Newsoverworld

THE REPORTERS WHO covered the Beatles’s first press conference in the United States, at JFK Airport on February 7, 1964, had never encountered anything remotely similar — and it showed. They asked the band a string of inane questions — about the accents, the hair, the money. Eventually someone asked what their secret was: what did these four lads have that made teenagers around the world scream at the mere sight of them, and spin their records until the needles were worn to a nub? Paul answered honestly: “We don’t know, really.” John cheekily chimed in: “If we knew, we’d form another group and be managers.” We can forgive the Beatles for not being able to explain the Beatles — after all, creative types of all kinds have struggled to explain the creative process, and scientists haven’t had much more luck. Even the vocabulary we use is fraught: creativity, insight, talent, genius — these are ill-defined words with overlapping meanings. And yet, we somehow know it when we see it. We admi...

PART I: Diana Arterian Interviews Andrew Wessels   Andrew Wessels’s book traces a day’s walk through Istanbul, placing itself in dialogue with the flâneur figure in W. G. Sebald’s  The Rings of Saturn . Yet  A Turkish Dictionary  also regards the profound impact a nation’s leader can have on language, historical record, and artifacts. It can be chilling to read, considering the tack many current world leaders are taking, the echoes of the past into the present. The collection is a thoughtful investigation of these concerns in conjunction with the self, curiosity, documentation, religiosity. So few poets can hold all these subjects in a single volume with such poise. Andrew and I only began to know one another after meeting randomly and agreeing to exchange our first manuscripts, and, even while reading an early draft, I was thrilled by the engines of the book, its lineage — and where it might lead. It reminded me of Barthes: “Is not the most ero...

AMERICAN POETRY LOVERS tend to be surprised when they learn that Wendy Cope is a celebrity in the United Kingdom, where the press still takes its poets seriously. Billy Collins and Claudia Rankine may be our most famous American poets, but neither is popular enough to be included in a Jeopardy! question. In England, Wendy Cope is fair game for game shows. She first received widespread attention in her early 40s with her debut book, the 1986 surprise best seller Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis , published by the venerable Faber & Faber. Cope caught the gatekeepers of the British literary establishment off guard, having circumvented most of their hurdles for young poets. The London Review of Books , for instance, praised Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis in two perfunctory paragraphs that were a small part of an omnibus review focused primarily on a book by Amy Clampitt. A small percentage of Cope’s early work had appeared in journals such as Poetry Review and the Times Literary Sup...

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