May 3, 2024 The Review’s Review Dream Gossip By The Paris Review From Alice Notley’s zine Scarlet #1. Digitized by Nick Sturm as part of Alice Notley’s Magazines: A Digital Publishing Project. “We asked our contributors to send us their dreams; most did not. A few did. One sent us some & then withdrew (“censored”) one. Dreams have gossip value—containing what didn’t happen that was so salacious. We offer this column as a random sampling of events in the night world; if you want to use it to remark on the nature of the poet’s (or the painter’s) soul, that’s your concern. We’re afraid that dream happenings are mere more of what goes on,” wrote the editors of the first Scarlet zine, Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver, introducing their new column, Dream Gossip. The first one featured dreams by Joe Brainard and Leslie Scalapino; a later column was illustrated by Alex Katz and prompted an essay by Notley on what we can and can’t learn from dreams. (Dream Gossip ran between 1990 and 1991, in the five issues of Scarlet, all of which have been digitized by the scholar Nick Sturm and are available here.) This spring, Hannah Zeavin interviewed Notley for our Writers at Work series. To mark the occasion, we sent a similar prompt to some of our contributors and staff, and are reviving Dream Gossip this week only. Welcome to our sampling of events in the night world! —Sophie Haigney, web editor Dream, April 9, 2024: I am eating chicken wrapped in cabbage at a table in my apartment. A book is open, possibly Middlemarch. The phone doesn’t ring but I pick up a landline with a coiled cord, and as I stare at the lines of text a voice on the phone says, “Nice place, but do you always just go looking into other people’s apartments?” Muffled but distinct, Beethoven is playing in someone’s car down on the street as they wait at the light. —Dan Poppick I was walking with C., deeply aware I was running late for dinner with my mother. She said, “Just walk me a bit further.” I did. We must have been in New York, because of the way the street looked at night, like it has rained even when it hasn’t. Eventually tried to beg off politely, wincing, pointing to a watch that wasn’t there. Then she tied a black truss around me, and from the truss was a leash, which she tied around her waist. I tried to turn on my heels and make it to my dinner. Impossible, obviously. —Hannah Zeavin Read More
May 2, 2024 Dinner Parties Emma’s Last Night By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. There had been concern when Jean and Emma got together that he was too serious, macho. I perhaps had it wrong that he had in art school driven to Chernobyl, uprooted a tree, and brought it back to France—a foreigner, I was capable of wild misunderstandings—but this was the story that had come to seem defining. Now he made a dance out of crumpling a wrapper, hopping up to throw it in the trash. He snapped his fingers to the music. It was cheerful music, music from my country though not from my era. In a city famous for ways of living developed, cultivated to exquisiteness, over centuries, we were engaged, that night, in a rare shabby tradition, that of the apéro dînatoire. Emma was throwing one ahead of moving in with Jean. Possibly the tradition was not exclusively Parisian. “They do it systematically in Greece,” Jean said. Read More
May 1, 2024 On Poetry Between the World and the Universe, a Woman Is Thinking By Sara Nicholson Poem by Alice Notley, in the collection Grave of Light. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press. Photograph by Sara Nicholson. Poets have always known how inadequate language is. The speaker of this poem knows it well. No matter how hard she tries to capture the sublime or primordial essence of being, words fail her. Alice Notley herself has written about this in an essay, first published in 1998, called “The Poetics of Disobedience”: “I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language.” Her poem “The World, All That Live & All That Occur” rubs up against the edge of the unsayable. Notice that it begins with “the world” and ends with “the Universe,” that its very structure points to the poem’s origin in and return to an infinite space beyond language. Paradoxically, impossibly, the poem is bounded by boundlessness. The poem’s situation is simple. A woman is looking out a window on a rainy day in New York City, 1977. She remembers a fight from the week before. She watches a man cross the street. She is also contemplating the nature of being, what she calls “the one organism.” This is how she defines it: “A monstrous life-death living not-dying / Caving-in upthrusting all over it- / Self like pits & mountains forever thing.” She’s speaking fast. These lines have a powerful rhythmic velocity. As she struggles to articulate an ontology, the words get squished together into a hilarious pileup of modifiers. It’s funny, awkward. She knows her definition is inadequate, but it’s the best she’s got. Read More
