Rarely is one so revised by experience, which like a river washes away the calcified sand of the soul to describe itself there anew. Rare, too, is the ability to recognize this revision. School had just ended, its shoulder-weight just … Read More
November 22, 2013 is when Susan Howe and David Grubbs sit in Woolworth Hall. Susan Howe and David Grubbs are at Princeton to perform their fourth collaboration, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER. There is no light in the room. A sun is outside, near … Read More
Kanye West divides and provokes and resides like few entertainers suspended in the stratosphere of fame. His skill as a musician is indubitable, but so is his misbehavior. To some, he is a prophet of the heavens, speaking Truth to … Read More
‘ . . . And what greater calamity
[be]falls . . . than the loss of worship . . .
or , in the first eras , territory , river ,
and sure on that tongue . . . my elder-tongue . . .
Sometimes, you forget: there are people out there who do absolutely brilliant, incredible things. Even at achievement-filled Princeton—especially at achievement-filled Princeton—greatness, which is a level below the place I write about, can become benign and unimpressive. Talent becomes the norm … Read More
I sit and breathe and try to recall my whole life. I now sit serenely in the brush by this shouldering road. It winds tightly through the Peloponnesian town of Megalopolis, where I sit, through the pink stucco homes clinging staccato to the high side of the mountain our bus, heaving, climbed. Rapt speech in the restaurant behind is mere chatter.
“When you’re famous and say you’re writing a book, people assume that it’s an autobiography—I was born here, raised there, suffered this, loved that, lost it all, got it back, the end. But that’s not what this is. I’ve never been a linear thinker, which is something you can see in my rhymes. They follow the jumpy logic of poetry and emotion, not the straight line of careful prose. My book is like that, too.”
I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a quiet settlement eight miles from Copley Square. The Marathon’s route follows Commonwealth Avenue through Newton into Boston. My house is a block from the Marathon’s 20-mile marker, in the middle of Heartbreak Hill, the most notorious of a series of four steep ascents that runners must endure as they pass through the city.
