The risk in living too dissolute, too full, too prosaic a life is that we sometimes forget to pick up our Wallace Stevens, and so miss out on images “Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom/That yuccas breed,” on sounds–especially in this pustular election season–of “speech belched out of hoary darks,” on lines as imaginatively drawn as a George Bellows canvas on “the ructive sea.”
Bill Murray to the rescue.
On June 11, Murray read two poems by Wallace Stevens at Bubby’s Brooklyn, as part of Poets House’s 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Poets House,” its website tells us, “is a national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.” Here he is, reading “The Planet on the Table” and “A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts.”
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