On Dec. 7, newly-minted laureate Louise Glück delivered her Nobel acceptance speech outside of her Massachusetts home. In it, the poet expressed her lifelong interest in a kind of confessional poem, in which the speaker intimately addresses the reader. And in making her point, she lauded a work many found tone-deaf in the current climate, prompting some to compare the speech to blackface.
Glück built her speech around a childhood competition she held for the greatest poem in the world.
“There were two finalists,” Glück said, “[William] Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’ and Stephen Foster’s ‘Swanee River.’”
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON â While plagues have historically fostered every kind of lossâof freedom, of livelihood, of hope, of life itselfâthe isolation of grim eras such as the one we are now experiencing can also provoke introspection, fresh curiosity, and, with luck and mettle, singular creativity. Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude â the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College â gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers far and wide who â despite the deficits of quarantine, self-isolation, and distancing â are closely bonded by a shared embrace of the written word and its ineffable powers of expression. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Dispatches from Solitude features two previously unpublished songs by Sandra Cisneros, recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; a new short story by 2020 Bard Fiction Prize wi