April 22, 2025 On Poetry Nights and Days By Henri Cole Henri Cole and James Merrill. Photograph by Dorothy Alexander, courtesy of Henri Cole. ARRIVAL IN KEY WEST I arrive in the afternoon. My baggage is lost in Orlando. It’s Epiphany. The airplane’s wings made A crucifix in the clouds; I let things happen. I spend the first night in my room with a head cold and fever. I sit in the jacuzzi. I phone James Merrill, as instructed. It is 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is dead from AIDS. I need a job and receive a phone message from Lucie Brock-Broido about an interview at Harvard. A cat meows on her tape machine in the background. My room feels warm. A ceiling fan hums overhead. There is sweat on my brow. The crow of roosters reminds me of my youth in the South and the unruly men in whose company I was reared. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s long poem “Roosters” (set in Key West) and how she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic in 1941 and is her war poem, with roosters standing in for a military presence. In a letter to her mentor Marianne Moore, she wrote that she wanted “to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.” In my military family, there was really only one version of masculinity, and I wanted something different. Perhaps writing poems was my own rebellious, antimasculine act, since gender is of no consequence, only our humanity and being alert to the secret vibrations of the universe. Still, Drawing with words, I Feel fearful, diligent, raw, Abject, and needy. Read More
March 28, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Nora Fulton on “La Comédie-Française” By Nora Fulton For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nora Fulton’s poem “La Comédie-Française” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review, no. 251. How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I wrote this poem in September 2024, but it was a reflection of a three-day seminar I’d attended the month before. The seminar, organized by two brilliant friends, Matt Hare and Sam Warren Miell, was about the French film production company Diagonale, and focused on the work of its central director, Paul Vecchiali. Of the films we watched, Encore and Corps à cœur were especially on my mind while writing. Both are romantic melodramas, but they undercut that tendency in lots of interesting ways—I think I find them moving precisely because they undercut that part of themselves. The seminar focused on the way that Diagonale functioned as a collective of people who would take up different roles in each film, both in front of and behind the camera. This was likened to the troupe established by Molière, to which the title of this poem refers. Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it? At the time of writing I was thinking quite closely alongside the poetry of the Swiss Francophone author Philippe Jaccottet. I had begun reading and translating his early poems during the summer, mostly just for myself—I was working on them between sessions of the seminar, and continued this work into the fall. I was particularly enamored with the way Jaccottet uses hesitation as a formal device in both his poetry and his journals (the incredible translations of which, by Tess Lewis, I was devouring during these revisions). It’s not easy to write hesitation without seeming either arrogant or naïve. How can one hesitate in the field of language, at all, anyway? But Jaccottet finds ways to write through a reticence that manages to fully surrender to knowing that it has no idea what it is reticent in the face of, as in his journal entry for May 1971. “I write exactly as I have said one should not write. I am not able to grasp the particular, the private—the exact details escape me, slip away; unless it is I who shies away from them.” Read More
January 22, 2025 On Poetry Prof. Dr. A. I. in Conversation with Tadeusz Dąbrowski By Piotr Czerski Tadeusz Dąbrowski on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre in Gdansk, Poland. After the poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s latest book, W metaforze (In metaphor), was published in Polish last year, he wanted to conduct an experiment. Dąbrowski’s collection of short essays, illustrated by Henryk Cześnik, analyzes a hundred or so metaphors drawn from the poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Zagajewski, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seamus Heaney, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Rather than be interviewed about the project by another writer, Dąbrowski decided he wanted to speak to an artificial intelligence, live, in front of an audience. This posed some technical challenges. While conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT have become both more sophisticated and popular in recent years, no public-facing software existed that could conduct a live interview. Piotr Czerski, a programmer and fellow poet, agreed to design a custom system for the event—a nontrivial task. His final “Prof. Dr. A. I.” Frankensteins (1) Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (to “hear” Dąbrowski’s spoken answers and convert them into text), (2) a large language model (LLM), specifically Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet (to generate questions in response to Dąbrowski’s answers), and (3) ElevenLabs’s AI Voice Generator (to read aloud the interview questions). The LLM had been fed the contents of Dąbrowski’s book and a series of prompts, written by Czerski, on which it modeled its interview questions. Several moments in the conversation were intentionally designed by Czerski—like the inclusion of an Easter egg (you’ll see!) and the system’s breakdown at the end of the twenty-minute event—but the rest of the conversation was generated in real time at Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre. The resulting interview—originally conducted in Polish and here translated into English by Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which was given a prompt to preserve the original tone of voice)—is thoughtful and wide-ranging. Dąbrowski and Prof. Dr. A. I. discuss, among other things, individual poets’ access to the universal and the power of poetry to disturb our relationship to language. They touch on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Blanchot, and Gaston Bachelard along the way. There were a couple of hiccups, as when Prof. Dr. A. I. included stage directions in its speech; when it concluded a joke with the word laughter, the audience did, in fact, laugh. Read More
