About three years ago, I decided to look into North Indian classical singing because I found it both intriguing (it was foreign) and difficult (it was foreign). I wrote once that “Foreign is a word for fear,” which I think is true but in context I mean to imply that fear can be useful because if you do enter the foreign, there’s a good chance you’ll grow. I decided on ragas rather than another foreign music not because I aspired to wear a bindi and go around in saris but because every time I heard them I’d felt something profound wash over me. Now, though the ragas I’d been exposed to were specific to the Hindu religious tradition, what they’d roused in me had nothing to do with religion. Bach makes me feel similarly and I’m not Christian either.

When I started studying with Swathi, she and her husband— who was and still is getting his PhD—and their twelve year old son Babu, were living in an apartment complex called Camelot. My first lesson almost didn’t happen because by the time I found the right apartment I’d meandered around the lettered buildings so long that Swathi would have been justified if she’d decided I wasn’t coming and gone out. But being herself, she’d waited, and when I did finally find her, she didn’t comment but held the door open and motioned me to one of the two folding chairs she’d set out in her living room, whose only other furniture was a bicycle, leaning against the wall. I’d asked for group lessons but since Swathi had said she preferred to teach me by myself, I was the only person there. Her first question was whether I wanted to study North or South Indian music. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know the difference, so she explained that the main one is that South Indian (carnatic) music demands absolutely precise rhythm. Being the girl who when she sang in night clubs used to bang a tambourine that she could hear got a little more off the beat with each jingle but didn’t know what to do about, my answer to that one was a non-issue.

Swathi’s second question was whether I wanted her to teach me the traditional way or in what she called “the Western short-cut” way. The correct answer to that was obvious enough that after a moment of western hesitation, I said “traditional.” “Traditional” turned out to mean six months of singing nothing but exercises (alenkars) but that was a good thing because there was a lot to learn.

The first challenge that confronted me was replacing do-re-mi with their Sanscrit equivalents—sa re ga ma pa dha ni sa– each of whose much longer name I was given but (Swathi, if you read this, forgive me) immediately forgot. The second challenge (which I’m not close to mastering) was that in Hindu tradition, unlike in western, each note has its own personality. The relationship between notes, too, turns out to be philosophically important. For instance, whole books have been written about the relationship between sa (one) and ga (three). And whereas in western music, the fifth of the scale tends to dominate, in Indian music it’s the fourth. This is reflected in the fact that some scales begin with four, rather than with the root note while others, like Raga Moorva, the scale I’m learning now leave the fifth out completely.

Internalizing just what I’ve already described would take a lifetime but at least lack of mastery of the relationship between notes doesn’t stop a student from singing. But what does, and where I really fall down has to do with something Swathi told me in one of my very first lessons: that if I want to sing this kind of music I’ll have to give up the visual. She explained what she meant this way: that when a western musician plays a piece, he or she almost always sees something. Even if she doesn’t read music, she’ll still see something, whether it’s keys moving or an imaginary hand rising and falling. When I protested that Indian musicians beat time, as Swathi does with her hand, turning the palm up or down to indicate sound or rest, so they must visualize Swathi said no, that with Indian musicians, their hands follow the music not the other way around.

Now Swathi’s advice to avoid the visual may have been rooted in the fact that in India music is an oral not a written tradition, but wherever it came from, it was quite right for this westerner. I got away with visualizing piano keys as long as the scales I was singing in weren’t too complicated. But now they are, unless I give up visualization, of keys or anything else, I can’t sing even close to speed nor can I make the jumps the music demands. When I think about it, Swathi’s advocacy for the right brain made perfect sense from the beginning. I just hadn’t brought it across. Early on, she had told me that we carry the seven notes of the scale inside our bodies, and that they’re in us all the time not just when we happen to be singing. And those seven notes, she went on, contain the whole universe. And all of that, I now see, describes perfectly the way I experience poetry. First, however small a fine poem, it does contain the whole universe. And second, my poems do live in my body not my mind. I’ve reading from memory since long before slams and spoken word came into vogue. And after almost every reading, someone says, how can you remember all that? You must have amazing memorization skills. And when I say, not really, it isn’t false modesty because in fact I’ve never memorized any of my poems. I just know them. Maybe some day I’ll be able to translate that feeling into singing in Sanscrit. I hope so. But even if I never do, just learning how much we who try for art are alike under the skin and how similarly holy all arts are will have validated, and more, every moment I’ve spent in that folding chair.

