April 1, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Cheswayo Mphanza Reads Gerald Stern By Cheswayo Mphanza National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—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 the distances. “Leaving Another Kingdom” by Gerald Stern Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983) I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs before I get too sad. I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower, and the blue squill go, and the primroses. Levine will be here by then, waving fountain pens, carrying rolled-up posters of Ike Williams and King Levinsky. He will be reaching into his breast pocket for maps of grim Toledo showing the downtown grilles and the bus stations. He and I together will get on our hands and knees on the warm ground in the muddy roses under the thorn tree. We will walk the mile to my graveyard without one word of regret, two rich poets going over the past a little, changing a thing or two, making a few connections, doing it all with balance, stopping along the way to pet a wolf, slowing down at the locks, giving each other lectures on early technology, mentioning eels and snakes, touching a little on our two cities, cursing our Henrys a little, his Ford, my Frick, being almost human about it, almost decent, sliding over the stones to reach the island. throwing spears on the way, staring for twenty minutes at two robins starting a life together in rural Pennsylvania, kicking a heavy tire, square and monstrous, huge and soggy, maybe a 49 Hudson, maybe a 40 Packard, maybe a Buick with mohair seats and silken cords and tiny panes of glass—both of us seeing the same car, each of us driving our own brick road, both of us whistling the same idiotic songs, the tops of trees flying, houses sailing along, the way they did then, both of us walking down to the end of the island so we could put our feet in the water, so I could show him where the current starts, so we could look for bottles and worn-out rubbers, Trojans full of holes, the guarantee run out— love gone slack and love gone flat— a few feet away from New Jersey near the stones that look like large white turtles guarding the entrance to the dangerous channel where those lovers—Tristan and his Isolt, Troilus and you know who, came roaring by on inner tubes, their faces wet with happiness, the shrieks and sighs left up the river somewhere, now their fingers trailing through the wake, now their arms out to keep themselves from falling, now in the slow part past the turtles and into the bend, we sitting there putting on our shoes, he with Nikes, me with Georgia loggers, standing up and smelling the river, walking single file until we reach the pebbles, singing in French all the way back, losing the robins forever, losing the Buick, walking into the water, leaving another island, leaving another retreat, leaving another kingdom. Cheswayo Mphanza’s debut poetry collection is The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press). His poems “Frame Six” and “At David Livingstone’s Statue” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.
March 31, 2021 At Work What Is There to Celebrate? An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib By Langa Chinyoka Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard. Hanif Abdurraqib spent the winter shoveling. In Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, he often found himself spending hours clearing the snow from his driveway, only for it to start back up again as soon as he was done. Sometimes, his neighbor would be out there, too, and as they braced themselves for the cold and the work ahead of them, they’d exchange a smirk, a raised eyebrow, and a nod, as if to say, Ain’t this some shit. Abdurraqib laughs as he offers this anecdote, not just because it’s funny but because of the simple, effervescent joy that bubbles up from beneath interactions like this—when you’re with your people, and things do not have to be explained, or even spoken, to be understood. But how do you put these moments into language? In part, this is the project of A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib’s new collection of essays on the history of Black performance in the U.S. It’s Whitney and Michael, minstrelsy and blackface, school dances and sports games, Soul Train and a spades table, and so many other cultural artifacts held beneath a loving microscope for Abdurraqib’s careful examination. A practiced author, poet, and critic with books such as Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us (2017) under his belt, Abdurraqib is in complete control here, balancing the personal and the public as he explores the legacy, the nuance, and sometimes, yes, the shame of Black performance while surrendering even himself to scrutiny—the limits of his past self, the limits of all this loving. When we spoke on the phone earlier this year, we discussed optimism, gratitude, and grace, I was reminded of the Lucille Clifton poem that goes, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” I thought of it again as I reread the book’s final essay, in which Abdurraqib writes, “Isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t?” Although Abdurraqib admits to feeling cynical sometimes, A Little Devil in America is a testament to still being here, still finding moments to celebrate despite everything else. If you were to transform a head nod into something that could be held within the pages of a book, it would look like this. If you were to tell someone you loved them, you missed them, and you were happy to know them, you would hope it sounded like this. There is no exaggerated sentimentality, but there is—even in the middle of mourning—music, and even dancing. INTERVIEWER In A Little Devil in America, you celebrate the joy of Black performance, but you don’t shy away from its difficult history. Can you talk a little about that? ABDURRAQIB When I was first writing the book, I spent a lot of time in the midst of minstrelsy and blackface. Much of that is still in the finished book, but the original drafts were anchored by it. I don’t want to disparage my past books, obviously, but I do think it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn. Which doesn’t mean that I’m, like, coming out in favor of minstrel shows, but it was important to recontextualize, to think about what it was like to be a person who had been enslaved, or had a relative who had been enslaved, and possessed very few resources to perform in a way that provided power to the people. Read More
