Posts Tagged ‘new york times’

Joseph Brodsky © Nancy Crampton

We’ve noticed a surge of interest in Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky centered around the recent New York Times article “Venice in Winter” and the use of poetry as travel guide.

The following two poems were recorded at the Donnell Library Center on December 18, 1980. The poet Mark Strand reads in English, and Joseph Brodsky reads from the Russian.

“A Part of Speech (as for the stars they are always on)”

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“A Season”

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Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org) and Mark Strand.

Daniel Swift is the author of Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War.

Photograph © by Deborah Copaken Kogan

On October 30th, at a press conference in London, Julian Assange—the founder of Wikileaks—announced the leak of 391,832 secret military documents about the war in Iraq. This represents, he said, “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” Here are tortures, newly revealed; here are awful rates of civilian deaths (perhaps 66,000)—and all presented in clipped, oddly formal, occasionally redacted fragments (here, for example, is the record of a friendly-fire incident from January 2008: “CAV REPORTS THAT SMALL ARMS FIRE ENSUED BECAUSE OF A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CLC AND IA. NO ENEMY INVOLVEMENT”).

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