News at Eleven: Certainly it is more difficult to write well

than to pull the trigger, and in his outliving of [Vladimir] Mayakovsky, [Boris] Pasternak found his strongest voice, as well as that estranging sense of living one’s own autobiography that might be necessary to poets in their practice. Pasternak once wrote, “the biography of a poet is found in what happens to those who read him,” but the mystical reversal became truer with time: the biographies of readers are found in what happens to the poets who write for them.

from Tablet: Selective Memoir

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