“We can work harder to mourn, get better at it, connect it better to how we live, how we care for people, how we educate people. It’s politics, for me.” ZYZZYVA interviews Max Porter about his Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Pair with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Millions essay on grief and art.
Light as a Feather
Poetry Reviews: What for?
Ahead of National Poetry Month, Publishers Weekly Poetry Reviews Editor Craig Morgan Teicher asks and answers the questions many have contemplated: “What is accomplished by poetry reviews? Do they help sell books? Do they keep the art form in line? Do they spur writers into creating better poetry or kick bad writers out of the halls of Parnassus? Do poetry reviews help readers?”
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Stanford Online Courses
Stanford’s next round of free online courses includes Cryptography, Human-Computer Interaction, and Game Theory.
The Sorrows of Jodorowsky
Recommended: Andrew O’Hehir on a failed adaptation of Dune.
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The Power of Poetry
Computational linguists Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight have created a computer program that uses meter and rhyme to generate more secure, memorable passwords. You could also check out Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
Tuesday New Release Day: Evison, Oates, Theroux, Fontane
New this week is Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story about the death of her husband (this was the source of her recent, quite moving essay in the New Yorker), and the expanded rerelease of Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Also new on shelves from NYRB Classics is Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, who discussed Fontane in our Year in Reading in December.
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This Is Just To Say
“’This Is Just To Say’ is magical because of this personal, endless quality to it,” writes Jezebel’s Kate Dries in her exploration of the poem’s prevalence among Twitter comedians. Meanwhile Andrew Epstein remarks in a supplementary blog post, “I guess this is just to say that the Jezebel piece reminded me that Kenneth Koch was remixing and spoofing [William Carlos] Williams almost 50 years before anyone ever dreamt of Twitter.”
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A(n Induced) Standing Ovation
Science now confirms what’s long been suspected by people related to theater kids: “the quality of a performance does not drive the amount of applause an audience gives.”
Queer Literature’s Role in the Revolution
David Canfield hosted a virtual discussion on the future of queer literature with Naoise Dolan, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Akwaeke Emezi, and Garth Greenwell.
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