Archive / 1980-1989

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Rorem, Ned 1980

Friday, November 21, 1980

I was a musician who happened to write, not an author who happened to compose. Thus the diary, being random and bloody and self-indulgent, answered to different needs than the music, which was planned, pristine, objective.

– Ned Rorem, “Setting The Tone, Essays and a Diary”

Continue reading the prologue of this book⇒

Listen to the New York Philharmonic perform Ned Rorem’s “Symphony No. 3:”

Ned Rorem / Symphony No. 3 (Bernstein)

Ned Rorem (b. 1923) Symphony No. 3 (1958) 00:00 – Lento appassionato 06:49 – Allegro molto vivace 09:10 – Largo 12:00 – Andante 16:38 – Allegro molto New York Philharmonic, dir. Leonard Bernstein (world premiere broadcast performance of 18 April 1959) “Rorem’s Third Symphony is much related to the last phase of his residence in France in 1957.

Read an interview with Ned Rorem from the Paris Review:

The Art of the Diary No. 1

ldquo;I am a composer,” Ned Rorem once said, “who also writes, not a writer who also composes.” His music-hundreds of ravishing art songs and instrumental scores, one of which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-has brought him fame. But it is his diaries that have b…

More info on Ned Rorem⇒

Spender, Stephen 1983

Monday, October 24, 1983

Stephen_Spender

The I is one of
The human machines
So common on the gray plains—
Yet being built into flesh
My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.

– Stephen Spender, “The Human Condition”

Continue reading this poem ⇒

Read this interview with Stephen Spender from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 25

The strength of Mr. Spender’s literary reputation, which is international in scope, has made him something of a nomad as scholar and poet. His homes are in St. John’s Wood, London, and Maussanne-les-Alpilles, France, where he spends his summers; but he is often on the road, giv…

More info on Stephen Spender ⇒

Smith, Dave 1981

Friday, May 1, 1981

davesmith

In spatter of spring shade and sun,
I spread my grandfather’s death
on his picnic table, his keys, notes
on cars he owned, travels he made,
repair kits for everything, an aerial
map of the Chesapeake Bay.

– Dave Smith, “A Boy With Ringworm”

Continue reading this poem ⇒

Read this interview with Dave Smith from How a Poem Happens:

Dave Smith

Dave Smith’s recent books include Afield: Writers on Bird Dogs (Skyhorse, 2010), edited with Robert DeMott ; The Wick of Memory: New and Se…

They hawk the yard, heaving big beaks,
laborers with picks, hoes, mattocks,
black all over them the formal suits
something has taught them to hang up
in bright air, brushed to sleekest shine,
and worn with the insouciance of rakes.

– Dave Smith, “Morning Grackles”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Watch Dave Smith read some of his work:


More info on Dave Smith ⇒

Perloff, Marjorie 1986

Friday, March 21, 1986

Watch Marjorie Perloff give a talk from Unoriginal Genius at the University of Richmond:

Writers Series: Marjorie Perloff, American poetry critic

Marjorie Perloff is the author of 13 books and a few hundred essays and reviews on twentieth century poetry and poetics and visual arts. Her books include Radical Artifice: Writing in the Age of Media, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Frank OHara: Poet Among Painters, Twenty-First Century Modernism, and Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.

Read the article by Marjorie Perloff, “Towards a conceptual lyric:”

Towards a conceptual lyric

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them.

More info on Marjorie Perloff⇒

Pastan, Linda 1981

Monday, February 23, 1981

Old woman,
enrobed in nothing
but faith
and strands of chiseled hair,
the living tree once hid
those gnarled limbs, that face
worn to its perfect bones
which has seen everything.

– Linda Pastan, “Donatello’s Magdalene”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Watch Linda Pastan speak at the 2011 National Book Festival:

Linda Pastan: 2011 National Book Festival

Poet Linda Pastan appears at the 2011 National Book Festival. Speaker Biography: Linda Pastan is the author of many works of poetry, including “Carnival Evening,” “Queen of a Rainy Country,” “Waiting for My Life,” “PM/AM,” “The Last Uncle” and her latest work, “Traveling Light: Poems” (Norton), among others.

This landlocked house should grace a harbor:
its widow’s walk of grey pickets
surveys an inland sea
of grass; wind
breaks like surf against
its rough shingles.

– Linda Pastan, “Widow’s Walk, Somewhere Inland”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Read an interview with Linda Pastan from PBS:

Linda Pastan

Jeffrey Brown talks with award-winning poet Linda Pastan.

More info on Linda Pastan⇒

Notley, Alice 1975; 1984

Friday, April 18, 1975
An Homage to Frank O’Hara
Friday, November 30, 1984
with Paul Carroll

What I lose you let me, accusation
always gets one in. But I want to talk like the dead
remember that town where we went or
how do I know when I’m just a soul – not
when I’m leading?

– Alice Notely, “My Sea”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Watch a Alice Notley read her work at the University of Chicago:

No Title

The Renaissance Society and Poem Present co-presented this reading by Alice Notley on November 17, 2011. Notley has published over 25 books of poetry, including Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006), awarded the Lenore Marhsall Poetry Prize; Disobedience (2001), awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Mysteries of a Small House (1998); The Descent of Alette (1996); Close to me & Closer .

An old woman of indeterminate race, in white hat
and scarf, no teeth staring back at me.
He sounded brittle and superior last night, do the
dead do that; Grandma had a plethora of tones of voice
compared to anyone in this anthology…

– Alice Notley, “The Anthology”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Read an interview with Alice Notely from the Boston Review:

“At the Mercy of My Poetic Voice”: An Interview with Alice Notley – Boston Review

Collaged fan. Image provided by Alice Notley. Talking with Alice Notley, I was equally struck by her ferocious integrity-her insistence, for

More info on Alice Notely⇒

Milosz, Czeslaw 1989

Sunday, November 12, 1989

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

– Czeslaw Milosz, “Campo dei Fiori”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Listen to Czeslaw Milosz’s 1989 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.

Buy this audio recording featuring Czeslaw Milosz⇒

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

– Czeslaw Milosz, “A Song on the End of the World”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Read this interview with Czeslaw Milosz from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 70

A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existent…

More info on Czeslaw Milosz⇒

Merrill, James 1985

Wednesday, April 17, 1985
Vintage poster of James Merrill's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of James Merrill’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

The hand with a seagull purpose falls upon
Sand where the beach is barren: through clean light
From eye’s blue zenith, past seascapes of blue,
Falls on grey sand; yet stenciled in its fall

– James Merrill, “Accumulations of the Sea”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Listen to James Merrill read some of his poetry at the 1969 Glascock Poetry Contest:

The boatman rowed into
That often-sung impasse.
Each visitor foreknew
A floor of lilting glass,
A vault of stone, lit blue.

– James Merrill, “The Blue Grotto”

Continue reading this poem⇒

Read an interview with James Merrill from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 31

Courtesy Rollie Mckenna Collection. My first glimpse of James Merrill, a dozen years ago, was in black and white. It was a photograph of him, in the Brinnin and Read anthology called The Modern Poets. He had just turned toward the camera-his mouth slightly open, as if not expecti…

More info on James Merrill⇒

MacDonald, Douglas 1981

Friday, May 27, 1981
Homage to Anna Akhmatova
with Anna Linchevskaya
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Vintage poster of Homage to Anna Akhmatova featuring Anna Linchevskaya and Douglas MacDonald reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Homage to Anna Akhmatova featuring Anna Linchevskaya and Douglas MacDonald reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Preview the book printed for this event:
Six poems & requiem

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