Where do we go when we read? Are we in the room, or have we disappeared between the pages? In her new book, Voyagers, Melissa Catanese compiles anonymous black-and-white found photographs of people lost in that liminal space between this world and a fictional one. Their bodies are left behind, vulnerable to our gaze, while their minds travel to places we cannot imagine. A selection of these photographs appears below.
A lyric essay on shame, shamelessness, and writing a novel under duress.
I don’t like novels. I love a few novels and brought some of them with me: The Hour of the Star, Woman at Point Zero, Forever Valley, Maud Martha, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I also brought a few novels, or novel-like books, that I had not yet read but that I thought I might love: Suite for Barbara Loden, Ban en Banlieue, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights. The rest of the reading I planned to do was, directly or indirectly, about shame.
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I first heard the term good-enough mother in a conversation with a poet friend who was training to be a psychotherapist. This was years ago; I had just begun to feel what I think is meant by a maternal instinct, or to suspect that my desire to parent might be stronger than my suspicion of that desire—stronger even than my fear of ruining my life. Good-enough seemed possible, seemed right.
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I read about the difference between guilt and shame in an essay written about Odysseus by a literary critic long ago. I forget the argument, but I remember the difference, or the fact of there being a difference. Odysseus’s palm tree made an appearance, too—though that might have been in a different essay, one about nostalgia, or was it grief, possibly by someone else.
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In my novel, the main character—Eleanor—is a woman who does not want to be a mother. I sent a draft to a new friend, a writer I admired, who said she could relate. I thought of writing back to clarify but was ashamed.
The family next door appeared two days ago: a woman and a man, two small children, and an older man, probably a grandfather. Everyone is very busy, coming and going to and from the car, bright clothing and little backpacks, ready for summer adventures. Except the grandfather, who sits on the porch, softly playing the banjo. I think it’s a banjo, though it may be a mandolin. Read More
In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line.
© Ellis Rosen
Dear Poets,
Is there a word for the feeling when you know the wise thing to do, but you, always a fool, do the opposite? I wish I knew the word—I would have said it when this boy slept a night by my side. I would have said it when I first lost him, and then six months later, he came back for me. I would have said it, even if only a whisper, when I fell for him all over again, even harder than before. And now I would repeat it to myself, like a benediction, as I face the possibility of him drifting away.
That is the feeling for which I need a poem. The feeling when you know that he’s going to leave, and you’re remembering how hard it was to lose him the first time, and this time you’re in deeper, and you know you should cut it off now to reduce the heartache a little, but you foolishly continue to hope. The feeling every lover has, before sadness makes them wise.
Sincerely,
A Hopeful Fool
Dear Hopeful Fool,
I love your letter. What you’re seeking—a word for a feeling you know but have no language for—gets exactly at one reason I hold poems close: not necessarily to choose differently but to experience differently. For you, Mary Szybist’s “The Troubadours Etc.”:
Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
I think one word for what you describe is the one you use: hope. But hope’s wisdom buckles when the vision it was pinned to dissipates. So here is a sturdier word: faith. Faith’s intelligence is not bound to the outcome of any single situation; faith is something surer that you build when you choose the not-knowing. Faith marks an interior constitution, a way of being that says more about the self than it says about any external event. “At least they had ideas about love.” Read More
This year, The Paris Review will engage in an exciting mission to expand its reaches through the world of poetry. For each of our next four issues, our editor, Emily Nemens, will work in tandem with four quite different, highly esteemed poets to find and select poems that define the forefront of literature. We are delighted to announce our guest poetry editors below. By way of introduction, we have asked each to provide a short response to the following prompt: Where is poetry now?
Fall 2018, issue no. 226: Henri Cole
Henri Cole.
I think American poetry is much as I found it forty years ago as a student. The poets I loved are gone, but their poems have imprinted me with their depictions of bliss, loss, trembling, compulsion, desire, and disease.
I think being a poet in the world opposes the very nature of it, which is driven by profit. In a poem, we have only a little snapshot of the soul in a moment of being. Still, though there is no monetary gain, there is profit. Something enters the brain that wasn’t there before—an illumination, an aliveness, a triumphing over shame. Read More
ABBA.
If you were in the land of the living in ’93, you’ll remember a song called “All That She Wants,” by the Swedish band Ace of Base. I don’t know anybody who resisted that song. I, who usually hate songs like that (porny-poppy, slick, computer-generated), bought the CD and sang along with it happily. I can still play it on the guitar twenty-five years later.
I’m about to say something that has been said many times. The power of that song resides in a mistranslation. Not a mistranslation—better say a slippage. The chorus of the song goes (and I’m doing this from memory):
All that she wants
is another baby
she’s gone tomorrow, boy
a-a-all that she wants
is another baby
uh-uh-huh
The intended meaning was “All that she wants is another lover” (so watch out, you sensitive boy who might foolishly fall for her). But of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant. She’s done this many times, and it’s what she’s doing now … ”
It was a long time (long, long time) before it occurred to anybody that those lyrics were simply a choice example of botched English idiom. Baby can indeed be used to mean “lover,” but not here.
Wait, why? These are song lyrics. Doesn’t baby mean “lover” in song lyrics?
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.
Blast into The Paris Review’s archive with Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 Art of Poetry interview, where he recounts his spacey hallucinations; Robert Olen Butler’s story “ ‘Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover’ ”; and Cynthia Zarin’s poem “Saturn.” Read More