“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
Keep Hope Alive
“It is not enough to have his idea.”
Recommended Reading: Four poems by Darin Ciccotelli are up at BOMB.
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Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
If you’re in New York this weekend, join Belladonna* and Kundiman for a celebration of what would have been the 60th birthday of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar). Nine poets, including Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Sina Queyras, and Anne Waldman, will perform a staged reading from Dictee, Cha’s best known work. There will be birthday cake, projected images, scholarly contextualization, and other surprises. Saturday March 5, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2pm.
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A Touch of Worldliness
To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Atlantic’s Twitter book club is reading (and discussing) The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Follow along on Twitter @1book140.
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All the Old Showstoppers
Back in the mid-aughts, The New Pornographers were known for having a large number of members with impressive (and exhausting) solo careers. As part of The Rumpus’ Albums of Our Lives feature, Ryan Werner remembers Middle Cyclone by Neko Case.
The Price of Diversity
What is the price of diversity? Colleen Muir asks this question at The Rumpus in relation to the hefty cost of writers’ conferences. A piece of her essay: “I’m not claiming that Breadloaf [sic] lacks for talent, or that its writers don’t have interesting things to say. But it certainly lacks for diversity in at least one significant way, because most attendees share a privileged experience of the world.” Pair with Gail Gauthier’s essay on working in the kitchen crew at Bread Loaf.
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Your Friendly Neighborhood Crytozoologist
Martin Connelly takes a look at The International Cryptozoology Museum, which is run by Loren Coleman up in Portland, Maine. If you can’t make the pilgrimage yourself (or if you’re just put off by chupacabra taxidermy), you can also get a feel for the study of far out beasts by reading Coleman’s “genre-defining” book, Cryptozoology A to Z.
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Hints of Granite
Recommended Reading: Charles Simic on drinking wine in New Hampshire.
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