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Review: Gabriel – A Poem, by Edward Hirsch

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch Knopf Doubleday, 2014; 96pp A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; 736pp How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; 368pp “Many of the very greatest poems seem as if they were written in blood,” Edward Hirsch once wrote. So it is with his magnificent, harrowing Gabriel (2014), a book-length poem that anatomizes Hirsch’s grief over the death in 2011, at the age of twenty-two, of his son. Gabriel is an elegy, a confession, a howl. It’s a poem steeped in literary history but also fluent in contemporary idiom and reference (the poem’s epigraph comes from a Blink-182 song). Reviewing it feels intrusive — like reviewing a eulogy. Yet I also imagine that Hirsch, always a passionate advocate for “a participatory poetics”, understood that in publishing such a personal work, each new reader would, in a sense, encounter Gabriel alive once more; the creative act of reading would have a resurrective aspect. In How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry (1999), he wrote that “The lyric poem seeks to mesmerize time. It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming […]

Fail Better

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis Simon & Schuster, 2014; 272pp In 2010, Sandra Bullock was briefly my favorite person in the world. In the same weekend, she won and accepted the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress (for All About Steve) and, for her role in The Blind Side, the Oscar for Best Actress. It was an astonishing act of humility; I doubt many in Hollywood would acknowledge so freely the unpredictability of artistic achievement. Bullock became, in that moment, a beacon of hope for all who see in their perceived failures the seeds of their future successes. Yes, she seemed to be saying, I did make All About Steve. But from the same well of emotion and experience that I drew on for that role came The Blind Side. If you try and fail, try again. Or, put another way: failure is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. This is the message of Sarah Lewis’s inspiring book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, which recasts failure as a useful and perhaps even essential step on the path to success, innovation, […]

Steven Pinker On Style

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker Viking, 2014; 368pp Is it better to err unwittingly or to be all crouching pedant, hidden snoot? This is perhaps a question more of lifestyle than writing style, but one I nevertheless contemplated throughout the happy week I spent surfing the pages of Steven Pinker‘s new writing guide, The Sense of Style. He offers no easy answers — sometimes it’s definitely better to put your foot down; sometimes you’ll end up with egg on your face — but, having read it, I go back out into the world with a renewed sense of purpose and a better-calibrated sonar for the faux pas. Like Pinker, I’ve been known to dip into style manuals for pleasure. I pride myself on being pretty good at spelling, punctuation, and grammar (although I’ve stopped putting that on my dating profile — it turns me off, let alone potential candidates). But with great power comes great responsibility. You can crush someone with a correction, however subtly administered. To point out an error in grammar or punctuation is, to me, no better than to tell someone they look rough today, or to ask them if they […]

ReadEasy, 15 May 2015

ReadEasy: a literary submarine cruising the depths of the internet. This week: writers recommend writers. That’s nice. Read on for top tips for #FridayReads et al from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Attwood, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Sedaris. (Pause to get a coffee. This is not part of the found object. :] ) NB the gold standard for #TwitterFiction is Jennifer Egan's "Black Box."— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 13, 2015 …written during the Twitter Fiction Festival. Very well, Margaret: here is Jennifer Egan‘s “Black Box“. Knausgaard recommends… Holly Hunter, Brandon J. Dirden and Corey Stoll were the readers at Symphony Space’s packed-out “Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard” last Wednesday, which also featured an interview with the man himself, nimbly, wittily conducted by Hari Kunzru. “I wanted to be a writer for almost all the wrong reasons,” the great Norwegian confessed to Kunzru; “I had failed as a rock musician.” Rock music’s loss was literature’s gain — Zadie Smith has compared Knausgaard to crack, and others are just as ecstatic. All this despite the critical near-consensus (bordering on cliché) that his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (published in hardback by Archipelago Books and in paperback by FSG) is in many ways quite banal. […]

One Simple Rule

After hearing from our six guest writers in April on the subject “One Simple Rule”, you might think we’d have some pretty solid advice for you. We don’t. Write what you know? Well, sometimes it’s best not to. Everyone should know CPR? Granted; hard to argue. Back up your work? Phew, yes, we’d all have saved ourselves some stress by following that one. Break all of the rules, always? We don’t like to be too prescriptive here… Well, we’ll leave you to judge, as you enjoy the wit and wisdom of Elif Shafak, Tom Rob Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Lisa Robinson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Beau Willimon. Elif Shafak was first up to the mic. An industrious author, Shafak has published several novels, numerous articles, and a collection of nonfiction. She’s a TED Talker. She’s Turkey’s most widely read female writer. She’s perplexed, then, by what she perceives to be a cult of idleness among many Middle Eastern men. “All across the Middle East, if you travel,” she said, “you will come across thousands and thousands of men — and always men — just sitting, playing backgammon, chatting — smoking, mostly — until it’s time to go home.” These men are not the subjects of her work, though. “What I’m interested in […]

