God has not shown me in nightdreams and no sorcerer has divined where my last day will overtake me and how my end will look, that I may know. Whether in my tent, on my couch, I will die with all my cherished close to me, every one of them camped mutely around me, sentries…
Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort…
In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch…
Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip…
Past the fences of beds we are movie sheds of sleep. We can’t stamp or clap. At best we shriek in monkey speech, our old dialect, about the latest things. And then we truly live through our own civilization. Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek
Night. The bridge’s scent. The fence lets in roots. Water shines for the earth. A listening stone. A hair sings. Night. Road. Your own knees lost in suppositions. There is no separate green. A different epoch of the…
A chair stands: article of truth sculpture of itself tied into one knot reality’s abstraction It broke. That’s a form too yes — candelabra yes — bull’s face. A chair’s abstract calling now summons whole crowds of reality ties them in one knot inside the stockroom of truth reality’s…
To Artur Sandauer Higher reveilles of shape habitations of touch all weathers of the senses . . . Lowest — I the staircase of reality rises from my breasts. And I feel nothing. Nothing succulent. Nothing colorful. I’m not only not a testament hero I’m worse…
the window’s wing I’m in my nook my ears hum weeds carried on Noah’s line in the painting, it’s incomplete, old brown greens fluttering for three hundred years and an angel’s bent elbow ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ what is this art when centuries fly interplanetarily us knocking at our own doors all…
Oh how I rejoice that you are sky and kaleidoscope that you have so many artificial stars that you glow in a monstrance of brightness, when I place your perforated half-globe over my eyes under the air. How unstrained in…
The Lamb Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed By the stream & o’er the mead, Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, wooly, bright, Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee?…
A fragile creature that cannot be broken is confounding, and this juxtaposition of delicacy and strength renders it freakishly powerful. Isabelle Huppert is so constituted. This is evident from almost every one of the dizzying number of films in which she has appeared. Her aura is incongruously encased in an exceedingly slim frame. Animated by…
