February 4, 2016 From the Archive February: Pemaquid Point By Ira Sadoff A postcard of Pemaquid Point, ca. 1930–45. Ira Sadoff’s poem “February: Pemaquid Point” appeared in our Winter–Spring 1980 issue. His most recent collection is True Faith (2012). Read More
January 27, 2016 From the Archive Jan. 27, 1979 By Mark DeFoe David Hall, Broadcast Television Intervention Work, 1971. Mark DeFoe’s poem “Jan. 27, 1979” appeared in our Fall 1983 issue. DeFoe lives in West Virginia; he is the author, most recently, of the collection Weekend Update. Read More
January 20, 2016 From the Archive The Distance Up Close By Molly Peacock Lovis Corinth, Walchensee, Schneelandschaft, 1919. Molly Peacock’s poem “The Distance Up Close” appeared in our Summer 1983 issue. Her most recent book is The Paper Garden. Read More
January 5, 2016 From the Archive Go Out in a Blaze of Glory By W. D. Snodgrass Robert Frost on a 1974 postage stamp. From “Dabbling in Corruption,” an essay by W. D. Snodgrass, in our Spring 1994 issue. Snodgrass was born on this day in 1926; he died in 2009. Here, he recalls seeing Robert Frost read at a Washington D.C. poetry conference in October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at full tilt. Frost was eighty-eight then, and, as Snodgrass writes, “obviously in his last months”; he died the following January. Our luncheon with Jacqueline Kennedy that day was suddenly canceled—rumor had it she was in a cave somewhere in a western state. Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were steaming toward Cuba; American war ships were steaming toward them. If they met in mid-Atlantic, World War III would almost certainly begin; Washington would be wiped out in hours … By the time [of Frost’s reading], I was even more drunk and … did not dare register what was happening until a day or so later. Frost began, as he almost never did, by reading someone else’s poem: “Shine, Perishing Republic” by Robinson Jeffers. The title alone might have outraged his audience but they were so preconditioned to reverence that nothing else could reach them. Moving to his own poem, “October,” he drew special attention to its relevance for the current autumnal crisis: Read More
December 15, 2015 From the Archive Brushfire at Christmas By Judy Longley This holiday season, remember the critical importance of fire safety. “Brushfire at Christmas,” a poem by Judy Longley, appeared in our Spring 1996 issue. Read More
December 10, 2015 From the Archive Favorites from the Archive By The Paris Review Fact: nearly every one of the 214 back issues in our archive, going all the back to 1953, is available for purchase—and they make great last-minute gifts. We’re recommending few of our favorites: the undisputed classics, the oddities, the sleeper hits. A Writers at Work interview with Rebecca West (Q: “Are there any advantages at all in being a woman and a writer?” A: “None whatsoever.”); fiction by Faulker and Gass; an epistolary squabble between Laura (Riding) Jackson, Martha Gellhorn, Stephen Spender, and the ghost of Yeats; work by thirty-eight poets, including Brainard, Sexton, Creeley, Schuyler, Baraka, and Swenson, and much more—there’s nothing not to love in the double-size twenty-fifth-anniversary issue from Spring 1981. And, perhaps best of all (which is saying a lot), issue 79 contains “The Paris Review Sketchbook,” a hundred-plus-page, mischievous oral history of the Review’s first quarter century: “Literary magazine people never work. They spend hours on end playing pinball machines in cafés.” —Nicole Rudick Read More