‘I’ve sometimes been asked why he wasn’t as famous as Burroughs and Ginsberg, and the other celebrated Beat writers, and I’ve always said he needed a better press agent or a better strategy. Until he was taken up by San Francisco’s radical gay activists, he was strictly a literary man—which was not enough to vault him to fame. His poems, fine as they were, didn’t make headlines.’ — from the Prologue
Speaking of Poets
Szymborska Had Something to Say
‘Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it’s much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they’re attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself…’ – Nobel Prize Laureate Wislawa Szymborska
A Poet Speaks of the Debacle of Our Lives
When I spoke of a church without a roof over its head
So that the heavens looked down upon it
Rained down upon it
And now of course
If I spoke of a ruin of a church in Odessa
I could be speaking of the future
That will soon be past
As my past will soon be over
Hard Landing Ahead
Lawrence Summers on Inflation and Recession
Lawrence Summers on Inflation and Recession
Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and is President Emeritus of Harvard University. He is also a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Summers is interviewed by Stephanie Flanders, Senior Executive Editor and Head of Bloomberg Economics, Bloomberg.
The Phenomenon Called AOC
“How did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an unknown bartender and activist, become the youngest woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of its most talked-about figures? And what is her possible future?” Those are the two biggest questions to be posed to Lisa Miller, Rebecca Traister, and Michael Kazin at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Craig Unger: On Trump, Putin, and the GOP
This interview looks at a huge can of worms poisoning American democracy.
He notes that Trump was identified as a potential KGB asset in the Cold War days, details a lavish junket held for powerful former GOP Congressman Tom DeLay, and talks about more than 250 million dollars that poured “without even breaking a sweat” into super-PACs aligned with Russian interests.
What Would Freud Say About Current Conditions?
I have no idea. But you can’t read the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” without believing he had written it only yesterday or without believing he had hope for the future. The fact that the book was written in 1929 does throw his hope into doubt, if it was intended as prognostication, which — to be frank — it was. But it’s still a great read.
Two Writers, Two Legacies
![Nelson Algren, 1962 [Photo: Steve Deutch]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Nelson-Algren-1962-Stephen-Deutch-copy-200x200.jpg)
Nelson Algren, as great a writer as ever came out of Chicago, was born on this day in 1909.
A Poet Recalls Odessa
No more crowding those Kiosks
That look like guard towers
Protected by hard currency
And the insect eyes peering out of them
Human eyes preying off their own kind
No more tram drivers drinking their coffee
While you wait for hours to get home to your child . . . — William Cody Maher
Slaughterhouse 6
‘The crows scream
and fly to town in whirring flight:
soon it will snow —
happy he who now still has a home!’ …
The world — a gate
to a thousand wastelands dumb and cold!
Whoever has lost
what you have lost, rests nowhere. … — Friedrich Nietzsche
That’s the Way to Travel
Jan Heller Levi & Marlies Pekarek
Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
Zelensky Thanks Russian Anti-War Protesters
… especially this one: Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up an anti-war sign on Russia’s main TV news broadcast. She was reported missing but has now appeared in court.
‘Dream’ by George Herms
Where does George Herms and his 1985 assemblage “Dream” fit in the continuum of American art? After reading “The Nature of Art” by Armand Marie Leroi and having a look at the Connect Vermeer website, I wondered whether a similar analysis could be done about Herms and “Dream.”
Vlad the Impaler
‘You’re occupiers. You are fascists. Why the fuck did you come here with your guns?’ Ukrainian woman confronting Russian soldiers in Henichesk, in southern Ukraine. ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so, at least, sunflowers will grow on your graves.’ (Translated by Alex Abramovich)
‘Bells ring / silently the evening / rolls in its void’ — Paul Celan
To Kingdom Come?
life is / kkkkrrrraaaazzzzy / for reasons / having nothing / to do with / rasPUTIN but / he could spitball / a nuke our way / in the time / it takes to say / ”oh shit.”
‘Escuela de Corte’ — ‘Last Time We Play Hooky’
A still shot from Rich Allen’s latest movie. If you look at the shoes .. well, the sneakers … you can see these kids were not actors.
‘A Poem for Patriots’ and ‘Upside the Morning’
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.