92Y's Read By

Sophie Herron on their selection: Last July, I read John McPhee's Basin and Range for the first time and was immediately captured by the slim volume—its structure, its fluid sentences, the breadth and depth of its probity and its wry and ever-present humor. The titular basin and range is an area between Utah and California, but the book is as much about geology itself, both the movement of rock and the movement of minds that have studied it. In 1785, a Scottish geologist, James Hutton, presented to the Royal Society a new theory: that landmasses were formed over an indescribable amount of time, and that the evidence of these changes were in the different formations of rocks—where one era of rock met another. I've chosen to read McPhee's accounting of Hutton's search for this geological evidence; a narrative in which McPhee coins the term “deep time,”—a piece of history writing which, it seems to me, enfolds the transcendent experience of humanity's tiny place in time and, concurrently, love for the work of discovery, communication, and of changing minds. It has stayed with me in the moments of excruciating ephemerality and eternity in the past year. Sometimes both at once. I hope, as a final episode for Read By, it serves for you, also, as a microscope that explodes. Basin and Range, by John McPhee Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Kenzie Allen on her selection: Growing up, I spent precious time each summer on a fire lookout, Sand Mountain, in the Oregon Cascades, and I still return there to volunteer with my father, as happened just last week. Each time I read “deer crowd up to see the lamp,” and “pancakes every morning of the world,” I'm transported back to the mountains, even (and especially) when I'm sitting on the fire lookout itself. For Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and for me, these places invite philosophy and meditation, and an openness to wonder, which I hope Whalen's “Sourdough Mountain Lookout” can inspire for others. "Sourdough Mountain Lookout," by Philip Whalen Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Alexandra Zuckerman on her selection: In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, it is as if, in Elaine Scarry's view, the external world has the power to tumultuously expose to us our errors of judgment; wrong beliefs cannot merely be held. Her small anecdote about a palm tree that compels her to experience “being in error” about beauty has stayed with me through the years. She argues that such small experiences guide our instinct to be just. Her palm, its leaves “barely moving, just opening and closing slightly as though breathing,” reveals to her its true beauty. She had denied it even the right to be a tree. On Beauty and Being Just is grounding and gives me hope when it is hard to see where true change comes from. On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Mag Gabbert on her selection: I read Kathryn Nuernberger's essay "A Thin Blue Line," which comes from her wonderful collection of essayettes, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. I return to these pieces often because they give me new ideas about limits—what can happen to a poem if it's allowed just a little more room to breathe, if those braces or splints that keep it packed into tight lines and stanzas are taken off? And: what happens to prose when it's distilled down to marrow? "A Thin Blue Line" somehow accomplishes both of these, and it does so while weaving Nuernberger's personal narrative together with bits of research material and shreds of fairy tale. To me, this piece strikes the perfect note between genres; it isn't hybrid in the sense that it checks none of the boxes, but because it checks all of them. And this is the kind of work I turn to when I need to reimagine the boundaries of my own relationship with language, to see how I might shape it differently and ask it to function in new ways. Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, by Kathryn Nuernberger Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Ina Cariño on her selection: Aracelis Girmay's “You are Who I Love,” first published in 2017, is still so, so needed today. The repetition of the title throughout the poem gives it a musicality that mimics the chants of those who march in the streets. I chose this poem because it calls to and speaks for all of us: those who fight for what is dear to them, those who heal and need healing, and those who give and give even when no one is looking. It's my hope that this poem and poems like this can be not just rallying cries for social justice, but also love songs to ourselves and to each other. the black maria, by Aracelis Girmay: Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Tracie Morris on her selection: I have the great pleasure of sharing small excerpts from Brent Hayes Edwards' wonderful book, Epistrophies. In it, I repeat a quote from the legendary Mary Lou Williams to introduce Edward's commentary on Sun Ra at the dawn of the Space Age. Epistrophies, by Brent Hayes Edwards Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Rowan Ricardo Phillips on his selection: The poem "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison'' was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the summer of 1797. He had been set to journey the Quantocks with a group of friends but burned his foot in an accident and thus was left behind, under a lime tree in the garden of a friend's home, while others––including William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb (to whom the poem is addressed)––embarked on the anticipated journey without him. Coleridge's poem nevertheless travels with them ("Beneath the wide wide Heaven") and in doing so makes something from nothing, pleasure from pain, and love from loneliness. I love the poem's own subtle journey from day to night unbowed by the encroaching dark. In light of recent times, Coleridge's dream of social connection from his position of isolation feels fitting and is a beautiful example of poetry's unique imaginative power. “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Sheila Heti on her selection: I chose a chapter from Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, which he wrote between 1934 and 1941. It is one of the most fascinating and vivid descriptions I have ever read—not only of what Victorian manners and morals were like, but what it feels like to have lived through history, in particular the great political and social upheavals that occurred between his birth in Vienna in 1881 and his death in 1942. He gave his publisher the typewritten manuscript of this memoir the day before he and his wife died, by suicide. Zwieg grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, and this is the world he is writing about. I found in these pages one of the greatest and most fascinating and sensitive eyewitness accounts of history I have ever read. I love the details. I love the feeling that I am seeing the truth about another world with such intimacy. This chapter has stayed with me since I first encountered it years ago. I am at about the age he was when he wrote it, and though I don't think the changes I have witnessed have been as dramatic, I feel I know what it's like to remember a lost world, and to set now against then and to weigh all of it up. The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Hi! Read By is taking a vacation this month. We'll be back in July with more episodes, from more great writers. Thanks for your support and see you soon! Stay safe. 

