September 15, 2016 Inside the Issue Water Source By Susan Stewart The genesis of “Channel,” a poem in our Fall 2016 issue. “Channel,” as part of the “habitus” exhibition. Photos by Jessica Naples Grilli. I grew up along the Susquehanna, and taught for many summers along the Tiber, and today most warm early mornings you’ll find me rowing my shell on the Schuylkill. I learned to row in middle age because I wanted to see my city, Philadelphia, from the perspective of the river and to know what it would be like to be buoyed by its surface. Was this how I prepared? Or was it water plants and buried objects, Whitman and Wang Wei, Charles Cros and Works and Days, rhymes and chants, imagining how we pass in parallel at disparate speeds? “Channel” began and begins with the words “salt” and “sweet.” I had been churning them in my thoughts for months—streams and the sea, the tears in our eyes, and the moisture in our words. A desire, after a hard winter, to write a long poem about a river. “Channel”: from canna, canalis, a pipe, a groove, a reed, a bed of running water. As I sketched and made notes, I wondered what views the poem could open, and how much history, where it would emerge (somewhere in a spring and in Spring) and where it would end (eventually at Siracusa, site of the sweet/salt legend of Arethusa and dear to my heart). In other words, it started with some words, as most poems start. Read More
August 9, 2016 Inside the Issue Redeeming Greek Speak: An Interview with Benjamin Nugent By Daniel Johnson Our Summer issue features Benjamin Nugent’s story “The Treasurer,” which follows Pete, a junior at UMass Amherst, through the aftermath of the initiation ceremony for his being elected treasurer of Gamma House. Before a wide audience of partygoers, his brothers bring in a stripper and command him “to go forth and prove your faithfulness by giving your finest cunnilingus to this girl.” Video of the “ceremony” leaks throughout campus and sparks controversy on Gamma’s Facebook page: Should the ritual be considered rape? And if so, who was the victim? Nugent’s story “God” was published in the Review’s Fall 2013 issue, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2014 and The Unprofessionals. Both stories feature in his forthcoming collection, Fraternity. On the patio of a bar in Brooklyn, beneath a pinewood trellis and twilight the color of bruises, I asked Nugent some questions as he chain-smoked American Spirit blues. Read More
July 6, 2016 Inside the Issue “Bad Behavior”: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs By Caitlin Love Photo of Alexia Arthurs by Kaylia Duncan. “Bad Behavior,” a short story by Alexia Arthurs in our new Summer issue, follows Stacy, the teenage daughter of Jamaican immigrants living in Brooklyn. After a series of troubling events at home and school, she’s sent to live with her grandmother in Jamaica. Arthurs, a graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was born in Jamaica and moved to New York with her family at the age of twelve. She wrote to me about her story by e-mail. INTERVIEWER Where did “Bad Behavior” come from? ARTHURS I wondered what an immigrant mother sacrifices when she raises her children in America—so many of her energies are directed toward survival and providing. I babysat to pay for my undergraduate education in New York City, and I noticed that women who were more financially settled—who could afford expensive childcare and someone to clean for them—were particularly concerned with the anxieties of their children. It’s interesting to consider which mothers have that privilege, to be present in a vigorous way. “Bad Behavior” deals with this—“Not all mothers could afford to be kind.” Also, once I knew of a young girl who was dangerously reckless, and I remember that someone suggested sending her to Jamaica as a last resort. I don’t know what became of the girl. Read More
June 15, 2016 Inside the Issue My Twinkie Poem By Monica Youn On “Goldacre,” a poem in our new Summer issue. Photo by Rainier Arenas I wrote “Goldacre”—my “Twinkie” poem—in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding last year’s Best American Poetry anthology, when the white writer Michael Derrick Hudson published a poem under the name Yi-Fen Chou, sparking a media frenzy. As one of the few #ActualAsianPoets to have had a poem (“March of the Hanged Men,” first published in The Paris Review) included in the anthology, I was unwillingly sucked into the whole mess. But after my initial queasiness subsided, the controversy stirred up a familiar set of questions for me. Read More
June 6, 2016 Inside the Issue News That Stays News By Robyn Creswell Can a poem be topical twice? From the cover of Adonis’s Selected Poems. The speaker of “Elegy for the Times”—a long prose poem by the Syrio-Lebanese poet Adonis, a master of Arabic verse—is not an “I” but a “we,” an anonymous collective that travels through a nightmarish landscape of tombstones, locusts, and sand. The journey is what the ancient Greeks called a catabasis, a descent from the interior to the coast, “the sea’s abyss.” Adonis’s “we” is a community in flight, but the end of the poem suggests that the sea may offer no escape, or that it may be the final, most harrowing obstacle. The poem, which I translated for our Summer issue, is visionary in scope, yet attentive to haunting details: the light glinting off a helmet, the stains of sweat on a dancer’s loincloth. Beyond the controlled hysteria of its images, I was drawn to the poem because it seems to have leaped from today’s headlines, conjuring the civil war in Syria and the vast migrations it has provoked. The scale of this ongoing tragedy defies the imagination, yet Adonis’s elegy is one of those rare works that aligns with Seamus Heaney’s definition of poetry: “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” (Heaney was thinking of Ireland’s own time of troubles.) Read More
October 6, 2015 Inside the Issue Eileen Myles on Reading Out Loud By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of I Must Be Living Twice. Photo: Catherine Opie “The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time,” Eileen Myles tells Ben Lerner in our new Fall issue: There’s a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I’m always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never read it out loud to myself until I’m in front of people … What is so great—I’ll even say holy—about reading a poem for the first time in front of people is that you’re sharing what you felt in the moment of composition, when you were allowing something. When I’m writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don’t mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness and that’s the birth of the poem. Writing is all performance. Something’s passing through … The performance is us writing what’s using us, remarking upon it. (Subscribe now to read the whole Art of Poetry interview.) Read More