92Y's Read By

Nicole Cecilia Delgado on her selection:

Conocí a Ámbar Past hace más o menos diez años en San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, en donde me quedé a vivir dos años. Fue una maestra esencial, no solo de cómo hacer libros de poesía, sino de cómo vivir con poco, en aislamiento, en contacto con la Naturaleza y en libertad. Vuelvo a su poesía cada vez que tengo que reconectar con la Animala, la Loba y la Huracana. Me prepara para estar sola y me enseña a sobrevivir. Estos poemas están publicados en el libro Huracana, una antología que reúne varios libros que fueron originalmente publicados en pequeñas ediciones de artista.

I met Ámbar Past about ten years ago in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, where I lived for two years. She was an essential teacher, not only on how to make books of poetry, but how to live with little, in isolation, in contact with Nature and freedom. I return to her poetry every time I need to reconnect with la Animala, la Loba and la Huracana. Her work prepares me to be by myself and teaches me how to survive. These poems were published in her book Huracana, an anthology that brings together several books originally published in small artist editions.

Huracana at Casa del Libro

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

Michael Chabon on his selection:

Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man” for the first time—around the age of ten or eleven—was the first time I realized that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. Not words, not turns of phrase, but imagery and patterns of metaphor. “The Rocket Man” unfolds to its melancholy conclusion in a series of haunting images of light and dark, machinery and biology, power and fragility. Bradbury, at his best—as here—was one of our best.

The Illustrated Man at Indiebound

Intro and outro from "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Nicole Krauss on her selection:

I recently finished a collection of short stories, and while writing it I sometimes turned to Leonard Michaels to remember what's possible in the form, and to rest in his fluency. “Isaac” is from Michaels’s first collection, Going Places, published in 1969. I chose it because… why did I choose it? Because it’s New York City. A hospital. Incomprehension in the face of the things that befall us. And because its language—bright, sharp, funny—is live-wire alive in the face of it all. 

The Collected Stories at Indiebound

This story contains language which may not be suitable for children.

Jonathan Franzen on his selection:

Vasily Grossman's towering achievement, Life and Fate, is a product of his unique access to every aspect of the Soviet society during the Second World War. Though he would soon fall out of favor with Stalin and would fare no better under Krushchev, he was a valued member of the Soviet intelligentsia, survived the purges of 1937, (he had friends and family who didn't), and was the country's leading war reporter. He published the first authoritative, eyewitness accounts of the Nazi death camps—his imagined account of his mother's last days in a Ukrainian Jewish ghetto, an early chapter in Life and Fate, is a cornerstone of the literature of the Shoah—and he had an unparalleled grasp of Soviet military life; the novel is necessary reading for its Stalingrad battle scenes alone. The chapter I've selected to read, which consists mostly of the writing of a religious kook imprisoned by the Nazis, is probably the least representative chapter, but it's arguably the most central. It feels spoken to me directly by an author caught between the great evil of Hitler and the slightly less great evil of Stalin and struggling to find something in humanity worth believing in.

Life and Fate at Indiebound

Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg:

Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines, the syntax, the rhythm, tone, tempo. This is the sign of tremendous formal skill—that one controls the audible voice of the poem right down to its minutest modulations. This is also the signature of a poem which is a lived experience—not the record of one, or the report of one. If there ever were, as Stevens puts it in “On Modern Poetry,” those urgent poems “of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice” they are the adamant, fierce, brave, poems of Linda Gregg. It is hard to describe poems which appear to carry true visionary experience in their marrow. They are, to a certain extent, disincarnate, icy, terse, as-if-dictated. Vision uses abstraction as if it were its natural integument. Vision would seem to use the poet, the poet’s body and voice, as a vessel to get itself expressed, forcibly pressed from the invisible into the visible, from the unknowable into the knowable or the transmittable. And these are certainly characteristics of Gregg’s poems. And yet they are also so deeply poems of the body’s unique knowledge—its intimations, forebodings, fears, lusts and loves. Her poems seem to do it all. It would appear quite impossible for the incarnate to shine so visibly carnate before us—and in so few words. But there she is, as Gregg would say, seeing the vision stand before her. Finally her poems exhibit a fearlessness, a recklessness which seems to be shared by both a way of living and a way of writing—a numinous incandescence, which has to do with searching for the limits of not just what life can be, but also of what language can hold—which might indeed be Too Bright To See. Not any self-indulgent or thrill-seeking recklessness, but recklessness in the name of a deeper reckoning. Until indeed, here she is, always blazing, always alive, Linda Gregg.

