In mid-March, I ran this gorgeous essay by Grove/Atlantic editor Lauren Wein as a feature on The Front Table. It’s kind of a work of art itself:

Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades.

Other than the cartoonish arch of his black eyebrows and his swarthy overall appearance, he is more Pan than underworld overlord. He is quick to laugh and does so with abandon; he has an infectious appreciation for beauty and eccentricity, is prone to exuberance, flights of fancy. These are qualities that often diminish with the years, but with Frank they always seem to broaden and deepen. When I began working at Grove many years ago, just as Frank’s novel The Ordinary Seaman was about to be published, one of the first things I noticed about him was his openness, his sense of wonder.

This is surely one of the things that drew Aura Estrada to him when they met. In Say Her Name, the novel in which Frank draws on Aura’s all too brief life, and their all too brief time together, he writes that “they were comedians for each other always.” From my first read, that was among my favorite lines, because even though their story ends in tragedy, that simple statement captures so much about who they were together, and exemplifies what gives this book its incredible richness and texture, its aliveness.

I knew Frank had been working on an “Aura novel.” He’d begun writing it soon after she died in 2007, at age 30, following a freak body surfing accident on a beach in Mexico just before their second wedding anniversary. He turned the manuscript in on June 8, 2010 and I read it compulsively over the next twenty-four hours. I found myself walking around in a heartbroken haze for days after.

Click here for more at The Front Table

“If I were your publisher, you would start off selling me your first novel for not very much money, and I would help you grow your reputation through independent bookstores and through reviews. Now, the bookstores don’t exist, the reviews [for these books] don’t exist. And, as a writer, you have very sensibly agented up. So I and four publishers – all of us afraid of getting caught out and not having signed up the only book that will sell that season – may throw millions of dollars at you and probably the book doesn’t sell. Or we may ignore you entirely. Your book might well have been a midlist novel 30 years ago – you would have had a quieter debut but you would have had a better chance of fulfilling your publisher’s expectations and developing a loyal readership.”

This exchange, about a line from Carson’s poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” is both interesting–I love Carson’s description of the way the line came to her–and amusing:

INTERVIEWER

The other line, the one I persist in using as the title of the poem despite your efforts, “I want to be unbearable,” is one of the most startling lines you’ve ever written. I thought it was exact and expressive of you as a writer.

CARSON

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

INTERVIEWER

You once said you meant “unbearable” in a metaphysical sense.

CARSON

Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.

INTERVIEWER

There are those days.

You can read the whole interview at the Paris Review cite, or in the magazine, or I suppose you could wait for The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 5, if you’re the masochistically patient sort.

Which led me to ask: Where’s Hall?

Today, I learned, from an amazing photo on the National Journal Tumblr, that Hall was right there the whole time!

Poet Donald Hall, that is. Oh, and the Oates was Joyce Carol. Still, how on earth did the Times let slip the opportunity to run a headline that read “Hall and Oates to receive National Humanities Medals”? What a sad day for journalism.

And so it was in this spirit that I got this e-mail today, praising the Kelly Blair covers for their new-ish Heinrich Boll books:

Which, as I’ll admit happens any time a poet uses the word “kiss,” led me back to my old favorite Robert Herrick, this time to his poem “A Kisse”":

What is a kisse? Why this, as some approve,
The sure sweet sement, glue, and lime of love.

Happy late Valentine’s Day, folks.

Anyone who has ever chanted slogans in a public demonstration has also probably asked herself at some point: why am I doing this? what does shouting accomplish? The question provokes a feeling of embarrassment, the suspicion that the gesture might be rote and thus empty and powerless.

With his article, he makes a case that in Egypt, and especially this time, those words do offer their speakers a form of power.