When I started over, several years ago now, I decided to allow nothing into my house that doesn’t fit one of two criteria: I use it or it has a story. So though part of the side of my refrigerator is reserved for phone numbers I might need in a hurry, the rest of it and all the front has nothing on it that doesn’t immediately matter. If you’re a poet, sooner or later someone will give you poetry magnets — but though lots of poets play with them all the time, I never did. Because I think so completely with my fingers—for me, writing’s like playing jazz piano—someone else’s words don’t work for me. But the magnets came in useful in the end because the day I moved into my house I found the words I wanted in them, and posted the following on my refrigerator: YOU HAVE ONLY THE MOMENT. Taking that in was critical to me because my marriage of many years had just broken up and some difficult emotions were beginning to build. It’s not that I didn’t know that every moment I spent indulging those emotions was a moment I couldn’t get back, but it helped me a lot to physically see that sentence when I got up in the morning.

As a companion to YOU HAVE ONLY THE MOMENT I put up a newspaper clipping I’ve kept so long it’s turned almost orange. The clipping is a column by someone named Gonzalo Gallo G. and begins “Huye de la mediocridad para no estar muerte en la vida.” Shun mediocrity if you want to stay alive. It goes on to advise you to put all your strength into developing whatever gifts you may have come with, and concludes that people who look for the easiest lives are often condemned to suffer the most difficult.

My first addition to those original two exhortations was something a dear friend of mine told me– a woman named Doris Bardon, who died not long ago at nearly ninety. Doris was a community activist, a fine amateur pianist (she used to have chamber music concerts in her house), and a historian. Besides all that, she had for many years owned an art gallery and one night, she gave me the picture I have over my couch. It’s a wash and pencil drawing called “Sarah” and is, like everything I live with these days, full of peace. Now, Doris’ mother had shipped little Doris off to boarding school as soon as she decently could and had had as little to do with her as possible for the rest of their lives. But, Doris told me, her mother had made her one great gift. One day when Doris was a teenager and very upset about something, her mother sat her down and told her: “Doris, always fret constructively.” That has to be one of the best single sentence advices I’ve ever heard. Anyhow, I printed it right away and posted it beside Gonzalo.

The source of the other quotes that grace my aging Kenmore’s front (it’s original equipment from the eighties) is another friend: a retired psychology professor named Bob Ziller. Bob is somewhere in his mid-eighties, won’t say where, but he’s still 6’2”, wears muscle T’s, plays tennis regularly, and once when we walked down the street a passerby stopped us and told us we made a handsome couple (Bob’s married so we aren’t a couple, just fond, but it shows you how his energy shines through.) I met him when I was working out a class on creativity for the U.F. honors college. A mutual friend told me Bob had once taught a course called that, so I called him up. It turns out that his class had been different from what I had in mind but Bob was and is such great fun to talk to that within a couple of meetings we became good friends. We both adore the big issues – Bob’s finished his magnum opus on The Meaning of Life not long ago— so we’ve had more animated lunches at Mildred’s Big City Foods than you can shake a stick at. Anyhow, at one of our lunches, Bob and I were talking about his days as a Professor of Psychology. He said he’d been something of a maverick (he hasn’t changed) and that sometimes his theories weren’t too popular around the department. As an example, he told me about the time he’d stopped a colleague in the hall and told him that he, Bob, had cracked the problem of the stages of human development. There are, Bob said, only two. They are— ready for this?— young and dead. As soon as I got home, that statement joined Doris’.

My other favorite Zillerism comes from the time Bob called me up and said, “I’ve just figured something out!” Bob is always figuring something out. “And you’re the only person I know who’ll appreciate it. SO. Whaddya think man’s greatest invention was?” I knew it wasn’t going to be the obvious and I knew I wouldn’t come up with it but Bob made me guess so I dutifully did. When I’d finished, he said with triumph in his voice. “Nope! It wasn’t fire, and it wasn’t the wheel, and it wasn’t (whatever other lame idea I’d come up with). It was”—and here he paused for a few seconds— “the kiss!” That went right under young and dead.

