92Y's Read By

Howard Norman on his selection:

I read two diary entries by the iconic haiku master, Masaoka Shiki, which I translated with Kazumi Tanaka while in Japan in 2007. Shiki was often confined by his lifelong illness to his bed; a recurring image is a parade of the tops of black umbrellas seen just over the top of a wall.

Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems, trans. Burton Watson

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Merve Emre on her selection:

At the beginning of March, I helped to organize a group reading of Robert Musil's unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. The excerpt I have chosen to read, from Chapter 32, "The Forgotten, Highly Relevant Story of the Major's Wife," wonderfully compresses much of what I admire about Musil's writing. The story of the major's wife is a story about a man who is in love with the idea of being in love, and as such, is narrated with irony and affectation, but also with pure and gentle beauty.

The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, trans. Sophie Wilkins 

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Chris Kraus on her selection:

A friend recommended The Executioner’s Song to me when I started researching a book set on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Mailer wrote it in 1979 based on events that occurred in Utah between 1976-1977. The culture described in the book feels close to the world I observed on the Range a half century later … different drugs, different guns and vehicle models, but the values and mindset are remarkably similar. Mailer’s book could not be more prescient.

The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Paul Tran on their selection:

The handprint is one of the earliest examples of self-representation. I can hardly imagine what it was like, thousands and thousands of years ago, to seek shelter in a cave; to find others had been there; to see the animals they painted; and then to join the animals by leaving their handprint on the wall. Maybe the word for it is hope. Maybe it’s realizing I’m not alone. I’m here, still.

“Between Darkness and Light,” Paul Tran, Shantell Martin and Shamel Pitts (TRIBE)

“The Cave,” by Paul Tran

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Valzhyna Mort on her selection:

On April 26th, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. I am reading from Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger and uncertainty that they still live with.

Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Keith Gessen 

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Paisley Rekdal on her selection:

Charming may not be a word commonly associated with Alexander Pope, but for me, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation” may be one of the most charming poems I know. Pope, famous for “The Rape of the Lock,” and his exhaustingly didactic essay “A Man,” delights with this epistolary poem—brief, by Popian standards—full of wit and life. Like all his poems, it displays a beautiful facility with rhyme and meter, (Pope was a master of the heroic couplet), and a beautiful sense of compassion to the young woman to whom it is addressed. In his poem, Miss Blount is subject to all sorts of whims and institutions—mother, aunt, the church, the squire. There are so many daydreams and visions enclosed inside “Epistle” that by the end of the poem, I’m almost lost inside its spell. Like Pope, I’m regretfully startled awake from this enchanting picture of Miss Blount, and want to return immediately to the poem’s beginning: to relive once more the few, evanescent moments in which Miss Blount is again young, willful, alive—a product both of Pope’s attentive admiration, and mine.

Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation” 

Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Jane Hirshfield on her selection:

“The Lives of the Poets”

Poems are about our human lives--their knowing by stories, language, feelings, comprehensions, perplexities, musics. Because the lives of poets include the making of poetry, some poems are about that. I've chosen a half-dozen, from a range of persons, places, and directions, from a folder I’ve long been keeping that I think of as “The Lives of the Poets.” Because this selection is for the 92nd St Y, a place where people have long come, and will come again, to hear poems said by their makers, and because we’ve all been through a year now of pandemic uncertainties, I begin with two that show the other side of the fabric of public readings.

Anna Swir: “Poetry Reading” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082

Lucille Clifton: “After the Reading” https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142

Han Shan: “Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars” (translated by Burton Watson) https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500

Yannis Ritsos: “Necessary Explanation” (translated by Kimon Friar) https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670

Adrienne Rich: “XIII (Dedication),” final section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World” https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310

Frank O'Hara: “Autobiographia Litteraria” https://bookshop.org/books/frank-o-hara-selected-poems/9780375711480

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Stacy Schiff on her selection:

In a contest between the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, I will opt for Howard every time -- with an exception made for Amis’s 1954 Lucky Jim. As laughter seems in short supply these days, I offer up this favorite Amis set-piece, arguably among the funniest pages of 20th century English literature not written by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m going to do my best to get through them with a straight face, but know that I never have before. Our hero, who is not much of a hero, is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in medieval history at a provincial British university. He is the houseguest of his department chair, who holds Dixon’s fledgling career in his hands. You needn’t worry about the minor characters who flitter by, all of them peripheral to the central drama here, which is Dixon’s climbing into bed and out of it, many hours, several surprises, and one epic hangover later.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Notes on the selections:

It’s been a year. That’s been the chorus for the past couple of weeks, and we're here, saying it too; it feels too notable, too hard-won, too full of loss, too much not to note. This episode is a compilation of some of the poems recorded over 62 episodes: a selection of poems that seem to speak to the intensely individual and communal experiences of grief and hope, of outrage and awe in the past year. Links to the poems and the original episodes below.

From “Read By: Terrance Hayes” - “Things No One Knows,” by Wanda Coleman 

From “Read By: Louise Erdrich” - “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word,” by Natalie Diaz 

From “Read By: Douglas Kearney” - “Big Thicket, Pastoral,” by Douglas Kearney 

From “Read By: Ada Limón” - “From the Other Side” and “The Dwelling Places” by Alejandra Pizarnik 

From “Read By: Tina Chang” - “Things I Didn't Know I Loved,” by Nâzım Hikmet 

Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Producer's note: We return this week to Diana Khoi Nguyen's reading of poems from Asian poets in diaspora. Please support your local Asian diaspora and anti-racist community organizing, as you can. In particular, Nguyen recommends donations to Stop AAPI Hate's fund: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate

Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection:

In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel. In a sense, I am able to be with these writers, and now enable for them to be with you--by facilitating an encounter between them and you in this intimate aural space. For this recording, I read the follow poems from the following writers:

Jane Wong, "Everything"

Dao Strom, excerpt from "Self-Travelogue/s (Endemism)”

Mary-Kim Arnold, "American Girlhood”

Vaan Nguyen, "Mekong River"

Christine Shan Shan Hou "Amanuensis"