That is what tenderness serves me for―because tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and... See more

Being a poet is what determines the “quality of light” by which she examines her life and the world around her, how she scrutinises her at-times chaotic feelings to figure out what information they might hold and what actions they demand. Poetry is also her method of connecting and communicating: her poetic practice is to take up her feelings and... See more

Thanks to the help of some fellow poets, Brodsky was able to find refuge in the United States and soon he had teaching positions at Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Michigan. In 1991, nineteen years after being exiled from the Soviet Union (and what must have seemed like an entirely different lifetime), Brodsky was appointed the United States... See more