Dana Gioia, Amy Winehouse: “Pity the Beautiful”

In 2007 (Photo: Jonwood2)

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.”

Tags: "Dana Gioia", Amy Winehouse, Guy Trebay, John Waters

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 17th, 2011 at 9:51 am by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.