June 28, 2022 On Poetry Marilyn the Poet By Elisa Gonzalez Monroe in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), from the July 1953 issue of Modern Screen. “It’s good they told me what / the moon was when I was a child,” reads a line from a poem by Marilyn Monroe. “It’s better they told me as a child what it was / for I could not understand it now.” The untitled poem, narrating a nighttime taxi ride in Manhattan, flits between the cityscape, a view of the East River, and, across it, the neon Pepsi-Cola sign, though, she tells us, “I am not looking at these things. / I am looking for my lover.” The very real moon comes to symbolize the confusion of adult experience. I quote these lines back to myself when I feel acutely that I understand less, not more, than I used to. Read More
April 24, 2022 On Poetry Listen to Henri Cole Read Poems from the Paris Review Archive By Henri Cole Henri Cole IN NAGS HEAD, NORTH CAROLINA, 1978. What a pleasure to read around in the Paris Review archive of poems from its pages. I experienced anew the capriciousness of taste and the ardor of individual decades. As the guest editor of the Review’s daily poetry newsletter this week, I chose poems that I consider keepers for my lifetime. All are by poets I read avidly in my twenties and thirties, when I was still unformed and seeking liberators. For me, Baudelaire, Miłosz, Walcott, Gregg, Glück, Wright, and Schuyler are masters in the craft of language. Their words (assembled into art) transport me. Even now, at sixty-five, I am always looking for new liberators. Thank goodness poetry is unkillable. Thank goodness poetry is continually renewed by a rediscovery of the past, by new translations, and by the ache of the young. Listen to Henri Cole read his selections here, and read his commentary below. Read More
March 23, 2022 Poetry Remembrance Day By Spencer Matheson Illustration by Alex Merto. Spencer Matheson is a novelist and poet. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions. He lives in Paris, and teaches at the École normale supérieure.
March 4, 2022 Poetry The One Who Happened By Xi Chuan Illustration by Thomas Colligan. He happened to hear the world was square, like the square table at home that could be used for eating or playing cards on. He happened to hear that the emperor is made so by divine right, but he was just a commoner so that’s nothing. He happened to have not heard of Hitler; that guy with a little mustache avoided him for nineteen years. He happened to have not heard of the Cultural Revolution, and looked at himself in the mirror in a positive light. Read More
December 15, 2021 Poetry Two Poems By Kathleen Ossip Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil Henry Hudson Wood is a masculine substance. Witness the Arts and Crafts movement, the men at the helm of it. Witness, for that matter, this room: Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling. The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak. The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer. The table I write on, particleboard with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin. And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles, right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers. What does geometry illuminate? I’m the sad cousin of a mind. Read More
December 9, 2021 Poetry Two Self-Portraits By Tove Ditlevsen Illustration by Na Kim Self-Portrait 1 I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences. I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths. I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty. Read More