Checkov said that medicine was his lawful wife, writing his mistress—how acutely I’ve felt the same sense of art’s illicit pleasures, in contrast to my more public calling....I’ve felt the same temptation (or need?) to bifurcate my life in a similar fashion. But chaplaincy, like poetry, requires absolutely everything—which is to say, not the exhaustion of one’s self, but the integration of it. This poem is an attempt to claim both modes of devotion, to be one person.
Christian Detisch on "Hospital Theodicy: Overnight Call" |
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"Phillis Wheatley: The Unsung Black Poet"
"While many New Englanders took note of the poet's gifts, no American printer would publish a book by a Black writer. Poems on Various Subjects was eventually financed by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and published in London. As a 19-year-old in 1773, Phillis travelled to the city, escorted by the Wheatleys' son. She was an instant sensation."
via BBC |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Marianne Boruch on "So we get there just as"
"Words came later, by accident in a silent room at a desk. But back there, one afternoon in that desolate expanse my husband and I and a stranger, the three of us came together over that creature stricken by a fellow human we desperately wanted to disown, a driver hot to desecrate the planet. I can’t tell you the rage in me as that car grew smaller and smaller then slipped into nothing’s pure distance." |
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