March 30, 2017 From the Archive Joanne Kyger in the Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Elsa Dorfman. We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with The Conversant, Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic duality. Living in Japan and seeing the guardian warriors outside the temple doors with their fierce animal-like expressions, I finally realized they were protectors. Fear creates a wall one can be afraid to pass by. If they scared you off, you didn’t have enough courage or knowledge to enter further. I think I was fearful of the energy of the animal self, whatever I thought that was. The Review published Kyger’s poems in the late sixties and early seventies; digital subscribers should check out her work in our Spring 1966, Summer 1970, and Spring 1973 issues. Below is my favorite, “June 7 … ” Read More
March 23, 2017 From the Archive Low Tide on “The Brown Coast” By Daniel Johnson Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. If you ask me, there’s nothing funnier than a man seeing all that he’s created—built, grown, accrued, whatever—brought to ruin by the simple, ruthless, infuriating existence of his hapless neighbors. Such is the fate of Bob Munroe, the tragic hero in Wells Towers’s short story, “The Brown Coast,” from our Spring 2002 issue. Bob wakes up on his face in his uncle Randall’s shack along the muddy beaches in Florida, where he’s been granted quarter while he works things out with his wife, on the condition that he fix the place up. Walking the beach one day, he finds a wondrous tide pool tucked at the reaches of a jetty. At low tide, it’s teeming with exotic sea creatures, which Bob—destitute and in need of beautiful things—collects and deposits in an aquarium in Randall’s shack. Read More
March 17, 2017 From the Archive The Light of the World By Dan Piepenbring I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. —Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37, 1986 Derek Walcott has died at eighty-seven. In the days to come, we’ll say more about his life and legacy—for now, I wanted to share the last three stanzas from his poem “The Light of the World,” which appeared in our Winter 1986 issue, and invite you to share in the “ecstasy” of his art, as he describes in his Writers at Work interview. He will be missed. Read More
March 14, 2017 From the Archive Groggy from Stolen Phenobarbs By Christian Kiefer James Leo Herlihy. In recent years, I’ve taken to buying the oldest issues of The Paris Review, despite the fact that the entire run is now available digitally right here on the website. There’s a certain joy in paging through the actual paper, the names within both familiar and unfamiliar, the styles waxing and waning with the years, sometimes bringing to them a level of obscurity that feels utterly lost. But other times, there might come a name I don’t recognize, and with it a story or poem that draws me toward something essential, something I didn’t know I needed. For me, James Leo Herlihy was just such a surprise. I still don’t really know how to say his last name without sounding like an idiot, and this alone may have provided reason enough for me to read the first piece of his I encountered in a crumbling physical copy of The Paris Review’s ninth issue, Summer 1955, and titled, perhaps fittingly (or not), “A Summer for the Dead.” Read More
March 13, 2017 From the Archive Why Did They Resist Her? By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941; he died in 2008. A few years before, facing a nightly curfew as Israeli tanks rumbled through his streets, Darwish spoke to BOMB about the genesis of his interest in poetry: Read More
February 28, 2017 From the Archive Talking Out of School By Dan Piepenbring Stephen Spender. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Stephen Spender, born on this day in 1909, was interviewed for our Art of Poetry series in 1980. It’s a gossipy, unrestrained interview, with asides about Yeats, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, and Auden, among others. But maybe Spender was running his mouth too much; the interview occasioned a pair of heated responses from Martha Gellhorn and Laura Riding Jackson, both of whom disputed the facts he’d relayed to his interviewer. Their letters were so long, and so full-throated in their denunciations, that we published them in their entirety in our Spring 1981 issue, allowing Spender to respond to both. Read More