“When I told her that Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus & Giroux had described the volume as ‘raw meat’ poetry— ’although,’ he added, ‘the poems are magnificent’—she was indignant. ‘That is absolutely untrue,’ she said. ‘Your poetry is racé [purebred]!’”

The Art of Reading is the natural outgrowth of The Art of Writing. While the written word has been the focus of The Art of Writing’s discussions, The Art of Reading brings the spoken word to the fore. The Fall 2022 iteration of The Art of Reading—the first—is very much a continuation of the Fall 2021 book group, The Art of Writing: The Beat Hotel. It consists of a series of dialogues between Harold Norse’s poetry and Anaïs Nin’s prose. Nin discovered Norse’s unique talent in the early 1950s in New York, nearly a decade before he took up residence at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

Led by Precious Brown.

• The Undersea Mountain by Harold Norse (1953)
• Hotel Nirvana: Selected Poems, 1953-1973 by Harold Norse (1974)
• The Diary of Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin (1966-1980)

• 10 September
• 8 October
• 12 November
• 10 December