On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Author:Zadie Smith [Smith, Zadie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Literary, Sagas, General, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9780143037743
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

On Beauty

library. They stood facing each other, almost the same height thanks to her towering boots. Vee hugged herself and plaintively pulled her lower lip under her large front teeth, the way beautiful girls sometimes pull goofy faces, without any fear that the effects will be permanent. In response Howard put on an extremely serious face.

‘My decision would depend very much . . .’

‘On what?’ She clapped her snowy mittens together.

‘. . . on whether there will be a glee club in attendance.’

‘A what? I don’t know . . . I don’t even know what that is.’

‘They sing. Young men,’ said Howard, wincing slightly. ‘They sing. Very close harmony singing.’

‘I don’t think so. Nobody mentioned it.’

‘I can’t go to anything with a glee club. It’s very important. I had an unfortunate episode.’

Now it was Vee’s turn to wonder if fun was being made of her.

As it happened, Howard was serious. She squinted at him and chattered her teeth.

‘But you’ll come?’

‘If you’re sure you’d like me to.’

‘I’m completely sure. It’s just after Christmas, ages away, basically

– January tenth.’

‘No glee club,’ said Howard as she began to walk away.

‘No glee club!’

It was always the same, Claire’s poetry class, and it was always a pleasure. Each student’s poem was only a slight variation on the poem they had brought in the week before, and all poems were consistently met with Claire’s useful mix of violent affection and genuine insight. So Ron’s poems were always about modern sexual alienation, and Daisy’s poems were always about New York, Chantelle’s were always about the black struggle, and Zora’s were the kind that appear to have been generated by a random word-generating machine. It was Claire’s great gift as a teacher to find



the anatomy lesson

something of worth in all these efforts and to speak to their authors as if they were already household names in poetry-loving homes across America. And what a thing it is, at nineteen years old, to be told that a new Daisy poem is a perfect example of the Daisy oeuvre, that it is indeed evidence of a Daisy at the height of her powers, exercising all the traditional, much loved, Daisy strengths!

Claire was an excellent teacher. She reminded you how noble it was to write poetry; how miraculous it should feel to communicate what is most intimate to you, and to do so in this stylized way, through rhyme and metre, images and ideas. After each student had read their work and it had been discussed seriously and pertinently, Claire would finish by reading a poem by a great, usually dead poet, and encourage her class to discuss this poem no differently than they had discussed the others. And in this way one learned to imagine continuity between one’s own poetry and the poetry of the world. What a feeling! You walked out of that class if not shoulder to shoulder with Keats and Dickinson and Eliot and the rest, then at least in the same echo chamber, in the same roll-call of history.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.