The rest of the front of my refrigerator consists of a rotating exhibit of pictures and miscellanea by my grandchildren who are now 7 and 4. At the moment, it’s three free-standing horses, and two cards. All the horses are long-backed and short-legged and look a little like dachshunds. Two were drawn by Ava, who’s seven, and one by Lydia, who’s four and wants to do everything her big sister does. But don’t think Lydia doesn’t have her own concerns because she does. While Ava is lyrically in love with horses, Lydia equally lyrically loves sheep. A few months ago she even asked her mother if she could have sheep riding lessons. This in spite of the fact that until I took her to see lambs at the University farm this past spring, she’d never seen a sheep.

The girls sent me the cards when I was away for seven weeks last summer. When you’re a Nana and you go away that long, you always miss something. In this case, what I missed was the girls learning to swim. Ava’s card is neatly written and clearly all her own work. It says she misses me and that she’s “lirnd how to swim.” She also asks whether I like “the picthur on the front” and whether I think the little pig (on the front) is “qute.” I do. She includes two pictures of the pool—it’s a round above-ground one– from the side so I can see the ladder, and from above. There’s an arrow on each picture saying “pool” in case I don’t get what it is, then for the top view, a label for each item floating there—for example, “duk, toob, noodel, ring (two), and so on. The note concludes with lots of xs and os (when I send Ava postcards, she counts the x’s and o’s and demands them when I get home; and woe to me if I didn’t count them so sent her sister more than she got.) Lydia’s letter ends simply, “Love” and is written in such huge letters and at such an angle that the right side spills into the left. Lydia’s message is more point by point than Ava’s. She says how she fell off her noodle and started swimming by herself without Mommy and Daddy helping her; period. Everything in hers is conventionally spelled so someone was clearly helping her. Together, the cards are terrific windows into those two little ones and I won’t take them down until I have something just as good.

On the side of my fridge towards the back I have emergency phone numbers and the trek magnet from my old house. In the place of honor towards the front are the three birthday cards I got day before yesterday. All three are on purple paper. Two of them are from the granddaughters and the other is from my daughter. They’re equally loving and in some ways you can hardly tell them apart. Bob was right: young and dead.

Kim Addonizio’s poem “November 11 — 2004” is up at The Washington Post.

O everyone's dead and the rain today is marvelous!
I drive to the gym, the streets are slick,
everyone's using their wipers, people are walking
with their shoulders hunched, wearing hoods
or holding up umbrellas, of course, of course,
it's all to be expected -- fantastic!
My mother's friend Annie, her funeral's today!
The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself!

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you use the exclamation point. Click through for the full poem.

(via Ron Charles, who you should follow immediately)

Freakbits reveals the 10 most pirated eBooks of 2009, as measured by the number of downloads on the BitTorrent file sharing network.

Also, check out the breadcrumb trail that led me to that link: Ron Charles twittered two of the books on the list, so I asked Ron for a source link, to which Ron replied no sorry no link but it came from Harper’s index for December, whereupon I Googled for Harper’s index only to discover that Harper’s doesn’t post magazine content to the Web (if it’s behind a paywall, it’s not really on the Web — although the magazine will let you search old issues of the index), my resourceful self turning then to the Ebsco and LexusNexus Academic databases and discovering to much chagrin (what the hell, Harper’s?) that the most recent issue of Harper’s isn’t available in those very locked down, proprietary databases either, but finding instead a mention of the same information being available from the Christian Science Monitor, so Googling the Christian Science Monitor and finding this blog post, which itself linked to the original source.

Hmph.

This week’s guest blogger here at Unstressed is Lola Haskins, who regular readers will remember as the author of both “The Gift” and “To ******* from the Residents of Point Reyes.”

Lola’s ninth collection of poems, Still the Mountain, is forthcoming (Paper Kite Press, 2010). Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA) appeared in 2004 and The Rim Benders (Anhinga) came out in 2001.  Two prose books appeared in 2007:  Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press), and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook).

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Boooks, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, and The New York Quarterly.  She adores radio—her work has been broadcast on BBC and NPR—and also particularly relishes collaboration. She has worked with dancers (playing Mata Hari in a full-length ballet whose script she wrote and pseudo-Cindy Sherman in a modern dance piece whose words she also scripted; with musicians (Paul Richards is setting her Forty Four Ambitions for the Piano) with and visual artists (currently collaborating with South Florida painter Derek Gores on a piece due in January, 2010.)

