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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
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
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
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
She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published works by their literary friends. After he left her and became Amiri Baraka, she found her own voice.Hettie Jones, a poet and author who with her husband, LeRoi Jones (who later became the incendiary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka), made her household a hub for Beat writers and other artists — but who was often described as a footnote in the rise of her famous spouse as “the white wife” he disavowed — died on Aug. 13 in Philadelphia. She was 90.Her daughter Kellie Jones confirmed the death.Raised in a conventional middle-class Jewish household in Queens, Ms. Jones was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity. She dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University, where she was studying drama, to work at The Record Changer, a jazz magazine, for $1 an hour. There she met a charismatic young poet named LeRoi Jones, and they fell in love.They hung out at the Five Spot on Cooper Square, listening to jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk. Though they were the rare mixed-race couple in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, theirs was a mostly colorblind world, Ms. Jones thought — until it wasn’t.She recalled the day they were walking together and heard jeers and racial slurs from behind. She wheeled around to protest, but Mr. Jones held her back.Ms. Jones in the 1960s. She was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity despite her conventional upbringing.via Jones familyThe situation was more dangerous for him, she realized, struck by her own naïveté and ignorance. (At the time, more than half the country had laws criminalizing interracial marriage.) She also realized, as she later wrote, that “to live like this I would have to defer to his judgment.”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
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment tests your knowledge of novels, poems and memoirs by writers connected to the Harlem Renaissance, a creative movement by Black authors, artists and musicians that crystallized into a cultural force a century ago. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books and other information if you’d like to do some further reading.3 of 5In 1930, Langston Hughes collaborated on a play called “Mule Bone,” which was never finished but was published in a new edition and produced on Broadway in 1991, long after both authors were dead. His co-writer, who was also an anthropologist, was the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including an autobiography titled “Dust Tracks on a Road.” Who was it? More
Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.He amended his statement.“Especially poets,” he added.To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”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
Legend says the Durandal sword had been stuck in a French hillside for nearly 1,300 years. When it went missing in June, an investigation to find France’s Excalibur began.As legend has it, a sword from God given to Roland, an 8th century military leader under Charlemagne, was so powerful that Roland’s last mission was to destroy it.When the blade, called Durandal, proved indestructible, Roland threw it as far as he could, and it sailed over 100 miles before slicing through the side of a rock face in the medieval French village of Rocamadour.That sword, as the story goes, sat wedged in the stone for nearly 1,300 years, and it became a landmark and tourist attraction in Rocamadour, a very small village in southwestern France, about 110 miles east of Bordeaux. So residents and officials there were stunned to discover late last month that the blade had vanished, according to La Dépêche du Midi, a French newspaper.An officer with France’s national police force in Cahors, a town 30 miles southwest of Rocamadour, said that the sword disappeared sometime after nightfall on June 21, and that the authorities opened an investigation after a passerby reported the next morning that it was missing.The officer, who declined to give his name, emphasized that the sword is “a copy,” but acknowledged that it had symbolic significance.He referred further questions to the office of the prosecutor of the republic in Cahors, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.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
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).There isn’t one. The true answer is in a comfortable chair.What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?I’ve learned everything and not very much. Not recently, but when I began writing poetry the two poets who taught and influenced me the most were Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell. In the case of Pound, the incomprehensible music of it, the reach and the size of the ambition, and the way the poetry finds moments of great simplicity and sweetness. In the case of Lowell, so many different things I learned and imitated from him. And otherwise it’s been many poets, everybody. What books are on your night stand?I like that — “night stand” — old-fashioned. Right now: Yukio Mishima’s book “Patriotism,” a silly piece of work; “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz”; the essays of Frank Kermode. Around as well are “Voyage in the Dark,” by Jean Rhys, and Joseph Roth’s novel “Flight Without End.” “The Little Auto,” a children’s book by Lois Lenski. “The Rest Is Noise,” by Alex Ross, and Louis Menand’s “The Free World.” “Skyfaring,” by Mark Vanhoenacker — I have a thing about speed, about flying, motorcycles, Formula 1, but especially motorcycles. I’ve written a lot of poems that I suppose are unusual for including motorcycles in them, with the emphasis on Italian ones, and a particular joy in the beauty and vast speed of them. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bologna near the Ducati factory, which made a racing motorcycle for me.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?I must have as a boy. I remember very much enjoying Maurice Girodias’s banned books in Paris that included Henry Miller and other distinguished authors. Girodias was himself a naughty delight. He printed the unprintable.What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?I suppose Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” My favorite of his novels, a work of genius. I’m not a big reader-laugher.The last book that made you furious?“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz” made me furious, the thought of his tragic life. The first poems are marvelous, and how much trouble there is with the enormous rest of the book. Such a gifted man, and so terrible a life.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
