Summer Poetry Reading List 2014

Ernesto Cardenal, Apocalypse and Other Poems Ernesto Cardenal, Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria Ernesto Cardenal, From Nicaragua with Love Ernesto Cardenal, Golden UFOs: The Indian Poems Ernesto Cardenal, Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems Ernesto Cardenal, Psalms Ernesto Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour…

Primacy

“[Shoshani] didn’t teach piety; he taught the texts. The texts are more fundamental—and vaster—than piety. “ –Emmanuel Levinas

Reading/212

“But books grant us many possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. It may be that there is no book, however well written, that can remove an ounce of pain from the tragedy…

Reading/713 (Master Chu)

In reading, you must keep your mind glued to the text. Only when every sentence and every character falls into place have you done a good job of thinking through the work. In general, the…

May We Always Be Amateurs

Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces Wislawa Szymborska Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Herein are a few score short pieces by the Nobel laureate (Literature, 1996), usually no more than a page or two, although…

Drugged by Books

Soon after my father’s death, I started reading Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish, his journal of reflections on his year of going to shul and saying Kaddish. In the days and weeks ahead, Wieseltier offered me some…

Books

My father had an Appalachian education That went through sixth grade I went after and got a BA, MA And a PhD I doubt my father Ever finished reading a book (I once asked him…