April 15, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Brian Tierney Reads James Wright By Brian Tierney National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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 distances. “Heraclitus” By James Wright Issue no. 62, Summer 1975 My beautiful America, vast in its brutality, and brutal in its vastness. All the way from Paris to Vienna takes less time to find than all the way from New York to Pittsburgh, where Duquesne University had a beautiful football team when I was a boy. One evening beside the river, only its name. Only one river, the Ohio, that is the loneliest river in the world. Patsy di Franco sank down into the time of the river and stayed, Joe Bumbico jumped naked into the suck hole and dragged up Harry Schultz. I started to cry. A cop gouged his fists into Harry’s kidneys. He must have thought they were lungs. Harry couldn’t talk plain. Harry puked. I loved Harry, he was one of my best friends. Harry, Harry, Are you still alive? Who? Me? I ain’t not. I swam all the way across the Ohio River with my friends alone. Me and Junior and Elwood and Shamba and Crumb. We made it all the way across to West Virginia. I was only a boy. I swam all the way through a tear on a dead face. America is dead. And it is the only country I had. Harry. Harry, Are you still alive? Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the author of the forthcoming collection Rise and Float (Milkweed, 2022). His poem “You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With” appeared in our Winter 2020 issue.
April 14, 2021 Off Menu Dial D for Dinner By Edward White In Off Menu, Edward White serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Alma Reville with a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s head, 1974. © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Within the shifted reality of an Alfred Hitchcock movie there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The ambiguity extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned in her own home by a cup of coffee, while homebodies in The Man Who Knew Too Much feel discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it’s handed to an unwitting guest at the Bates Motel as part of her final meal. In his private life, Hitchcock felt the same unease about comestibles. He adored food and the experience of dining but resented the impact that consumption had on his body: “I’m simply one of those unfortunates who can accidentally swallow a cashew nut and put on thirty pounds right away,” he explained. Of the various aspects of Hitchcock’s identity that I wrote about for my book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, it was his existence as a self-described “fat man” that most revealed him as a cultural figure ahead of his time. Hitchcock being Hitchcock—an expert self-mythologizer—he turned his anguish about his appearance into a joke and then exploited its potential for publicity. Though he made his love of food a prominent part of his reputation, he also shared his dissatisfaction with his body image in a way that no male celebrity had ever done, posing for photographs that charted the progression of his weight loss and expressing the pain of counting calories. As with so much else in his life, Hitchcock’s accomplice in this peculiar gastronomic odyssey was Alma Reville, his wife, best friend, longest-serving creative collaborator, and, to quote Hitchcock, “as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.” Their partnership began in the mid-’20s, when Reville worked as Hitchcock’s assistant director on the silent films that launched him to fame in his native Britain. For the next fifty years, she was his steel girder, lending her talents to scriptwriting, casting, editing, and promotion, in both official and unofficial capacities. And at their residences in England and America, it was Reville’s exceptional cooking that made their home a living extension of the Hitchcock screen universe, a place of sensory stimulation, both earthly and transporting. Read More
April 9, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Carrie Fountain Reads Maya C. Popa By Carrie Fountain National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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 distances. “Letters in Winter” by Maya C. Popa Issue no. 236 (Spring 2021) There is not one leaf left on that tree on which a bird sits this Christmas morning, the sky heavy with snow that never arrives, the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast nothingness, it’s easy to feel afraid, overlooked by something that was meant to endure. It’s difficult today to think clearly through pain, some actual, most imagined; future pain I try lamely to prepare myself for by turning your voice over in my mind, or imagining the day I’ll no longer hug my father, his grip tentative but desperate all the same. At the café, a woman describes lilacs in her garden. She is speaking of spring, the life after this one. The first thing to go when I shut the book between us is the book; silence, its own alphabet, and still something so dear about it. It will be spring, I say over and over. I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back. I see how winter is forbidding: it grows the heart by lessening everything else and demands that we keep trying. I am trying. But oh, to understand us, any one of us, and not to grieve? Carrie Fountain is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Life, and serves as poet laureate of Texas.
April 1, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Cheswayo Mphanza Reads Gerald Stern By Cheswayo Mphanza National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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. “Leaving Another Kingdom” by Gerald Stern Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983) I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs before I get too sad. I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower, and the blue squill go, and the primroses. Levine will be here by then, waving fountain pens, carrying rolled-up posters of Ike Williams and King Levinsky. He will be reaching into his breast pocket for maps of grim Toledo showing the downtown grilles and the bus stations. He and I together will get on our hands and knees on the warm ground in the muddy roses under the thorn tree. We will walk the mile to my graveyard without one word of regret, two rich poets going over the past a little, changing a thing or two, making a few connections, doing it all with balance, stopping along the way to pet a wolf, slowing down at the locks, giving each other lectures on early technology, mentioning eels and snakes, touching a little on our two cities, cursing our Henrys a little, his Ford, my Frick, being almost human about it, almost decent, sliding over the stones to reach the island. throwing spears on the way, staring for twenty minutes at two robins starting a life together in rural Pennsylvania, kicking a heavy tire, square and monstrous, huge and soggy, maybe a 49 Hudson, maybe a 40 Packard, maybe a Buick with mohair seats and silken cords and tiny panes of glass—both of us seeing the same car, each of us driving our own brick road, both of us whistling the same idiotic songs, the tops of trees flying, houses sailing along, the way they did then, both of us walking down to the end of the island so we could put our feet in the water, so I could show him where the current starts, so we could look for bottles and worn-out rubbers, Trojans full of holes, the guarantee run out— love gone slack and love gone flat— a few feet away from New Jersey near the stones that look like large white turtles guarding the entrance to the dangerous channel where those lovers—Tristan and his Isolt, Troilus and you know who, came roaring by on inner tubes, their faces wet with happiness, the shrieks and sighs left up the river somewhere, now their fingers trailing through the wake, now their arms out to keep themselves from falling, now in the slow part past the turtles and into the bend, we sitting there putting on our shoes, he with Nikes, me with Georgia loggers, standing up and smelling the river, walking single file until we reach the pebbles, singing in French all the way back, losing the robins forever, losing the Buick, walking into the water, leaving another island, leaving another retreat, leaving another kingdom. Cheswayo Mphanza’s debut poetry collection is The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press). His poems “Frame Six” and “At David Livingstone’s Statue” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.
