The Radical Future of Film The Radical Future of Film
A more convivial, expansive and life-affirming future is with us now—and the movies can help take us there.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Home Song Home Song
March 24, 1926 Oh breezes blowing on the red hill-top By tall fox-tails, Where through dry twigs and leaves and grasses hop The dull-brown quails! Is there no magic floating in the air To bring to me A breath of you, when I am homesick here Across the sea? Oh black boys holding on the cricket ground A penny race! What other black boy frisking round and round, Plays in my place? When picnic days come with their yearly thrills In warm December, The boy in me romps with you in the hills— Remember! Paris, 1925 This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Claude McKay (1889–1948), author of the novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), only published this one poem in The Nation, but he also wrote three essays in the mid-1930s on race relations in New York City—including a firsthand report on the 1935 Harlem riot—and one travel dispatch from North Africa.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Claude McKay
Tight Rope Tight Rope
July 13, 1963 We live in fragments like speech. Like the fits of wind, shivering against the window. Pieces of meaning, pierced and strung together. The bright bead of the poem, the bright bead of your woman’s laughter. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. The Nation was one of the first major publications to print LeRoi Jones’s work, including his 1964 essay on the fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. Jones (1934–2014) later changed his name to Amiri Baraka.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / LeRoi Jones
Parting Parting
December 7, 1963 White morning flows into the mirror. Her eye, still old with sleep, meets itself like a sister. How they slept last night, the dream that caged them back to back, was nothing new. Last words, tears, most often come wrapped as the everyday familiar failure. Now, pulling the comb slowly through her loosened hair, she tries to find the parting; it must come out after all: hidden in all that tangle there is a way. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Over a half-century, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) wrote twenty-two poems for The Nation and several reviews and essays, including a 2002 piece exploring the meaning of “antiwar.”
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Adrienne Rich
The Starry Night The Starry Night
September 2, 1961 “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” —Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother The town does not exist except where one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die. It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die: into the rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Anne Sexton (1928–1974) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Anne Sexton
The Plain Sense of Things The Plain Sense of Things
December 6, 1952 After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) published ten poems in The Nation between 1936 and 1952.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Wallace Stevens
Present Present
December 28, 1964 The stranded gulch below Grand Central the gentle purr of cab tires in snow and hidden stars tears on the windshield torn inexorably away in whining motion and the dark thoughts which surround neon in Union Square I see you for a moment red green yellow searchlights cutting through falling flakes, head bent to the wind wet and frowning, melancholy, trying I know perfectly well where you walk to and that we’ll meet in even greater darkness later and will be warm so our cross of paths will not be just muddy footprints in the morning not like celestial bodies’ yearly passes, nothing pushes us away from each other even now I can lean forward across the square and see your surprised grey look become greener as I wipe the city’s moisture from your face and you shake the snow off onto my shoulder, light as a breath where the quarrels and vices of estranged companions weighed so bitterly and accidentally before, I saw you on the floor of my life walking slowly that time in summer rain stranger and nearer to become a way of feeling that is not painful casual or diffuse and seems to explore some peculiar insight of the heavens for its favorite bodies in the mixed-up air This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. This poem by Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was published the same year his collection Lunch Poems brought him to fame.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Frank O’Hara
Have We Reached the End of Jazz Itself? Have We Reached the End of Jazz Itself?
John Coltrane and other “lost” musicians of the ’60s are teaching a new generation of artists to bend time and space.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Gene Seymour
Weird Bedfellows Weird Bedfellows
In their defense of “tradition” against the liberating potential of architecture, Prince Charles and Xi Jinping find unlikely common ground.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin
Two Views of a Cadaver Room Two Views of a Cadaver Room
January 30, 1960 I The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. II In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a leaflet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands Of the death’s-head shadowing their song. These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long. Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner. This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) published four poems in The Nation between 1955 and 1960.
Mar 23, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Sylvia Plath