Tobias Wolff on his selection: I read three poems, two by my longtime friend and colleague, Eavan Boland, who died last year, a loss that I feel still. There is a tradition in Irish poetry, inflected by the long Independence movement and a certain kind of heroic poetry, that Boland confronts. The third poem is one by John N. Morris, a poem I have carried in my mind since the mid-70s, that has gathered meaning for me as I had my own children, and now grandchildren: the heroism of learning to let go. New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland  The Life Beside This One by John N. Morris Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Howard Norman on his selection: I read two diary entries by the iconic haiku master, Masaoka Shiki, which I translated with Kazumi Tanaka while in Japan in 2007. Shiki was often confined by his lifelong illness to his bed; a recurring image is a parade of the tops of black umbrellas seen just over the top of a wall. Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems, trans. Burton Watson Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Merve Emre on her selection: At the beginning of March, I helped to organize a group reading of Robert Musil's unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. The excerpt I have chosen to read, from Chapter 32, "The Forgotten, Highly Relevant Story of the Major's Wife," wonderfully compresses much of what I admire about Musil's writing. The story of the major's wife is a story about a man who is in love with the idea of being in love, and as such, is narrated with irony and affectation, but also with pure and gentle beauty. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, trans. Sophie Wilkins  Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Chris Kraus on her selection: A friend recommended The Executioner’s Song to me when I started researching a book set on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Mailer wrote it in 1979 based on events that occurred in Utah between 1976-1977. The culture described in the book feels close to the world I observed on the Range a half century later … different drugs, different guns and vehicle models, but the values and mindset are remarkably similar. Mailer’s book could not be more prescient. The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Paul Tran on their selection: The handprint is one of the earliest examples of self-representation. I can hardly imagine what it was like, thousands and thousands of years ago, to seek shelter in a cave; to find others had been there; to see the animals they painted; and then to join the animals by leaving their handprint on the wall. Maybe the word for it is hope. Maybe it’s realizing I’m not alone. I’m here, still. “Between Darkness and Light,” Paul Tran, Shantell Martin and Shamel Pitts (TRIBE) “The Cave,” by Paul Tran Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Valzhyna Mort on her selection: On April 26th, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. I am reading from Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger and uncertainty that they still live with. Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Keith Gessen  Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Paisley Rekdal on her selection: Charming may not be a word commonly associated with Alexander Pope, but for me, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation” may be one of the most charming poems I know. Pope, famous for “The Rape of the Lock,” and his exhaustingly didactic essay “A Man,” delights with this epistolary poem—brief, by Popian standards—full of wit and life. Like all his poems, it displays a beautiful facility with rhyme and meter, (Pope was a master of the heroic couplet), and a beautiful sense of compassion to the young woman to whom it is addressed. In his poem, Miss Blount is subject to all sorts of whims and institutions—mother, aunt, the church, the squire. There are so many daydreams and visions enclosed inside “Epistle” that by the end of the poem, I’m almost lost inside its spell. Like Pope, I’m regretfully startled awake from this enchanting picture of Miss Blount, and want to return immediately to the poem’s beginning: to relive once more the few, evanescent moments in which Miss Blount is again young, willful, alive—a product both of Pope’s attentive admiration, and mine. Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation”  Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Jane Hirshfield on her selection: “The Lives of the Poets” Poems are about our human lives--their knowing by stories, language, feelings, comprehensions, perplexities, musics. Because the lives of poets include the making of poetry, some poems are about that. I've chosen a half-dozen, from a range of persons, places, and directions, from a folder I’ve long been keeping that I think of as “The Lives of the Poets.” Because this selection is for the 92nd St Y, a place where people have long come, and will come again, to hear poems said by their makers, and because we’ve all been through a year now of pandemic uncertainties, I begin with two that show the other side of the fabric of public readings. Anna Swir: “Poetry Reading” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082 Lucille Clifton: “After the Reading” https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142 Han Shan: “Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars” (translated by Burton Watson) https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500 Yannis Ritsos: “Necessary Explanation” (translated by Kimon Friar) https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670 Adrienne Rich: “XIII (Dedication),” final section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World” https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310 Frank O'Hara: “Autobiographia Litteraria” https://bookshop.org/books/frank-o-hara-selected-poems/9780375711480 Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Stacy Schiff on her selection: In a contest