March 27, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Cynthia Cruz By Cynthia Cruz In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. Read More
March 26, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Mark Wunderlich By Mark Wunderlich In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. Read More
March 25, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Unconsoled By Emma Garman In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they’re finally making time for and consider what it’s like to read them in these strange times. Many conversations I’m having at the moment—you, too, probably—include a preamble that tries to acknowledge the current situation: “It feels, I don’t know, unreal? Like a dream, or a nightmare. I can’t quite grasp the enormity of it. I keep expecting to wake up and find that normality has resumed.” Meanwhile my actual sleep tends to feature classic anxiety dreams—of being lost, delayed, imperiled, accidentally in the wrong place or at the wrong time, dropped into a context both familiar and alien—that cause an abrupt awakening in the small hours. Displacing the bewilderment of the dream with waking reality is, obviously, not much of a relief. Especially if attempted via my usual method of scrolling Twitter. Instead, I’ve been rereading a novel that captures the peculiar landscape of dreams with an accuracy few other authors have come close to: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. When I first read it, soon after it came out in 1995, I was at first intimidated (not least by its 500+ pages), then progressively awed but also perplexed by Ishiguro’s flagrant jettisoning of fiction’s rules. Isn’t it cheating, for instance, to let your first person narrator access the inner life of whomever he meets? Now, though, with a further quarter-century of anxiety dreams behind me, and with life as we know it splintering and dislocating before our eyes, I found myself submitting utterly to the novel’s uncanny, déjà vu–steeped spell. Read More
March 24, 2020 Re-Covered What’s It Like Out? By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Turns out that watching an actual pandemic unfold in real time isn’t enough for many of us. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is being streamed by droves across the globe, sales of Camus’s The Plague are through the roof, and I just received a message from a friend asking if Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was worth a read. Seems like none of us can get enough of stories that echo our current moment, myself included. Fittingly, though, as the author of this column, I found myself drawn to a scarily appropriate but much less widely known plague novel: One by One, by the English writer and critic Penelope Gilliatt. Originally published in 1965, this was the first novel by Gilliat, who was then the chief film critic for the British newspaper the Observer. It’s ostensibly the story of a marriage—that of Joe Talbot, a vet, and his heavily pregnant wife, Polly—but set against the astonishing backdrop of a mysterious but fatal pestilence. The first cases are diagnosed in London at the beginning of August, but by the third week of the month, ten thousand people are dead. Initially the government is more concerned with covering its own back than looking out for its citizens, so it’s slow to take action: “No one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Soon, however, it’s impossible to ignore the bodies. The eerie “glow in the sky” above the city at night is evidence of vast makeshift crematoria. London is put under lockdown, cut off from the rest of the country. Joe gallantly offers his much-needed help in one of the capital’s overcrowded, understaffed hospitals, while Polly, scared about her impending confinement and increasingly lonely, obtains a medical certificate verifying her health so that she can make the arduous journey to her mother-in-law’s house in a distant, uninfected coastal town. Some enterprising journalist hails Joe as a national hero, but then another digs up a gay sex scandal from the selfless vet’s adolescence and he becomes persona non grata. Read More
March 24, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Stephanie Burt By Stephanie Burt In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Untitled [There are more of us]” by Killarney Clary Issue no. 88 (Summer 1983) There are more of us. We came out of a time when birth was happy. We are prizes. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so important, so healthy. If any of us suffered war, we were pained less by the enemy than our ability to kill him. Our number seems a useless power. We were sold on dis-satisfaction—now we’re sold families but they’re no sign of survival this time. I am very lucky but that’s not life. And maybe no more than any person born in any year, I want but don’t know what, feel unsettled in a sea of similarly restless faces. The breadth of possibility makes choosing seem evasive. We decide but we are slow and small with doubts. It was 1954 when my parents moved to have room for me. I remember a box my mother packed for me to store at school, filled with canned milk and soup and Hershey bars. Two thousand good nights. My checked uniform on a hook. My face to the hall light because that felt like a day in the sun. Not fear, not loneliness, but my preference for sleeping near the window and near the floor, humming. Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, coeditor of poetry at The Nation, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. She lives in Massachusetts.
March 20, 2020 The Last Year The Rooms By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June. It’s the middle of the night, or maybe it’s just dark in my memory. I’ve already put my daughter, Indie, to bed. She’s ten, maybe eleven, and we’re living in northern New York. I’m standing in the living room, hitting my palm against a wall and shouting, “Something has to change. Something has to change.” Not long ago, I asked Indie if she remembers that night. She said she doesn’t. But I can still summon the room, still feel the pinch in my chest. My weariness. At what, I don’t remember, but I can guess it was about a late check in the mail or not finding a permanent university position or maybe it was the snow falling outside the window in April. In our memories, there are rooms we’ll always be standing in, saying one thing or another. Or not saying what we should. In high school, before I had my driver’s license, I snuck my father’s Olds 98 out of the garage. I wanted to borrow an outfit from my friend, Amy, an outfit my mother would never allow. I can still feel the rush of rounding Riggs Circle, the windows down, the radio up. Later, when my parents pulled into the garage in my mother’s Cutlass, my father noticed pens and a notebook on his floorboard. I had forgotten to put the seat back (and turn down 97.1 FM, The Eagle). In the living room, I sat on the brick ledge of the fireplace, watching him yell. At fifteen, I was growing more defiant, more confident in my rebellions. “When you leave this house,” he raised his arms, “you’re going to go wild. Wild!” I stood up, arms by my sides, fists clenched. I yelled back, “I already have!” Read More