Kamran Javadizadeh @kjavadizadeh Twitter profile

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

18 days

I wrote about a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters—and about what letters can and cannot do—for @NewYorker .

When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In

The supposed recluse constantly sent letters to friends, family, and lovers. What do they show us?

www.newyorker.com

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Lydia Davis, perfect and terrifying.

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@kjavadizadeh

2 years

New out of office reply

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@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Langston Hughes

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Philip Larkin, born 100 years ago today.

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@kjavadizadeh

2 years

I’ve always loved this Lydia Davis

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Lucille Clifton, my goodness.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Honestly, what a first paragraph (this is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory)

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Virginia Woolf, on certain friends: “I love them when they are not there—they leave beautiful spaces behind them.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Anne Carson, whose birthday it is today. “You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

6 years

James Baldwin, who would have turned 94 today, from his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley. “It comes as a great shock...to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance...has not pledged allegiance to you.” Full debate here:

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Thom Gunn, who would have turned 92 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

This devastating poem by Thom Gunn, unfolding its logic rhyme by perfect rhyme.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

Thom Gunn, wrenching and perfect.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Lucille Clifton, who wrote this on her 63rd birthday, who passed at 73, and who would have turned 84 today. “it is a dream i am having / more and more and more.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Linda Gregg. “It is possible to be with someone / who is gone.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Today is Rilke’s birthday. Reading him as a teenager was, I think, the closest I ever came to having a mystical experience. This piece I wrote last year was my attempt to get at that, to think about how writing could become a kind of occult technology.

Can Rilke Change Your Life?

“Letters to a Young Poet” has spoken to artists for almost a century. The other half of the famous correspondence reveals the treacherous work of becoming who you want to be.

www.newyorker.com

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Edna St. Vincent Millay god damn

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Linda Gregg, who was born on this day in 1942.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Somebody in my neighborhood has posted—I mean literally—my favorite Heaney poem.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

On what would have been Philip Larkin’s 99th.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

On this suddenly terrifying night, I find myself thinking of this epigraph in Solmaz Sharif’s Look (2016), quoted from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (1949).

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

6 years

CAConrad “you think Oscar Wilde was funny / well Darling I think he was busy / distracting straight people / so they would not kill him”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

@JacobRude @LakerFilmRoom This low angle with retired jerseys and banners in the background too

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Jameson Fitzpatrick, “Poem in Which Nothing Bad Ever Happens to Me”—just a gorgeous poem, one that manages to tell what happened and hold it in a state of suspension all at once.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Louise Glück. “You want to see my hands? / As empty now as at the first note.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Louise Glück. “You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Today would have been Lucille Clifton’s 86th birthday. She wrote this on her 70th.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Sylvia Plath would have turned 89 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Lucille Clifton: “if you had heard her / chanting as she ironed / you would understand form and line / and discipline and order and / america.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Beginning The Odyssey today with a new group of students, and once again inclined to share poems with them like this one, by Louise Glück. “The beloved doesn’t / need to live. The beloved / lives in the head.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

A friend shared this with me

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Annie Dillard, who turns 77 today, from The Writing Life

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

“O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” Sylvia Plath wrote these lines on her 30th birthday, her last. She’d be turning 87 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Linda Gregg. “I wonder what will take the place of desire. / I could be the ghost of my own life returning / to the places I lived best.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

6 months

James Merrill, who would have turned 98 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

7 months

Diane Seuss, with one of the most beautiful sonnets I’ve read in a long time.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

When Virginia Woolf’s brother died, she lied about it for nearly a month in a series of letters to her closest friend. I wrote about those letters—and about what her lies made possible—for @NewYorker .

How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

For Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see.

www.newyorker.com

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

6 years

Hieu Minh Nguyen. “Though I’d like to be, / it’s impossible to be prepared for everything.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Adrienne Rich. “You’re wondering if I’m lonely: / OK then, yes, I’m lonely”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Sylvia Plath would have turned 90 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

200 years ago today Keats got very dramatic with his out of office reply

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Cameron Awkward-Rich. “Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the / institution of dreaming.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

On this date in the 1819, Keats took a walk and then somehow did this

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Megan Fernandes, from Good Boys

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@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Lucille Clifton

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Lucille Clifton. “with too many candles / in her hair / she is a princess of / burning buildings / leaving the year that / tried to consume her.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Yeats on how to text your ex

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@kjavadizadeh

6 years

D. A. Powell

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

James Tate

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

I know there are newer and more complete editions and probably you all have your own book covers that do this for you but this is still the one for me

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

James Wright

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Lucille Clifton, in the voice of her late husband.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

On her birthday, Louise Glück. “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Anne Carson. “Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Sharon Olds. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Hbd to Auden, who wrote one of these poems at age 23 and the other at 50.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

