Poetry and Poets

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      Match the Taylor Swift Song to the Poem Inspired By Her Music

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      In honor of Madison Cloudfeather Nye Somehow the voices twined around a young mind encouraging gentle stanzas, open endings, even in a Texas town where they wanted you to testify before cashing a check. Heck with that, boys. I’m heading out in my little gray boots, slim volumes of poetry in my holster, William of […] More

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      Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100

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      Madeleine Riffaud, a swashbuckling French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, and who later became a crusading anticolonial war correspondent, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis.Ms. Riffaud was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.“That moment,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.“I remember saying to myself,” she said, “‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”Madeleine with her father, Jean Émile Riffaud, in about 1925. Mr. Riffaud, who had been wounded in World War I, was a pacifist.Fonds Madeleine RiffaudShe connected with the Resistance in Grenoble, France, at a sanitarium where she was being treated for tuberculosis. She had contracted the disease while studying midwifery in Paris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      3 Poets Who See Society Freaking Out, and Respond in Kind

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      New collections from Alexandra Teague, Daniel Borzutzky and August Kleinzahler tap into a strain of cultural anxiety.Are you overwhelmed? I know I am. Even with recent sparks of hope, there have been a hell of a lot of slings and arrows lately. We have not been fine. But when things get tough, we can turn to poetry. Of course, poetry’s as overwhelmed as we are, anxious company, as these three new books amply illustrate.Alexandra Teague meets this moment with megaphones blaring in her fourth collection, OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFYING (Persea, paperback, $18) — the volume knob on most of these poems starts at seven and goes way past 11. They portray an oversaturated America where “the man in the size-twelve heels calling Girl, how do these look?/would never tell you walking in this country is free.” This multiscreen, surround-sound blitz is often thrilling — Teague seems to have an everlasting supply of ideas, and she is frighteningly clever. Her best lines are like stand-up tragedy.Everywhere Teague looks she sees the rapid degradation of human civilization and the planet along with it. “Because something has to be to blame,” she recruits Yeats’s rough beast, that famous harbinger of doom, as her avatar in a series of poems that journey into the bowels of a fallen nation plagued by guns and “foreclosed windows. Meth.” The beast is, of course, an embodiment of the horrors humanity has wrought, “made of the past like a junk shop/with split-frame washboards/and dolls with crazed, crazy eyes.” Teague’s beast reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ “person man,” the one who was “hit on the head with a frying pan”: sad, sympathetic and a bit blank.In Teague’s more personal poems, all that churning associative machinery sharpens her metaphors to startling points, as in the gorgeous “The Horse That Threw Me,” a visionary lyric, one of the finest I’ve read in years. Figures braid and cascade until horseback riding becomes synonymous with the will to live: “Didn’t you want to canter beyond yourself? Of course you/did.” It’s a glorious poem, and there are more. But be warned: Teague dramatizes a seriously overwhelming world by seriously overwhelming her readers. This book may induce authentic anxiety. But so does your phone, every time you pick it up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brontë Sisters Plaque at Westminster Abbey Typo Fixed

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      Punctuation delayed, but not denied: A memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë at Poets’ Corner in the celebrated London church finally gets its accent marks.For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.This week, the error was fixed when six diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about a third of an inch in diameter — were added above the E of the famous last name.It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.“Those three women fought harder than most to have their voices heard, to have their work understood on its own merits, and it endures,” said Sharon Wright, who discovered the mistake while visiting Westminster Abbey in London in January. “We can at least get their names right.”Ms. Wright, who describes herself as a stroppy Yorkshire woman like the literary sisters, was researching her upcoming book “The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar,” when she visited the plaque. Ms. Wright, who also edits the Brontë Society Gazette, a periodical for Brontë fans, compared the plaque with how the women had signed their own names, and saw the discrepancy.“Three of our greatest writers, and their names are spelled incorrectly,” Ms. Wright said at the abbey on Friday. “You can’t make it up.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More