Gene Kelly is from #Pittsburgh so… 🔥 🎶

Yesterday’s clouds (it’s after 12 here, so… 💜) #October #Saturday

This might come through twice 🤔 Morning #read *American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin* by Terrance Hayes #poetry Everytime I go to a Terrance Hayes reading— it’s 🔥

Vladimir Mayakovsky… Back in 1918, he wanted something contemporary… but was an admirer nonetheless. “On 19 January 1922, Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky gave a speech which included this declaration: "Anna Akhmatova's indoor intimacy, Vyacheslav Ivanov's mystic poems and Hellenistic themes —what meaning have they for our harsh and steely age? But how can we suddenly say writers like Ivanov and Akhmatova are worthless? Of course, as literary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order, they will find their place in the pages of histories of literature, but for us, for our age, they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms" (quoted and trans. by Haight, p. 71). Yet Lily Brik, Mayakovsky's mistress for many years, said that whenever he was in love he read Akhmatova, quoting her from morning until night.”

Tonight’s section of #poems #reading “You will stop laughing before dawn.”

Going to this event: Free In Person or Livestream Tickets available: “Our International Reading Series continues, this time featuring a reading and conversation with Salar Abdoh, author of A Nearby Country Called Love. It is a sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which a man struggles to find his place in an Iran on the brink of combusting. Haunted by the death of a woman who lit herself on fire in Zamzam, Tehran, Issa is forced to confront the contradictions of his own family history while protest and violence stew in the streets.”

City of Asylum

World Literature with Anderson Tepper: Finding Humanity Amid Chaos with Salar Abdoh - City of Asylum

Salar Abdoh, author of "A Nearby Country Called Love," participates in a reading and conversation at City of Asylum.

Usually behind a paywall… The Paris Review is opening up some of their archives to remember Louise Glück. #poetry

The Paris Review

Louise Glück

Stories, poems, essays, and interviews from The Paris Review by Louise Glück