Last week marked the release of The Heart is Strange, a new collection of John Berryman poems released to coincide with the centenary of the poet’s birth. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring digs through the magazine’s interview archives to find Berryman’s account of meeting W.B. Yeats. Pair with: Stephen Akey on Berryman’s classic The Dream Songs.
“Big, though, big head”
Apply for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship!
February 1st is the application deadline for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing. It’s a two year post-graduate fellowship that offers $40,000 per year while you work on completing a second book or starting a first. Apply now!
After the Wall
“[Christa] Wolf was a committed dissident in the GDR (East Germany) and a forceful voice resisting Western triumphalism after reunification. It would seem like some sort of explanation was owed to the public. Yet how does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past, to the psychological and cultural backdrop of such fateful decisions, is not even subjectively available?” On City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.
And a Bomber Pilot
Early Birds
If you’ve ever wondered how old your favorite authors were when they hit their creative peaks, you’ll enjoy this graphic, which charts the ages at which well-known writers published their most famous works.
Fahrenheit 32
Say the books in your Encyclopedia Britannica are moldy, unread and obsolete. You know you could burn them or throw them away, but somehow, you can’t do either. Why not?
A Home at the End of the World
“I’m not paranoid, I’m really not.” The Washington Post has a profile of the so-called American Redoubt, an area of the Pacific Northwest populated by doomsday preppers. Pair with our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s reading list of five can’t-miss apocalyptic narratives.
Saunders Meets DFW
Sometime Millions writer Frank Kovarik plumbs the connections between George Saunders’ recent story in The New Yorker and David Foster Wallace’s suicide.
Gonzo Film Crit at Gizmodo
At Gizmodo, the art of the Comcast movie summary. (My favorite is The Seventh Sign, though I Know Who Killed Me –an unforgettable piece of so-bad-its-good filmmaking–runs a close second.)