These mail-ordered tulips,
shockingly gaudy,
open and close, re-open, re-close,
like a storefront, time after time,
until the noon comes that they open too far and are
suddenly vanished,
a shiver of crayon-yellows and reds, of violet
reaching towards black that wind-drifts aw ay across the lawn:
the just fate of the over-ambitious.
And yet, haven’t we each attempted that trick, desiring
ourselves into wideness, more wideness, until we are lost?
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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