February 2010 Archives
Photo by Rollie McKenna Joy Williams is the influential author of dozens of short stories and essays, which are collected in Taking Care (1982), Escapes (1990), Honored Guest (2004), and Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She has also written four novels, including The Quick and the Dead (2000), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and State of Grace (1973), nominated for a National Book Award.
In this recording from the 1989 Key West Literary Seminar, Williams reads "The Last Generation," which would be published in Esquire later that year. It tells the story of 9 year old Tommy, whose mother has recently been killed in a car crash, and his relationship with Audrey, the darkly philosophical ex-girlfriend of Tommy's teenaged older brother
"The last generation has got certain responsibilities," Audrey said, "though you might think we wouldn't. We should know nothing and want nothing and be nothing. But at the same time we should want everything and know everything and be everything."
Upstairs in his room, Walter Junior was lifiting weights. They could hear him, breathing, gasping. Audrey's strange, smooth face looked blank. It looked empty.
"Did you love my brother?" Tommy asked. "Do you still love him?"
"Certainly not," Audrey said. "We were just passing friends."
From KWLS 1989: The American Short Story: A Renaissance
(31:42) / 14.7 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 1989, 2010 Joy Williams. Used with generous permission from Joy Williams.
Photo by Curt Richter Richard Wilbur is among the singular poets of our time, the only living poet to have twice won the Pulitzer Prize, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. As a young veteran of World War II, Wilbur became friends with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and began writing the refined and rigorously optimistic poetry that characterize his sixty-year oeuvre. In the 1960s, Wilbur and his wife Charlee began spending winters in Key West, where he became friends with a circle of poets including James Merrill, John Ciardi, and John Malcolm Brinnin. In January 2010 we welcomed Wilbur back to Key West with Clearing the Sill of the World, our 28th annual Seminar, held in his honor.
In this recording from January 9, 2010, Wilbur reads more than two dozen poems and translations, many of which will be published by Harcourt this fall in his 10th collection, Anterooms. These new poems include "The House," "A Measuring Worm," "Flying," "Trismegistus," "The Censor," "Out Here," and several new translations of riddles from Symphosias ("Nine lives I have...," "I have no tresses...," "Through middle air...," "All things I powerfully crush...," and "A god's sweet mistress..."). He reads "Security Lights, Key West" from the 2004 New Poems as well as "Nuns at Eve" by John Malcolm Brinnin, for whom the Seminar's Saturday evening address is named. From Mayflies (2000), Wilbur reads "For C.," "Crow's Nests," a translation of Valeri Petrov's "A Cry From Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being." From 1987's New & Collected Poems, we get "The Ride," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook," while from 1976's The Mind-Reader we get "The Writer," and the comic poems "Piccola Commedia," "To His Skeleton," and "The Prisoner of Zenda." Wilbur continues this survey with "Complaint," from Waking to Sleep (1969), and "Advice to a Prophet," from the eponymous 1961 collection, before concluding with several pieces from one of Wilbur's books of light-hearted verse for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(1:06:52) / 31 MB
To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.
More Richard Wilbur resources from KWLS:
A reading in tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, from KWLS 1993
A reading from KWLS 2003
The World is Fundamentally a Great Wonder: Wilbur in conversation with Arlo Haskell, 2009
Photo by Curt Richter Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and graduated from Princeton University in 1973. She studied Zen for nearly eight years at the San Francisco Zen Center, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College. She is the author of six books of poetry, as well as the influential prose collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She has also translated and edited the works of early women poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu and other books. Hirshfield has said "I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once– heart, mind, voice, and body."
In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, January 10, Hirshfield begins with "The Poet," from her 1997 collection Lives of the Heart. The remaining poems are all new and uncollected, including "First Light Edging Cirrus," "French Horn," "The Supple Deer," "Alzheimer's," "Left-handed Sugar," "Vinegar and Oil," "Sonoma Fire," "A Day is Vast," "One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another," and "A Hand is Shaped for What it Holds or Makes."
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(16:09) / 8 MB
To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Jane Hirshfield. Used with generous permission from Jane Hirshfield.
Photo by Sharon Mcgauley Maxine Kumin was born in 1925 and lives on a horse farm in rural New Hampshire. She has published sixteen collections of poetry as well as numerous books for children, four of which were co-written with the poet Anne Sexton. Kumin won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Up Country, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1981-1982. Three new books by Kumin are forthcoming in the spring of 2010: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010; The Roots of Things: Essays; and What Color is Caesar?, a book for children.
In this January 10 recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Kumin reads a selection of poems from the forthcoming New & Selected, including "Looking for Luck in Bangkok," "Praise Be," "The Nuns of Childhood: Two Views," "Rendezvous," "Jack," "The Final Poem," and "Seven Caveats in May."
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(15:45) / 7.8 MB
To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Maxine Kumin. Used with generous permission from Maxine Kumin.
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Each January, we explore a different literary theme through lectures, panel presentations, readings, informal gatherings, and discussions. In January 2011, we explore food in literature with our 29th annual Seminar, THE HUNGRY MUSE
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