Advertisement

Category Archives: On Poetry

April 2, 2021
On Poetry

A Continuous Musical Delight

By Vijay Seshadri

Published earlier this week, Poets at Work is the latest release from Paris Review Editions, the book imprint of The Paris Review. The anthology gathers thirteen Art of Poetry interviews from the magazine’s nearly seven decades of history. In the book’s preface, which appears below, The Paris Review’s poetry editor, Vijay Seshadri, explains the process by which he selected this baker’s dozen, as well as the particular pleasures of the magazine’s Writers at Work interview series.

The Paris Review’s first Art of Poetry interview was with T. S. Eliot, and was published in issue no. 21, Spring–Summer 1959. As the magazine had been publishing interviews since its inception, in 1953, transforming in the process a commonplace American journalistic feature into something like an art form, it isn’t unreasonable to ask why it took so long to get around to a poet. (Robert Penn Warren had been interviewed, but about his fiction, and an early attempt to corral Robert Frost had failed.) Poets sensitive about the prerogatives of their art should be reassured, though, just by the nature of the Paris Review interview itself—a natural-seeming object that is actually delicate and labor intensive and involves the intersection of many serendipitous elements, not the least of which is the rare sympathy between interviewer and subject that brings a conversation to life. Also, along with the usual chances and mischances of publishing, when it came to a magazine that saw itself as canonical (in an era when there was such a thing as the canonical) and at the same time improvisational, secular, hip, casual, and cosmopolitan, editorial choices must have been made under multiplying, contradictory pressures.

Whatever the reasons, once the interviews of poets got going, they sprinted along, energized perhaps by the editors’ coming to recognize that poets are very good at talking about themselves. The resulting hundred-plus conversations from which this selection was made are rich and various, and so satisfying across the board that choosing just a baker’s dozen was an excruciating job. Even limiting the set to poets born before the historical watershed of World War II left over sixty to choose from—interviews with fathers of civilizations (Frost, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, W. H. Auden), poets unfairly neglected or forgotten (Conrad Aiken, Charles Tomlinson, May Sarton, Amy Clampitt, John Hall Wheelock, Karl Shapiro), masters outside the anglophone tradition (George Seferis, Yevgeny Yevtushenko), and several of the most celebrated poets of the Silent Generation (Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright). Read More
January 29, 2020
On Poetry

The Other Billy Collins

By Anthony Madrid

William Collins (1721-1759)

Let me tell you something. The eighteenth century was just straight up not a good time for poetry. Of course, there are exceptions; we’re talking about a hundred years (or, if you’re in graduate school, we’re talking about 160 years). Still, the principle is essentially sound. 1700–1800: bad poetry.

Well, “bad.” Better say unreadable. Some inventive genius could probably set up a pay schedule where the big eighteenth-century poets get their fair share of huffin’-and-puffin’ adjectives. But adjectives aside, the desire to read the stuff is small, vanishingly small.

It wasn’t a bad century for prose. Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell. Or zoom in close: Have you ever looked at Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Epictetus? Or Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters? Anybody today’d be damn proud to be compared to any of those cats. Whereas, if somebody compares your poetry to that of Thomas Gray, you are being made fun of.

So why in the world do I read eighteenth-century poetry. Am I a pervert? Do I like things that should not be liked? Answer: I’m no different from you, when it comes to taste. The difference between us is I’m interested in escaping my own perspective as to what’s good and bad in poetry. I want to know what in the world those wigged heads saw in Shenstone, Young, Akenside, Lyttleton…

You don’t care about that. You don’t have a whole lot of time for poetry in the first place, let alone stuff nobody’s read in 150 years. Unless … maybe you’re a little bit like me, after all? Maybe you’re afraid the poetry that you yourself are writing—though esteemed and popular now—will one day be a prompt for baffled speculation. “What in the world did those fapoons in the twenty-first century think poetry was for anyway?”

Read More
May 15, 2019
On Poetry

Et in Arcadia Ego

By Anthony Madrid

Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, ca. 1514–18.

One winter morning, seventeen years ago, Nadya woke me up with the words “Anthony, get dressed.” She explained there was a house on 57th Street (Hyde Park, Chicago), with all the windows and doors open, students everywhere, people walking out with grocery bags of books. “Everything’s free. He just wants the house emptied ASAP.”

I got down there quick as I could, but most of what had been in the house had already taken a walk. I gathered that the previous owner of the place had been a high school French teacher, age 1,000. The current owner of the house, age I-wanna-say-sixty, was visibly drunk, grinning and gabby, on the porch. Somebody said he worked in Hollywood.

I went upstairs. There was a hill of books in the middle of the floor of a ransacked bedroom. I picked up a book and bagged it. Here are photos of the book I bagged, 9 February 2002:

Don’t get too excited. It’s a 1772 Venice print of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. As you can see, it’s bound in vellum. In the condition shown in the photograph, the book is probably worth a hundred bucks.

