It’s funny, but I like being “pink and helpless” – when I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent – and superior. I keep thinking, “Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better” – and I love being rather unfathomable. – Zelda Fitzgerald, from a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 1919
Even before it became officially so in the United States, April has long been the poet’s month. “April” (or “Aprill”) is the third word of one of the first great poems in the English language, The Canterbury Tales, and the first word in The Waste Land, which does its best to feel like the last great English poem. April — “spungy,” “proud-pied,” and “well-apparel’d” April — is also the most-mentioned month in Shakespeare, along with its springtime neighbor May, and it has given a poetic subject to Dickinson, Larkin, Plath, Glück, and countless others. Why? Do we like its promise of rebirth, its green and messy fecundity? Its hopefulness is easy to celebrate — and easy to cruelly undercut, if you’re T.S. Eliot rooting his lilies in the wasteland of death. – Tom Nissley, “April Books: A Reading List for Rebirth and Taxes”
♥ ♥ ♥ ON REPEAT: “West Coast,” Lana Del Rey’s new single from her upcoming album Ultraviolence ♥ ♥ ♥