Sheep-dipping, singing, and feminism with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

On April 21, our co-founder Amanda Foreman interviewed Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts about their roles in Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd at New York’s La Grenouille. Below is a transcript of their talk. Amanda Foreman: I think the reason why we love the nineteenth-century novelists — the Brontës, the Dickenses, the Hardys, the George Eliots of this world — is because they both give us these traditional truths about humanity, and yet they also dissect them, they eviscerate them. The premise of Far From the Madding Crowd is very simple. It’s about love, it’s about betrayal, and it’s about money. These are eternal concepts. They revolve around a young woman named Bathsheba Everdene, who is a young country girl who suddenly comes into a great deal of money. With that independence comes not the freedom she thought she was going to have, because she is surrounded by three male antagonist-protagonists. And it’s her visceral struggle for independence vis-à-vis these three men. Because it’s about Bathsheba, I’m going to start with Carey Mulligan, who plays Bathsheba. I must say, you’re currently also playing a role in David Hare’s Skylight, about a woman who refuses to be defined by the men […]

Review: The Marauders, by Tom Cooper

The Marauders by Tom Cooper Crown, 2015; 320pp “Of course he knew that searching for an island of marijuana was crazy. But he also knew that every so often fools stumbled upon fortune, whether by fate or fluke.” This is Cosgrove, one of the gallery of scofflaws and no-hopers that fill out Tom Cooper‘s cracking debut novel, The Marauders. A thriller set in Jeanette, La., in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, The Marauders channel-hops between twin drug dealers, a one-armed shrimper, a teenage boy and his bitter father, a drifter and his criminal buddy, and a BP middleman sent to settle claims to the oil company’s advantage. All the while, its helter-skelter plot unfolds. The teeming swamps of Barataria Bay are a constant mysterious presence, and it’s here that Cosgrove and Hanson, who met on a community-service program, go hunting for the Toup brothers’ legendary marijuana island. It’s also where Lindquist, who pops painkillers from a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, roves with his metal detector, hoping to turn up pirate gold, or, failing that, jewelry lost in the floods of Katrina. Cooper’s sense of place is masterful, reflecting both the stoicism of the Barataria’s inhabitants and the precariousness of their way […]

Building a House of Cards: An Interview with Beau Willimon

“Event television” has been replaced by a new phenomenon in recent years, and that’s in no small part thanks to Beau Willimon. On February 1, 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of a show Willimon had (loosely) adapted from a BBC series from 1990, itself a translation of a political thriller published the year before. Gone, though, was Ian Richardson’s uppity Chief Whip, his lapine poise and aristocratic camp. Gone were the Whitehall setting and the early-’90s sexual mores. In their place, the cool, adult style of David Fincher; the Jacobean viciousness of politics inside the Beltway; the Southern camp of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. The show was House of Cards; the rest, as they say… Beau Willimon very kindly agreed to answer your questions. So with many thanks to our readers for sending them in, please find below his (declassified) responses. Read on to find out why Underwood couldn’t have been a Republican, how comedy plays into House of Cards, and what Frank advice might look like. Ryan Merola: How did you decide that making Underwood a Blue Dog Democrat from South Carolina would be both a fair analogy to the original British villain-protagonist as well as a good avenue for making your […]

Curtain Call: One Simple Rule

Psychosis. Architecture. Rock music. Dead stars. Racial politics. Could this be another Seriously Entertaining show from the House of SpeakEasy? You might think that; we couldn’t possibly comment. But yes, this month’s line-up is certainly a sizzler. Best-selling novelist Tom Rob Smith rubs shoulders with House of Cards creator Beau Willimon; poet and actress Amber Tamblyn clinks glasses with Turkish author and human rights activist Elif Shafak; and rock journalist Lisa Robinson breaks bread with Obie Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Get a taster of what you might expect on Tuesday with our pick of the internet’s videos. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘s plays include Neighbors, Appropriate, War, and An Octoroon, which recently concluded a triumphant second run at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. In his review of the transfer, The New York Times‘s Ben Brantley commented, “in its current incarnation, ‘An Octoroon’ feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic.” In our review, we called it “an eloquent dissertation on the seeming impossibility of talking meaningfully about race in the United States.” Jacobs-Jenkins won the Obie Award for best new American play for An Octoroon and Appropriate in 2014; here he talks about his historical sources for An Octoroon and the battle over authentically representing slaves. In several decades traveling […]

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