Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, Tess Gallagher was born on July 21, 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and MA from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke, and a MFA from the University of Iowa. Her first collection of poems, Instructions to the Double, won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for "best book of poetry published by a small press". In 1984, she published the collection Willingly, which consists of poems written to and about her third husband, author Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. Other collections include Dear Ghosts (Graywolf Press, 2006); My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems (1995); Owl-Spirit Dwelling (1994) and Moon Crossing Bridge (1992).

Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment of the Arts Awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.She has taught at St. Lawrence University, Kirkland College, the University of Montana in Missoula, the University of Arizona in Tucson, Syracuse University, and Willamette University, Bucknell University, and Whitman College.

From https://poets.org/poet/tess-gallagher.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.

From https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/183905/raymond-carver?tab=penguin-biography.

For more information about Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver:

A New Path to the Waterfall: https://groveatlantic.com/book/a-new-path-to-the-waterfall/

“Tess Gallagher”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tess-gallagher

“Raymond Carver”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/raymond-carver

“Regarding Tess”: https://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-culture/2009/01/0508-regardingtess

“Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver

“Raymond Carver: the kindest cut”: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/27/raymond-carver-editor-influence

Today’s Quotation is care of Naomi Shihab Nye. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also the author of the young adult novel Habibi, which was named an ALA Notable Book, a Best Book for Young Adults, and winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award as well as the Book Publishers of Texas award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/1339809.

For more information about Naomi Shihab Nye:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Naomi Shihab Nye on The Quarantine Tapes: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-073-naomi-shihab-nye

Edward Hirsch about Nye, at 18:00: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-173-edward-hirsch

Words Under the Words: https://www.amazon.com/Words-Under-Selected-Poems-Corner/dp/0933377290

“Adios”: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2018/02/07/adios-by-naomi-shihab-nye/

“Naomi Shihab Nye”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

“Naomi Shihab Nye, On Being”: ​​https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-before-you-know-kindness-as-the-deepest-thing-inside/

“Naomi Shihab Nye Believes in the Found Poem”: https://miscellanynews.org/2020/10/21/arts/naomi-shihab-nye-believes-in-the-found-poem/

Today’s Quotation is care of Marcel Proust. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871 in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was one of France's most distinguished scientists. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was a well-educated woman who loved the great classic writers of the 17th century, especially Molière and Racine. Marcel's only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873. The hypersensitive Marcel suffered all his life from a number of ailments, especially asthma. Although he earned university degrees in philosophy and law, he always knew that he wanted to be a writer.

In 1910, he had his bedroom lined with cork to block out the deafening noise of daytime Paris because he slept during the day and wrote through the night, after returning home from some of Paris's most exclusive salons. He was known as the city's most famous recluse, he even called himself an owl because he wrote while listening to his “nocturnal Muse.” Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, was published in November 1913 and was headed for a fourth printing when World War I broke out.

Proust continued to write, incorporating the unprecedented conflict into his story of contemporary French society. In 1919, Within a Budding Grove was published and won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The final three years of his life saw the publication of The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah. The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained were published posthumously. The novel's main themes are time and memory and the power of art to withstand the destructive forces of time.

From https://www.proust-ink.com/biography.

For more information about Marcel Proust:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Sven Birkerts about Proust, at 18:00: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-181-sven-bikerts

Merve Emre about Proust, at 16:46: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-170-merve-emre

The Hare with Amber Eyes: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250811271/theharewithambereyes

In Search of Lost Time: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/SLT/in-search-of-lost-time

“Reading Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ During a Pandemic”: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/reading-proust-in-search-of-lost-time-during-pandemic/616850/

“What We Find When We Get Lost in Proust”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/what-we-find-when-we-get-lost-in-proust

Today’s Quotation is care of Maurice Sendak. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) was born on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. A largely self-taught artist, Sendak illustrated over one hundred-fifty books during his sixty-year career.

The books he wrote as well as illustrated include Kenny’s Window, Very Far Away, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Nutshell Library (consisting of Chicken Soup with Rice, Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny, and Pierre), Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, Bumble-Ardy, My Brother’s Book, and Presto and Zesto in Limboland (co-authored by Arthur Yorinks). He has collaborated with such celebrated authors as Meindert DeJong, Tony Kushner, Randall Jarrell, Ruth Krauss, Else Holmelund Minarik, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. And he has illustrated classics by Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy.

Sendak began a second career as a costume and stage designer in the late 1970s, designing operas that included Krása’s Brundibar, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, as well as Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker. He also designed the sets and costumes, as well as wrote the book and lyrics for the musical production of Really Rosie.

Maurice Sendak remains the most honored children’s book artist in history. He was the recipient of the 1964 Caldecott Medal, the 1970 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 1983 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and the 2003 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. In 1996 President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America. In 1972 Sendak moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut with his partner of fifty years, the psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Glynn (1926-2007).

From https://www.sendakfoundation.org/biography.

