June 1, 2021 Redux Redux: The Modest Watercolor By The Paris Review 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. Derek Walcott, ca. 2012. Photo: Jorge Mejía Peralta. This week at The Paris Review, we’re dabbling in watercolors. Read Derek Walcott’s Art of Poetry interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Jefferson’s Beauty,” and Michael J. Rosen’s poem “Watercolors.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37 Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986) What I tried to say in Another Life is that the act of painting is not an intellectual act dictated by reason. It is an act that is swept very physically by the sensuality of the brushstroke. I’ve always felt that some kind of intellect, some kind of preordering, some kind of criticism of the thing before it is done, has always interfered with my ability to do a painting. I am in fairly continual practice. I think I’m getting adept at watercolor. I’m less mucky. I think I could do a reasonable oil painting. I could probably, if I really set out, be a fairly good painter. I can approach the sensuality. I know how it feels, but for me there is just no completion. I’m content to be a moderately good watercolorist. But I’m not content to be a moderately good poet. That’s a very different thing. Read More
June 1, 2021 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Issue By The Paris Review Issue no. 237 of The Paris Review is here for your summer reading! The Summer 2021 issue, online today, features interviews with Arundhati Roy and Roz Chast; fiction by Adania Shibli and five emerging writers; the first English translation of a monologue by Vladimir Nabokov; poetry by Kaveh Akbar, George Bradley, and Ada Limón; an essay on tennis by Joy Katz; and art by Elizabeth Ibarra paired with an essay by Aimee Nezhukumatathil—and, of course, much more! “I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer,” Arundhati Roy tells managing editor and interviewer Hasan Altaf in the Art of Fiction No. 249. Roy, the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction—including the 1997 Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the 2019 essay collection My Seditious Heart—describes the singular pleasure of losing herself in novel writing, with detours along the way to discuss her architecture-school days in New Delhi and her time spent reporting in the forests of Bastar. “I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years,” she says. “There is never a time when I am more alive … Being in that universe, that imperfect universe, is like being in prayer.” “I don’t think a cartoon is just an illustration of a funny idea. The drawing style has to go along with the words, and be funny also,” Roz Chast tells Liana Finck in the Art of Comics No. 3. Chast, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the author of works such as 2014’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, considers how words and pictures “are conjoined twins. They’re interconnected in a primary way. When I was at art school, and a painter, I missed the words, and when I write, I miss drawing.” Also in this issue: fiction by Anuk Arudpragasam, Camille Bordas, Lydia Conklin, Kenan Orhan, and Christina Wood, and poetry by Jennifer Barber, Charles Baudelaire, Marianne Boruch, Daisy Fried, Ishion Hutchinson, John Kinsella, Michael Klein, Jim Moore, Jesse Nathan, Barbara Tran, and Matthew Zapruder. Enjoy! And don’t forget to subscribe for full access to both the Summer 2021 issue and our complete sixty-eight-year archive.
May 28, 2021 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring By The Paris Review William Hilton, John Keats (detail), ca. 1822, oil on canvas, 30 x 25″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Poets can be divided into two groups: those who dutifully tortured “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” in secondary school (POET = WORRIED ABOUT DYING scrawled unhelpfully in the margins) without ever giving its author a second thought, and those for whom Keats serves as spiritual teacher. To his followers, Keats is a poet’s poet, is the poet’s poet, a writer whose brief span compressed all the love, pain, and existential uncertainty of a lifetime, which the finest of his fifty-four published poems animate. He believed pain and trouble were their own education, “school[ing] an intelligence to make it a soul.” His was a rare gift, and yet his best poems weren’t earned without effort; early examples are uneven and clumsy, and for that perseverance and learning by shrewd emulation, we admire him all the more. His death at twenty-five trapped that quiddity in amber. “When I have fears that I may cease to be”—and then he did; he died young, corroborating that fear, poised and brave in his final moments, and leaving the rest of us neurotic types (what sort of reasonable person isn’t hung up on the terror of premature death?) wringing our hands, staring into the middle distance. In this way, Keats confirms every poet’s greatest anxiety—that our fears, in truth, are sometimes justified, and that our clever poems may know more than we do. These, of course, are my own ramblings on a figure whose life I found myself drawn to only once I had outlived him. Each year now brings me paradoxically closer and farther from Keats. Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet is fantastically scholarly and accessible, a term that’s been overused so as to mean almost nothing. What I mean is this: on a Sunday in ninety-degree heat, you can lift the tome in your withered state, flip to a chapter at random, and find Motion guiding you with energy, intelligence, and a true sense of partaking in the marvelousness of Keats with you. Motion is wonderfully clear and direct while still making his mark on the prose at every turn, as on our understanding of the dimensions and shape of Keats’s life through his well-considered interest in the poet’s social and political circumstances. His description of Keats’s dying moments is quietly gripping, worthy of a season finale of one of the medical dramas that multiply like invasive species across American television, and yet the book goes on another twenty pages, making such partings bearable. Life goes on, even when major stars extinguish. In Keats’s case, that extinguishing served as a spark, with each subsequent generation of poets holding vigil. —Maya C. Popa Read More
May 28, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Rita Dove Reads Ingeborg Bachmann By Rita Dove The second series of Poets on Couches continues with Rita Dove reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “My Bird,” translated from the German by Mark Anderson. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances. “My Bird” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mark Anderson Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world sinks back into twilight, the forest offers it a sleeping potion, and from the tower the watchman’s forsaken, peaceful and constant the eyes of the owl stare down. Whatever comes to pass: you know your time, my bird, you put on your veil and fly through the mist to me. We peer into the haze where the rabble houses. Yon follow my nod and storm out in a whirl of feathers and fur— My ice-gray shoulder companion, my weapon, adorned with that feather, my only weapon! My only finery: your veil and your feather. And even when my skin burns in the needle dance beneath the tree, and the hip-high shrubs tempt me with their spicy leaves, when my curls dart like snake tongues, sway and long for moisture, the dust of distant stars still falls right on my hair. When I, in a helmet of smoke, come back to my senses. my bird, my nighttime ally, when I’m ablaze in the night the dark grove crackles and I hammer the sparks from my limbs. And when I stay ablaze as I am, loved by the flame until the resin streams out of the trunks, drips over the wounds and spins the earth warm into thread (and though you rob my heart at night, my bird of belief, my bird of faith!) the watchtower moves into brightness where you, tranquil now, alight in magnificent peace— whatever comes to pass. Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet to have been honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. A professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, she lives in Charlottesville. Her poems “Postlude” and “Naji, 14. Philadelphia.” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue.
