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"You seem to have me figured out to be the next reincarnation of Charles Manson." On December 15, 1971, Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner, and Norman Mailer appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. Mailer, having recently been panned by Vidal in a review, was in a less than pleasant mood. What ensued is considered by many to be the greatest—and funniest—literary feud ever caught on film.
Composer Luis Escareño's multimedia performance piece is based on Maggie Nelson's book Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) and was recorded live at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Written as a series of vignettes, the performance features text and narrated monologue adapted from the book, images, and music performed by the Living Earth Show.
"Within that economy of words, you choose words that have certain angles, that have certain edges, that effect people in a certain way." Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about what he learned as a poet and how those skills continue to influence his writing.
In our Writers Recommend series, Camille Rankine writes about how her ideas and inspiration come from “eavesdropping on the world.” This week, collect phrases from overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, TV shows, or magazine articles. When you have a quiet moment, read over your notes and pick one quote that sparks your imaginative impulses. Write a poem that uses the found quote as a first line. Explore your immediate reactions and emotions, allowing those feelings to develop the tone of the lines that follow.
With an introduction by poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Carrie Fountain reads from her books Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010) and Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014) as part of the Lannan Foundation's Poetry Sundays in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fountain and Nye will be panelists at Poets & Writers Live in Austin, Texas on January 9.
"Can we reclaim a word? Can we take a word and drop it and crack it open, or are we always a prisoner to it?" Poets Terrance Hayes and Saeed Jones talk about craft, the evolution of language, and why America needs poetry for HEArt, a journal of contemporary literature and art that challenges discrimination and promotes social justice. Jones will join the Why We Write panel on January 9 at Poets & Writers Live in Austin, Texas.
"I was captured by the Facist Militia on December 13 1943." So begins Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, republished as If This Is a Man in the new three-volume collection, The Complete Works of Primo Levi (Liveright, 2015), edited by Ann Goldstein. Robert Weil, David Remnick, and John Turturro read selections from the edition at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
This video, animated by Sophie Koko Gate, features an excerpt from the poem “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, and is narrated by Peter Blegvad. Produced for Harvard University's Fundamentals of Neuroscience course, the Poetry of Perception animated series looks to poetry to explain sensory perceptions.
Featuring the poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” by Emily Dickinson, narrated by Anna Martine, this video was animated by Hannah Jacobs for Poetry of Perception, a series of scientific animated short films.
With animation by Isaac Holland, this video features the poem “Smell” by William Carlos Williams, and is narrated by the poet. The Poetry of Perception short animation series focuses on representations of sensory perceptions and is produced for Harvard University's Fundamentals of Neuroscience course.
