'The Crooning and Combative Language of the Street'

You may not know this, but in a different life I was a poetry blogger. And one of the poets I wrote about was Grace Paley--her final collection, Fidelity, came out in 2007.

Here is a selection of audio of a Poets House tribute to Grace, including some very smart comments from A.M. Homes:

"I think of Grace and I think about how when I first read her stories I really couldn't understand them. They were lost on me and I didn't know why. And then I borrowed a record from the library--it was a recording of Grace reading 'Goodbye and Good Luck' and 'A Conversation with My Father' and suddenly listening to the sound of the reader's voice reading her own work, her intonation like an incantation made it all perfectly clear."

PS I can't take credit for the title of this post--it's a comment on Grace's work by the poet Jane Cooper.