May 27, 2021 Brush Strokes On Returning: Gerhard Richter, New York, and Birds By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Vision of Saint John, ca. 1608–14, oil on canvas, 87 1/2 x 76″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain. I will remember 2020 not as a year of looking but as a year of listening. For months as the pandemic overtook New York, ambulance sirens sounded at all hours in strange choruses. When the sound of the sirens would break occasionally or fade into the distance after dawn, it was replaced not by eerie silence but by birdsong: the shrieks of the blue jays, the playful cheeps of the sparrows in the bushes, the eeks, chirps, and oddly varied sounds of the grackles everywhere. I wondered then, Were these sounds always here, and it was we who were made quiet? I rarely left my neighborhood of Ditmas Park, in Brooklyn, except to take my partner, Kate, pregnant with our second child, to appointments at the Manhattan hospital complex that was itself a hive of sirens that grew louder each time we approached. In my memory the sirens and birdsong were followed by police helicopters seemingly always overhead, as the city erupted in Black Lives Matter protests and the violent police response that only ensured they should continue. The helicopters loomed in the skies above as I ran circles over the same patch of weeds in the small plot of our shared backyard, playing a game my four-year-old daughter, Leo, calls “dinosaur chase” (she is the dinosaur, I am her lunch). Half the year was marked by interrupted sleep—first the constant fireworks at all hours of the night and then, by the end of the summer, the squawking and cooing of the baby, unaware of the distinction between day and night. As I write this, collecting a year, it is spring again. The neighborhood seems to be returning to some approximation of the old sounds from before. That is, if we can recall the way it used to sound. Even the old sounds are heard differently now. With my daughter in her mud boots, bird book and binoculars in hand, as the baby sleeps at home on Kate, we begin each day our circuit. Leo collects sticks, rocks, and seed pods, stomps in puddles, and pauses to track blue jays in a tree, following their noisy stutter. This past October, I had my temperature taken outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After seeing the line that snaked out for what seemed like a mile, I immediately wanted to leave. There were a number of reasons I felt so jittery. I was concerned about the ethics of visiting at all, of the labor of the museum worker, a role I had once played, having to now be exposed regularly as they held the thermometer to our foreheads, even the baby’s. Also, I was worried that maybe Leo had gone feral for the better part of the year, no longer spending her days on the college campuses where her parents taught or in the museums and galleries we frequented. I tried to keep her standing on her yellow dot, as she agitated to dart off and play in the fountain. The idea was to make a pilgrimage to experience a shard of the abruptly abbreviated Gerhard Richter show that had closed nearly as soon as it opened in March 2020. My distrust of the press-preview experience of art had left me waiting to see the exhibition among a crowd, and by then it was becoming clear that it was unwise to gather in crowds at all. In the months afterward Manhattan became a place over the river, its galleries and museums suddenly impossibly far away. Read More
May 27, 2021 Arts & Culture New York’s Hyphenated History By Pardis Mahdavi In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate. Flyer for the New-York hyphen debate, 1774 copyright © New-York Historical Society In the midst of an unusually hot New York City spring in 1945, Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran was riding the metro downtown to a meeting at City Hall. Curran, the former commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, and former president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, had forgotten to bring his copy of the paper that morning. As a result, he found himself reading the various ads surrounding him on the colorful New York City subway. Curran tried to focus on different advertisements to distract himself from the heat, and from his growing restlessness. Until, that is, one particular ad seized his attention. It was an ad for the “New-York Historical Society.” Innocuous enough at first, it was the tiny piece of orthography that caught Curran’s eye and sent a wave of heat through his body. Was that—could that be a hyphen? Sitting unabashedly between the words New and York? The anti-hyphenate politician was furious. Curran swiftly exited the subway, marched into City Hall, and got his friend Newbold Morris, president of the New York City Council, on the phone. Later that week, the New York World–Telegram—oh, the irony of the hyphen placement in the publication that reported the incident—documented the conversation between Morris and Curran. “This thing—this hyphen—is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the dark … you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and have a surgical operation on it! We won’t be hyphenated by anyone!” Curran reportedly said to Morris. Read More