Though it was only released a month ago as I write this, Kelela’s album Raven has been on constant rotation: whether it’s the summery “On the Run,” the piercingly erotic “Sorbet,” or the emotionally expansive “Enough for Love.” Her fusion of R&B, house, and electronica is like no one else. Unlike a lot of contemporary albums, I tend to listen to Raven from start to finish. It asks you to immerse yourself.
For my birthday a few years ago—August, 2020, just months into the pandemic—my partner Tiina bought me a projector, so we could watch films on our living room wall, and a subscription to the Criterion Channel. I’d always been a film lover, but this put me over the top. Since then I’ve been watching at least four or five old classic movies per week.
Maybe it was the strange relationship to time the pandemic created, but at some point after this thing started I finally watched the movies of Andrey Tarkovsky. I say finally because, despite being a lifelong film lover, I’d never seen Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, or Stalker.
During the many months of quarantine, given an infinite amount of time to read and write, my husband and I binged most of Netflix. I remember very little of it. Murder mysteries blend into each other; some of them include grey shorelines of various parts of Great Britain, and others are set in grey cities of indiscriminate corruption.
The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach
As an admirer of rampant kinds of poetics, I first discovered this Longenbach volume shortly after its 2004 publication and was instantly struck by its refusal to make poetry accommodating, accessible, to evidence the strain so many other poetics texts possess in their aim to convince the reader of the genre’s palatability, transparency, likeability.