Robert Hass on Linda Gregg:

The first poem of Linda's that I read was "We Manage Most When We Manage Small." I think I read it twice. A couple of days later I realized that I had it more or less memorized, from that startling first line—"What things are steadfast? Not the birds." Her music certainly had to do with the way she used questions and declarative sentences and her feel for the relation of sentence to line, which is very strong and very often very simple. She wanted to make poems that were plain and radiant like the chunks of thousand-year-old marble she would occasionally turn up on the island of Santorini when, as a young woman, she was living there with Jack Gilbert and learning to write. Her aesthetic, I noticed, when I came to know her, was frugal and like the way she lived the practical parts of life. I remember her describing her relation to shopping and to the objects of desire in a consumer culture. She said she liked to go downtown, to Union Square in San Francisco or uptown to Madison Avenue in New York and hunt down the very best and most beautiful version of the thing she had desired and study it for a while and walk away. It reminded me of Richard Wilbur's wonderful phrase about Emily Dickinson's poetry. He said she traded in "sumptuous destitution." Something like that seems to account for the light Linda's poems give off.

"We Manage Most When We Manage Small"

"The Poet Goes About Her Business" 

"Eurydice"

"The Girl I Call Alma"

"Too Bright to See"

"The Apparent"

"There She Is"

Terrance Hayes on his selection:

I'm reading two poems by Wanda Coleman to celebrate the April publication of her selected poems, Wicked Enchantment: “Things No One Knows” and “American Sonnet #54.”  I’m also reading two of my poems in conversation with her work: “The Things-No-One-Knows Blues,” from my sophomore collection, Hip Logic, and an unpublished American Sonnet. She was a guiding light for me even before she became a friend. I was honored to edit her selected poems.

Lauren Groff on her selection:

I've long loved "Sredni Vashtar" for its fury and wildness, and for its profound understanding of the human needs for religious reverence, ceremony, and vengeance. Poor sickly Conradin is a full, complete, utterly ghastly child whose cold final act, of simply making toast, shakes me every time.

The Chronicles of Clovis at IndieBound

Colm Tóibín on his selection:

When W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory met at the end of the nineteenth century, she, thirteen years his senior, had published very little. She was a widow living in a large house called Coole Park in County Galway in West Ireland. He was every inch the young poet. She had one son, Robert, who spent most of his time in London. Until his marriage in 1917, Yeats spent many summers at Coole. He and Lady Gregory collaborated on many projects, including plays and the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1918, after Robert Gregory was killed in the First World War, Yeats came to Coole, joining Lady Gregory and her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Yeats there wrote his two great elegies for Robert: “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” a public poem remembering a hero, and the other, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in a more hushed tone, written for a ghostly voice, attempting to offer his old friend comfort by finding a new context for his death, suggesting balance and completion for the dead airman rather than strife or tragedy.

These poems were written in a time of loss, in a place where no visitors came, when the house was isolated so that the poet could work.

Billy Collins on his selection:

I chose poems from William Matthews (1942-1997) and Thomas Lux (1946-2017) because I wanted to honor two fallen soldiers who fought for an increase of beauty and truth in the world, who also knew that a good poem must at least be a series of good lines—that is, they found their way to the end of a poem one line at a time. In their own different ways and with highly different voices, they both understood the importance of broad humor and subtle ironies in freeing a poem from the claustrophobia of purely autobiographical designs. All poems are autobiographical in that it takes a human being to write one. But these two faced the world, not the mirror, when they wrote, and thus followed the advice that “poems should at least be interesting.” Plus, it’s no secret that they were both irreplaceable pals of mine—as well as teachers by the distinctive example of their best work.

Rachel Cusk on her selection:

Tennyson’s In Memoriam crops up in the dullest Victorian stretches of an English Literature degree, and so the glimmering self-utterance that stutters into life across its (intimidating) number of lyric sequences has the impact - for the browbeaten student - of the birth of modernity. I read it then, and picked it up again much later in life, in a time whose trials and revelations it seemed almost to have prophesied. If this is the most one can expect literature to do, it does it. The lyrics I’ve chosen are the two in which I find the most sustenance, partly for the contrast offered by their two very different readings of the process and moral structure of change.

In Memoriam 95 [By night we linger'd] at The Poetry Foundation

In Memoriam 106 [Ring out, wild bells] at The Poetry Foundation