April 11, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Ordinary Sex By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, I am in the happiest, healthiest relationship of my life, which is still going strong despite a period of long distance. My boyfriend is currently searching for a job, his first “adult” job since graduating, but seems to be falling at the last hurdles each time. He is usually a very upbeat and optimistic person, but rejection and his current job in the hospitality industry are having an effect on him that is hard to watch for someone who loves him. I am doing my best to reassure him that “the right opportunity will come along” and “you’re doing all the right things,” but this feels very easy to say without knowing what he’s going through. I have so much faith in him; he’s intelligent and passionate. I’m struggling to know how to help. Everything I say sounds clichéd or false, so until I can work out how to put my feelings into pragmatic advice, I’m hoping there’s a poem that might give him some hope for the future, and make him see himself the way I do. Best, An Optimist for Two Read More
April 11, 2019 Notes on Pop On Believing By Hanif Abdurraqib Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan area code and a very particular type of pride): South Detroit is, in fact, not a real place, at least not within the flimsy geographical construct of the United States. Anyone beginning in Detroit and traveling south will, because of how the borders are drawn, end up in Canada. From a geographical standpoint, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario. The restaurant South Detroit, which is in Windsor, Ontario, was opened by someone with a slick sense of humor and a sharp eye for nostalgia and aesthetics. Since we are burdened with borders, it must be said that there are a lot of good reasons to travel to a border and then cross it. From Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, the drive to Windsor, Ontario, is about four hours. Three and a half if you disregard the speed-limit signs posted along Route 23, where there are no blue-and-whites hiding along the high grass, and even if there were, they wouldn’t dare flick on their sirens and interrupt their downtime, reclining along the road. My friends and I would make the trip to go to the South Detroit diner in Windsor—passports and all. We’d wait in the long line clogging up the bridge to another country. The food at the diner wasn’t at all spectacular, and my pal Kyryn claimed they didn’t know how to mix a good cocktail—I don’t know much about drinks, so I took her at her word. What South Detroit did have was a good jukebox. I like a jukebox that requires labor. I’m not aging into one of those fist-shaking olds who sits on a porch and bemoans the fact that kids these days don’t play outdoors or that people stare at their phones or whatever else gets said about the younger generations. But there is the fact that I prefer a jukebox, one that cannot be controlled by a phone. I believe in accountability everywhere, even as it so eagerly escapes much of our day-to-day lives. And so, I must ask for accountability at the jukebox, where people know what songs I’ve played, because they’ve watched me approach the machine and fumble for my coins and scroll through the options. They’ve watched me sit back down and glance eagerly at the machine as each song ends, if they’re watching closely. If they keep watching, they might see a half-smile leap from the edges of my mouth when the first notes of my tune arrives. The jukebox alone is just a vehicle for sound, same as any other. But when a person enters, they can attach themselves and whatever hopes they have for the night, to that vehicle, and it becomes something greater. Read More
April 10, 2019 Hue's Hue Flowers for Yellow Chins, Bruised Eyes, Forsaken Nymphs, and Impending Death By Katy Kelleher From Francesca DiMattio’s portfolio of ceramics in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue (Photo: Robert Bredvad). Once you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches. Meadows aren’t filled with blue, yellow, and red wildflowers—they’re home to chicory and buttercups and fireweed. Knowing the names of things also allows you to see and name patterns. You start to realize that those thin-stemmed flowers with feathered, three-lobed leaves that you saw at the florist look an awful lot like the skinny little weeds that bolt up from the sidewalk near your house. You start to see how blossoms with swirls of intricately layered petals can be the sisters of flowers with just five lemon-yellow petals. When you begin to learn their various names, you begin to understand how their roots intertwine, how their histories align, how their mythology has been built, layer by layer, over the centuries. A rose by another name may still be a rose, but a buttercup, when called by another name, tells an entirely new story. “Coyote’s eyes” is a relatively common folk name for buttercups, and it’s possible this name comes from the simple fact that coyotes have yellow-gold eyes that glow in the dark. They’re one of the first flowers that many people learn to identify, thanks to the old “Do you like butter?” game, which involves holding a buttercup under the chin of a child. If their chin shines yellow (it almost always does—buttercups have reflective petals) then the answer is affirmative. It’s the kind of cutesy nonsense that adults foist on kids and that kids, being smarter than most people, quickly abandon. Read More
