…
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Next Line, Please: When Two Strangers Meet and . . . [by David Lehman]
For the first Next Line, Please contest of 2015, David Lehman invites readers to finish a paragraph that he's begun with a provocative sentence fragment. Here's how Lehman introduces the challenge: I like keeping…
