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AN ELOQUENT BREVITY

Part 1:

Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication of her Collected Poems, "the ...

Part 1:

During the years 1999 to 2005, I retired by stages after a 50 year student-working life from: FT, PT and casual/volunteer work. It was an early retirement at the age of 55. I had come to find the demands of job and family, Baha'i community and society in general with their 60 to 80 hour weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone stuff more than I could cope with. I remember, in the last months of employment taking monthly shots of testosterone. The decline in testosterone levels that ...

JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

AN EXPLOSIVE PRODIGALITY

The following prose-poem arose is a result of reading a review of The Book of Disquiet published posthumously in 1982 as I was beginning that portion of my life north of the tropic of Capricorn in Australia. The work is by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). It is a fragmentary lifetime project which was left unedited by the author. He introduced his book as a "factless autobiography."1

This volume was reviewed by George Steiner in The ...