Jen Vafidis

By Excluding Myself, I’ll Grow: Bill Knott, 1940-2014

March 13, 2014 1 Comment

The poet Bill Knott has died, and this time it seems like it’s not a hoax. He was 74 years old and “the closest thing the American poetry establishment has to a rebel,” publishing vibrant work for decades and teaching his students awe and disappointment. Knott’s poetry was remarkably alive and inventive, surreal and controlled; he could surprise you with what his poems could do, what they could tell you about yourself. He was angry, disappointed, and critical, but he […]

Columns, The Reading Life

The Reading Life: Those Rumors Have Been Exaggerated

February 24, 2014 No Comments

I run into a friend at a Christmas party in a very warm apartment. He and I eat cheese by the open window. We talk about work, and this leads to us talking, for some reason, about Renata Adler. “You know,” he says, “there is a great Renata anecdote in the Daniel Menaker memoir about his time at The New Yorker. Menaker talks about how she reported that a hospital was bombed, but not only could they not confirm the […]

Columns, The Reading Life

The Reading Life: The City as Itself

January 27, 2014 No Comments

I don’t understand people who don’t like to go to the movies alone. I try to do it as much as possible. To explain why I like it so much, I would have to make a list of every time it has made me feel better (or, more accurately, made me feel something instead of something else), and that would be a very long list, a maddeningly digressive list that would have no argument or arc, no single thread or […]

Columns, The Reading Life

The Reading Life: Drains and Radiators

January 13, 2014 No Comments

When we talk about other people, my friend Leah and I divide them into two categories: some people are drains, and some are radiators. We do not think, of course, that anyone can be one thing for all people, and we do not assume, of course, total innocence, recognizing that we have been drains ourselves in our most unattractive moments. This method is as helpful as it is limited. But it has become useful shorthand for describing how someone is […]

Year of Favorites

A Year of Favorites: Jen Vafidis

December 18, 2013 No Comments

I did not sit still very often this year. I changed jobs. I moved twice. In the upheaval, I reread a lot of poetry. I read Ovid’s blunt love poems when I wanted something to make me feel like I was paying attention. Elizabeth Bishop always seemed to help, in her way. But, aside from the work I had to do as a reviewer (funny what deadlines do), I was often too preoccupied to focus on anything that required surrender. That’s why […]

Columns

The Reading Life: Why Are You Telling Me This?

November 18, 2013 No Comments

A few weeks ago, among a relatively large group of people, I sat in a bookstore and listened to several editors from women’s websites talk. An audience member stood and asked the panel about a new, infamously mocked site. Should you write for publications you dislike when you need the money? One of the editors said that the audience member had named a website that ultimately doesn’t pay that much. She said that for one post they pay less than […]

Columns, The Reading Life

The Reading Life: Her Dark Materials

October 21, 2013 No Comments

Over dinner after drinks, my friend and I eavesdrop and happen to hear two women talking about books. One of them summarizes The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. as “all set in Brooklyn.” My friend and I make faces at each other and keep listening. Other books are brought up, but none of their selling points seem to us as crushing as the first. “All set in Brooklyn.” “I have to read that” was the response, in case you didn’t […]

Columns, The Reading Life

The Reading Life: All of Them Witches

October 7, 2013 No Comments

The interiors of the apartment building where Rosemary Woodhouse would become Satan’s unknowing paramour were filmed elsewhere, but anyone knows that the exterior shots were of the Dakota, on Central Park West and 72nd Street, a corner most famous for being where John Lennon was shot. (Mia Farrow’s sister was the Prudence to inspire John to write “Dear Prudence,” but that is a campfire tale digression.) I lived a few blocks from the Dakota for a couple of years. I […]

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