My weakness is for color words.
It doesn't begin to annoy until such time
As the parrots and Africas are
Once too many times labored.
But all the time I'm better at
Disguising this effect: by the time I'm thirty,
A critic will have to know me very well.
Or command a subtler
Understanding of poetry than most,
To detect the artificiality
The unfair insemination of balanced images,
Which are really plums off the same tree
And of invariable taste.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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