March 30, 2021 Re-Covered Walking Liberia with Graham Greene By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In 1935, Graham Greene spent four weeks trekking three hundred fifty miles through the then-unmapped interior of Liberia. As he explains in the book he subsequently published about the experience, Journey without Maps (1936), he wasn’t interested in the Africa already known to white men; instead, he was looking for “a quality of darkness … of the inexplicable.” In short, a journey into his own heart of darkness, to rival that of Conrad’s famous novel. As such, he knew that his recollections—“memories chiefly of rats, of frustration, and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before,” as he recalls in Ways of Escape (1980), his second volume of autobiography—weren’t enough. What he wrote instead was an account of this “slow footsore journey” in parallel with that of a psychological excursion, deep into the recesses of his own mind. Rather ironically, though, in 1938, his traveling companion published her own record of their expedition, and it was precisely the kind of account—what he’d looked down on as “the triviality of a personal diary”—that Graham himself had taken such pains to avoid. Even if you’ve read Journey without Maps, you might struggle to remember Graham’s co-traveler. Understandably so, since she’s mentioned only a handful of times, and always only in passing. It’s easy to forget she’s there at all. But she was: his cousin, twenty-three-year-old Barbara Greene, who’d gamely agreed to accompany him after one too many glasses of champagne at a family wedding. “Liberia, wherever it was, had a jaunty sound about it,” she endearingly recalls. “Liberia! The more I said it to myself the more I liked it. Life was good and very cheerful. Yes, of course I would go to Liberia.” Such innocent, rose-tinted enthusiasm obviously doesn’t last, but as she goes on to explain, “By the time I had found out what I had let myself in for it was too late to turn back.” Originally published as Land Benighted, it’s the later edition—published in 1981, with the catchier title Too Late to Turn Back and a new foreword by the author, as well as an introduction by the acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux—that’s probably better known. Even so, it’s been out of print now for nearly forty years, something that most likely wouldn’t upset Graham: although Barbara proved “as good a companion as the circumstances allowed,” where she did “disappoint” him, he admits in Ways of Escape, was in writing her book. Read More
March 10, 2021 Écuyères The “Princess Daredevil” of the Belle Époque By Susanna Forrest In Susanna Forrest’s Écuyères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Émilie as a “beauty of the circus” holds the center as Hippodrome girls and lesser écuyères make up the frame. Illustration appears in the January 5, 1878, issue of La Vie parisienne. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the circus poster, nothing but these words: “Today: Debut of Mademoiselle Émilie LOISSET” Nothing else, no other program. Why would you add more? It suffices for the habitués of the Franconi circus. It’s a talisman, this feminine name … Émilie Loisset! ÉMILIE LOISSET! ÉMILIE LOISSET!!! —“Scapin,” a.k.a. Alexandre Hepp, in Le Voltaire, May 15, 1881. I used to know three things about the circus horsewoman Émilie Loisset: she was beautiful, she was good, and, like many of the most cherished young women of a morbid, misogynist nineteenth century, she died tragically and gruesomely when she was only in her twenties. While these bare facts are true, they do not evoke a person so much as an archetype—the virtuous beauty who meets her fate with her melancholy face untouched. The way in which men wrote about her before and after her death reminds me of what Elisabeth Bronfen called “culture [using] art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.” In fiction and in reminiscences and journalism and even riding manuals, her death is reenacted over and over as melodrama, cautionary tale, and plot twist. I was hoping that by collecting and overlaying these texts, I’d find the real woman amid them. What I found instead was an international game of telephone mined with conflicting accounts, confused identities (of both people and horses), facts carried over into fiction and fiction into “facts,” lavish, unverifiable hearsay, and, somehow, a glimpse of an individual who both was and was not what the men wanted her to be. I searched French, Belgian, Austrian, and German newspapers of the period, contacted aristocratic European families, triangulated points on maps and dates in sporting pages, signed up to genealogy communities, queried museums and archives, and finally found myself zooming in on the handwritten record of her death—and, as it turned out, her true name. I’ve reached the limits of what I can research during the pandemic, but this is what I know so far. She was born Marie Laurence Émilie Roux in Paris in 1856. Her father, Jean-Joseph Roux, was a popular ice-cream maker, and her mother was Antoinette Fortunée Loisset, an illegitimate daughter of the circus proprietor Jean Baptiste Antoine Loisset and Virginie Hélène de Linski—his later wife and codirector, who had been just sixteen when she had Antoinette. Virginie went on to have many more children with Jean Baptiste, although between the Loissets’ constant traveling and their circus habit of reshuffling family and stage names, it’s hard to straighten out their doubled family tree (not to mention the fact that one child can be Séraphin François in Belgium and Franz Seraph in Germany and eventually be known simply as François). Most of the children performed in their father’s circus, with varying degrees of endurance and success: equestrianism was their specialty, whether rosinback acrobatics or high school dressage. Read More