If Youâre Feeling Isolated
Try writing a letter.
Published Jan. 29, 2021Updated Feb. 4, 2021
Welcome. The Sundance Film Festival is on until Wednesday, and like most things these days, itâs gone virtual. Make like A.O. Scott and watch it from your sofa. Weâll help you select some features that suit your taste, or you could check out The New York Timesâs selection of Op-Docs from this year and previous ones. Then youâll want to read this profile of Tabitha Jackson, the festâs new director.
There goes your weekend, if you can swing it.
Here in New York City, an hour before sunrise, itâs 19 degrees and windy, which makes an indoor film festival sound like just the thing. But perhaps youâre in Sydney, where the rain should be clearing up soon, and temperatures could climb into the 80s; youâll probably spend at least part of the day outside, maybe have a masked meet-up. In California, an atmospheric river-borne storm is bringing heavy rain
Rita Dove
In 1993, Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, making her the youngest person – and the first African-American – to receive this highest official honor in American Poetry. She served 1993-1995. In 1999 she was reappointed Special Consultant in Poetry for 1999/2000, The Library of Congress Bicentennial year. From 2004-2006, she served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Thomas and Beulah” (1987), author of numerous poetry books, a novel, short stories, a play, and is editor of “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.” Her honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama the only poet ever to receive both medals as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poe
A strange turn occurs toward the middle of Frederick Seidel’s 2009
Paris Review interview. The poet, whom Adam Kirsch once deemed the best in the United States, describes himself as coming late to an appreciation of New York School poets James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Until this point in the conversation, Seidel’s distinctive sensibility snapped into place commensurate with his biography. His patrician vocabulary and profoundly conservative sense of rhyme and meter gestured toward his Harvard education and his Sorbonne classes at midcentury. Visits to Ezra Pound in 1953 (who at the time was institutionalized and warding off a treason charge for his radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Italian fascism during World War II) and T.S. Eliot (a fellow St. Louis native who, through talent and a penchant for self-invention, acted out an Anglophile’s version of what a poet should be) taught Seidel that achievement didn’t lie solely in a moralist’s idea of virtue and that
Black Fiddlers documentary poster image
Many of us have heard about the history and relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman of African descent working at his Monticello plantation. Historic records and DNA evidence show that Jefferson fathered six children with Hemings, four surviving to adulthood.
What of those children? What became of them?
According to research from The Early Music Access Project (EMAP) in Charlottesville, two of Jefferson and Hemings’ sons, Beverly and Eston, became accomplished fiddlers for Monticello and beyond, spawning a legacy of music throughout our region.
Black Fiddlers, a documentary from EMAP and the Heritage Film Project recently began production. It features the legacies of two families of fiddlers, connected by blood and by marriage to Jefferson and Hemings.
5 Contemporary Black Poets You Should Know
Our nation’s poet laureate Amanda Gorman is in good company.
When Amanda Gorman ascended to the steps of our nation’s capital she did so standing on the shoulders of Black women who have captured the spirit of momentous occasions in black and white for generations.
Gorman contributed to a rich legacy that includes Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Tracy K. Smith, Maya Angelou and more when she became the youngest National Poet Laureate. Her thoughtful description of our “unfinished,” nation and recognition of a light that is occasionally obstructed but never snuffed out infused hope into our country for six full minutes.