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Derek Walcott: ‘What the Twilight Says’
Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum PhotosDerek Walcott, St. Lucia, 1994; photograph by Inge Morath1.The first poem in this substantial selection of the work of the St. Lucia–born poet Derek Walcott was...
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Why Dylan Deserves It
Estate of Chuck Palin/Cache AgencyPatti Smith and Bob Dylan at the Bitter End on the night they first met, New York City, June 1975In her interview for No Direction Home (2005), Martin Scorsese’s...
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On the Trail of ‘A Shropshire Lad’
Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty ImagesA.E. Housman, circa 1900In the summer of 1902 the American novelist Willa Cather set off from Pittsburgh for Europe with her friend...
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She Shampooed & Renewed Us
David Gahr/Getty ImagesJoni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen at the Newport Folk Festival, July 1967In an interview with Gene Shay for the “Folklore Program” broadcast on March 12, 1967, Joni Mitchell...
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Poems That Breathe
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith CollegeJoan Murray, late 1930s–early 1940sThe only poem by Joan Murray (1917–1942) published during her short life appeared in the April 1941 issue of Decision: A Review...
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‘Inventing New Ways to Be’
Nancy CramptonAdrienne Rich, New York City, 1973Although Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) never considered herself an epic poet, it’s hard to think of a more apposite definition of her vast and varied oeuvre...
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Three Novels in Pepper Marinade
Agustín Fernández Mallo; drawing by Tom BachtellThe Spanish poet and novelist Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy had its origins, the reader is informed in a note appended to Nocilla Dream (the...
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A Style of Revolt
“Whether he poses or is real,” Thom Gunn wrote in one of the first poems inspired by Elvis Presley, “no cat/Bothers to say.” To many British men who came of age during the austere and repressive 1950s,...
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‘An Age of Prudence’
When, on October 23, 1922, T.S. Eliot assembled and dispatched to the New York lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn a packet containing drafts of The Waste Land as well as a notebook of early poems...
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When my father—a shy, stern man—Died, his features were unrelenting. I’d barely known my mother. I was nearing twenty. So I took up writing…but I kept Hearing that demon Truth Whistling over my...
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