Archive for 2009
Whose Words These Are (20): Rick Benjamin
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Benjamin. (38 minutes, 18 meg mp3)
Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change …
Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk, the jazz pianist and composer, returns in Robin Kelley's biography, from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music.
Gordon Wood: Empire and Liberty, then and now
Brown University historian Gordon Wood tells us how Jefferson's paradox of empire and liberty persists in Obama's speech on Afghanistan.
Whose Words These Are (19): Andrew Motion
In our poetry series: Andrew Motion, poet Laureate of the UK for the last ten years, reads his work for us and muses on the social and political resonance of his personal experience.
Orhan Pamuk and his Museum: This is your brain on novels…
Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel novelist from Turkey, is building a bricks-and-mortar museum in Istanbul: Museum of Innocence, his new novel, may be read an annotated catalog of the real building and its contents.
Whose Words These Are (18): Keith Waldrop
Keith Waldrop, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, talks in our poetry series about Kansas roots and the making of collages words, quilts in phrases.
This "Year of India" (3): Suketu Mehta, Bombay’s Biographer
Suketu Mehta in his great biography of modern Bombay, "Maximum City," has tracked (soul by soul, it feels) the change in Gandhi's beloved "nation of villages."
This "Year of India" (2): Rana Dasgupta
The writer Rana Dasgupta, in the second of our "Year of India" conversations, sees a rampant money culture and a knack for American ways driving India toward a pinnacle of power.
Whose Words These Are (17): Henri Cole
Henri Cole, in our poetry series "whose words these are," speaks of poetry as the place where as a young gay man he worked through yearning and anger to astringency and order.
Whose Words These Are (16): Nick Baker’s Chowder
Nicholson Baker, the novelist of "Vox," joins our poetry series with his fictional poet Paul Chowder, a passionate fan of rhythm and rhyme a la Kipling and Dr. Seuss.
