"In the Spring I had Great Hunger..."

from today's New Yorker "Book Bench"

Iceland has been in the news a lot recently. When I heard that the poet Anne Carson was living there as an artist in residence, working on a choral piece in Stykkisholmur, I asked her what her impressions were of the headline-making nation:

Vast empty silent. Kinds of light unlike any other. Weather changing every ten minutes.

The choral piece, based on a sequence of Carson’s sonnets, will be scored by Kjartan, from Sigur Rós, and moved to New York next year.


(Exclamation marks, anticipation and punctuation marks of desire all around)

"A cleaving to a certain freedom..."

A melancholy rage, a fiery laze. A sullen funk, an unproductive morning. A glaring footdrag of errands, an armful of literary mags (the new Granta, the new Bookforum, the new Believer, buying the Boston Review for a new Anne Carson poem...) and a latte.

And a discovery. A wish, a truth:

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line
and no visible recompense.

Fanny Howe, "Poem from a Single Pallet"

Wise words

The nearly right
And yet not quite
In love is wholly evil
And every heart
That loves in part
Is mortgaged to the devil.


I loved or thought
I loved in sort
Was this to love akin?
To take the best
And leave the rest
And let the devil in?


O lovers true
And others too
Whose best is only better
Take my advice
Shun compromise
Forget him and forget her.


"To the Tune of the Coventry Carol" Stevie Smith