April 1, 2001
Dead Gallop
From the Spanish. From Residencia en la Tierra (1925-31) Like ashes, like seas breeding into themselves, in the sunken slowness, in the formless, or the way one hears from high […]
April 1, 2001
The Widower’s Tango
From the Spanish. From Residencia en la Tierra (1925-31) Oh Maligna, now you've found the letter, now you've cried with rage, and you've insulted the memory of my mother, […]
April 1, 2001
Creativity in the Arts and the Sciences
NOTE: In 1981 I wrote a paper bearing the same title for the bicentennial meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the subsequent two decades, our understanding […]
April 1, 2001
Prescription
From the Polish. Everything but confessions. My own life Annoys me so, I would find relief In telling about it. And I would be understood By those wretches—how many!—who wobble […]
April 1, 2001
Sickbed 7
From the Bengali. November 12, 1940 (Night) Deep night-interior, beneath my clouded sight, when I see your wakened presence, the sky's uncounted planet-suns in limitless time greet my mortality. After, […]
April 1, 2001
‘Endless Dawns’ of Imagination
Introduction by Wendy Singer “The same sun is newly born in new lands in a ring of endless dawns.” Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet, wrote this verse to Albert […]
April 1, 2001
Serendipity Is No Accident
All the inventions that the world contains, Were not by reason first found out, nor brains; But pass for theirs who had the luck to light Upon them by mistake […]
April 1, 2001
Castalian Spring
Thunderface. Not Zeus's ire, but hers Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it. This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate That […]
April 1, 2001
Tagore (Nobel, 1913)
From the sanskrit only jingles if the west would tell it straight, but this is a Bengali poet, 2000 songs to his poem, and in the west nothing sacred; […]
April 1, 2001
Sickbed 5
From the Bengali. November 4, 1940 Under this vast universe pain's mill wheel rotates, grinds planets and stars to powder. Sparks flash, scatter suffering on every side, ash-webs from annihilated […]
April 1, 2001
Editors’ Notes
Creativity—the drive to generate something new from the materials about us or from the materials within our own imagination, to discover what we didn’t know or couldn’t see or simply […]
April 1, 2001
Reality Requires
From the Polish. Reality requiresthat we speak of these things: life rolls on, near Cannae, and Borodino, in Kosovo, Guernica. A petrol station stands on a little Jericho square: in […]