Elizabeth Bishop, "Interior with Extension Cord." Undated; watercolor, gouache, and ink.

There are thirteen addresses in Manhattan where devout readers can stalk Elizabeth Bishop’s ghost: seven hotels and six apartments. Because no historical plaques have been hung to mark them, vigilance is crucial. You could pass by any one of them without realizing one of America’s greatest poets once called it home, or some version thereof. If these locales are not enough, peruse the writer’s several thousand letters for additional jaunts. At the entrance to the public library’s main reading room, for example, you can sit on the bench where, in 1936, Elizabeth arranged to meet Marianne Moore. The city is dirty enough that a small remnant of the writer, if only the dust on her soles, might linger there.

The compulsion to visit Elizabeth’s former residences is the same one that drives Shakespeare lovers to Stratford-upon-Avon and Thoreau converts to Walden Pond. Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-covered tomb proves such journeys are never simply educational field trips, but affairs of deep passion. Accordingly, I begin a pilgrimage: I will visit all these addresses. And so I set out on a cool spring day for 16 Charles Street, the poet’s first Manhattan residence, where she spent the fall of 1934. Bishop was then twenty-three years old, a would-be writer whose mind was as much a boxing ring for hope and trepidation as my own. She was sick that New Year’s Eve and spent the night on the floor, perusing a map of the North Atlantic. Doped up on “adrenalin and cough syrup,” she wrote:

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

As I examine the wide building where Bishop once lived, my own questions sound comparatively banal: Was this the same brass doorknob she turned every day? When Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber was renovated in the twentieth century, several of the queen’s dress pins were found wedged between the floorboards. I scrutinize the red-brick facade for a similar detail that might bring the poet into focus, but whatever she may have left behind cannot be seen through these stoic windows, all gridded neatly in white, each revealing less than the last. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/some-realms-i-owned-elizabeth-bishop-in-manhattan/feed/ 1 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/its-not-the-answer-but-the-question-an-interview-with-craig-nova-by-craig-nova/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/its-not-the-answer-but-the-question-an-interview-with-craig-nova-by-craig-nova/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:42:52 +0000 Craig Nova http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=54630 Read More »]]>

We thought it would be fun to do something a little unusual with this interview, as befits Craig Nova’s inventive fiction. In short, we suggested Nova ask himself whatever he wishes interviewers would ask. This interview was conducted in Paris, where Craig Nova, both subject and interviewer, was staying this spring.

What do you like best about writing a novel?

Disappearing. Or, I should say, the sense I have of vanishing while working. If the magic of fiction for the reader is that the chair the reader is sitting on disappears, why then, the magic of writing fiction for the novelist is that the chair, the room, everything vanishes as the novelist finally gets to work. The sensation is sort of like Alice going down the rabbit hole, but whatever the right comparison might be, I feel as though I have suddenly reappeared at my desk after a long trip to a distant place. This moment is one of profound fatigue and regret, since I can remember where I have been and wish I was back there.

Does this happen suddenly? Do you just sit down and, as you say, vanish?

Oh, no. If it were only that easy. I have often thought that the entire business is a sort of Zen discipline, and that whatever the ceremony, each writer goes through a kind of chant, or something like that, to get in the mood. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/its-not-the-answer-but-the-question-an-interview-with-craig-nova-by-craig-nova/feed/ 0 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/typewriter-tip-tip-tip-and-other-news/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/18/typewriter-tip-tip-tip-and-other-news/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:30:45 +0000 Sadie Stein http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=54612 Read More »]]>

The Spring issue of The Paris Review includes a long poem by Ange Mlinko, “Wingandecoia.” It took me a few rereads, but, after a bout of Google searching, I saw this poem trace its arc in several directions—those of time, of place, and of musical imagination. Along the way to understanding, Mlinko treats the reader to lines that feel both alive and spectral. Some are even like incantatory but welcome earworms.

Mlinko has also published three books of poetry—Matinees, Starred Wire, and Shoulder Season. And this fall her next book, Marvelous Things Overheard, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Between books, she writes on language and the arts for The Nation. 

Like the two poems you published in issue 199 of The Paris Review, “Wingandecoia” contains many unfamiliar words and names. How do you see these poems, and that idea, figuring into your forthcoming book, Marvelous Things Overheard?

The book is partly an exploration of time. The sixth-century brigand poet, the Macedonian general, and the ineffectual managers of the lost colony at Roanoke are allowed a measure of strangeness through the language each poem invokes. It amounts to a kind of foreign language within our familiar one. I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn’t want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not “getting” a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me—in fact, it was a seduction.

