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
May 26, 2021 Arts & Culture To Witness the End of Time By Namwali Serpell Podgrad pri Vranskem Castle, 1830. Kaiser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Terry Pratchett’s 1988 summary of The House on the Borderland begins: “Man buys House. House attacked Nightly by Horrible Swine Things from Hole in Garden. Man Fights Back with Determination and Lack of Imagination of Political Proportions.” It ends: “The journey to the Central Suns sold me infinity.” Infinity is a rather lofty reward for persevering through a battle with pig-men. But Pratchett was right. William Hope Hodgson’s novel, published in 1908 (but likely written in 1904) is one of the most startling accounts of infinity that I’ve ever read. The novel came to me serendipitously: my friend Mike stumbled across it while googling some Dungeons & Dragons thing called “Into the Borderlands.” He read the book, loved it, and passed it on to me. I read it with no knowledge of who Hodgson was or what I was getting into. As an immigrant, I often experience the delight of belated discovery: Frederick Douglass, Star Wars, Lolita. But with Hodgson, I’m not alone. After his death in Ypres at age forty-one, Hodgson was mostly forgotten until a brief—and apparently unsuccessful—revival in the thirties. When fiction reappears after a spell of obscurity, we often say it was before its time. To me, The House on the Borderland is untimely in another, more enthralling way: it undoes time. It begins conventionally enough. The narrator (a figure for the author) and his friend decide to take a fishing trip to “a tiny hamlet called Kraighten” in the west of Ireland—an unusual place for a vacation, but a classic frame for a Gothic tale all the same. One day, the two men go exploring. Tracking a strange spray of water shooting up above the canopy, they find themselves in a kind of jungly lowland with a pit in the middle of it. Jutting into this pit is a protruding rock, at the tip of which sits the ruins of an old house. In the rubble, they find a half-destroyed book—a diary. Smoking their pipes at camp that night, “Hodgson” reads it aloud. The entries feel at first like a haunted-house story, with echoes of Edgar Allan Poe: a rambling old mansion bought by folks from out of town, a canine companion named Pepper who tugs at our heartstrings, intimations of a long-lost love, and a hero unaccountably drawn to investigate holes in the ground. But then the diarist recounts a strange vision of spinning out into the universe and descending upon an unearthly plain ringed with mountains, a black sun limned by a ring of fire hovering over it. In the middle of the amphitheater, he sees what appears to be a replica of the house in which he lives on Earth—this one, though, has an eerie, green glow. In the mountains above, he makes out the giant shapes of ancient gods—Kali, Set—and a hideous beast that moves “with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine.” Read More
May 25, 2021 Redux Redux: A Good Reading Night 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. Richard Powers. This week at The Paris Review, we’re counting the weekdays. Read on for Richard Powers’s Art of Fiction interview, Gish Jen’s short story “Amaryllis,” and Wayne Miller’s poem “Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night.” 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. Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction No. 175 Issue no. 164 (Winter 2002–2003) In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you got there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeing the first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers. Read More
May 25, 2021 The Moon in Full Flower Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten, 1907, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. An afternoon at the end of May, I stood on a porch in another state, and the day went staticky and dark. The sky purpled and every blade of grass on the hill was pricked by the electricity in the air, a field of green antennae buzzing with the signal. The purple that took hold: not a soporific lavender but the threatening plum of storm, a night come sudden and gone wrong. Said someone on the porch whose third language was English, “It is an eclipse?” It was not, but it felt like one, or how I imagine one to feel, time getting bent by light, the boundary breaking between day and night, one bleeding into the other, destabilizing in the way that certain incomprehensibilities can be, when the messages the senses bring to the brain outpace the brain’s ability to make sense of them. Sound went weird as well. In the pond at the bottom of the hill, the peeper frogs, which otherwise started their song at nightfall, were tricked by the sudden dark and began a berserk and feverish peepage. Each night these mud-colored squishers ballooned their throats in seductive celebration, engaged in the springtime pursuit of keeping their creaturehood around. Fertile vernal peeping fever. You could hear messages, words, rhythms in their high-pitched love songs. Peak peak peak. Complete complete complete. Seek seek seek. That afternoon, a thunderstorm moved through, the sun reappeared, and, like that, the frogs returned to their daytime silence. They saw night where there was none, and made what meaning they could from it. We heard words where there were none, the same way we make a face on the full moon’s surface: a perceptual inclination called pareidolia, in which our minds impose patterns or meaning where they might not exist. You’ve glimpsed a turtle riding a motorcycle in a cloud? Seen a demon in the nubbled texture of your ceiling? Heard syllables sloshing from the dishwasher? Pareidolia. It used to be considered a symptom of psychosis. Now it’s known as just another route to making meaning. “Look at walls splashed with a number of stains,” advised Leonardo da Vinci. “You can see the resemblance to a number of landscapes … vicious battles … lively postures of strange figures.” We can see “monstrous things” and we’re better for it: “by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” We make sense where there is no sense, out of the half-seen and overheard, out of all the indistinct; the big truths don’t reveal themselves when we look at them directly. Tonight, the full moon is the closest it will be to earth all year, a big fat full supermoon. What will you see on its round white wall? Read More