At the Poetry Foundation’s website, Ruth Graham tackles a strangely ubiquitous question: how does a couple go about choosing a wedding poem? (For context, it helps to keep the following quote in mind: “the aesthetics of [a personal] wedding, at least for couples of a certain age and posture, are practically set in stone: indie pop music, mason jars, white Christmas lights, wildflowers.”)
Till Death or Cliches Do Us Part
Celebrating Beverly Cleary
With her 95th birthday approaching, Beverly Cleary gets the profile treatment in the Times. (previously at The Millions: Cleary’s underappreciated memoirs)
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Whiting Winners
Lots of excellence on the list of 2011 Whiting Award winners: Teddy Wayne, Daniel Orozco, Ryan Call, and more. If I were you, I’d celebrate the weekend by reading Orozco’s “Orientation.”
Scrutinizing Letters from Sylvia Plath
Anwen Crawford reflects on newly published letters from Sylvia Plath; “The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world.” In the New Yorker
Reasons to Read the Classics
In 1968 Italo Calvino published 14 reasons why we should read the classics, and his list still feels relevant. Pair with the Millions’s essay on, well, reading the classics.
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Indie Bookstores Charge for Readings
A number of indie book stores, squeezed by patrons using their shelves only for research into later online purchases, are starting to charge admission for in-store readings and events, the New York Times reports.
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Longstanding Controversy
Nowadays, Huck Finn is as a lightning rod for racial issues, which explains why so many schools have banned the book over the years. But in the late 18th century, when Mark Twain published it, the novel was more controversial as a critique of childhood in America. In the Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reads Huck Finn’s America, a new book by Andrew Levy that sheds light on the context of the era. You could also read our founder C. Max Magee on reading Huck Finn as a child.