From the NYTimes obit for Nina Cassian, the exiled Romanian poet who died Monday in Manhattan: Though she moved with apparent ease in American literary circles, reading and lecturing widely, Ms. Cassian by her own inclination remained something of an outsider. She was amused, for instance, by a practice she deemed singularly American, in which a poet giving a reading precedes each work with a précis of the very work to be read. Parodying this practice, as The New York Times reported in 1995, Ms. Cassian liked to say: There was a pear tree on my grandfather’s farm, and one day I noticed that when its blossoms fell, they looked like dandruff falling on my grandfather’s shoulders. So I wrote a poem about it. It goes like this: On my grandfather’s farm there used to be a pear tree. When its blossoms fell, they looked like dandruff falling on Grandfather’s shoulders.”
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 13:00:37 +0000
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