In the Winter 2013 issue of The Paris Review, Kevin Prufer published a poem, “How He Loved Them,” that tackled the aftermath of a car bomb explosion outside of a courthouse. On the magazine’s blog, Robyn Creswell interviews Prufer, who laments that “somehow, when we enter the territory of politics, we expect our poems to shill for votes, to argue strongly for particular beliefs.” (He also has a new book out.)
Poetical Territory
Chicken or Hen?
“Katrina Dodson has spent more time thinking about the word ‘chicken’ than you have spent thinking about anything.” The Stranger sits down with Katrina Dodson, translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories. Pair with Dodson's Year in Reading.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Englander; Sloan; Kassabova; le Carré; Ward
Out this week: Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander; Sourdough by Robin Sloan; Border by Kapka Kassabova; A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré; and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Allen Ginsberg, Beat Historian
"It’s not often one gets the opportunity to take a course on a major literary movement taught by a founding member of that movement," but Allen Ginsberg's lectures on "the literary history of the Beats" are now available online via Open Culture.
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It & Co.
For The Brooklyn Rail, John Ashbery answers some questions about writing in French, crushes on boys, and the presence of “it.” As he puts it, “I’m sort of notorious for my use of the pronoun 'it' without explaining what it means, which somehow never seemed a problem to me.”
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Sustainable Olympics
Year in Reading alumna Nell Zink writes on the future of global sport. As she puts it, "Under my plan for reform, the Olympics will no longer be assigned a fixed geographic location."