Watermark An Essay On Venice: Joseph Brodsky.
After reading The Big Green Tent, especially the last line, I had to read something by Joseph Brodsky. When I saw he had written a couple of books of essays in addition to poetry and that one of those was about Venice, I immediately got myself a copy of Watermark.
Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered.
The Gift. Joseph Brodsky and the fortunes of misfortune.. and Brodsky’s friends insisted that he go to Moscow to wait things out. They further insisted that he check himself into a mental.
Brodsky’s classical affiliations are evident in essays on Marcus Aurelius and Horace, while his gift for friendship is manifest in the wonderfully affectionate essay that concludes the book.
Joseph Brodsky on How to Develop Your Taste in Reading. His talk, titled “How to Read a Book” and included in the 1997 anthology On Grief and Reason: Essays (public library), is a beautiful and timeless meditation on the value — the purpose, the challenge, the transcendent joy — of the written word. Although it was written with books.
This essay appears in a special symposium on intellectuals, which is entirely composed of essays by the editors of The Point. Click here to read all of the essays from the symposium. In 1964, when Joseph Brodsky was 24, he was brought to trial for “social parasitism.” In the view of the state, the young poet was a freeloader.
Reminiscence: Joseph Brodsky -Sven Birkets. I knew Joseph Brodsky, not well by some standards, but with such exaggerated eagerness on my part that his influence remains, even now, eight years after his death, enormous. I don't mean his literary influence—though his effect there was considerable—but what might be called his tutelary presence.