On the New York Literary Establishment in the Fifties
“There’s no room for youth and vitality in New York. It is a city full of guilty academicians.” –Gregory Corso “Too big, too multiple, too jaded.” –Jack Kerouac “We want everyone to know that we…
Category: World Literature
A Poem, a History, a Novel
This fall Dianne, Lynette and I are reading the following books:
“I’ll Never Know, in the Silence You Don’t Know, You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”
Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
Yiddish Writers/5
I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… –H. Leivick
Yiddish Writers/4
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
A Briiliant Bit of Victor Hugo
My friend Andrew Wimmer has taken on a translation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. He shared the following in this morning’s email… “If it had not rained on the night of June 17, 1815, the future…
Yiddish Writers/3
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (Elie Wiesel, whose first book, And the World Remained Silent, was in Yiddish, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.)…
Yiddish Writers/2
I tried in my book Kiddush Hashem to picture Auschwitz in seventy pages. But I wrote the book over a period of six years, in pain and agony. And writing it I became a changed…
Yiddish Writers/1
If you’re looking to buy something, I’m afraid I’m all out of stock, unless I can interest you in some fine hunger pains, a week’s supply of heartache, or a head full of scrambled brains….
Living Beats
I received an email from New Directions today and found a link to this The Washington Post profile of Ferlinghetti, McClure, di Prima, Gold, and Snyder. Enjoy!