Word: poets
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...came across it in 1955, while working part-time on a BBC radio program called Caribbean Voices. Although Naipaul says he broadcast everything Walcott submitted to the show, he also claims to have done so believing that "the first flush" of Walcott's inspiration had gone, and that the poet "was now marking time." Walcott's borrowing of Western European literary forms is peevishly dismissed as "falsifying" and his later career pooh-poohed with a donnish sneer: "A wonderful new black voice in the United States ... called out from the islands to teach in American universities...
...rather like listening to the postprandial monologue of a cantankerous old guest at a literary dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford...
...wish it weren't so. As a bald man, I long for a President who is, in the words of the English poet Matthew Arnold, "bald as the bare mountaintops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." This is the baldness of Sean Connery or Michael Jordan or Buddha...
...Thurman’s ability to conduct such investigations unifies her disparate topics. She groups her essays into seven parts whose subjects are loosely—but not always convincingly—connected. In her first part, after writing about a bulimic performance artist, a drug-addicted poet who committed suicide, and a self-proclaimed “orgiast,” she includes an essay on the art of making tofu. But “Night Kitchens” functions as more than just a palate cleanser after the three stomach-turning essays that preceded it. Thurman describes...
...networking. He started his Great Men series in the early 1900s and continued doing portraits of the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan, Richard Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for much of his life. It didn't hurt his reputation that his brother-in-law, the well-known poet Carl Sandburg, published a biography, Steichen the Photographer, in 1929. In later years, Steichen's portraits tended toward show-business types like Gloria Swanson, mysterious behind a layer of lace, and W.C. Fields, hamming it up in his pajamas in one of the exhibition's few candid shots...