I’ve heard the sea upon the troubled rocks
Waste this past night, with dreams more troubled still,
And where the images that you and I
Would smooth a sullen morning by? The fly,
Some mottled bird, the new brood of the fox?
O nothing will be born again, until
The monkish body and the eye can see
Down to the darkened sea’s nobility
That now but seems a dancer on a bed
Glutting the clumsy, storm-delighted dead.
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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