92Y's Read By

Anne Carson on her selection:

Edwin Denby is a pleasure and an education to read.  He lived from 1903 to 1983 and wrote dance criticism, more general cultural criticism, and poetry. His observation of what happens on stage is so punctilious, his way of telling you about it so simple and clear, his manner of telling so gracious. He was friends with magical people like Alice B. Toklas and Frank O'Hara and seems to have been a bucket of fun. His critical writing achieves a standard rarely seen anymore.

Dance Writings and Poetry at Bookshop.org

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

Leslie Jamison on her selection:

More than anything, I love Brian Doyle for his awe. It's not a blinding or a blunting awe, the kind of awe that scours away the grit and grain and difficulty of things -- it's more like supple attention, an awe not just for hummingbird hearts the size of pencil erasers or whale hearts with valves like swinging saloon doors, but for a mother's papery hand in the thicket of her son's hair -- for the way that tenderness and mortality live side by side, proximity and loss are never far apart. It's an awe for the infinitudes that live in the daily and the ordinary, because what else do we have? It's an awe that gulps the little things the way a hummingbird heart gulps oxygen. It's an awe that knows we're all going to die. It's an awe that knows we'll never be known as fully as we dream of being known. It's an awe that keeps looking anyway, keeps knowing anyway. I've used Doyle as ammunition to fuel reckless love affairs; I've read him to my toddler daughter. His voice feels like an invitation to be baffled by the world, and stunned by it.

One Long River at Bookshop.org

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

Asa Drake on her selections:

I read two poems by Ai, "Cuba, 1962" and "Guadalajara Cemetery." I found her book Vice when I started working for the public library. I don't know how this book found its way into Central Florida, but her poems made me feel at home again in the South, where everything outside of me is beautiful and violent, and somehow means more work.

Luther Hughes on his selections:

For the last several years, I have suffered from depression. It kind of hit me out of nowhere. I've attempted suicide and contemplated it more than several times. "Ice Storm" by Robert Hayden is a poem I love because it exemplifies moments in my life where anything, even nature, will make you question not only beauty, but a higher power--God, really. "The Worst Thing" by Sharon Olds, even though this poem is about her divorce, reminds me of this, too, but it also pushes me to say "the worst thing." To face it with my whole heart. "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton and "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limon remind me to keep pushing. To breathe. To live.  

Ana Portnoy Brimmer on her selections:

In Nicole Cecilia Delgado's collection, Apenas un cántaro, a graffiti credited to "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" reads: "Vivir es despedirse." To live is to say goodbye. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about departures, leave-takings, distance, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and (extra)exacerbated political crisis came into view. The poems "In Exodus I Love You More," by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah), and "Lamento Borincano," by Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado, seemed like appropriately heart-wrenching reads during moments in which goodbyes (those said, unsaid, feared, postponed, awaited, stolen, uncertain) permeate so much of our linguistic and emotional landscapes, and as we contemplate distance as a political condition. Finally, as a Puerto Rican poet and organizer of profound decolonial conviction myself, it seemed so fitting to read the work of a Palestinian and a Puerto Rican poet, side by side, both places of shared struggles, fighting against colonialism and occupation, and as voices for this meditation and moment. 

En la colección, Apenas un cántaro, de Nicole Cecilia Delgado, un grafiti acreditado a "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" lee: "Vivir es despedirse." He pasado mucho tiempo pensando en las despedidas, los adioses, la distancia, incluso antes de que la pandemia del Covid-19 y la crisis política (extra)exacerbada se volvieran realidad. Los poemas "In Exodus I Love You More", por el poeta Palestino Mahmoud Darwish (traducido por Fady Joudah), y "Lamento Borincano", por la poeta Puertorriqueña Nicole Cecilia Delgado, me parecieron lecturas apropiadamente desgarradoras para momentos en los cuales las despedidas (aquellas dichas, no dichas, temidas, pospuestas, esperadas, robadas, inciertas) forman gran parte de nuestras esferas lingüísticas y emocionales, y mientras contemplamos la distancia como condición política. Finalmente, como poeta y organizadora Puertorriqueña de profunda convicción decolonial, me pareció oportuno leer el trabajo de un poeta Palestino y una poeta Puertorriqueña, lado a lado, ambxs siendo lugares de luchas compartidas, batallando contra el colonialismo y la ocupación, y como voces para esta meditación y momento. 

Daniella Toosie-Watson on her selections:

I don’t know how to write love poems. At least when I’ve tried, it’s been wildly challenging. I’m learning how to write intimacy and tenderness, and when I first read this poem by Ilya Kaminsky I thought it was just the perfect way to write those things. I aspire to write and craft love with this kind of subtlety and care.  I chose to read the Carl Phillips poem because it articulates my feelings around sex that I’ve never been able to put to words: “into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be, that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming.” When I first read that line it was a punch to the gut. You know those poems that you wish you wrote? This is one of those poems for me.

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

From Douglas Kearney's "Playing the Changing Same:"

There’s a saying that goes, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” It’s worn, maybe, but not played out. More than whatever truth it holds, I’ve been drawn to the maxim’s symmetry and paradox, something I might describe to my students as holding a contradiction in its hands.