Merwin

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@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Schuyler. “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s: / tomorrow I’ll think about / that.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Keats wrote “To Autumn” 203 years ago today. Let’s all read it tonight.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

Anne Carson. “You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

My heart is broken. My beautiful sister Bita has died. I can’t believe it.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Anne Carson. “I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

1 year

Linda Gregg. “I’ve come back to the country where I was happy / changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now. / I wonder what will take the place of desire.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Why is my dirty pan the angel of history

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

John Berger. “What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Linda Gregg, who would have turned 80 today. “It is possible to be with someone / who is gone. Like the silence which / continues here in the desert while / the night train passes through Marfa / louder and louder, like the dogs whining / and barking after the train is gone.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

“I wish one could press / snowflakes in a book like flowers.” For the day before Valentine’s Day, from James Schuyler’s Payne Whitney Poems, written from the hospital.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Anne Carson in @NewYorker . “I always say this but it’s true, there are / so many things / I don’t understand, / I don’t mean steak tartare, // I mean irony, corpses, how to not / see yourself everywhere in comparison. / How to instead see what’s there.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Dickinson. “But are not / all Facts Dreams / as soon as / we put / them behind / us – ”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Today is James Merrill’s birthday, and here I am, in his home. He would have been 96. This he wrote at 41.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Oh my god, Solmaz Sharif

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

“there were faces I knew for years / and the nearness of them began only / when they were missing” W. S. Merwin, who would have turned 95 years old today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Adrienne Rich. “I have always wondered about the leftover / energy, water rushing down a hill / long after the rains have stopped”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

I loved it so much, I cut this Richard Wilbur poem out of the New Yorker when I first read it. I just looked it up and apparently I’ve been carrying it around for 24 years? Anyway happy Valentine’s Day, you old so and so’s.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

It’s Seamus Heaney’s birthday, so here again is my favorite poem of his, which he signed for me the one time I got to meet him. Oh how I wish I could take his advice today...

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Louise Glück. “All day I tried to distinguish / need from desire.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Mary Oppen. “I come as a guest / entering my own life”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Robin Coste Lewis in @NewYorker . “Absolutely nothing / significant / except the growing / realization that / with or without me / it is happening.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

James Merrill. Today I can’t think of anything more beautiful than this.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Inger Christensen, from alphabet (trans. Susanna Nied)

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

3 years

Louise Glück

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Hopkins, a perfect quatrain.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Lorine Niedecker

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

It’s a perfect poem

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 months

On Seamus Heaney’s birthday, my favorite of his poems.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

“The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear.” -Elizabeth Bishop, “The Sandpiper”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

7 months

“I wish one could press / snowflakes in a book like flowers.” (from James Schuyler’s Payne Whitney Poems)

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

5 years

I’m teaching The Odyssey (in Emily Wilson’s gorgeous translation) to new undergrads. I like to pair the Homer with contemporary(-ish) poems that take up its characters. Here’s one, by Louise Glück. What are your favorite poems about Telemachus, Penelope, Odysseus? Links/pics plz!

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

I'm doing it! "Close Readings," a podcast about poetry. Each episode: me and a guest, talking about a poem they love. I'm lining up the first few episodes now—sign up here for updates.

Coming soon

This is Close Readings, a newsletter about my podcast (conversations about poems), and a place where you can learn about new things I have written.

kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

Fascinating—and moving—postscript in a letter by Woolf, 100 years ago today. “I think I mean that beauty, which you say I sometimes achieve, is only got by the failure to get it; by grinding all the flints together; by facing what must be humiliation—the things one can’t do—”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

John Berryman. “I don’t think I will sing // any more just now; / or ever.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

I think Layli Long Soldier’s “38” is one of the most extraordinary poems of the last several years, one that changed my sense of what a poem could be. Today is the anniversary of the event it commemorates. Listen to her read it here.

38

A poem by Layli Long Soldier.

onbeing.org

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Linda Gregg. “Everything I have I give away / and it goes away.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

1 year

My favorite poem by Seamus Heaney, who would have been 84 today.

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

1 year

I wrote about my sister, and poetry, and grieving ahead of time.

Kamran Javadizadeh: "Ahead of Time"

"Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them."

yalereview.org

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

Solmaz Sharif. “America, ignore the window and look at your lap: / even your dinner napkins are on FIRE.”

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@kjavadizadeh

6 months

Adrienne Rich. “At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever. / At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.”

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

2 years

160 years ago today, 38 Dakota men were executed by the United States. Layli Long Soldier's poem about that event is also a meditation on what it means for a poem to be "about" anything, what poems are, what they can do. It's extraordinary. Listen here.

38

A poem by Layli Long Soldier.

onbeing.org

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Kamran Javadizadeh

@kjavadizadeh

4 years

On James Baldwin’s birthday, a clip from his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley. “It comes as a great shock...to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance...has not pledged allegiance to you.” Full debate here:

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