Welcome to your daily distraction, our recommendations for ways to stay engaged and entertained while we socially distance ourselves to combat the novel coronavirus outbreak. You can find our past recommendations here; many of the opportunities we’ve highlighted are ongoing. A quarantine haiku: Out of my window The streets below are empty Good; flatten the…
Does poetry matter? If you ask Stephanie Burt, the poet, Harvard University English professor and co-editor of poetry at The Nation, the answer is no. Well, almost. Burt, author of the newly-released “Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems,” thinks the word “poetry” does a disservice to poems, obscuring the diversity of…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A remarkable history of women’s poetry in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is currently available only in its native Polish, but it’s imperative that it be translated into English as well. The monograph, “Kol Ishe: The Voice of…
At some point in your life, you will likely hear the maxim that the personal is political. Afterward, you will look at the paraphernalia of your existence, and wonder which parts, exactly, are covered by that idea. Your routine when you wake up? What you choose to cook? What you say when you greet a…
Is it possible to be born in a place that sounds more poetic than Maple Heights? That was where Mary Oliver came from: Maple Heights, Ohio. Not everyone from that town was destined to live out the lyric simplicity promised by their birthplace’s name, but Oliver was, and she did. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who…
Thanks to the internet we have the numbers to prove poetry is still a popular medium — at least online. The Academy of American Poets has announced that the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness” was this year’s most popular poem by a contemporary poet on its website, Poets.org. The poem, which was read by…
Hold on to your fedoras, my friends: Leonard Cohen has spoken from beyond the grave, and the message is: To hell with Kanye West. Yes, just when you think 2018 can’t get any wilder, the lately deceased unofficial poet laureate of the Jewish people pipes up to deliver a warning about false prophets that is…
A new and important translation aims to introduce readers to David Avidan, the most experimental poet in the history of Hebrew poetry, and a poet unjustly unknown to nearly all English-language readers. Avidan was also a filmmaker, a conceptual artist, and a television and radio host. In all his pursuits, he was obsessed with the…
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