“There is nothing to do in art but to persevere hopefully in one’s peculiarities.”

Encouraging words, and I love the resolutely old-school use of hopefully.

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Hanging-Charles-Duff/dp/1845881419/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253805440&sr=1-1

I’ve sent it to proponents of the death-penalty, to a deafening if not deadening silence.

I don’t know Jill McDonough’s work, but I’ll look out for it.

The best imagined description of an execution of a killer that I know of toward the end of Denis Johnson’s Angels, where your heart pounds in rhythm with his heart’s failing.

Thanks for the show. Look forward to the rest of the series.

In a pleasant meadow-land,

The watchers watched him as he slept,

And could not understand

How one could sleep so sweet a sleep

With a hangman close at hand.

But there is no sleep when men must weep

Who never yet have wept:

So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—

That endless vigil kept,

And through each brain on hands of pain

Another’s terror crept.”

From The Ballad of Reading Gaol

by Oscar Wilde (the only thing he wrote while he was in prison).

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174763

Seamus Heaney, writing on Yeats, said “The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

Jill McDonough seems to fit right into that tradition. And I love Jill reads. It’s raw.

And three cheers for the Grolier Poetry Book shop.

http://grolierpoetrybookshop.org/blog1/