April 8, 2019 Archive of Longing The Ragpicker: Frédéric Pajak’s Uncertain Manifesto By Dustin Illingworth In his monthly column Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Read an excerpt of the book discussed below, Uncertain Manifesto, here. Is collage a fantasy of wholeness or a revolt against its possibility? Walter Benjamin, eclectic aesthete, commodity historian, theorist of shards, often wrote in fragmentary forms—most notably the Denkbild or “thought-image”—in order to forgo the possibility of finished work, which he considered the death mask of conception. The representative figure of modernity for Benjamin was the ragpicker, who “early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart.” A century on, this once-emergent persona has become commonplace. In 2019, we are all unwitting collagists of culture, collectors of bytes and blurbs, list makers, GIF gawkers, anxious improvisers, curators of ever smaller forms in whose composite we detect something like a self-portrait. Our literature reflects this recombinant impulse: see the rise of fragmentary fiction; the blocky, asterisk-divided essay; autofiction’s itemized subjectivity; the staccato cadence of the Extremely Online novel. It would seem a kind of paternity has been established: we are all of us the ragpicker’s children. Walter Benjamin is the unlikely hero of the French writer and artist Frédéric Pajak’s Uncertain Manifesto, the first of whose eight volumes has recently been published by New York Review Books. A hybrid work of text and image, it reconstitutes intellectual history—Benjamin’s especially, but also Samuel Beckett’s and the Dutch painter Bram van Velde’s—into oblique memoir. “As a child, maybe ten years old, I dreamt of a book mixing words and pictures,” Pajak writes in the book’s preface, “snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea.” Set beneath large and starkly beautiful black-and-white drawings of fields, crowds, seascapes, corpses, palms, and shadowed alleys, Pajak’s Manifesto blends personal memory with history, biography, memoir, travel writing, and aphoristic fiction. The resultant narrative register—spectral, echoic, image rich, materially preoccupied—suggests the improbably varied source material of the self. Read More
April 4, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: For My Lover, Returning to His Wife By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, It’s 1 AM where I live now, and it’s yet another sleepless night for me. For the past four years, I lived in another country across the world, but I recently had to move back home due to some paperwork-related issues. My expat life was exciting and it transformed me. It pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and gave me my best friend and new hobbies and interests. But I’m now stuck back in my hometown, unable to make any future plans until the issue is resolved. I have no close friends here, there are no interesting events, and a good time for most people my age is to get wasted. My days are spent going to the gym and to the same two cafés (it’s a pretty small city) to study or read. I’ve been trying to stay positive, but the thought of wasting my life like this has been keeping me awake for quite a while now. Do you have a poem for people who feel left out of life? Sincerely, Stuck In Limbo Read More
April 4, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Etty Hillesum By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Etty Hillesum (Photo courtesy of the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, Middelburg, the Netherlands) In 1942, the year before she died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine, the Dutch diarist and mystic Etty Hillesum wrote: “I have the feeling that my life is not yet finished, that it is not yet a rounded whole. A book, and what a book, in which I have got stuck halfway. I would so much like to read on.” She was in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and had decided to stay, voluntarily, at the Dutch transit camp Westerbork as a “social welfare” representative of the Jewish Council—Joodse Raad—that had been set up to mediate between Jewish citizens and the Germans. Unlike some, Hillesum didn’t expect her association with the council to save her, and she harbored no illusions about the tragedy engulfing Europe. What the Nazis wanted, she realized, was “our total destruction.” Still, she had hopes of coming through the war alive. She longed to channel her prodigious literary talent into writing Dostoyevskian novels, as well as documenting the history she witnessed. “I shall wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer,” she declared, “and my words will have to be so many hammer strokes with which to beat the story of our fate.” Read More