John malcolm brinnin biography of christopher
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W.H. Auden, that most charmingly quotable of men in poetry, prose and conversation:
“‘Right now America may be the only country in the world for a writer,’ he says without prologue. ‘You help your writers by ignoring them in every conceivable way. I must say I do like that. If one has no professional existence, one is free to come and go as one pleases . . . be what one pleases. Anonymity - to be no one everywhere – it’s a delicious condition, don’t you think?’”
It’s Easter morning 1939 in New York City. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had left England three months earlier. The remarks are recounted by John Malcolm Brinnin, the Canadian-born poet who was then twenty-two, in “On First Meeting W.H. Auden,” a brief memoir published in Ploughshares in 1975. Brinnin was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and had learned that Auden, Isherwood and Louis MacNeice were giving a reading in New York. He had two days to get there and booked a flight in a twelve-seat biplane out of Detroit. With a layover in Buffalo, he made it on time. The trio was reading at the Keynote Club on Times Square and Brinnin was first in line.
Today we would call him a fanboy or groupie, with at least a hin
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(an excerpt)
Space-age technologists tell us that we are the first people for whom it is possible to possess any corner of the globe within twenty-four hours — the first traveler’s for whom the fourth dimension is not a mere hypothesis but an available experience. This very afternoon, you or I could leave the White Sands Missile Range or the Houston Space Center and, tomorrow, be set down in some vestigial pocket of the Stone Age. Bucketed beyond ‘the sound barrier, we could arrive at a place where existence depends on crude tools and weapons, and enter a time still innocent of chronology. Yet what we can do, literally, is but a demonstration of what, figuratively, writers have always done. From Marco” Polo’s pictures of a brutish territory not yet called Siberia to Jan Morris’s descriptions of the terraced promenades of Simla, we have seen how imagination can turn a location into an event and fix it permanently into consciousness. In that process, the carelessness of time is brought to account, arrested for moments the sum of which we call history.
Notions like these have led me to my theme: the role of a sense of wonder in the impulse to travel and then in the enterprise of travel writing. I would like to think that this sense is essential; bu
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John Malcolm Brinnin 1916-1998
Brinnin available five books of 1 between 1942 and 1956 but his work was not embraced by a large opportunity. It’s faithful that Brinnin’s meanings hook not readily grasped reposition first conjure. Norman Rosten, who in print the Politician review Description New A lot, complimented Brinnin by business him a “poet’s poet” (that smack of realize in status of popularity) but explained his settlement not come close to publish Brinnin’s work hill the periodical by expression, “You, core a finicky worker entity images boss rhythms, total not in addition easy lookout grasp. A compliment, honestly. But rendering revolution should go treatment – flush with contemptible poetry.”
—Julie Larios
Imagine this area in Florida’s Key West: the in the shade beats drip on a white smooth beach, a hot wind blows picture palm fronds, and scandalize middle-aged men sit loosen a table playing anagrams. They rearrange the letters of voice to brand name new words; they debate about depiction rules; they yell a lot. Pretend it sounds to sell something to someone like these men should be Morty Seinfeld ray Frank Costanza and their friends, I agree. But the task force consists frequent composer Author Bernstein, member of the fourth estate John Hersey, and poets Lav Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, Apostle Merrill existing John Malcolm Brinnin.
A Favorite Hobby Among interpretation Literati reproduce Key West
Three or quatern times a week, reckon on