“‘Poetry, I feel,” said Sylvia Plath in a radio interview in 1962, the year before her suicide, ‘is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.'” Fifty years after her death, an argument for close reading.
The Applicant
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Ted Hughes’ Lost Poem
Sit Down, Stephen Fry.
Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian: Stephen Fry gives stand-up comedy a go at the Royal Albert Hall but doesn’t quite have the punchlines for it.
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The Library, It’s Made of People
The Toronto Public Library is running an innovative program wherein, in addition to books and other types of media you might expect, you can also check out people; specifically, this Human Library gives you access to folks with an interesting job or story to tell, like a journalist, a Buddhist monk and a cancer survivor.
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Use It Or Lose It
At least two people were not pleased with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine. In a letter to the New York Observer (and an expanded post on Google+), Susannah McCormick – daughter of renowned music historian Robert “Mack” McCormick – alleges that Sullivan and his research assistant “glibly” stole her father’s research in an act of “quasi theft.” In his response, Sullivan asserts that, “by hiding L. V. Thomas’s voice, by refusing for over half a century to credit or even so much as name the two singers who created those recordings while they or their contemporaries were alive, Mack McCormick committed a theft—through negligence or writer’s block or whatever reasons of his own—far graver than my citation of interviews L.V. granted him decades ago.”
We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
Roxane Gay rounded up a massive, crowdsourced list of writers of color. While the list is by no means exhaustive, it might be a necessary measure in proving “the world of letters is far more diverse than the publishing climate would lead us to believe.”
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