Dana Gioia, Amy Winehouse: “Pity the Beautiful”

The title poem of Dana Gioia‘s forthcoming collection of poetry, Pity the Beautiful, is paired with an excerpt from Guy Trebay‘s appreciation of Amy Winehouse, “A Bad Girl With a Touch of Genius,” in today’s New York Times.  Read it here.  (And I’ve written a lot about Dana, here and here and here and here and here.)

The comments are interesting, too.  In these fast and thoughtless times, I appreciate anything that makes me slow down and think about a poem.

I was intrigued by this analysis of Winehouse’s striking “look” in Trebay’s article:

“It’s hard to look that cheap and pull it off,” John Waters said admiringly of Amy Winehouse, some days after the English singer was found dead in her London bed.  …

“She took vintage looks and combined them with punk into brand-new looks that gave even bad girls pause,” Mr. Waters said. …

According to Mr. Waters, anybody else trying to pull off Ms. Winehouse’s look was doomed to failure. “It all looked like it came very naturally to her,” he said. “She didn’t look like Halloween, but you could go as her on Halloween, and there’s the difference.”

Author: Cynthia Haven

Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year. Join me at twitter: @chaven View all posts by Cynthia Haven