And then, obviously, these words are beautiful. Wingandecoia is a beautiful word. So is psittacines. So is pot pot chee. They suggest rhymes, anagrams, and puns. They make music, which I think is an indispensible pleasure. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/poetry-must-still-dance-an-interview-with-ange-mlinko/feed/ 3 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/the-part-about-the-helmets/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/the-part-about-the-helmets/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:00:11 +0000 Sadie Stein http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=54571 Read More »]]>

We were thrilled to run across this custom bike helmet, modeled on the 2666 cover designed by Charlotte Strick (who just happens to be The Paris Review’s art editor!). Says Ariel Abrahams, who commissioned the literary topper,

I chose my design because when I read the book 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, I was literally taken aback. I had to sit down, stop my life and just read. I really fell in love. I thought a bike helmet depicting the magical sea-life images from the cover of the third book of 2666 would commemorate these overwhelming, larger than life feelings somehow. If you have read the book, you know the importance of the sea creature images to the tone of the story.

Two years ago yesterday I followed a man dressed in black into a small pharmacy in Dublin. Bars of yellow soap covered the shop’s dark wooden shelves and countertops. I watched from across the shop as the man conversed loudly with the pharmacist, gesticulating as he spoke. He ordered a specific type of lotion. He then grabbed a bar of soap, indicating that he’d return later to pay for the soap and lotion. I lifted a bar to my nose and sniffed: lemon. The man waved goodbye to the pharmacist and left. I put down the soap and followed him out.

While I don’t usually stalk errand-running strangers in foreign cities, this was an exception: I was participating in Bloomsday, the annual reenactment of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on the anniversary of day the novel takes place, June 16, 1904. The man clad in black was an actor portraying protagonist Leopold Bloom as he moves through his day in real time, in the actual spots around Dublin where Joyce set his narrative. I was part of a spectator’s group of about thirty people—some dressed in period garb, including an unwitting infant in a lace collar and antique stroller—that trailed Bloom through the streets of Dublin throughout the day. We visited a home on Eccles Street that could have been Bloom’s. The pharmacy was Sweny’s, a Dublin establishment still selling the same lemon-scented soap that Joyce first made famous in 1922. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/wheres-leo/feed/ 0 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/undiscovered-joyce-title-and-other-news/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/undiscovered-joyce-title-and-other-news/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:30:29 +0000 Sadie Stein http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=54545 Read More »]]>

It is best to dispense at once with the salacious stuff of Charlie Newman’s life: he was a drunk, a bastard, and a boor. His marriages did not last. His books did not bring fame. When not poisoning his liver or relations with both family and fellow writers, he taught college, smoked a pipe, and trained dogs.

Only the very last of these facts is relevant when reading In Partial Disgrace, a fantastically odd posthumous novel for those who like their beauty strange, their plots unruly, their ideas ambitious. It has been patched together by his nephew Ben Ryder Howe—a former editor at The Paris Review–and released this spring by Dalkey Archive Press. The book is set in a fictional European land called Cannonia, its history based on that of Hungary but its name quite clearly derived from the Latin for dog, canis. The main character, Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar, is a dog breeder, and there are roughly 0.7 references to the canine species on each page of this gorgeous mess of a novel, which is what Pale Fire (a novel Newman adored) might have read like if given a heavy-handed edit by Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Millan. Read More »]]> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/14/the-dogs-of-men-and-war-charlie-newman-and-his-lost-novel/feed/ 2 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/14/what-were-loving-piano-rats-black-flag-bolano/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/14/what-were-loving-piano-rats-black-flag-bolano/#comments Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:52:32 +0000 The Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=54492 Read More »]]>

“Pretty Much Every Single Black Flag Poster Designed by Raymond Pettibon” pretty much says it all. This gallery of eighty-two posters, in the collection of Kill Your Idols publisher Bryan Ray Turcotte since 1982, has been keeping me occupied the past few days. I’ve been trying to pick a favorite, but it’s tough. I still remember seeing the Black Flag logo for the first time: it was unmistakable and striking and strangely compelling. It still is. —Nicole Rudick

In the search for Roberto Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policeman, I ran across the New Directions edition of his 1980 novel Antwerp tucked between his better-known works. It’s an amalgamation of short, experimental descriptions of conversations and neo-philosophical interpretations of love and life, written when the author was twenty-seven. I haven’t come across something so simultaneously challenging and lucid in a long time. —Ellen Duffer

I was in Chicago this past weekend for Printers Row Lit Festival, where the Review shared the Small Press Tent with a handful of old friends (A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Bookforum) and new friends (featherproof books, MAKE magazine, Midwestern Gothic). Over the course of the festival, I picked up Franki Elliot’s chapbook Piano Rats from Chicago publisher Curbside Splendor and spent a plane ride with Elliot’s brief, deeply personal free verse “stories,” which detail her varied interactions with both strangers and current/past lovers.

the only sound was our breathing
when you cleared your throat and said,
neither loud nor quiet

“I wish there was a God.”
I didn't have to say anything

At times mundane, awkward, offensive, and, ultimately, heartbreaking, it takes a while to warm up, but, by the end, leaves a lasting impression. I didn’t sleep a wink on the plane. —Justin Alvarez

I was one of the many fans devastated this week when Scottish indie band the Pastels canceled their U.S. shows (the first since 1997!) due to work-visa issues. At least we can derive some solace from listening to their gorgeous new release, Slow Summits, which is as tender, wistful, and thoughtful as all their albums. (And start saving up for tickets to Glasgow.) —Sadie Stein