Leading Ladies

A leading ladies game leads to a tombstone-poetry pop quiz before Monica Farrell reads a poem by Michael Dumanis. Happy Pride Month!Watch Anne Sexton respond to a vile review (published in The Southern Review) of Live or Die.  Read "Menstruation at Forty" from Live or Die.  Read "Rapunzel" from Sexton's Transformations.On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, appearing with Natalie Portman to promote May December, Julianne Moore names her performance in Far From Heaven as her "personal best performance." On another episode, Moore talks about being fired from CanYou Every Forgive Me?  by Nicole Holofcener. Here's the receipts for why.It's not just Aaron who doesn't think of Moonstruck as romantic comedy.Read "The Wicked Candor of Wanda Coleman." Read this terrific appreciation of Kathy Acker in The LA Review of Books.Here's the New Yorker profile in which Judith Butler tells the story of her job interview at Williams in the late 1980s. James Wright's first book The Green Wall won the Yale Younger  in 1957 (chosen by Auden) and is full of formal verse. Compare "On the Skeleton of a Hound" (from The Green Wall) with "A Blessing" (from his 3rd book, The Branch Will Not Break).Kim Addonizio's poem "What Women Want" is the poem James was thinking about. It was first published in Tell Me.  You can buy Diannely Antigua's new book Good Monster, just out from Copper Canyon Press.The epitaph on Auden's grave is from his poem "In Memory of WB Yeats," which you can listen to Auden reading here.Read Dorothy Parker's "Interview."Watch this intro to the project at Canterbury Christchurch University's celebrating Aphra Behn. Read her poem "Love Armed."The epitaph on Kenyon's and Hall's tombstone is from her poem "Afternoon at MacDowell"At the end of the episode, Monica Ferrell reads Michael Dumanis's poem "East Liverpool, Ohio" from his new book Creature. Read a conversation with Michael in Adroit here.