Bidart identifies “Ulanova” as the “poem I’ve never been able to write,” adding that it’s about “burning an image into the soul of an eighteen-year-old (me) of the severity and ferocity at the root of classic art, addicted to mimesis.” He’s attesting not just to the power of art to reshape a life, to turn it from appreciation toward an idea of making, but also to susceptibility. This staging of an encounter with another kind of art, a different form of passion, attunes us to Bidart’s degree of alertness, and in his passing along of the mimetic impulse we read with greater awareness of the importance of what is being offered.
Related:
Year in Books: Word plays, Symbolic nature, Poetic license, More 
- Year in Books: Word plays
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that the Phoenix wrote about in 2008.
- Symbolic nature
The flowering landscape is more than just beautiful and awe-inspiring for East Asian artists and poets, who have always attributed layers of symbolic meaning and to nature’s blooms and branches.
- Poetic license
For generations, moony adolescents have stoked their feelings of being sensitive and misunderstood by moping around reading poetry.
- Ralph Hamilton
My lovable, impossible friend of more than 30 years, the artist Ralph Hamilton, died on February 19, of complications from diabetes. He was only 59. It’s a very sad loss. He was one of Boston’s most original and searching painters and had been doing some of his most ambitious and moving work.
- Not TV
Big names, new names, and a handful of poets provide worthwhile reading this winter to distract you from the Sopranos reruns on A&E.
- The 12 step program
From The Fatal Glass of Beer to Animal House to Old School .
- Classics and Shakespeare
Autumn approaches with a theatrical windfall, so I’ll dig right in, sans ceremony.
- Road trip
There comes a time in a woman's life when she just has to leave her husband at home with his mistress, toss her suitcase in a roadster, and head Downeast for a little timeout with her new, butch girlfriend. In July 1933, that's exactly what first lady Eleanor Roosevelt did.
- Glower power
It’s a mysterious career. To Whitehead’s credit, it’s not a career in the normal sense at all.
- Harvard Square
Harvard Square was very different 40 years ago.
- Bishop, after all
To enter a Bishop poem with the mind and senses wide open is to be scrubbed back to first principles.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Poetry, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Poetry, Vaslav Nijinsky, Frank Bidart, Festivals and Parades, Less