Yet, it does make an argument. If I take the saying and break it down, as a philosopher might have once suggested, to its very last compound, I find myself at: “change/same.” In this, I see the formula for “pattern”: a structure that requires—and amplifies—the simultaneous presence of change and sameness. In full, the adage includes “more things,” and this, I think is important to remember. In “more things”—imprecise and multiplicitous—we have the opportunity for variation, difference, changes on the changes. These should not, however, distract us from recognizing the big pattern, the changing same at the saying’s bottom. And that big pattern? It stays happening despite the differences playing over its surface.

To read the full essay, visit 92y.org/ReadBy

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

Roxane Gay on her selection:

There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

Drawn from Gay's editor's introduction to The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, forthcoming this fall. Pre-order at Bookshop.org.

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

Caryl Phillips on his selection:

It’s over thirty years since I first came upon the work of C.P. Cavafy. A friend of mine, a Polish poet, had recommended Cavafy’s Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. I worried a little that, not being a poet, there would not be any real point of connection. However, from the first page I recognized something in Cavafy’s work that struck a chord with me. Cavafy lived between two worlds—the Egyptian and the Greek—and had a complex relationship to the word “home.” He underpinned his work with historical detail and had little interest in the world of publishing. His was an essentially reflective, and reclusive, muse—looking back at time past and wondering about what lay ahead. This seems to be exactly what many of us are now doing. Taking this time to think about how to stitch together our past and present so that when we return to “normal” we might have a more balanced, and purposeful, sense of what we should do with the rest of our lives.

Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. Keeley and Sherrard at Bookshop.org

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

Rivka Galchen on her selection:

I chose this story because it deals with anxieties both rational and irrational. I love the way the narrator of this story works so hard to be cheerful. We see the labor, sometimes absurd, sometimes heroic, that goes into feeling okay with the basics of the world: that time moves, that calamities happen, that our hearts are unreasonable and panicked. Also Cheever describes California palm trees as "disheveled and expatriated" and like "rank upon rank of wet mops"—those incidental accuracies and pleasures are (for me) sunshine. I admire the story for offering a moment of grace—an almost silly one—that I can believe in. At least briefly.

The Stories of John Cheever at Bookshop.org

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

Claudia Rankine on her selection:

This untitled poem, by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, was written in November of 1937. He was living in Paris, having traveled back from Spain, and he was working on what would become the posthumous poems. He worked between September and December of that year and then fell ill and died in March of 1938.

The Complete Posthumous Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia

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

David Mitchell on his selection:

I hope you’re well, whoever you are, wherever you are. If my readings were songs on a playlist, I’d call it "A Winter, Some Ghosts and The Summer." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to revisit New York soon.

1) John Connolly is a contemporary Irish crime writer and fantasist. This is my favourite very short ghost story. Thanks to John for letting me read it here.

2) Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, translator and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This cool shot of vodka of a poem is translated here by Joanna Trzeciak.

3) Henry Cecil was a lawyer and writer from the mid-20th century, mostly forgotten now. This story came from a spooky anthology I owned as a kid, called The House of Nightmare. It has a killer ending...

4) Edward Thomas died in the trenches in 1917. The poem evokes a ‘before the war’ moment, when a golden peace was on borrowed time. The train platform in the poem strikes me as a liminal space between life and death.

5) The Country Child is another book from my childhood about a childhood. I love the animism of the trees in this passage. Alison Uttley also wrote A Traveller in Time. She had a historian’s eye and a poet’s ear.

6) “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” William Wordsworth at his shortest. Having to learn ‘the one about the daffodils’ at school bleached Wordsworth for my generation. Discovering this poem, a few years later, put the colour back in.

7) I found James Wright’s collection The Branch Will Not Break in Auckland, NZ on my first visit to the country as a published author. I loved it then and I love it now. On the face of it, the final line from “Lying in a Hammock…” is a downer: why do I find it so uplifting?

8) Ursula K. Le Guin woke up my hunger to write narrative, and to (try to) make other people feel what this novel made me feel. Most hungers consume, but the writing-hunger sustains. I didn’t know Ursula well, but we emailed occasionally. She was sharp, funny and gracious, and the world is a little less magical now she’s no longer in it. Luckily, we still have her writing to make the world more magical than it otherwise would be. This exquisite passage from A Wizard of Earthsea, written (so she told me) on her kitchen table at night after she had put her kids to bed, doubles as a metaphor for the whole, glorious, transformative Wow of Art.

Nocturnes at Bookshop.org

“A Word on Statistics” at Poetry Foundation

“Adlestrop” at Poetry Foundation

The Country Child at Penguin UK

“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” at Poetry Foundation

The Branch Will Not Break at Bookshop.org

A Wizard of Earthsea at Bookshop.org

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

Luis Alberto Urrea on his selection:

Annie Dillard’s books came to me in one of those writerly seasons of transition. I could dip into any of her first volumes and get lost. It’s the way she conflates what some people call “nature writing” with philosophical depths at play, with sudden bursts of homespun vernacular and finally what can only be a kind of theological verve. She is one of the masters who pushes me into a new way of seeing.

In "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard is telling us how savage and sacred our moments of life, how fleeting. She is reminding us to live all of our moments ferociously. I think that is the perfect message for all of us right now.

Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org

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