April 30, 2024 On Poetry Alice Notley’s Prophecies By David Schurman Wallace ALICE NOTLEY AT HOME WITH HER SON ANSELM, NEW YORK, 1984. PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN CATALDO, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems. I was not raised with any religion. We weren’t told that God was dead; having never existed, he’d had no opportunity to die. Instead, the material world had its own beauty, if occasionally cold or mathematical: the paradox of particle and wave, the litanies of astounding facts and figures (do you know how a snake sheds its skin?). It was a view of life ruled by information: sensible, finite, hard. And so, when poets find the confidence to prophesy, I often doubt. If someone tells me in so many words that they are about to deliver me another Book of Luminous Things, as Miłosz memorably titled one anthology, my brow furrows, even if I remain curious. When I was in college, I was in a workshop with a poet who was writing their dissertation on “vatic” poetry of the twentieth century. After looking up the word, I always found it slightly amusing. How easily the mystic could be isolated, another device in the poet’s bag of tricks. Poets are used to the idea of other voices speaking through them (don’t get them started on the etymology of inspire), but an overreliance on a private line to a higher power can begin to feel cheap. There’s a reason Berryman called Rilke a jerk (though of course, pot, kettle). Read More
April 29, 2024 On Poetry On Being Warlike By Joyelle McSweeney IN FRONT OF SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL IN PARIS, 2005. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX DUPEUX, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems. This is another useless plaque for you all including the schoolchildren my brother may have accidentally mortared. —Alice Notley, “The Iliad and Postmodern War” We’ve long set aside the notion of “greatness” in literary studies because it smacks of (male) cultural hoarding, an analogue to the practices that allowed and allow some men on earth—be they emperors or billionaires—to extract the resources that would have otherwise sufficed whole populaces—see: the conquest of the Americas, with its genocidal and ecocidal sequelae; see: the forced mining of rare earths by endangered child workers in Congo so that ever-newer models of iPhones might succeed each other like a procession of pale and feeble heirs. (As for me, a poet and mother writing this essay in the Rust Belt with one window open on the latest end of the world—a February day nearly thirty degrees warmer than the historical average—I don’t want to crouch in some bolt-hole like a prepper Scrooge McDuck on a tin-can pile of greatness. I can’t afford it. Then I read some billionaire is sending the world’s first cargo of junk to the moon by private rocket. Proof of junk concept.) Read More
April 26, 2024 The Review’s Review On Elias Canetti’s Book Against Death By Joshua Cohen Evert Collier, Vanitas – Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull, 1663, oil on panel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Read an excerpt from The Book Against Death on the Paris Review Daily here. Quixotic is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’s novel was his favorite novel but because Canetti, too, was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was re-spelled, and settled in Adrianople—today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders—before moving on to Rusçuk, known in Bulgarian as Ruse, a port town on the Danube whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to Manchester, UK, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in England, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. It was in Vienna that Canetti acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after—in chronological order—Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine but spent most of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices. At the time, his primary influence was journalistic—the feuilletons of Karl Kraus—which might have been a way of giving himself the necessary distance from the German-language novels of the Viennese generation preceding his own, the doorstops of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both of whom were known to him personally. His own contribution to fiction—his sole contribution to that quixotic art—came in 1935 with Die Blendung (The blinding), which concerns a Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who winds up being immolated along with his library. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto da Fé—a preferred punishment of the Inquisition—though Elias’s original suggestion for the English-language title was Holocaust. In nearly all the brief biographical notes on Canetti, this is where the break comes: when he abandons the theater, publishes his only fiction, and escapes the Nazis by leaving the continent. Exile brought him to England again, and to nonfiction, specifically to Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), a study of “the crowd,” be that in the form of an audience, a protest movement or political demonstration, or a rowdy group threatening to riot—any assemblage in which constituent individuality has been dissolved and re-bonded into a mass, as in the chemical reactions in which Canetti was schooled, or as in the atomic reactions that threaten planetary existence. Canetti’s singular study of collective behavior, published in 1960, stands at the center of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell or touch was ever completed, and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book “against” death, a version of which—the only available version of which—can be found on the pages that follow. Read More