Word: poets
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...Aggressively dressed in a long, full, Out of Africa skirt," Alexander writes at one point, she set out to trace her poet's imaginings. Mighty string-pulling brought a rare approval from the Chinese to visit Shangdu, in military territory 200 miles north of Beijing. This was the summer capitol -- pleasure dome is a fair description -- established by Kublai (1215-1294), grandson of Genghis Khan, and a personage who, according to Marco Polo, "always rides on the back of four elephants, in a very handsome shelter of wood, covered inside with cloth of beaten gold and outside with lion skins...
...journeying begins as it should, in libraries, and in particular with a 1927 work, The Way to Xanadu, by the British scholar John Livingston Lowes. He not only traced literary and mythological influences on the poet's imagery, but demonstrated that Coleridge (1772-1834) was a tireless armchair traveller. There was, in fact, a real Xanadu (more commonly called Shangdu) with the remains of real walls and towers. Marco Polo had been there. And there were in the world -- though not in the same place except on Coleridge's bookshelf -- marvellous caves of ice, mighty fountains, rivers that might well...
...stage monologist and now the tattooed front man of the Rollins Band, a group sacred to many college radio stations. He winces. "Hip has become a lot of asses to kiss, a lot of places to be, a lot of parties to go to." Try it out on the poet Allen Ginsberg, who helped invest the idea with meaning in the '50s. After carefully distinguishing some current notions of hip from the outcast's lucidity that was his vision of it all, he lets loose. "An upper-bourgeois life-style con. A camouflage for egocentricity and commercial theatrics." Propose...
...says psychologist Russell Barkley of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. "ADHD adults," he notes, "can be incredibly successful. Sometimes being impulsive means being decisive." Many ADHD adults gravitate into creative fields or work that provides an outlet for emotions, says Barkley. "In our clinic we saw an adult poet who couldn't write poetry when she was on Ritalin. ADHD people make good salespeople. They're lousy at desk jobs...
...person who spurs Richard out of his marital torpor is Anna Danilova, a young Russian poet who arrives in London in 1990 on an apparent mission of mercy. Her brother, having served a sentence back in Moscow for currency violations, is still being held in jail. Anna's plan is to circulate a petition signed by prominent Western intellectuals that declares her to be a world-class writer whose relative is being persecuted by Soviet officials; they might then be shamed into releasing the prisoner. Since Richard is an established authority on the literature of her homeland, Anna asks...