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Tag: poetry

An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

art, books, fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, poetry, Sylvia Plath, writing

10/02/2025
Will you fall in love with this poem? I did. – The New York Times

The rhymes and near rhymes make a jagged scheme that is all the more beguiling for its asymmetry. When you read the poem aloud, you hear its jumpy, syncopated rhythm. It resolves into a tidy, clever pair of end-rhymed lines, a mic drop proclaiming the supremacy of poetry over grubby, fact-based scholarship. Maybe he smelled, but the dude could write. And so can Diane Seuss.

Dianne Seuss, John Keats, poetry

19/12/2024
A poem about waiting, and wishing you had a drink – The New York Times

No one would call “Party Politics” a masterpiece: Commissioned for a 1984 issue of Poetry Review devoted to “Poetry and Drink,” it didn’t appear in any of the books issued in Larkin’s lifetime. But it shares the qualities of some of his best poems. Larkin is prized for his blunt honesty about the inevitability of disappointment, and for the stoicism and virtuosity that lighten the gloom.
philip-larkin poetry time

Philip Larkin, poetry, time

04/11/2024