Word: poem
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...enduring power?escapes conventional measurement, but by any standard, the range and volume of his work in two languages is prodigious. It includes 15 novels (nine Russian, six English) and translations of other writers' work. His fiction differs from most novels in much the same way that a poem differs from a political treatise. One is an end in itself. The other, however intricate and elegant, is a means to an end. In a classic sneer...
...show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs-The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm -and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going...
...magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy were all part of an increasingly grotesque effort to revitalize the nineteenth century musical syntax. Munificently colored cathedrals were raised upon the collapsing sands of lurid fin-de-siecle romanticism. Self-paralysis, excruciating self-examination, and creative resumption along new paths followed this cataract...
Later, in another room, Miss Bas Cohain began her presentation by reading a poem by Cummings. She then showed slides of paintings by Klee, Modigliani, Pollock, and various other modern artists, introducing them by saying simply that she liked them. The women in the audience sat silently in the dark, some smiling, some bewildered but receptive. Miss Bas-Cohain had said that she preferred not to explain what she was doing. She wanted to let the slides and the exhibit speak for themselves...
Just for the fun of it, William A. Stewart had translated Clement Moore's famous poem into a loose imitation of ghetto language as a Christmas greeting from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. By chance, a twelve-year-old Negro girl with a serious reading problem picked up the parody in Stewart's presence. To his astonishment, she breezed through it with ease. Yet when she was asked to try Moore's original, she fumbled and stammered over the words, exhibiting all her old reading difficulties...