January 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Emily Osborne on “Cruel Loss of Sons” By Emily Osborne An early draft of a stanza of “Cruel Loss of Sons.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. A selection from Emily Osborne’s translation of Egill Skallagrímsson’s “Cruel Loss of Sons” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 250. What was the challenge of this particular translation? The poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds, or poets, from the Viking Age—the late eighth to mid-eleventh century C.E.—is notoriously challenging to translate. It was composed orally and passed down orally for generations before being written down in manuscripts. As a result, in the extant manuscripts and runic fragments found on sticks that preserve the poetry, we find variations in redactions, illegible or illogical word choices made by scribes, and frequent references to obscure myths and cultural traditions. Simply understanding a skaldic poem requires a fair amount of background scholarship. The skaldic practice of using compound kennings, in which metaphors and symbols are substituted for regular nouns, adds another layer of complexity. For instance, in this poem, Egill calls his head the “wagon of thought,” his mouth the “word-temple,” and Odin the “maker of bog-malt.” Above and beyond gleaning the literal meaning of words, a translator must also be able to understand the frequent and surprising tone shifts that add shades of insinuation or emotion. Statements that seem illogical could be ironic or expressing litotes. In “Cruel Loss of Sons,” I found it particularly difficult to interpret Egill’s tone when he speaks of his strained relationship with his patron god, Odin, and the other gods after the death of his sons. In lines such as these, the emotions communicated are ambiguous: “I was on good terms / with the spear-god, / trusted in him, / tokened my loyalty, / until that trainer / of triumphs, champion / of chariots, cut cords / of closeness with me”; and “I’d scuffle with / the sea-god’s girl.” Is the poet indicating betrayal? Sorrow? Defiance? Incredulity? Anger? Self-deprecation? Absurdity? When translating, it can be hard to avoid pinning down the tone too neatly. My task with this poem was to allow grief to carve out its own emotional track. Read More
January 6, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Hua Xi on “Toilet” By Hua Xi For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Hua Xi’s poem “Toilet” appears in the new Winter issue of the Review, no. 250. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? While I was writing this poem, I was going back and forth from the U.S. to China to take care of a family member. There was a lot of “going” in my life. I was thinking a lot about things that would be “gone” soon. I think the word go has a lot of depth. It means to go somewhere and it also means to use the bathroom. People will say “I need to go” to excuse themselves politely in a social setting. There’s a feeling of freedom associated with the term that’s somewhat illusory, since the verb by itself, lacking an object, does not actually “go” anywhere at all. Read More
November 22, 2024 On Poetry Mallarmé’s Poetry of the Void By Quentin Meillassoux Édouard Manet, frontispiece for L’Après-midi d’un faune. Public domain. The following is drawn from one of three texts accompanying Florian Hecker’s Resynthese FAVN, a ten-CD box set to be released by Blank Forms in December. Hecker’s work points back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem L’Après-midi d’un faune—and its subsequent musical and choreographic interpretations by Claude Debussy and Vaslav Nijinsky—in which a faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion; asks the faun, “Did I love a dream?” Hecker, in turn, asks listeners to examine their own sensory perceptions, destabilizing the language of Robin Mackay’s libretto within the hallucinatory textures of his composition. This text, adapted from Meillassoux’s essay “The Faun, Hero of a Dyad,” translated by Maya B. Kronic, is a close reading of Mallarmé’s rhymes. What L’Après-midi d’un faune presents is a fully developed form of the poetic art: a form that resulted from Mallarmé’s discovery of the “Void” ten years earlier, as he put it in a 1866 letter to his friend the poet and physician Henri Cazalis. The tension inherent to his project from the moment of this “negative revelation” stems from the fact that it is combined with a refusal to renounce the vaulting ambitions of early Romanticism. Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine assigned to poetry the unprecedented task, following the example of the Psalms, of configuring a new religion to succeed an outdated Catholicism: a religion of modern man, heir to the universalist rupture of the French Revolution. Mallarmé never renounced this ambition, as can be seen in his Le Livre (probably written between 1888 and 1895), in which his own poetry becomes the centerpiece of a future ritual that resembles a kind of civic Mass. Read More