October 17, 2022 Letters Love, Loosha By Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie All photographs courtesy of Chip Livingston. In 1994, the internationally acclaimed fiction writer Lucia Berlin met the New York School poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, where they were both visiting writers. “We just clicked,” Berlin said in a 2002 interview. “We cut through right away into each other’s deep feelings. It was like falling in love, or going back to your childhood best friend in first grade, that kind of really pure friendship.” That friendship developed through a faithful and frequent correspondence, a literary exchange of about two letters per week over the course of a decade. Lucia was living in Boulder, Colorado, and later in Los Angeles; Kenward was dividing his time between New York City and Calais, Vermont. Despite the distance between them, the two writers came to depend on their intimate friendship and deeply valued their correspondence. In the following letters dated between May 28 and August 5, 2000, Lucia and Kenward discuss a New York production of Kenward’s musical play, Postcards on Parade, and the books each was working on at the time: Lucia’s memoir, Welcome Home, and Kenward’s fourteenth poetry collection, Blast from the Past, which he wanted to dedicate to Lucia. They write about the books they’re reading, Lucia’s recent move to a trailer park, and the thrilling poetic visuals she sees from her windows. —Chip Livingston Read More
October 14, 2022 The Review’s Review Twilight Zone Dispatch: The Last Stop and the Book of Revelation By Nicolette Polek A screening of “A Stop at Willoughby” at the Last Stop Willoughby Festival. Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER. Read More
October 13, 2022 Diaries Unconditional Death Is a Good Title By Bernadette Mayer Yellow tree, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. vladimir nabokov said: i confess i do not believe in time in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger didn’t finish the time part in time to publish it with the being part so everything-now must be not-being there is a pine needle stuck in the screen the side nearest me must be the being side the one further away’s the time side nabokov only said the first line even when you have nothing to do there’s not enough time in the day there are 5 stinkbugs on the back porch—the stinkbugs don’t make you feel good or likable. but the one beautiful tree we have that i can see is still fulsome. in years past it’s always been the best & most long-lasting foliage tree & now, even in this year of all the leaves blown down & drabness, as i see it, it’s a glorious tree between the locusts, acting as if there’s not a stinkbug around. if i’m so smart how come i don’t have another typewriter? i’d like to know what the word indexicality means too. Read More
October 13, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Taeko Kōno By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. The Japanese writer Taeko Kōno is a maestro of transgressive desire whose stories often—and deliciously—use food as a metaphor for sexual appetite. Kōno, who died in 2015, is considered one of Japan’s foremost feminist writers and one of its foremost writers of any kind. She won many of the country’s top literary prizes, including the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri. The single selection of her work in English, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, first published by New Directions in 1996 and translated by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, contains ten dark, deceptively simple stories about women who find the gender roles in Japanese society unbearable, and are warped by them. Read More
October 11, 2022 Diaries Attica Prison Diary By Celes Tisdale Enrance of the Attica Correctional Facility, 2007. Photo by Jayu, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Following the Attica uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale, a poet and a professor at Buffalo State College, began leading poetry workshops at the correctional facility—the first at a U.S. prison to be run by a non-inmate and an African American. Poems written by his students were published in 1974 as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, by Broadside Press, the first major Black-owned publishing house in America. Below are several noncontinuous entries from the diary Tisdale kept during that time, beginning with his first day at the facility. May 24, 1972 4:30 P.M. “Anticipation” Many times have I basked in the glory of applause, adulation, recognition as I interpreted the Black poet masters. But, today, I wait in painful/joyful anticipation of meeting those humanity-scarred men who must express themselves or perish from anonymity. Sitting here on my front porch waiting for Randy to pick me up, I suddenly realize that I have never sat on my front porch before. What enjoying faces on the buses! I really see their faces and talk with my neighbor next door for the first time. He offered to let me use his wax for my car. Can this heightening of perception of my surroundings be conscious preparation for what I’ll be doing later today and every Wednesday, 6–9 P.M., for sixteen weeks? Can you imagine conducting, possibly, the first Black poetry workshop inside a prison (maximum security)? Maybe I’m making history—maybe. Well, here’s Randy in his green Volks somehow very much like himself: frantic, intense, a constant gear shift. He’s Jewish. Read More
October 11, 2022 Bulletin Vivian Gornick Will Receive Our 2023 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Vivian Gornick. Photograph by Mitchell Bach. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “I could hardly believe my luck in having found her,” Vivian Gornick writes of the persona she created for her pivotal 1987 book Fierce Attachments, a rich, genre-redefining portrayal of fraught maternal bonds that the New York Times has anointed the best memoir of the past fifty years. “It was not only that I admired her style, her generosity, her detachment—such a respite from the me that was me!—she had become the instrument of my illumination.” That shock of wonderment and good fortune is familiar to all Gornick’s readers, and especially to the many writers of nonfiction who still pass around The Situation and the Story (2001)—in which those words appear—like a talisman. It’s a thrill to read Gornick’s precise, elegant account of how a voice and a narrative are made, and to see that process so masterfully demonstrated in her own work is often (as she herself has said of reading and rereading the likes of Edmund Gosse or Joan Didion) to become “enraptured.” It’s in that spirit that the Review will present Vivian Gornick with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at our seventieth-anniversary Spring Revel on April 4, 2023. Her engrossing Writers at Work interview, which appeared in issue no. 211 (Winter 2014), was the magazine’s second ever to focus on the art of memoir. Read More