September 27, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Hannah Arendt, Poet By Srikanth Reddy Hannah Arendt, 1958. Photograph by Barbara Niggl Radloff. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them. Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue. Read More
July 11, 2024 A Letter from the Editor The Ringo Starr of the Haiku Pantheon By Srikanth Reddy If you attended school in the U.S. like I did, the first poem you wrote as a child was, more likely than not, some version of the Japanese haiku. As a grown-up, you may have gone on to read the haiku masters Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson—the Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison of Edo-period Japan. But most Western readers have yet to twig on to Masaoka Shiki, the Ringo Starr of the haiku pantheon. Born more than two hundred years after Basho, this latecomer to the declining literary form launched a haiku revival in late-nineteenth-century Japan, writing haiku about modern subjects like baseball (“dandelions / the baseball rolled / through them”) and penning a memorable little essay titled “Haiku on Shit.” By the time of his death from tuberculosis at thirty-four, Shiki had written nearly twenty thousand verses and founded a new school of haiku poetry with its own literary magazine, Hototogisu, which continues to publish haiku today. Read More
June 18, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.” The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”) Read More
March 19, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Spring Issue By Emily Stokes Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways. Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides. Read More
February 8, 2024 A Letter from the Editor A Winter Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.” Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window. Read More
December 5, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Winter Issue By Emily Stokes A poet recently sent me an essay by George Oppen called “The Mind’s Own Place,” published in 1963. In it, Oppen grapples with lines from Brecht’s “To Those Born Later”: “What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” Oppen, a poet who had withdrawn from writing for nearly twenty-five years to pursue his political commitments, sees Brecht’s concern as valid: “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” But he also acknowledges that there is “no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of ‘flowers,’ ” which tend to “stand for simple and undefined human happiness.” He goes on: Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for itself, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does undertake just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.” Read More