1919. Then nothing for twenty years
Until her first profession of religious vows
When she changed her name to Sister Joan Frances
Of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
At seventy my cousin published her only book,
Lenin to Gorbachev, a history of communism.
The Telegraph-Herald of Dubuque, Iowa
Records her death in this tiny obituary.
They call her a teacher — don’t mention the book.
She taught grade school in Butte, Montana and St. Paul,
College kids at Loyola University, Chicago.
Her mother’s name was Helen, like Helen of Troy.

A vein is a concentration of similarity that our perception associates with a line. An accretion that follows a narrative direction here then here then here. The patterns of these lines suggest shapes to the eye. Differences that grow from the interaction between the liquid nature of ink and the material substrate of paper, the interconnection of fibers. From this interaction the artist adds his intension of where to apply the ink, how many layers to apply, which shapes on the material’s surface to respect and which to ignore. The image appears from the continuum of lightness to darkness, paper to ink. The image emerges not from the material but from the viewer’s memory, the sensations the viewer associates with places, feelings.

T.S. Eliot proposed that “poetry can communicate before it is understood,” and readers of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien may find this both true and helpful. Since their publication, these ten poems have stirred controversy and bewilderment. Attempts to pinpoint and paraphrase the work’s thought processes have often been reductionist. But how is one to work with Rilke’s insight that “the work of sight” had been “realized” in his earlier writing, and “now” was the time for “some heart-work / on all those pictures, those prisoned creatures within you”?

The currently high esteem Oscar Wilde is held in by the French and Germans may seem odd to an Englishman. But the enduring fascination Wilde exerts on the modern mind is certainly reciprocated in contemporary England — the stained glass window in Westminister Abbey (1995) — alongside luminaries like Pope, Housman, Marlowe; the monument near Trafalgar Square (1998) as well as the more recent Oliver Park film adaptations of Dorian Gray (2009), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) and The Ideal Husband (1999). In fact, in the last decade, there have been at least seven film adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray alone…

American poet Steve Orlen’s A Thousand Threads, the last collection published before his unfortunate passing last year, challenges readers’ assumptions about the kind of writer Orlen is. Most people familiar with his work are likely to think of him as a narrative poet, and, in his life, he often seems to have fully embraced that label. On the other hand, his poetry here is so robust and carefully textured that it is difficult to separate the lyric from the narrative qualities….

If your goal is success in the conventional sense, rather than a given intensity of experience or quality of composition, there won’t be time for silence. But poetry takes time. Literally and figuratively. Time enters into the fibers and figures of a poem, into the sound and space that bind its letters and lines. And if you don’t give a poem and a poetry time, life won’t enter into it. On the other hand, too much silence and you have only that, or worse — sanctimony, a failure to respond, which is an abdication of responsibility. When time is giving form to a poem — mine or someone else’s — when, syllable by syllable, it becomes a critical part of the poem’s in-formation, the poem provides a complicated kind of pleasure that is also a carrier of wisdom.

— EXCERPT FROM What is Found There:
Keeping the Mystery Alive —
Peter Cole on Writing and Translation
BY Fiona Sze-Lorrain AND Peter Cole

I remember listening to Toscanini’s recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the NBC Orchestra. My parents had this record, and I listened to Symphony No. 5, 6, 7, and 9, endlessly as a young child. This was my first inkling of the power and complexity and incredible emotional content of classical music. This was also my first awareness of my desire to possibly be a musician of some type.

Later, after I had decided to become a composer (or rather, after it became clear to me that that’s what I AM) when I was seventeen, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring called to me. I had never heard anything like it, and still consider it one of the most remarkable creations by a human being.

— EXCERPT FROM The Art of Tonality and Sonic Images: Composer Marti Epstein
BY Sally Molini AND Marti Epstein

As a child Katya swam in backyard pools with grotto landscaping. She knew without anyone saying so that she lived in Fresno’s best neighborhood: the most rose bushes per capita and almost no single-story houses. Beds, in her experience, had footboards and dust ruffles. Trucks and window air conditioners were apart and alien, but in passing merely curious, like a film reel flickering. Her first palpable bewilderment came at a classmate’s house: the house not a house, but an apartment, downtown near offices. The fact of the front door being upstairs was irreconcilable in a way that made her legs brittle. Then the classmate’s mother never alluded to dolls or butterfly nets, but took the girls on errands to waiting rooms and the post office….

— EXCERPT FROM The Eleventh Novel by Yolande Brun
BY Jennifer Kelly-DeWitt