Nols takes a register of ten artists, poets, and authors who were told by courts, critics, markets, and silence that they had failed. They had not failed. This is their work. Read it. Look at it. Go toward it. Nols improvises ten poems in response to their stories and encourages you to do the same. Send your responses to nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com prompts below provide list of prompts in one sentence Markievicz Write about a love you were not allowed to name in public.Cahun Write about a self you constructed deliberately.Hall Write the first page of the book that would have saved twelve-year-old you.Turing Write about what it costs to be useful to people who do not love you.Arenas Write about something you made in secret.Blake Write about making something with your hands when the official channels were closed to you.Kafka Write about a system you are inside of.Van Gogh Write a letter to the one person who believed in you when no one else did.Akutagawa Write about a vague anxiety about your future.Angelou Write about a defeat you survived. 01 CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ 1868–1927 · Revolutionary, painter, poet Her prison letters — written on single sheets in tiny handwriting, incorporating drawings and poems — are the primary document of her interior life. → Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz — Internet Archive (free) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176226 → Her political writings — Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/markievicz/index.htm → W.B. Yeats: "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43279/in-memory-of-eva-gore-booth-and-con-markiewicz Eva Gore-Booth, her sister and lifelong love, was also a poet and radical. Her collected poems are harder to find online — seek them out. 02 CLAUDE CAHUN 1894–1954 · Surrealist artist, photographer, resistance fighter The largest collection of her photographs and archive material is held by Jersey Heritage and is fully free to browse online — the best place to start. → Jersey Heritage — full Cahun & Moore collection (free) https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org/claude-cahun/ → MoMA — six works online https://www.moma.org/collection/works/83692 → Getty Museum collection https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104PH8 → Metropolitan Museum — 56 results including Aveux non Avenus https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Claude+Cahun Her written work — Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals) — is harder to find in English translation. The Met has the 1930 original in their collection. 03 RADCLYFFE HALL 1880–1943 · Author of The Well of Loneliness The Well of Loneliness (1928) is now in the public domain in the US and freely available in multiple formats. Read it. → The Well of Loneliness — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73042 → Standard Ebooks edition — clean free epub/mobi https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/radclyffe-hall/the-well-of-loneliness → LibriVox audiobook (free) https://librivox.org/the-well-of-loneliness-by-radclyffe-hall/ The obscenity trial transcript is worth reading alongside the novel — the gap between what the judge said and what the book actually contains tells you everything. 04 ALAN TURING 1912–1954 · Mathematician, codebreaker, father of computing The Turing Digital Archive at King's College Cambridge holds nearly 3,000 images of his letters, papers, photographs, and unpublished manuscripts — free online. → The Turing Digital Archive — King's College Cambridge (free) https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/ → AlanTuring.net — virtual archive of computing history documents https://www.alanturing.net/ → His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers" — the foundation of computing https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf Andrew Hodges's biography Alan Turing: The Enigma is the definitive account and is available in most libraries. The film The Imitation Game is a simplified version — read the book. 05 REINALDO ARENAS 1943–1990 · Cuban novelist, poet, exile Before Night Falls, his memoir, is the essential starting point. It is not in the public domain but is widely available. The film adaptation by Julian Schnabel (2000) is also excellent. → Before Night Falls — Open Library (borrow free with account) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1740458M/Before_night_falls → Wikipedia overview with bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinaldo_Arenas His Pentagonia — five novels including Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea, The Color of Summer, and The Assault — is his major work. Most are available from Penguin. His suicide note is one of the most important documents in queer literary history. It ends: Cuba will be free. I already am. 06 WILLIAM BLAKE 1757–1827 · Poet, engraver, visionary The William Blake Archive is the gold standard — facsimiles of his illuminated books as he made them, hand-coloured, in high resolution. This is how the work was meant to be seen. → The William Blake Archive — illuminated books in facsimile (free) https://www.blakearchive.org/ → Poetry Foundation — poems and extensive commentary (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-blake → Songs of Innocence and Experience — Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1934 → The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45315 Start with Songs of Innocence and Experience, then The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The prophetic books (Jerusalem, Milton) are for later — they require some time to enter. Blake is buried at Bunhill Fields, Islington — a short walk from Canonbury. His grave is marked and visitable. 07 FRANZ KAFKA 1883–1924 · Prague, insurance, "burn everything" His three novels and most of his short stories are freely available online. Start with The Trial. Then Letter to His Father, which he also never sent. → The Trial — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7849/7849-h/7849-h.htm → The Metamorphosis — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200 → In the Penal Colony — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1195 → The Castle — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18027 Letter to His Father (Brief an den Vater, 1919) — written but never sent to his father — is one of the most devastating documents of family, failure, and self-analysis ever written. Find it in any Kafka collected works. His diaries, edited by Max Brod, are equally essential. The entry where he writes about wanting to destroy everything is worth reading alongside the novels. 08 VINCENT VAN GOGH 1853–1890 · One painting sold The complete letters to Theo — over 800 of them — are freely available online in the scholarly Van Gogh Letters edition. They are among the greatest pieces of writing in the history of art. → vangoghletters.org — complete letters, searchable, free https://vangoghletters.org/ → Letters of a Post-Impressionist — Project Gutenberg (free)https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393 → Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam — collection online https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection The letter where he writes "I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint" is Letter 686, July 1888. He painted the Starry Night, the Irises, and the Wheat Field with Crows while living in an asylum. The Van Gogh Museum has high-resolution images of all of them free online. 09 RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA 1892–1927 · Father of the Japanese short story Rashomon and In a Grove are the gateway — short, brilliant, structurally perfect. Cogwheels, his final hallucinatory work, is the one to read last. → Rashomon — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1982 → Rashomon and Other Stories — Internet Archive (borrow free) https://archive.org/details/rashomonothersto00akut → The Essential Akutagawa inc. Cogwheels and A Fool's Life — Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/essentialakutaga0000akut Cogwheels (Haguruma, 1927) — written in the final year of his life, published posthumously — is his masterpiece. A first-person account of breakdown, cogwheels at the edge of vision, the sense of being ground through a system. Read it last. Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), adapted from In a Grove and the Rashomon story, is freely available on various streaming services and is itself a masterwork. 010 MAYA ANGELOU 1928–2014 · Defeat after defeat after defeat. Still. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is her memoir and her masterpiece. Still I Rise is the poem. Both are worth your time today. → Still I Rise — Poetry Foundation (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise → Maya Angelou — Poetry Foundation full archive (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maya-angelou → On the Pulse of Morning — 1993 inauguration poem (free, YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59zGMWH3K5I → I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Open Library (borrow free) https://openlibrary.org/works/OL472609W/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings Her autobiography runs to six volumes. The first three — Caged Bird, Gather Together in My Name, and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas — are the ones to read in order. She did not publish her first book until she was 41. James Baldwin told her at a dinner party in 1968 that she was a poet. She had been a poet her whole life. MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed makepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwa If this episode gave you something, consider supporting MPWA so we can keep making it.
