Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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AWARDED. To WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, 73, masterly Polish poet of the prosaic; the Nobel Prize for Literature; in Stockholm. The Academy described her as the "Mozart of poetry." Her flowing verses and everyday imagery reveal the grace and depth of simplicity...
...knows many things," wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In his famous 1953 essay, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that conceit to divide Russian writers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he suggested, are individuals who relate everything to a single, all embracing principle, while foxes are those who see a multiplicity of things without fitting them into some universal system. (Dostoevsky was a hedgehog, Tolstoy a fox.) Berlin regarded this contrast as a profound philosophical difference that divided writers, thinkers and even politicians...
...happened already, some Ph.D. candidate will write a dissertation on the effect of poetry readings on the practice of poetry in 20th-century America. The poetry reading itself has a venerable tradition--in the Woodberry Poetry Room, one can listen to a virtual roll-call of American poets reading at Harvard, from T.S. Eliot '10 to Robert Lowell and beyond. But, at some point, perhaps in the 1960s, the act of reading one's poems aloud to an audience--one of the main ways poetry is consumed today, and a source of income for virtually every poet--clearly started...
...reads them. On Tuesday night, the audience clearly loved him and them, responding with exclamations and applause at all the right moments. And, as with Hall, some of his poems verge on comedy; a real crowd-pleaser on Tuesday was "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson," in which the poet imagines telling off a pompous, Derridaspouting professor. It's a clear set-up with an easy pay-off; Kinnell even put on an odious voice when reading the professor's lines, making sure that we knew with whom we were to sympathize. Here, too, the influence of the poetry reading...
...would not be fair to be to single out Hall and Kinnell for this prosaic, performative style; it is characteristic of our period. And there is no doubt that these poets are, in their different ways, two of the most accomplished now writing; each knows what he wants to say and can say it well, which is perhaps the definition of a good poet. But if you do read them, be sure to look for the author's reading tour at a theater near you; that's where these poems are most at home...