"Sendak in All His Wild Glory"

From the New York Times:

"One week before the official opening today, final touches were being put on the Maurice Sendak exhibition at the Jewish Museum...

Not to worry. It's safe to bring the children. The exhibition even includes a reading room inspired by Max's imaginary bedroom in 'Wild Things.' The designers have created a charming space outfitted with a forest, stars and the moon, plus pillows scattered on a comfy green shaggy rug to lie on. And of course, there will be Sendak books to read or thumb through."

Read the rest.

More information about the exhibition is available at the museum website.

I wish *I* were in New York!

Arrgh!

So, why can't they just publish the poem -- found during National Poetry Month, no less! -- instead of just taunting us with the fact of its existence?

SIGH.

From Yahoo!: "A previously unpublished poem by Tennessee Williams, described as having been 'written out of absolute, complete despair,' has been discovered in his blue test booklet from a college course in 1937. The 17-line poem, titled 'Blue Song,' has been acquired by Washington University in St. Louis, where Williams, as a student in his mid-20s, plummeted into depression before fleeing the city he said he despised."

Read the rest (but, alas!, not the poem).

Saul Bellow dies

From Yahoo!: "Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in "Herzog," "Humboldt's Gift" and other novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died Tuesday. He was 89."
Read the rest.

Poem o' the day

In memory of the brilliant Robert Creeley, one of his poems:

Water Music

The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat--

no meaning,
no point.

Quote o' the day

I loved this quote from an article from the New York Times about the probable closing of the Salinas public libraries. author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez said her Cuban father learned English at the public library in Albuquerque. "We didn't come from money," she said. "Words were our only capital."

The whole article is here.

Robert Creeley dies

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Robert Creeley, the American postmodern poet associated with the Beat generation, has died at the age of 78.

Creeley, regarded as one of the leading poets in the U.S., died Wednesday of pneumonia and complications of lung disease at a hospital in Odessa, Tex. He was in the midst of a two-month literary residency at a school in Marfa, Tex., when he fell ill.

Read the rest.