between the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, I will opt for Howard every time -- with an exception made for Amis’s 1954 Lucky Jim. As laughter seems in short supply these days, I offer up this favorite Amis set-piece, arguably among the funniest pages of 20th century English literature not written by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m going to do my best to get through them with a straight face, but know that I never have before. Our hero, who is not much of a hero, is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in medieval history at a provincial British university. He is the houseguest of his department chair, who holds Dixon’s fledgling career in his hands. You needn’t worry about the minor characters who flitter by, all of them peripheral to the central drama here, which is Dixon’s climbing into bed and out of it, many hours, several surprises, and one epic hangover later. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Notes on the selections: It’s been a year. That’s been the chorus for the past couple of weeks, and we're here, saying it too; it feels too notable, too hard-won, too full of loss, too much not to note. This episode is a compilation of some of the poems recorded over 62 episodes: a selection of poems that seem to speak to the intensely individual and communal experiences of grief and hope, of outrage and awe in the past year. Links to the poems and the original episodes below. From “Read By: Terrance Hayes” - “Things No One Knows,” by Wanda Coleman  From “Read By: Louise Erdrich” - “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word,” by Natalie Diaz  From “Read By: Douglas Kearney” - “Big Thicket, Pastoral,” by Douglas Kearney  From “Read By: Ada Limón” - “From the Other Side” and “The Dwelling Places” by Alejandra Pizarnik  From “Read By: Tina Chang” - “Things I Didn't Know I Loved,” by Nâzım Hikmet  Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Producer's note: We return this week to Diana Khoi Nguyen's reading of poems from Asian poets in diaspora. Please support your local Asian diaspora and anti-racist community organizing, as you can. In particular, Nguyen recommends donations to Stop AAPI Hate's fund: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate 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"

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

"How savage our moments of live, how sacred." A special re-issue for the end of 2020. We'll be back on Jan. 10!  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. This episode was first released on May 18, 2020. Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Joseph O’Neill on his selection: I chose to read from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pnin, a book I turn to very often when I need a tonic. Pnin at Bookshop.org  Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Alice Oswald on her selection: John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (written between 1832 and 1837) are designed as astonishments rather than thoughts... Fourteen lines, ordered into separable couplets, each couplet containing a different moment - these poems are like portable fresh air and I have been reading them every day since moving to the city. Northborough Sonnets at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Alan Hollinghurst on his selection: I read “September 1, 1939,” the date being that of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which marks the start of the Second World War. It’s a poem Auden himself was dissatisfied with, he cut it, changed some important wording, and later refused to reprint it, feeling it was intellectually dishonest. Nonetheless, in its magnificent rhetoric and its address to issues which continue to press upon us, it retains a power to move, to frighten and to reassure. It’s a poem which comes often to my mind these days, as so many things around us get worse and worse, faster and faster, and the good things that happen take on an ever greater freight of hope. “September 1, 1939” at Poets.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Hanif Abdurraqib on his selection: This poem is an interesting choice for me, as someone who is always too anxious to engage in the act of singing at any karaoke night, but there is something I love about being present during a karaoke night. And what I think I love about seeing the kind of excitement that fans through a room or that fans through one of my friends when they’re on stage, singing a song that they know they know, is that karaoke is in some ways the height of the communal exercise of enjoying music. There is no real hierarchy; the person who is singing on the stage is not the profession who wrote the song; it almost in someways does not matter if they sing the song well. What matters is that they sing the song with a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that can tremor through a crowd and get that crowd to also tilt towards a type of ecstasy, knowing that they know a song too. It is this really, to me, fascinating mold of music and music enjoyment. So watching a friend of mine transform into someone entirely different onstage, and through that transformation, this grand excitement—it allows me to hear a song differently. And I think this poem encompasses that. And I think this poem celebrates a moment of loving music in a way that feels familiar to me—the interior love of a song—where a song becomes more what we need it to be, more than what it might have been. All Heathens at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Miller Wolf Oberman on his selection: I will not try to introduce Anne Carson here. If you are one of the several people who do not know the work of this poet, essayist, and classicist, I will just say I envy you your impending discovery. One of the great joys, for me, of her work is that I am never certain what I’ll find. A scholarly translation of an ancient Greek play? A collaborative reinvention of an ancient text into a