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on Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields (Knopf)

David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto ardently tags after the American poets who have dismissed the facts of the day and their shotgun-riding media and arts. “Realism is a corruption of reality,” said Wallace Stevens. In 1951, as the hydrogen bomb made its debut, William Carlos Williams voiced his disregard:

on The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, ed. by Mark Weiss; and It’s Not You, It’s Me, ed. by Jerry Williams

The statue of José Martí (1853-1895) is situated at the 59th Street entrance to Central Park near the Grand Plaza. The Cuban poet-patriot is depicted at the moment Spanish bullets ripped into him at the Battle of Dos Rios.

on Director’s Cut, a novel by Arthur Japin, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Knopf)

In 1990 Federico Fellini directed La voce della luna, his final film. In the years before his death in 1993, unsuccessful in raising funds for new projects, Fellini created a TV commercial for a bank and dedicated it to a Signora Vandemberg.

on Look At Me! by Orville Gilbert Brim (Michigan), and Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! by Gerald Nachman (California)

Briefly celebrated for Typee and resenting the expectations of his new audience, Herman Melville complained, “All fame is patronage. I want to be infamous.” The cultivation of fame is conventionally regarded as inappropriate behavior. A reporter once asked Al Pacino how he deals with fame.

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