Her most recent collaboration was “Of Air and the Water,” done on Gainesville’s Hippodrome main stage with dance and cello. Lately, she has been writing poems set in the natural world. Her new ambition is to be Florida’s ecstatic nature poet. For more information, please see her website.

Janet Maslin says nice things about Stephen King’s new novel in the New York Times.

In the spirit of “On Writing,” “Under the Dome” takes a lucid, commonsense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it’s even harder to put down.

When Linebreak asked me to blog for a week, I was sorely tempted to say no. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the honor but I didn’t think I was the right person for the job. I’ve never journaled. And though I’ve written a little prose here and there, I haven’t much faith in my abilities in that direction. I do have hopes for my poems but that’s because in them I can get in and out before anyone notices.

In the end, as you see, I decided to say yes, because when I’m presented with something I think I can’t do, I have enough it’s-good-for-you in me that I usually go for it. It also helped that Linebreak told me I don’t have to write about poetry. If I were capable of writing intelligent essays and if doing it would bring someone I admire into the light, I would. But it’s a non-issue because I don’t happen to have a critical set of bones.

So what I thought I would do, since I’ve never managed to settle down to just one discipline, is to spend my week as diversely as possible. I’ll start with refrigerators and move on to Hindu classical music. From there, I may talk about my sixth grade teacher or creativity or wild spaces or mistletoe, or maybe water, I haven’t decided. The only promise I can make is that I’ll try not to be boring. Okay, I feel better now. Here goes…..

…

When I was little, some people were still calling refrigerators “iceboxes” and as far as I knew, all of them were as white as Miss Gillespie’s uniform. Miss Gillespie was my pediatrician’s nurse. At some point early on I had a condition that required weekly shots. And since I didn’t like needles especially the big ones they used for penicillin, I used to squeeze myself underneath the doctor’s desk where Miss Gillespie, who was fat, couldn’t reach me. And every week she had to fetch my mother from the waiting room because she, being wiry, could get under there and pull me out. Which, I’m sorry to say, she did.

Like nurse’s uniforms– usually flowered now, right?– refrigerator colors have come a long way since then. I think the first fashion was avocado. Remember when even toilets were avocado? Now, we seem to have calmed down and it’s bone that most often joins the classic white. And for people with urban tastes, there’s black. I did though once come across a red refrigerator.  So why stop at red? Why not hot pink? Or sports team colors? Or camo, for people who hunt or are in the military?   Feel free to pick that up; I won’t charge you a penny.

Refrigerator size has grown more diverse since I was young too. Though I didn’t know anyone who had one, I should think there’ve probably always been small ones, in dorms or apartments and definitely, as there still are, in Europe and Asia.  But I don’t think there were always the steroidal specimens you sometimes see in people’s houses, usually people who pretend to being gourmet. The only justification for those, in my view, is that you live so far from a store you can only stock up once a year. Or you serve twenty or thirty meals a sitting on some regular basis. But if you’re that into level of service, why not open a restaurant?   I have a confession to make here, though, and once you read it I may not have further credibility.  I was the child, who looked at COMING SOON! signs and thought why are they building another grocery store? We already HAVE a grocery store. Remnants of that child still linger. I still don’t see why we need another place to buy the same clothes every other store already has.

But it’s not consumerism I want to talk about. Nor is it even, at least not directly, refrigerators.   What I find most interesting is what we do with (and to) the outsides of them.  Until the 1970s, it would have been basically nothing because until then fridge fronts and the corners tended to be curved,  so nothing larger than plastic letters (which came into vogue in the late 1960s) would have stuck for very long.   When I read in Wikipedia that the first patent for refrigerator magnets was issued to a Mr. Zimmerman of St. Louis early in that decade, though the date made sense, I wondered about that because I’d thought patents were for processes not ideas and it seemed to me that magnetism (not the David Copperfield or the Jesus kind, the scientific kind) would have been in the public domain. And sure enough, according to Patrick Dwyer, the nephew of that same Mr. Zimmerman, the Wikipedia information (which was picked up by almost every other website in the cool world) is wrong and Mr. Zimmerman hadn’t patented refrigerator magnets. But he WAS the first person to successfully market magnetized cartoon figures as paper-holders; he even got the initial contract to make the Disney ones.

