February 19, 2016 Poetry “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire By Sadie Stein In 1912, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in the journal Les Soirées de Paris; a year later the poem appeared in his collection Alcools. Even in Apollinaire’s lifetime, the melancholy piece—which uses the image of the ornate bridge spanning the flowing Seine to explore love and the passage of time—was one of his best known. In the years since, its fame has only grown: it was set to music in a much-covered 1953 song by Léo Ferré, made into a choral arrangement by Lionel Daunais, and later interpreted by the Pogues. A plaque bearing the last lines can be found on the bridge’s foot. In a rare recording, you can hear Apollinaire himself read “Le Pont Mirabeau”: In issue 202, the Paris Review staff contributed unsigned translations of ten Apollinaire poems. The following translation of “Le Pont Mirabeau” is by Frederick Seidel. Le Pont Mirabeau Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at Saint Louis Flows the Seine And our past loves. Do I really have to remember all that again And remember Joy came only after so much pain? Hand in hand, face to face, Let the belfry softly bong the late hour. Nights go by. Days go by. I’m alive. I’m here. I’m in flower. The days go by. But I’m still here. In full flower. Let night come. Let the hour chime on the mantel. Love goes away the way this river flows away. How violently flowers fade. How awfully slow life is. How violently a flower fades. How violent our hopes are. The days pass and the weeks pass. The past does not return, nor do past loves. Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. Hand in hand, standing face to face, Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream, And our dream Of getting back our love of life again. Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
December 9, 2015 On Poetry The I and the You By Ben Lerner Last night, Pioneer Works, an artists’ space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, hosted a celebration of John Ashbery, who turned eighty-eight this year. The poets Geoffery G. O’Brien, Mónica de la Torre, and John Yau read some of their work and their favorite poems by Ashbery. Before Ashbery came to the stage, Ben Lerner made the following remarks. —D. P. Good evening. Some of my favorite words written about John Ashbery were written by John Ashbery about Gertrude Stein. Reviewing Stanzas in Meditation, in the July 1957 issue of Poetry, he wrote: Read More
October 8, 2015 On Poetry On “Relativity” By Sarah Howe The poetry of astrophysics. A 2008 image of Omega Centauri from the Hubble telescope, revealing that the cluster “appears to harbor an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its center.” It’s not a new idea that poets and scientists should talk to one another. During a visit to Florence in 1638, the young John Milton sought out Galileo Galilei. By then a blind old man, Galileo was living under house arrest, confined by the Inquisition for asserting, after his celestial observations, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Years later, old and blind himself, Milton would pay homage—in his epic poem about the origins of our universe, Paradise Lost—to the great astronomer, who makes a cameo appearance with his telescope pointed at the sun’s dark spots. Five years ago I got my first job, as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; in the stray hours between thinking about Milton or Donne, I finished my first book of poems. In college, a wooden ramp across the four-hundred-year-old stone steps is the only outward sign of its most famous fellow. Fifty years ago, Stephen Hawking arrived fresh from his Ph.D. (as I did) to take up a research fellowship at Caius, then never left. Within that community, where I would sit down to lunch with friends in maths, genetics, or cognitive science, traces of those conversations began to creep into my notebooks and even into poems. When I got the commission to write a poem on light for this year’s National Poetry Day—today, in the UK—my first thought was paradoxically of its absence: the black holes whose mysteries Professor Hawking has spent his career working to unfold. Read More
September 11, 2015 On Poetry Letter from Shanghai By Eleanor Goodman How a scandal about a Chinese name has been received in China. This past February, the Chinese media widely announced that the Chinese poet Biqujibu, an ethnic Yi from western Sichuan, had been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, international category. Only twenty-three years old, he was selected for his very first book of poetry, a 1,500-line epic poem written in English, called A Poem Sacrifice for a Mountain Dream. Among the literary stars who wrote glowing reviews of the book were Biden Sitland (a famous American poet), Liffen Lushby (a prominent American translator, critic, and member of the Nobel selection committee), and Didian Linda (an American woman poet, a proponent of “rural writing”). This was an astonishing honor for a young ethnic-minority writer living in a country whose great literary works have been largely overlooked by American critics and readers. But of course it never happened. The entire thing, including the unconvincing names and the assertion that the Pulitzer committee created the “international” prize just for Biqujibu’s sake, was made up. Even the poet in question turned out not to be ethnic Yi, but Han (the majority ethnicity in China). News of this fantastically ambitious ruse never made it to the States. And why should it have? It had nothing to do with the U.S., really; it had to do with the distant fame of the Pulitzer, and a lust for outside recognition in a dusty mountain town somewhere near the border of Yunnan. Read More
September 11, 2015 On Poetry The Most Misread Poem in America By David Orr Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong. Frost in 1913. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr. A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold—for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching—the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: Read More
July 27, 2015 On Poetry Masks By Jake Orbison Confessional poetry and The Twilight Zone. A still from “The Masks.” Who wants to be a confessional poet? Those we’ve saddled with the label—Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, et cetera—usually react to it with frustration, if not outright hatred. That should come as no surprise. Most poetic movements are met by some degree of disapproval, or at least discomfort. Writers are practically obliged to deny this critical tendency: how dare we readers, critics, English students, reduce entire books, careers, or generations to a singular term. Maybe writers resent words like confessional, imagist, or even Romantic because they inevitably blur a poet’s individual edges into something bland, familiar, and more easily shared. Or maybe the anxiety stems from the fact that labels like this often hover over living writers like tombstones, as critics prepare to title their chapter in literary history. For whatever reason, confessional poets really hate being called confessional poets. Several of them have unleashed their outrage in the pages of The Paris Review. For example, Berryman: Read More