Second Looks |
A Sly Beast: Rereading Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
“Yourcenar wrote that one cannot write about women because their lives are filled with secrets. Perhaps, by inhabiting Hadrian’s mind and body and allowing him to inhabit her imagination, she could live in full.”
Second Looks |
on Versailles, a novel by Kathryn Davis
“In 2003, the year after I graduated from college, Davis came to the Brattleboro Literary Festival to read from her new novel called Versailles, about Marie Antoinette. I wasn’t so sure about Marie Antoinette. She seemed like kind of a jerk to me.”
Second Looks |
“Alexandrian Delights: Rereading Cavafy”
“Constantine Cavafy, a half-closeted gay man, and Ida von Pechmann, a matronly housewife from Bavaria half-adjusted to Alexandrian society, had little in common except for the fact that they lived and wrote in the same place.”
Second Looks |
Revisiting Shirt In Heaven by Jean Valentine
“I was carrying a copy of Shirt in Heaven, Jean Valentine’s final collection of poetry, on one of the last evenings I saw her. It was 2017 and she was reading at Yale’s Beinecke Library.”
Second Looks |
“Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo Reconsidered”
“The erasure between the lyric and narrative drives is something I aspired to achieve in my own work, but it wasn’t until I read Rulfo’s novel that I learned how to do it.”
Second Looks |
“Rereading May Swenson”
“I think rereading is an act of hope, a way of seeing if the past is truly present, or could be, or should be. As I get older, I find I return to the things that first made sense in poetry, before I was hardened into opinion, or career …”