Incidentally, while I was looking around for magnet information I found out that refrigerator magnets are technically different from conventional ones because hey alternate polarities rather than being set up uniformly north-south.  The result of that  is that to double the magnetism on the back side while almost erasing it from  the front. It’s that polarity difference that gives larger refrigerator magnets their staying power.

Enough science, let’s get to the real stuff. I don’t know about you but when I walk into someone’s kitchen the first thing I notice is what’s posted on the refrigerator. I asked Patrick, Mr. Zimmerman’s nephew, what’s on his and he said mostly travel stuff. He’s in the Air Force and has recently come back from Turkey to Del Rio Texas. It’ll be great when he posts pictures of Del Rio, which is a few miles from the Mexican border, alongside shots of Turkey—what an interesting contrast! Still, I‘d bet good money that what the Dwyers post on their fridge is going to change as their baby grows up but, you know, maybe not. When I contacted him, Patrick started looking around for magnet info himself and he told me about a collector named Louise Greenfarb on Facebook who  owns 30,000 magnets, nearly all of which are on either her refrigerator and her car.

The most interesting thing I’ve personally seen on a refrigerator was in the house of someone I dated for awhile, a very good person—we’re still friends—but notoriously commitment-phobic. And what does he have on his refrigerator but several pictures of himself with a gorgeous blonde lady, both of them looking thrilled to be together. The blonde lady, who doesn’t resemble him, happens to be his sister but he doesn’t volunteer that so the photos work perfectly to alert the rest of us that there are plenty of women out there and we’re bound to be replaced by one of them sooner or later. My daughter’s refrigerator, by contrast—she and her husband have two little girls– is plastered with a barrage of school schedules, scribbles her children have come up with, grocery lists, and a scatter of miscellaneous reminders. Oh, and, sliding towards the bottom, some plastic letters. I had those for her when she was growing up and one thing I’ve noticed about them is that as their novelty fades they tend to slip farther and farther down the front of the refrigerator until finally, because they keep falling off, you put them away.

When D’Arcy and her brother Django were growing up, I used to post kid stuff too but I also posted items entirely absent from D’Arcy’s space: listings of upcoming art movies, concert notices, opening, continuing ed possibilities, the Florida gymnastics team’s schedule, etc. etc. I didn’t get to go to many of those events but just posting them kept them, albeit in a shadowy way, part of my life. I also put up newspaper clippings I’d found interesting, lists of what to plant in the garden, cleaning remedies- how to remove red wine stains was a big one, phone numbers I didn’t want to lose, whiteboards for grocery lists, the odd poem, and so on. A few of the magnets had actual meaning, like the one Django decorated at school and the one commemorating the Coast to Coast, a 200 mile trek across northern England I made with my ex-husband.  From time to time my postings would get so layered they began to resemble the internet—too much information and not only that, a lot of it out of date.   I’d tolerate the mess for awhile then, when I couldn’t stand it any more, then I’d go through and junk things. Because our house wasn’t air-conditioned (I live in Florida), I used to find that some of it had been there so long it had mildewed (note the metaphor) underneath. So what do I display now, all these years later? Tune in tomorrow and find out!

In a long interview at The Morning News, Tobias Wolff talks about the past and future of the short story, including the perennial question of why short stories aren’t more attractive to the modern attention span.

In the wake of the announcement that TriQuarterly is shutting down, A Public Space reprints editor Charles Newman’s foreword to the journal’s first issue. His remarks on the purpose of literary journals still hold true:

Our task is to assemble. Literary reviews provide no more viable standards than I.Q. tests or annual income. They are simply another alternative; an attempt to bind temperament and action through language. Without resorting to epilogues or manifestoes, we want to embellish those proper nouns and common verbs which have made our culture too often a vehicle for minor aspirations and mock debate. It will be a modern enterprise, perhaps embarrassingly so, in that we are justified by little save our own potential. We’re getting dressed up to celebrate the fact we’re still looking.

A Public Space, by the way, is a beautiful print journal. (And its web site is one of the few that takes care to style CLMP’s submissions manager to match the rest of its design.)

via The Morning News

My friend Ida Stewart has a lovely short up at Staccato Fiction, a nicely designed and very well executed online journal for microfiction.

