Word: poems
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...more complicated friendships was with James Agee, who reviewed movies for The Nation and Time, had contributed the text to the Dust Bowl picture-poem Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and would go on to write the novel A Death in the Family and the African Queen screenplay with John Huston. (He also worked vagrantly with Manny on a never-completed script.) Agee was the alcoholic Episcopalian golden boy to Manny's cranky Jewish mensch, and that may have stoked jealousy and resentment. How was Manny to know that Agee, however lauded in his time (he died...
Were he alive today, the Buddha would be in jail for child-support violations. Two-and-a-half millenniums of adoration and mythology have obscured the unflattering fact that the Buddha was a deadbeat dad. So a shimmering new English translation of the Buddhacarita, the 2nd century Sanskrit poem chronicling his life, reminds us that in his search for enlightenment and release from samsara - the wheel of rebirths that condemns us to endless lives and thus suffering - he cruelly abandoned his wife and young son Rahula (whose name, making a not-so-subtle point, means "fetters...
...what the Loeb Classical Library - publisher of those pocket-sized, green and red volumes found in many a university reading room - has done for Greek and Latin texts over the past century. As such, it's geared more toward lofty specialists and Indiana Joneses than curious general readers. The poem is cluttered with arcane history, dry scriptural debate and explanations of Buddhist doctrine - the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and the Triple Refuge - that can be meticulous to the point of opacity...
...needn't be a scholar to enjoy this wondrous poem, which continually marvels us with its grand gestures: moments of divine intervention, political assassination plots, infernal visions and hellish battles with chimerical fiends. Recent pop culture has tackled the Buddha, from fantastic depictions (see Osamu Tezuka's eight-volume manga interpretation of his life) to the absurd (one thinks of a bronzed Keanu Reeves strutting as Siddhartha in Little Buddha). Yet you would be hard pressed to find anything that ranks close to the Buddhacarita, which still mesmerizes with its vividness and sheer audacity...
...even if asked, and he spent his tenure overseeing the library's poetry collection. Subsequent laureates have used the position to broaden the reach of poetry in America. Joseph Brodsky championed poetry in public places; Robert Hass started an annual student competition; Billy Collins launched a website with a poem for every day of the school year. Ryan isn't yet sure what she's going to do but notes that she is constitutionally "incapable of saying what people expect me to say." Her predecessors would have approved...