graphic novel? A poetry collection? A combination of these things that pours out of a box in a literal accordion, connecting a single, brief lament in Latin to contemporary grief, because what is time? In Carson’s “The Life of Towns,” which comprises one section of her 1995 collection of poems and essays, Plainwater, each line is end stopped, disrupting the sentence as a unit entirely, and interrupting our desire to see a sentence as something whole. Plainwater at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado on his selections: What could we say to them, those we love, those we’ve lost, our beloveds, now eight months into a pandemic? What kind of vow could make ourselves legible to them and therefore to ourselves? It's been 229 days since I left the Upper East Side and opened shop in Brooklyn, where I spend most of my days at work. These three poems, I feel, make me believe that we can find a way to make the world bearable for each other—the strength and power we desperately need comes from new contract for life and for each other. The Carrying by Ada Limón at Bookshop.org The Pink Box by Yesenia Montilla at Bookshop.org Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill at Thriftbooks.com Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Juan Gabriel Vásquez on his selection: My choice is one of my favorite passages in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, the book that we Spanish speakers think of as the place where the novel was born. Along with Shakespeare and Montaigne, Cervantes, with this book, invented the modern man; and, as I intend to prove or suggest, he also anticipated the modern woman. In this passage, written sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, a young man by the name Grisóstomo has killed himself after being rejected by the beautiful shepherdess Marcela. His friends, who blame Marcela for his suicide, are out to bury him when she suddenly appears. One of the friends asks her if she has come to see if with her presence blood spurts from the wounds of the dead man, or to gloat over the cruelties of her nature, or to tread on this unfortunate corpse. This is her answer, which I will read first in Edith Grossman’s great translation, and then in the Spanish original. Don Quixote trans. Edith Grossman at Bookshop.org Don Quijote de la Mancha at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Dunya Mikhail on her selection: My translation of this poem by Louise Glück, the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is part of my continuous work to translate contemporary American poetry into Arabic. Like the rest of Louise Glück’s poetry, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” makes us contemplate how a personal narrative informs a universal truth.  This poem was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The American Scholar. Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Tina Chang on her selection: I chose to read "Things I Didn't Know I Loved," by Nâzım Hikmet and translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, from the collection, Poems of Nâzım Hikmet. Hikmet is one of Turkey's most foremost poets and recognized as one of the world's most influential poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1902, he was a prolific writer and wrote plays, poems, novels, and collaborated on librettos. He spent thirteen years in jail as a political prisoner for his "radical acts." "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" was written by Hikmet after being released from prison and, in it, I recognize the almost childlike appreciation for sky, earth, and the cosmos, after spending a long time in solitude. During the pandemic, I am deeply comforted by the appreciation of simple things. When I walk outside, I breathe in and am grateful that all I remembered is still intact. During this most complex year, this poem has been my constant companion. Poems of Nâzım Hikmet at Persea Books Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Tessa Hadley on her selection: Deidre Madden is an Irish novelist whose books I love. Her writing has a beautiful lucidity and simplicity of style, free of all affectation; her stories begin so naturally and easily, and yet can take the reader down into the deepest - and sometimes the darkest - places. The lovely conceit of her novel Molly Fox's Birthday is that the writer has swapped homes, for a few weeks, with her best friend Molly Fox, a successful actor. What a brilliant invention - and yet so inevitable, now that Madden has thought of it! So the narrator, who is herself a playwright, wakes up on this first morning in the other woman's house in her absence: among her things, inside the shape of her life - and also inevitably, as time passes, among Molly's friends too, and caught up in the complex net of Molly's relations. It's such a richly intriguing way of exploring a life and telling a life-story. Molly Fox’s Birthday at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Yiyun Li on her selection: Some writers are good to be read in one mood but not another, some are good during one specific period but not another. The writers one can read at any moment are those who refuse to have a simplified relationship with their time. James Alan McPherson is one of them. I often return to his work for clarity; few writers' words can always do the work of mental Visine as well as his. What he wrote in this essay—"In my private view, some things were of greater importance than others...I wanted to do something for myself, outside of any group involvement, something private but also right according to my own scale of values"—has always been a guidance for my own writing.  A Region Not Home  Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Eileen Myles on their selection: I picked this book off a shelf in a small place I was staying in Provincetown this summer. I'd never read Victor Hugo and found his writing so painterly and lush and philosophical and yet confoundingly graphic. A shipwreck felt so culturally apt too. I think we are at sea.  