Category Archives: News
April Bernard: Ghastly but possibly interesting
Alvin Lightman’s life first touched mine when both of us were staying at Holdon House Facility upstate. Formerly it was Holdon Hospital, before that Holdon Asylum, and called variously by those who have worked and lived there, among other witticisms, Hold It, The Hold, and Hold On I’m Coming. That I had “committed myself” was […]
Writers: April Bernard
The return of Richard Crashaw (ca. 1613–1649)
The English Poems of Richard Crashaw, edited by Richard Rambuss, is the first critical edition of Crashaw in over forty years. We have a poem from the edition in Little Star Weekly this week, and the quotations on the book are so interesting we offer them here: Our usual accounts of the early modern lyric […]
Writers: Richard Crashaw
Gro Dahle
I bend, cringe. I am less than a normal person. I am a child. Less than a child. I am an ape. I am a dog. Less than a dog. A cat. A rabbit. I am a turtle. A frog. No, less than a frog. A grasshopper. A …………….beetle. I am a wood louse that hides […]
Writers: Gro Dahle
P is for Poetry, a definition of sorts from Edward Hirsch
POETRY An inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language; an experience through words. Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it. It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.” Even Samuel Johnson maintained, “To circumscribe poetry by a definition will […]
Writers: Edward Hirsch
Welcome Derek Walcott!
Derek Walcott is arriving in New York for a week of readings, and we wanted to mark the occasion by rounding up all we have had to offer of his work over the years, for your delectation: • Poems in Issue #1 • Translation of a Christmas Poem by Joseph Brodsky • Performance of his play, […]
Writers: Derek Walcott
Marcelle Sauvegeot, “Laissez-moi”
A woman travels on a train from Paris to a sanatorium to be treated for tuberculosis. She is regretting leaving behind her lover; she doubts him. When she arrives she receives a letter: He is leaving her and marrying another woman. She ruthlessly studies their love, its exaltation, and the seeds of its destruction that […]
Writers: Marcelle Sauvageto
Tagged Belle lettres, France
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Sohrab Sepehri
This week in Little Star Weekly we feature a poem from the Persian of Sohrab Sepehri. Tonight I will say farewell. I have spoken to my neighbors through the wide-open window but don’t understand what they are talking about. Sohrab Sepehri was born in 1928 in Kashan, Iran, and was trained as a painter. In […]
Writers: Kazim Ali, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, Sohrab Sepehri
Max Jacob Extravaganza!
In February 1912, the newly fledged Futurist painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini—those who had signed the first two Futurist manifestos of painting), led by the poet and publicist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had held their first Parisian exhibit, at the Galerie Bernheim, provoking several tart articles by Apollinaire. The […]
Writers: Max Jacob, Rosanna Warren
Pushkin Hills, by Sergei Dovlatov
At noon we pulled into Luga. We stopped at the station square and the tour guide adjusted her tone from a lofty to an earthier one: “There to the left are the facilities…” My neighbor pricked up his ears. “You mean the restroom?” He nagged me the entire trip: “A bleaching agent, six letters? An […]
Writers: Sergei Dovlatov