Ida is generally a poet, as you can see from a recent poem at Unsplendid. She’s also good to have around when you’re looking for the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC at 2 a.m.

Robert Pinsky talks about inspiration, the place of poetry in contemporary America, and ebooks in a recent interview by Michael Shea at The Southeast Review.

Q: [...] As someone who’s been writing for over 40 years, where do you still find inspiration?

A: The only resource, ultimately, is great works of art. The music or poetry or building or movie you love. Or will love. Art inspires art

Brian Spears, who was kind enough to provide this week’s recording for Linebreak, has a new poem at Redheaded Stepchild titled “The Hazards in Child Naming.”

Redheaded Stepchild’s guidelines are interesting: the editors only want poems that have been rejected by other publications. Also, the site displays a hit counter next to each poem in that issue’s table of contents.

There’s far too much good stuff in this long talk with German culture czar Frank Schirrmacher for me to sum up in a blog post, except to say that it has to do with information overload and the way technology is changing how we think, and you should print it or Instapaper it and read it the next time you have an hour to spare.

A nut graph from Shirrmacher:

What did Shakespeare, and Kafka, and all these great writers — what actually did they do? They translated society into literature. And of course, at that stage, society was something very real, something which you could see. And they translated modernization into literature. Now we have to find people who translate what happens on the level of software. At least for newspapers, we should have sections that review software in a different way, at least the structures of software.

And a response from psychologist Daniel Kahneman:

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath.

The other day, I was talking with someone about all the original poetry you can find online now, and she asked me how I keep up with it all. And this was a sincere question, her assumption being (maybe because I do Linebreak and this blog and other such things, and because she knows me as a “computer person”) that keeping up with it all is even possible, possible for anyone, which of course it isn’t — not even in a field as relatively limited as contemporary English poetry.

In some ways, creating Swindle was an exercise in admitting this — that most days I don’t have time to even go and check the handful of places I trust to post new poems online, much less look for new ones — and in looking for a way for the Internet to help me solve a problem that the Internet itself created. Think about those old science fiction movies where people had robotic assistants — big, bulky machines that followed them around serving as maids or security guards, doing some kind of manual labor. The machine assistant I need isn’t a physical entity that helps around the house — it’s a virtual one that lives in Google’s cloud, monitoring the entire real time information stream, and letting me know when someone posts a Jack Gilbert poem I haven’t seen yet.

None of that is half as smart as the stuff waiting behind the link. Really, go read.

Dave Bonta’s Moving Poems blog is a wonderful source of video adaptations, animations, and readings of poems. For a sample, try these clips of Anne Sexton reading and talking about her work.

At the Wall Street Journal, 11 novelists describe their writing process:

[Kate] Christensen, who works out of her home in Tribeca, says a lot of her writing time is spent “not writing.” Most mornings, she does housework, writes emails and talks on the phone to avoid facing her work. In the past, she’s played 30 games of solitaire before typing a first sentence.

This video mashup is the most disturbing and subtly brilliant thing I’ve seen in weeks. Amazing how much pathos is wrung from simple juxtaposition.

How long, do you suppose, before this kind of editing is acknowledged as a primary rather than secondary creative act?

The women of Double X magazine try to work while drinking as much as the guys from Mad Men. Their findings: drunk ideas are never as good as they seem, and liquor makes meetings much more fun.

We drink like this everyday in the Linebreak office. Or would, if Linebreak had an office. (via Kottke)

Stephen King has a long narrative poem called “The Bone Church” in the current issue of Playboy. (Full text available after the link).

And that’s probably the only time anything here will be tagged not safe for work.

Were he starting out as a novelist in today’s publishing world, John Irving would be tempted to shoot himself. But he still believes that books have a future.

Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Patrick McGuiness recalls the life and work of  Lynette Roberts, a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas who was all but forgotten upon her death.

When Roberts died in 1995, aged eighty-six, in a west Wales nursing home, her work had been out of print for nearly half a century, and has gone unregistered in histories of British poetry, even those dedicated to that much-maligned period, “the Forties”. “Oblivion” is too dramatic a word for what happened to her – footnotehood probably captures it better.

Roberts’s Collected Poems (edited by McGuiness) was published in 2006.