The Man Who Laughs at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection: Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a century after his death. He is also, in my eyes, the great poet of agency, and of promise: "there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest," he writes in Return to My Native Land. "We know now... that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth without limit." Exit old ghosts. Return to My Native Land, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger at Archipelago Books "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Isabella Hammad on her selection: Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet’s strange, recursive, resistant chronicle of the time he spent in the early 1970s with the Palestinian fedayeen in the refugee camps in Jordan. Edward Said called it “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden.” Throughout the book Genet meditates on the Black Panthers, whom he had visited in March 1970, just a few months prior to joining the Palestinians. In each context he describes feeling like a “dreamer inside a dream"; in each context he felt at home. He considers the similarities of the movements--both peoples are deprived of territory from which to launch their revolutions, and therefore rely on spectacle to assert themselves. But spectacle is transitory, and sometimes shades into illusion. Spectacle, says Genet, is  “the product of despair.” Prisoner of Love at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Ada Limón on her selection: I chose to read poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, from her book Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, who has done a marvelous job. I believe Pizarnik, an Argentinian author who died in 1972 at the young age of thirty-six, is largely not well-known in the United States—I highly recommend looking her up and spending time with her. During this pandemic, I have found a lot of grace—and despair—in her poems. I find them very helpful, and very beautiful. Extracting the Stone of Madness at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Francisco Goldman on his selection: My reading is from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pnin.  Timofey Pnin, Russian emigre professor at Wainsdell College somewhere in the Northeast, has belatedly just learned to drive, and has undertaken the drive to the summer house of the wealthy emigre Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov, otherwise known as Al Cook.  There other emigre intellectuals, artists, liberals, etc, are gathered.  Lonely Pnin, often a figure of fun, has sat down to relax a bit after trouncing his competitors in croquet, when he experiences one of those episodes of nervous or even cardiac unease that in this novel signals a dissolving of the separation of past and present. This passage is about how those we've lost return; how in an idyllic-seeming present, the monstrousness of the past can still, at least momentarily, grip our hearts again; how loss and the past, both monstrous and sweet, permeate the present.   Pnin at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Elizabeth Strout on her selection: William Trevor is brilliant at capturing the nuances of many people's perspectives, all in one story, as he does in this story of a young woman is who just reaching adulthood.  We see her sorrows, confusions, and the poignancy of all the characters involved.  Trevor is a wonder in his ability to portray characters without his own judgment ever intervening, he just tells us what we need to know—and then we can weep as well. A Bit on the Side at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Geoff Dyer on his selection: I've chosen two passages, both about place. The first is from the start of D. H. Lawrence’s essay, "Taos," published in 1923. Lawrence had arrived in New Mexico with his wife Frieda at the invitation of Mabel Dodge in September the previous year. As was his way, Lawrence began making  pronouncements about the place almost from the moment he arrived. The second passage is from "The Country and the City" by Raymond Williams, published fifty years later, in 1973. It’s from the chapter where Williams discusses the magnificent country houses or stately homes that are such beautiful—and persistently alluring—features of the English countryside.   The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence, edited by Geoff Dyer at Bookshop.org The Country and the City by Raymond Williams at Bookshop.org Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Jennifer Egan on her selection: The House of Mirth was the first literary classic that I picked up entirely on my own, without prodding from a teacher or a parent, and adored.  I read it as a teenager, during a stifling summer visit to my grandparents, when my literary tastes were unsophisticated (Archie comics were high on my list).  I recall the experience as my coming-of-age as a reader—when I learned, years before discovering that I wanted to write, what transformative power a work of fiction can have.  Because my attachment to The House of Mirth is so personal, I tend to reread it with slight trepidation that the magic may have fled.  But each time, I find the novel’s tragic power intact, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift—from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world toward women (young adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult readings) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artifact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies.  All of which moves me to assert that Edith Wharton’s second novel is a masterpiece, a pinnacle of American letters that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st Century. The House of Mirth with an introduction by Jennifer Egan at Bookshop.org  Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

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