We all probably had the humiliating experience of reciting a poem in high school. Yet at Salon, Nina Kang believes that memorizing poetry is a lost art. She blames the loss of the discipline on our tendency to skim and new poetry’s seeming aversion to memorization. “Writers actively fight against the appearance of artifice, and often instead strive for an informal, offhand tone, with that hint of clumsiness that lends a certain authenticity to the voice. It turns out this is a quality that makes the reciter’s job that much more difficulty.” Here’s our take on the lost art of recitation.
Forgetting Poetry
Kanye West, Philosopher + Author
Kanye West is back on Twitter. And in literary news, he's decided to write a philosophy book, Break the Simulation and publish excerpts (or maybe the entire thing) on Twitter. There appears to be no release date or publisher attached so stay tuned.
Out of the Rain
The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek root nostos, meaning "return home," and algos, or "pain." It's painful because we cannot return home again. Ramp up the nostalgia and check out this elegy to the old school book tour by Keith Lee Morris. If we're talking book tours, here's a piece on the distinct personality types sure to derail your literary event.
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The End of Beauty
Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”
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Talking History
On the topic of reading classics: Alberto Manguel at the New York Review of Books considers the dialogue across history that books afford. "The relationship between a reader and a book... eliminates the barriers of time and space, like 'conversations with the dead.'"
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Televising Literature
“Tom Stoppard isn't shy about tackling literary giants. The British playwright has rewritten Hamlet for the stage and recently turned Tolstoy's Anna Karenina into a Hollywood feature. But he struggled with a television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's sprawling modernist masterpiece Parade's End.”
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10th Grade, high-school: the first twenty lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.