Posts
 |
| Follow on Twitter as @GregoryCowles |
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times by Gregory Cowles, Senior Editor, Books.
In 1997, the poet Adrienne Rich was
selected to receive the National Medal for the Arts. She refused it.
“There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice,” she
wrote to the head of the National Endowment for the Arts in a letter
explaining her reasons. “But I do know that art — in my own case the art
of poetry — means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of
power that holds it hostage.”
The
relationship of art to justice, and of art to political power, is very
much at the center of poetry these days, as Tracy K. Smith (the United
States poet laureate) noted in a recent issue of the Book Review
dedicated to the subject. Books from that issue dominate this week’s
recommended titles, from poets new and established, considering
everything from class politics to colonialism to queer identity. Our
staff critics round things out with a radio host’s book about running
and a legal scholar’s argument that corporations have grown too
powerful: proof that poets aren’t the only ones thinking about the role
of politics in our lives.
Read more...
Source: New York Time
Read more...
Source: New York Time
