June 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Roadside Memorials By Jane Stern Photo: Chenin Gilles Today I’m in Paris—Paris, Texas. It’s a sweet little town heading toward the Arkansas border. Some people would say it’s in the middle of nowhere, but Parisians regard it as very cosmopolitan. To prove their kinship to Paris, France, the Texas Parisians have erected a sixty-five-foot Eiffel Tower replica, but this one is crowned with a giant red metal cowboy hat. Other than the Eiffel Tower, there’s not much sightseeing to be done in Paris. I know because I drove around the town, which took ten minutes, and nothing caught my eye. That is, except the graves. Not cemetery graves, but roadside grave markers. No bodies are buried here, but homemade wooden crosses and bouquets of faded plastic flowers mark the places where a loved one died along the lonesome highway. Read More
May 31, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Complaints By Anthony Madrid (Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie.) 1. Suppose you want to know whether a given Czesław Miłosz poem rhymes in the original. Or you want to know if it’s in meter. If you don’t speak Polish, friend, you have some serious fuss ahead of you. Tell you one thing. You won’t find out by reading the introduction to any English translation of Miłosz I’ve ever looked at. Questions of this sort are regarded as matters of absolutely no interest. Why would you want to know anything about a poet’s prosody. Read More
May 25, 2017 Our Correspondents Paradox Formation By Anelise Chen Crystal Liu, the moon and the tides, “please be gentle” (detail), 2016, gouache, ink, and watercolor on paper, 47″ × 104″. Courtesy Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco. LOS ANGELES BASIN The mollusk writes this from a state of longing, far from the highland plateau where she had been only two weeks earlier. This sea-level suburb where she’s staying should be a more natural place for a mollusk to be, but now it’s two A.M. and she finds she’s out walking. The terrain unfolds in grids: straight boulevards bordered with tidy squares of lawn. The symmetry oppresses her. She catches herself staring with heightened intensity at garden flagstones and piles of pebbles, at gnarly shrubs vaguely reminiscent of juniper. What she’s looking for is so far away. There are no sandstone outcrops here, no stands of cottonwoods lining a wash, no dots of evergreen on the hills or snow on distant peaks. Two weeks earlier: the mollusk’s brief stint in New Mexico had come to a compulsory end, so she loaded up the Camry and drove off in a daze, enclosed momentarily with all of her belongings, like a snail. Why did she have to go? Snails hated to go; slow, trepidatious mollusks, once a snail gets settled, she generally prefers to stick around. It’s a desperate snail who crosses the road, and if she does, she is wise to get across as quickly as possible. Read More
May 17, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Limericks By Anthony Madrid Just a few words about the rhymes and pictures below. The limericks date from 2013. I wrote more than three hundred that year, and might have continued indefinitely except I was made to stop. At first, they were a form of self-medication. In the aftermath of turning in my Ph.D. thesis and finally graduating (June 2012), I was completely numb. Only Edward Lear’s limericks did me any good, so I wound up studying them. And then I just wanted there to be more of him … Naturally, all good things have to be taken too far and made monstrous. Some days I made four or five limericks, or four or five versions of the same limerick, texting every one of ’em to the people in my life who, in my judgment, did not then and do not now deserve God’s mercy. Everyone was fed up. So I promised to knock it off come Christmas 2013. Which promise was faithfully observed. The pictures, meanwhile, are newborns, less than six weeks old. These five specimens together, and buckets more just like them, are slated to appear in book form in 2018. Prelude Books has graciously agreed to, et cetera. Of these items, “Minsk” is the most authentic (where authentic is defined as “closely approximating the verbal manner of Edward Lear”). Elsewhere, the rhyme {Bensonhurst | mention first} will be judged satisfactory by persons who think all rhymes should be like that. “Bozeman,” Montana is where my life partner, Nadya, is from. The image depicts the two of us very accurately. In closing, it’s vital that everyone understand that the pictures were not done by me, but by my friend Mark Fletcher, who also designed the covers of both my books. I said for years that I had never heard this man’s voice. It’s still true to this day. All we ever do is email. We were put in touch, seven or eight years ago, by our mutual friend Michael Robbins, who, incidentally, headed the movement to annihilate the limericks juggernaut. Anyhow, I want to underscore that Mark Fletcher alone is responsible for the gorillas, the blankets, the verisimilitude of the Louvre exterior, and for ninety-six percent of any actual value attaching to this whole enterprise. Read More
May 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Canine Cremains By Jane Stern Photo: Kippelboy Because I have owned many dogs, I have many containers of what remains of them. Without meaning to, I’ve become a hoarder of canine cremains. When one of my dogs dies, the vet will ask me how I wish to dispose of the deceased. I am at that moment of two minds. One is abject and hysterical grief. The other is: I want to get home as fast as I can, cry, and drink a lot of bourbon. So I pretty much say yes to any options the vet offers, and then I run out the door. If I lived on a farm in a rural area, I could dig a hole in the ground and bury the dog, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less. Living in suburbia, the options are more limited. I can have the dog cremated with a bunch of other dead dogs or have the dog cremated separately, after which the facility sweeps its ashes into a pretty urn or wooden box. It arrives a few weeks later with a heartfelt note and a sentimental poem. Read More
May 3, 2017 Our Correspondents H.D. Notebook By Anthony Madrid H.D. Last year, having been invited to participate in a public discussion of the poet H.D., I decided to explore H.D.’s fictional works, virtually none of which appeared during her lifetime. Many of these, even just ten years ago, were available only to scholars willing to visit the Beinecke at Yale, where most of her manuscripts and papers are housed. But almost everything’s in print now. Though I admire H.D.’s poems, I did not expect my prose project to be pleasurable, and it wasn’t. I don’t know how many of her novels and novellas I read, but I found all of them (with one exception, dealt with below) annoying. Mainly they are exactly what people mean by “self-indulgent.” The reader is exposed to the spectacle of the writer hunting around for a style worthy of her personal melodrama. Inefficiency and joyless obscurity abound. Even the one I liked is not a great book or anything. But none of this matters. I say I didn’t find the project pleasurable, but I did find it engrossing. I became very invested in coming to some kind of reckoning with H.D.’s personality, mainly because I saw that over the years I’ve known and been friends with quite a few H.D.s—at least four. The key difference being that the H.D.s in my life could never have written any of H.D.’s mature poetry. But all of them could have written her novels. Except for Bid Me to Live. Read More