Any Italian literary person would know the name “Sannazaro” in the same way people in my village would know the name “Sir Philip Sidney.” I’m not saying their merits are equivalent, just talking about name recognition. Both writers are classics, but the fame of each is hobbled by his investment in Renaissance pastoral, a much-maligned department of literature.

Read More
January 30, 2019
On Poetry

Where Stevie Smith’s “From the Greek” Is From

By Anthony Madrid

Anthony Madrid uncovers the source text of a small poem by Stevie Smith

Poet Stevie Smith/Wikimedia Commons

Stevie Smith’s first book of poetry was called A Good Time Was Had by All. It came out in 1937; she would have been around thirty-five at the time. That book happens to contain one of my favorite four-line poems in all the galaxies; it deserves to be better known. Here it is:

From the Greek

To many men strange fates are given
Beyond remission or recall
But the worst fate of all (tra la)
’s to have no fate at all (tra la).

Allow me to spell out why this is good.
Read More
April 30, 2018
On Poetry

Nabokov Reads “The Ballad of Longwood Glen”

By The Paris Review

Vladimir Nabokov.

As a capstone to National Poetry Month, we bring you a 1964 recording of Vladimir Nabokov at 92Y reading his poem “The Ballad of Longwood Glen,” which he describes as “a short poem I composed in Wyoming, which is one of my favorite states of existence, and it is also one of my favorite ballads.” Nabokov was quite particular about pronunciations, particularly that of his own name. As Matt Levin, who spent long hours at the Morgan Library listening to the archival audio of our Writers at Work interviews for our podcast, wrote recently:

The four-beat leitmotif that George Plimpton conjures out of the name Nabokov never fails to delight me in its voluptuousness—Nǝ (pause) Beau (pronunciation drawn out like an arch gossip columnist) Kavv (the fricative subtle, fading away like a comet tail). It corresponds perfectly to the wily quote that Nabokov himself gives about the pronunciation of his name—“My New England ear is not offended by the long, elegant middle o of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.”

In the recording below, there are precisely zero despicable gutterisms to be found:
April 18, 2018
On Poetry

“First of All I’m Naked”: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally

By Eileen Myles

Michael Lally reading at Folio Books in Washington, D.C., c. 1977, with Doug Lang and Terence Winch.

Michael Lally’s Another Way to Play, out next week, is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won’t do it in a day or in many days, but during the passage of reading it you will learn something about time. Another Way to Play seems to offer advice—and it’s advice from self to self, which might be the only way to enact advice truly. Plus, who is that “another”? Somebody else?

As I’m climbing over the rocks, the poems of Michael Lally, this incomplete utopia, a rugged landscape of a book, it occurs to me that what Michael takes on is nothing less than the feat of being alive and the exploding and strewn nature of that exactly on its own terms (living in a body) while this writer keeps trotting out his own arrogance like a family joke, and deep humility is in there, too, humility is the gas station of so much of what Michael Lally does and is, poet and man. Lally is mostly a straight guy, but you may viscerally experience the embrace of another man in “Watching You Walk Away,” which was dedicated to Gregory Millard, one man who died collectively—of AIDS, so there’s an imputation here—of being a survivor of love, even being a man of a certain age or moment who knows that being a loving man and loving men now has both its glory and its price:

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
in each others arms
distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
down in the dark to pick up in the morning
I like your brown eyes when you talk

This collected poems or collected poem is constructed of similar yet all different mostly brave moments. It’s a compendium of what one is possibly brave enough to do—to labor, to fail, to lounge, to love. Lally’s not fessing up, but he’s proud. This is undoubtedly the book of a proud man. Proud to a fault, and he’s the first to tell you that as well. I mentioned family before. Yet what one more likely feels throughout the four-hundred-odd pages of Another Way to Play is that you’re kind of in a relationship with this guy. Whether you’re male or female. Which is kind of octopussy, but stylistically Lally is a dancer, habitually reeling from form to form. It’s a broken book in the best sense. There’s no whole here, the self is never resolved, but what’s delivered, weltered in poem form, is a novelistic series of impressions. It’s a real thing and a changing thing. An aesthetic and a biographical one. Years ago I read in James Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” that Schuyler approved of Michael Lally because he looked you straight in the eye. Here we’ve got an extended Lally poem (“The Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets”) that tells us much the same thing—that “Jimmy knew what mattered.” The men’s mutual admiration, their like for one another has a special feeling, a leveling affect. They invite us into their intimacy. Their public “like.” Which makes me want to step out too and acknowledge that I’m discovering that I’m extremely influenced by Michael Lally and I hadn’t thought so much about that until I was dwelling in Another Way to Play. Because his affect occurs through so many different gestures. In the most existential way, his poem is an act. Read More