92Y's Read By

Yesenia Montilla on her selections:

It seems truly unbelievable that we are coming on a year of this pandemic and I have been like so many: just trying my hardest to survive. How I have survived is by slipping into poetry; my own and others. What deeply moves me about the four poems I chose are their honesty and their surprise, their tenacity and how they unravel a kind of ethos for us all within every line. The words have carried me through even though to me all four seem to work as elegies in a lot of ways; the elegy often times can be the beginning not the end. In this time, right now, I am craving beginning and cursing all the ends that we have suffered and maybe that is why the elegy calls to me. The four poems I am reading for you today are "temporary statement" by Sheila Maldonado; "Vita Nuova" by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado; "This Moment/Right Now" by Roberto Carlos Garcia and "Our Last Summer Together" by Cheryl Boyce Taylor. I hope they strike and move, create fire, or bring peace.

That’s What You Get by Sheila Maldonado

The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

[elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia

Mama Phife Represents by Cheryl Boyce Taylor

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

Raquel Salas Rivera with coquíes in background:

“ataúd abierto para un obituario puertorriqueño” // “open casket for a puerto rican obituary”

This poem responds to Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” by expanding it to include those Puerto Ricans that still live in Puerto Rico, recontextualizing the imagined return in contemporary Puerto Rico. It is both an homage and answer to Pietri’s poem. I am constantly searching for ways to capture what it is like to live in Puerto Rico. This poem is the closest I’ve come to that description.

lo terciario / the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera

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

Monique Truong on her selection:

On March 5, 2020, mere days before COVID-19 would change our day-to-day existence, I attended a crowded bookstore reading here in NYC, where Yoko Tawada and her friend Bettina Brandt read from Tawada's novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear. They sat side-by-side, each wearing one white glove, and occasionally they held over their respective faces a hand-drawn polar bear mask, made for the occasion by Tawada. I couldn’t make up such delights. Here’s the photographic proof. Now, when I revisit the off-kilter originality of Tawada’s novel, featuring not one but three polar bear narrators, it brings me right back to that reading, which seems to belong to another lifetime or to a parallel reality, which is apropos as the novel itself so deftly evokes the warp and weft of another way of existing, achingly familiar yet different and strange.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

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

A.E. Stallings on her selection:

Matthew Prior (1664 – 1721) rose from humble beginnings--he was the nephew of a tavern owner--to be one of the most important poets of his day, and to serve as a diplomat in the Hague and Paris. He is known now for his satirical poems and vers de société. "Jinny the Just" is an elegy for a real person: Jane Ansley, a widow from Flanders, who served as Prior's housekeeper, and was also his mistress. (Prior never married.) Poem-as-portrait is a relatively rare genre. (Not many other good examples spring to my mind--Brooks' "Rites for Cousin Vit" is one.) I like that this isn't about an idealized young woman, but a capable middle-aged woman who rules her domestic sphere, and whom we really get to know. I love the deep affection and gentle humor in the poem, which somehow makes it all the more affecting.

Matthew Prior at the Poetry Foundation

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

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"

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

Quan Barry on her selection:

There are two books lying on an end table in my living room that I like to keep out should any visitor to my home feel inclined to pick them up. One is called How to Be a Villain, and the other is Gary Soto’s What Poets Are Like. I decided there’s enough villainy going around these days, so rather than perfect the fine art of being an arch nemesis, here’s a brief reading from one of Soto’s delightful essays on these crazy beings we call poets.

What Poets Are Like, by Gary Soto 

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

Ruth Franklin on her selection:

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is deservedly famous for suspenseful fiction like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. During her lifetime, though, she was equally well known for the humorous stories she wrote about her absent-minded-professor husband and their four children, published in popular women’s magazines of the era and collected in two best-selling memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. “Charles,” the story I’ve chosen to read, is her first family story and perhaps the funniest, capped by a perfect punchline.

Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson

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

T.C. Boyle on his selection:

It was Donald Barthelme, along with Robert Coover, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar and Flannery O’Conner who spurred me to be in writing myself. Barthelme is best known for his abstract stories, like “Indian Uprising,” a story I cherish, but I’ve chosen “The School” for this program because of its tight comedic narrative and its presentation as a dramatic monologue. It works by escalation, as much of our humor does. The line, “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy” always brings down the house. Of course, at its core, the story questions what education--knowledge itself--can do to ease the souls of a species, burdened with the foreknowledge of its own death.

Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme

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

Jenny Xie on her selection:

Rich’s words are ones I’ve revisited, during this time of intersecting and unfurling crises, to help me think through the efficacy of the arts—particularly poetry—to respond to the clamor, the turmoil, and the extraordinary pressures of this moment. What civic responsibility do artists and writers bear? And what does it mean to write and read poetry that attempts to make sense of what’s at stake in our time? The moral clarity of Rich’s rhetoric is bracing. Her words offer a resolute commitment and a summons, along with a necessary reminder of what revolutionary power lies in hearing differently, speaking differently, imagining differently—in that hard labor of committed attention.

Poetry and Commitment: An Essay, by Adrienne Rich 

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

Catherine Barnett on her selections:

Because there are so many texts I love and because of the radical adjustments we’ve had to make in the space-time continuum, I chose to curate a small collection of poems and prose excerpts, each of which takes notice of, or is somehow guided by, time. I’ve included the following poems and excerpts; a collection I’m calling “On the Specious Present and the So-Called Obvious Past.”

Philip Larkin, "Days"

From Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing, #3"

Dominique Bechard, "Half a Party"

Gwendolyn Brooks, "An Aspect of Love: Alive in the Fire and Ice"

Guillaume Apollinaire, “There Is” or "Il y a"

Claudia Rankine, "Weather"

John Berger, from "Paul Strand"

Saskia Hamilton, “On. On. Stop. Stop.”

Wislawa Szymborska, "May 16, 1973"

Yiyun Li, from "Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life"

Jean Valentine, “For Love”

Rick Barot, “The Galleons 4”

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Storm"

Paul Celan, "So many constellations" (trans. Michael Hamburger)

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