My luckless lady needs no sheet of sun
Nor winter’s briskest word
To stir her now,
Needs not these
Nor the rage of print on a wood told page
To lift her high
And let her lie
In justice’s fold and the dome-shaped splendor.
If time betray not morning’s carved forecast
She will be dancing
In that unpredictable palace of quaint devices
To sophisticated music
And multitudinous green chimes.
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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