stylus

THE LAYING ON OF HANDS: On “Physical Distancing” as an Ethics of the Archive

In these intangible, at times untenable days—the duration of which keeps extending its parenthesis—days in which we’re instructed not to touch, or greet within six feet, in which we’re made increasingly cognizant of what Amichai called “the circumference of the bomb,” or at the very least the consequential perimeter of our being, days of the necessarily distant and of griefs behind glass, days of...

THE DOUBLE DREAM OF JOHN ASHBERY: On the Ashbery Papers and Reading Library

Just as the publication of John Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring (1970) helped to cement the poet’s post-Tennis Court Oath reputation, the double presence of Ashbery's papers (at Houghton Library) and his personal reading library (at the Woodberry Poetry Room) promises to do the same for generations to come.

Announcing the 2018-2019 WPR Creative Fellowship & Grant Recipients

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that Tracie Morris (of Brooklyn, New York) has been selected as the recipient of the 2018-2019 WPR Creative Fellowship for her project “The Impossible Man.”

POETRY’S NOBLE PAUSE: On Patti Smith’s Nobel Prize Performance & Poetic Rupture

Poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s recent magisterial performance at the Nobel Prize ceremony—in which she interrupts her own rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and takes a moment to apologize for her nerves—offers us a chance to reflect upon and celebrate poetry’s role in an increasingly mechanistic society.

AIR RAID: Archibald MacLeish and the Radio as Literary Device

On October 19th, 1938, a year and a half after the Columbia Workshop debut of his first (and what is largely considered the first) verse play for radio, The Fall of the City, Archibald MacLeish sat down at a microphone in Holden Chapel at Harvard University to record (and more importantly to inform the reading of) his most ambitious verse drama to date: Air...

TWO SIDES FOR WALLACE STEVENS

I hear the “noise” and “skips”—products of a one-off experiment in digital playback and recording—as felicitous deformations of both the text and Stevens’ reading. They open up a way of listening to the poem’s own difficult re-reading of the substance of experience. In other words, in this recording I hear IRENE practicing a kind of unconscious deformative criticism.

A CONCERT OF WORLDS: On Ed Roberson & Joseph Donahue

It is a profound honor to introduce Ed Roberson and Joe Donahue, two poets who have enormously enabled my own writing and thinking, influencing me in ways I am still trying happily to discover. They are poets for me, and I trust for many here this evening, whose work is of such an astonishing, acute clarity and force that reading them is to learn...

OUR SKILL SOMETIMES TO RECORD IT: On W.C. Williams’ Debut of “The Desert Music”

When William Carlos Williams first agreed to speak at Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises in 1951, he did not realize that the delivery of the poem would truly require exercise. He could not have foreseen at the time of commission the stroke he would suffer the following month, and the toll it would take on his capacity to perform it.

MAGPIETY: An Interview with Melissa Green

Poetry is Melissa Green’s landbridge, her strongest connection to the wider world—though it would be more accurate to say that, through poetry, the rest of the world gains access to Green’s “tremendous intensity and tremendous intelligence,” as Joseph Brodsky put it. Marie Howe has written that “Melissa Green might well be a 21st century version of Emily Dickinson, poet of ecstatic states and extremity.”...

ODE TO THE INSTRUMENT: Liner Notes for a John Wieners’ Recording

“Now a poem from Black Mountain, written in 1955,” begins this affecting recital of “Ode to the Instrument,” recorded for the Woodberry Poetry Room at Boston’s Fassett Studio in March 1962. The crystal-clear track is the only known recording of this uncollected early poem, in which Wieners’ later lyricism—his soft-stated allusiveness and lovesick, apostrophic poise—can already be heard lifting into place. The poem, written...