July 27, 2017

Igor Kholin. Illustrations by Ripley Whiteside.

The Russian poet Igor Kholin died in 1999 an underappreciated talent, but his literary star is on the rise. His Selected Poems were published in 1999 to wide acclaim, followed by his collected prose. This year, a new collection of his diaries and prose will be published in Russia. Ugly Duckling Presse released Kholin 1966: Diaries and Poems this past spring. We’ve published an excerpt of these diary entries—selected from his 1966 diaries and translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich—below. —Ed.

August 17

I remember that as a kid I was particularly sensitive to verbal insults.

I think that poems should adhere to three rules. They should be:

1) Formally solid.

2) Emotional.

3) Intellectual.

I came to these conclusions in part after reading a piece by Krishnamurti.

Both my neighbors were utterly drunk. One of them dragged the other one home on a horse. They’re both around 70. Read More

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July 27, 2017

First Person

My Brief (Doomed) Surfing Days

By Dave Hickey

LeRoy Grannis, Makaha, Hawaii (detail), 1966. © LeRoy Grannis Collection. Courtesy TASCHEN. From Surfing by Jim Heimann, published by TASCHEN.

I went to first grade in Fort Worth with Lee Harvey Oswald. I went to second grade in Shreveport, where my dad had a gig in some Dixie greaser lounge, but we were moving up. In third grade, we lived in nifty North Dallas. Every Thursday, in social studies class, we drew the name of a country out of a hat and wrote a report about it. We made our own folders for each report. Then we would vote for the best cover. First shot, I drew Italy—and how can you fuck up Italy? I had grapes, columns, and a version of Trajan’s Market that foreshadowed the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My grapes foreshadowed late Sam Francis. They were especially praised, and I won. I got the Hershey bar that was the prize. Next time, I reached in and drew Bolivia. Right, Bolivia. I cut out a brown mountain and stuck it on a blue sky. My friend Cecily drew Egypt and she killed it. Perspectival pyramids with scaled triangles of ocher in different shades. These were major pyramids, but I won again.

I thought this was outrageous. Either North Dallas third graders had developed a prescient taste for minimalism or I won because I had won last time and now I was the guy who won. The insult festered and I gave my Hershey bar to Cecily because I am a critic and not an artist. I don’t care about winning. I care about being right. Meanwhile, at home, my mom and dad screamed at one another. They threw clocks and vases. My mother was late for an appointment one morning. She backed out of the garage in a hurry, spinning her wheels, and ran over my Jack Russell terrier, Milton. She reminded me that it was my damn dog—that she was in a hurry—and rushed off, gone before she was gone, leaving me to bury Milton in the backyard. I took the little brass plate off Milton’s collar, nailed it to the side of the garage, and buried Milton under it. No one ever spoke of Milton again. On Saturdays, my parents were in the house together all day, so I would set off on my bike at 10 A.M. and ride down to the Inwood theater on Lovers Lane, and then over to the Village Center on Preston Road, to watch movies a day long. Unlike other movie fugitives I have known, I came to hate movies. Also, eventually, somebody stole my bike. Read More

July 21, 2017

First Person

Voyage in the Dark

By Brian Cullman

I was in London in November of 1978, staying at the Portobello Hotel, famous for having a twenty-four-hour bar in its basement. I came back late, two or two thirty in the morning, and there was Van Morrison in the lobby, sitting on a low stool and staring at a coffee table. Just staring, in a trance. He radiated a deep and hard-won solitude, and it looked like he was in the mood to kick someone’s cat.

I went up to my room, but better sense prevailed, and I came back to the lobby a few minutes later. He was gone. I looked around and decided to go down to the always-open bar in the basement. It was empty, aside from a pretty girl tending the bar and what looked like an overcoat someone had left in a booth.

I saw Van Morrison upstairs, I said.

The girl nodded. Read More

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July 12, 2017

First Person

Peter Matthiessen’s Notebook

By Terry McDonell

A way to talk about work and friendship.

Peter Matthiessen.

Before I became friends with Peter Matthiessen, I was his editor. We talked on the phone and our conversations, when I’d reach him driving one of his numerous loops through the deep West, never started with where he was but rather where he was going. All the travel, all the reporting, were central to his work. “I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit,” he said, when he talked about writing. “I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.” And they did, I think, because his great discipline allowed him to write well from wherever he went, from however deep he got. Read More

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June 27, 2017

First Person

Starting Out in the Evening

By Brian Cullman

Photo: Dan McCoy, NARA, 1973.

Years ago, a psychic of some sort told me that the top of my head was open, that I had a WELCOME mat where a locked door ought to be, and I should be careful: any passing or wandering spirits could just drift in and make themselves at home. It felt like that last night. Partly in terms of psychic disturbance, getting too many signals from too many stations—but also because everyone on the street wants to tell me something. Read More

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June 27, 2017

First Person

From the Foreword to Debths

By Susan Howe

From the cover of Debths.

The below is excerpted from the foreword to Debths, Susan Howe’s latest collection, out today from New Directions.

Going back! Going back!
“Little Sir Echo, how do you do? / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Little Sir Echo, we’ll answer you / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)/ Won’t you come over and play? (and play)/ You’re a nice little fellow / I know by your voice/ But you’re always so far away (away).”
—Bing Crosby and the Music Maids (1939)

When I was eight my parents packed me off to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Armington in the foothills of New Hampshire cofounded and owned by Mary Hoisington and Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently the women chose the name because of an echo that bounces off the surrounding White Mountains. An actual child may or may not fit parental fantasies. I hated the place. Most of all I dreaded riding classes and spent many nights praying I would be assigned the tired elderly horse with a creaking stomach for the next day’s obligatory ride around the ring. On the one visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ransom me. But no. Around four P.M. they left for Boston, leaving me alone with my dread of being lost in the past; absent. Read More

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Category Archives: First Person

First Person

Excerpts from a Grumpy Russian Poet’s Diary

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My Brief (Doomed) Surfing Days

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Voyage in the Dark

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Peter Matthiessen’s Notebook

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Starting Out in the Evening

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From the Foreword to Debths

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