Well, with all the other things going on (and on and on), we take refuge in quiet voices from the past. A car ride was in the offing and I found that Capote had recorded an hour’s worth of In Cold Blood, which may have been available before, but was recently combined with pieces of the score by Mychael Danna from the film Capote. Well it’s a real treat. Not only do we hear the poetry of the writing as it was meant to be heard, read here in snippets from the bold first paragraph to the whispering last, but Truman’s hilarious and ghoulish mimicking of the local players in the tragedy. A look into The New New Journalism edited by Robert S. Boynton shows us how that book and that writer continue to be a cornerstone of much that we have come to appreciate about good reportage.

A hunger for more has revealed Essential Welty, an hour plus of Eudora reading three stories Caedmon recorded in 1956. A hoot of a different kind. Blasting into Why I Live at the P.O., Eudora reads like she’s been told to hurry up and finish, the next stop is ours. It is a tour de force as Faulkner used to say, whose own reading style was as quick if nowhere as colored. The other two, Powerhouse and Petrified Man, are more tempered and downbeat, but are told, voice to ear, as if you’re in the parlor with her, which is by gosh something to have.

From Anne Sexton to W. D. Snodgrass, February 24, 1959:

. . . I read “Heart’s Needle” and I changed. It made me see myself new. In seeing you, in feeling your marvelous restrained sense of immediate loss, I saw my own loss in a new color. And I changed. I said to Fred [Morgan], “A poem isn’t supposed to do that! It isn’t supposed to be that vital!” . . . meaning, of course, how unusual, how much genius and the fine grip of talent, is in such a poem that reaches down and touches the inmost part of the reader. A writer, showing himself, in his true light, and doing it so well, has indeed done something so great that one might be afraid. Afraid of the writer’s truth and their own truth. . . That’s what I think you did. That’s the great thing you did. And who would expect it from ‘just a poem’ . . .

. . . What I’m trying to say is that, I think a poem that can do that to people, make them see themselves through yourself, is valid . . . not unseemly, not too personal . . . but worth it!

Christ. I’m off again. Talking in circles. My darling, the peanut butter calls.