For more information about Maurice Sendak:

“He saw it, he loved it, he ate it”: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/he-saw-it-he-loved-it-he-ate-it

“‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak

“Transcript: ‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/152248901

“Sendak’s Fantastic Imagination”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/01/22/among-the-wild-things

“Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’”: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/maurice-sendak-interview

“An Illustrated Talk With Maurice Sendak”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH2OaaktJrw

“The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death”: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/

Today’s Quotation is care of C. P. Cavafy. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

For more information about C. P. Cavafy:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Daniel Mendelsohn about Cavafy, at 11:50: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-096-daniel-mendelsohn

C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems: https://www.danielmendelsohn.com/book/c-p-cavafy-complete-poems

“Cavafy Archive”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/

“Man With a Past: Cavafy Revisited”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past

“The City”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/the-city

“Handwritten notes on ‘The City’”: https://cavafy.onassis.org/object/ad3m-a5bh-hs47/

Today’s Quotation is care of Rainer Maria Rilke. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

On December 4, 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. His parents placed him in military school with the desire that he become an officer—a position Rilke was not inclined to hold. With the help of his uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly gifted child, Rilke left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By the time he enrolled in Charles University in Prague in 1895, he knew that he would pursue a literary career: he had already published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, the previous year. At the turn of 1895-1896, Rilke published his second collection, Larenopfer (Sacrifice to the Lares). A third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) followed in 1896. That same year, Rilke decided to leave the university for Munich, Germany, and later made his first trip to Italy.

In 1897, Rilke went to Russia, a trip that would prove to be a milestone in Rilke's life, and which marked the true beginning of his early serious works. While there the young poet met Tolstoy, whose influence is seen in Das Buch vom lieben Gott und anderes (Stories of God), and Leonid Pasternak, the nine-year-old Boris's father. At Worpswede, where Rilke lived for a time, he met and married Clara Westhoff, who had been a pupil of Rodin. In 1902 he became the friend, and for a time the secretary, of Rodin, and it was during his twelve-year Paris residence that Rilke enjoyed his greatest poetic activity. His first great work, Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), appeared in 1905, followed in 1907 by Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; to Italy, Spain and Egypt among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry, influenced by the visual arts.

When World War I broke out, Rilke was obliged to leave France and during the war he lived in Munich. In 1919, he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was here that he wrote his last two works, the Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. At the time of his death his work was intensely admired by many leading European artists, but was almost unknown to the general reading public. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he has come to be universally regarded as a master of verse.

From https://poets.org/poet/rainer-maria-rilke.

Today’s Quotation is care of James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

James Baldwin — the grandson of a slave — was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.

Today’s Quotation is care of W. S. Merwin. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 2010, William Stanley Merwin had a career that spanned seven decades. A poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist, Merwin has become one of the most widely read and honored poets in America.  He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted, on Friday, March 15, 2019.

Born September 30, 1927, in New York City, William Stanley Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five. He was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. As a young man, Merwin went to Europe and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice moved from the more formal to a more distinctly American voice. As the Atlantic Monthly said, “The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.”

He has lived in Majorca, London, France, Mexico and several places in the United States, as well as Boston and New York. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world. He continued to live, write and garden in Hawaii until he died at home on Friday, March 15th, 2019.

From https://merwinconservancy.org/about-w-s-merwin/.

Today’s Quotation is care of Henry James. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Henry James, (born April 15, 1843, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 28, 1916, London, Eng.), was a U.S.-British novelist. Born to a distinguished family, the brother of William James, he was privately educated. He traveled frequently to Europe from childhood on; after 1876 he lived primarily in England. His fundamental theme was to be the innocence and exuberance of the New World in conflict with the corruption and wisdom of the Old. Daisy Miller (1879) won him international renown; it was followed by The Europeans (1879), Washington Square(1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886), his subjects were social reformers and revolutionaries. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew(1897), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), he made use of complex moral and psychological ambiguity. The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) were his great final novels. His intense concern with the novel as an art form is reflected in the essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), his prefaces to the volumes of his collected works, and his many literary essays. Perhaps his chief technical innovation was his strong focus on the individual consciousness of his central characters, which reflected his sense of the decline of public and collective values in his time.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Henry-James-American-writer.

For more information about Henry James:

The Aspern Papers: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-aspern-papers-henry-james/1116755591

“A Discussion of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/entitled-opinions/another-look-dci-event-discussion-henry-james-aspern-papers/

“Henry James”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/henry-james

“Henry James and the American Idea”: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/julyaugust/feature/henry-james-and-the-american-idea

Today’s Quotation is care of Kay Ryan. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Born in California on September 21, 1945, Kay Ryan grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA. Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011; The Niagara River (2005); Say Uncle(2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends(1983).

Ryan's awards include a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.

Ryan's poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.

From https://poets.org/poet/kay-ryan.

For more information about Kay Ryan:

Erratic Facts: https://groveatlantic.com/book/erratic-facts/

“New Rooms”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55648/new-rooms

“Kay Ryan”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kay-ryan

“Kay Ryan at 75: Surprised by Joy”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/kay-ryan-at-75-surprised-by-joy-11600466756

“Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5889/the-art-of-poetry-no-94-kay-ryan

“Kay Ryan Reads From Her New Book, Erratic Facts”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMYWy9WKD_k