Word: writes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...native city of Leningrad in 1969, the young poet had good reason to feel depressed. He had spent 18 months laboring on a state farm in the Arctic, convicted by a Soviet court of being a "social parasite." Released but still convinced that his mission on earth was to write rather than surrender his skills to the dictates of the state, he faced bleak prospects: the official campaign to discredit him had taken on undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed "The End of a Beautiful...
...visual impressions, as in this look at the scenery surrounding a state farm: "The horses, inflated casks/ of ribs trapped between shafts,/ snap at the rusted harrows/ with gnashing profiles." Such concrete images can survive the transition from Russian to English with much of their freshness intact. To write his poems, Brodsky still uses his native language, but he has acquired a formidable, sinuous command of English. He sometimes translates his own works...
...course, all these matters will be settled by the heedless masses of people who rarely look at dictionaries, much less write them; that is the way of linguistic evolution. So is there any point in resisting changes that may be inevitable? Yes, indeed, as the late poet and translator John Ciardi eloquently argued. "Those who care," Ciardi wrote, "have a duty to resist. Changes that occur against such resistance are tested changes. The language is the better for them -- and for the resistance." It is regrettable that RHD-II resists so little. But it is admirable that it erects such...
...surface of his work after 1975. Nevertheless he was putting himself at some risk. His new paintings, as they got loopier and more & baroque, looked like a critique of the high cool and decorous lyricism that had become the twin poles of American abstraction. "Somehow painting today," he would write later, "especially abstract painting, cannot bring itself to declare what Caravaggio and Rubens demonstrated again and again -- that picture building is everything...
Tighten up interest deductions. America's most venerable tax shelter is the deduction on home-mortgage interest, a provision that was originally created to help families buy their first home. But perhaps that write-off is too generous. Earlier this month the House Ways and Means Committee adopted a $12.3 million tax-increase package that, among other measures, would finally put a cap on the deduction, limiting it to the first $1 million in mortgage debt. But why not lower the boom even further? As Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski pointed out, "With the people I represent, if you talk...