March 30, 2021 Redux Redux: Her Perfume, Hermit-Wild 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. Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco. This week at The Paris Review, we’re using our olfactory senses. Read on for Ha Jin’s Art of Fiction interview, Fleur Jaeggy’s story “Agnes,” and May Swenson’s poem “Daffodildo.” 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. Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202 Issue no. 191 (Winter 2009) INTERVIEWER What do you remember most about your arrival in the United States? JIN There was a chemical smell here. It was very alien, very overwhelming. Also a lot of people wore perfume. I know a woman who came here from China and said she couldn’t stop vomiting. Read More
March 30, 2021 Re-Covered Walking Liberia with Graham Greene By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In 1935, Graham Greene spent four weeks trekking three hundred fifty miles through the then-unmapped interior of Liberia. As he explains in the book he subsequently published about the experience, Journey without Maps (1936), he wasn’t interested in the Africa already known to white men; instead, he was looking for “a quality of darkness … of the inexplicable.” In short, a journey into his own heart of darkness, to rival that of Conrad’s famous novel. As such, he knew that his recollections—“memories chiefly of rats, of frustration, and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before,” as he recalls in Ways of Escape (1980), his second volume of autobiography—weren’t enough. What he wrote instead was an account of this “slow footsore journey” in parallel with that of a psychological excursion, deep into the recesses of his own mind. Rather ironically, though, in 1938, his traveling companion published her own record of their expedition, and it was precisely the kind of account—what he’d looked down on as “the triviality of a personal diary”—that Graham himself had taken such pains to avoid. Even if you’ve read Journey without Maps, you might struggle to remember Graham’s co-traveler. Understandably so, since she’s mentioned only a handful of times, and always only in passing. It’s easy to forget she’s there at all. But she was: his cousin, twenty-three-year-old Barbara Greene, who’d gamely agreed to accompany him after one too many glasses of champagne at a family wedding. “Liberia, wherever it was, had a jaunty sound about it,” she endearingly recalls. “Liberia! The more I said it to myself the more I liked it. Life was good and very cheerful. Yes, of course I would go to Liberia.” Such innocent, rose-tinted enthusiasm obviously doesn’t last, but as she goes on to explain, “By the time I had found out what I had let myself in for it was too late to turn back.” Originally published as Land Benighted, it’s the later edition—published in 1981, with the catchier title Too Late to Turn Back and a new foreword by the author, as well as an introduction by the acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux—that’s probably better known. Even so, it’s been out of print now for nearly forty years, something that most likely wouldn’t upset Graham: although Barbara proved “as good a companion as the circumstances allowed,” where she did “disappoint” him, he admits in Ways of Escape, was in writing her book. Read More
March 29, 2021 Arts & Culture Gary Panter’s Punk Everyman By Nicole Rudick Jimbo in Despair, the drawing used as a color overlay on pages 86–87 of Gary Panter’s Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise. The first time I drew Jimbo … I knew I’d always be drawing him. I don’t know why. —Gary Panter Jimbo was born in 1974, two years before Gary Panter moved from Texas to Los Angeles. He is a combination, Panter says, of his younger brother; his friend Jay Cotton; the comic-book boxing champ Joe Palooka; Dennis the Menace; and Magnus, the titular tunic-clad robot fighter in Russ Manning’s mid-century comic; as well as being influenced by Panter’s Native American heritage (his grandmother was Choctaw). Panter has called Jimbo his alter ego, and the character’s most common epithet is “punk Everyman.” According to Panter, he didn’t set out to create Jimbo, “he just showed up.” Jimbo made his first public appearance in the punk magazine Slash in 1977 and his cover debut two years later. His pug-nosed mug moved to Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s radical art-comics anthology Raw in 1981; some of Jimbo’s stories there made up the first Raw One-Shot, a spin-off of the periodical, the following year. He joined an ensemble cast in Panter’s Cola Madnes, written in 1983 but not published until 2000, and landed his first full-length book, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, in 1988, published by Raw and Pantheon. Jimbo has since starred in four issues of a self-titled comic published by Zongo in the nineties and stood in for Dante in two illuminated-manuscripts-cum-comic-books: Jimbo in Purgatory (2004) and Jimbo’s Inferno (2006). He is, as you read these words, being sent out into fresh adventures by Panter’s fervid imagination and tireless pen. Read More
March 26, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Language, Liberation, and LaserJet By The Paris Review Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby. Photo: Maria Rusche. Courtesy of Utopia. The writer and director Emma Seligman is in good company. Like the breakout features of auteurs such as Wes Anderson, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Damien Chazelle, Seligman’s feature-length debut, Shiva Baby, evolved from a short film of the same name. The story centers on the near–college graduate Danielle (Rachel Sennott), who struggles to keep her composure when her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy turn up at a family shiva. The title does a lot of work in forecasting the mood of the film, mixing sugar baby, or one who works as a companion for an older client, with shiva, the Jewish period of mourning. The tension between the two terms manifests in Danielle, literally and figuratively lost between bassinet and casket, no longer a defenseless child but not quite an independent woman, swirling in the awkward overlap of what were previously distinct and separate social circles. The film’s genre matches this duality, with more cringe and quips than most comedies but dizzying visuals and a nervy score fit for horror, straddling the humorous nuance of Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child and the familial psychodrama of Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha, both of which also began as shorts. But if you’re not interested in form, then show up for the cast. Polly Draper is a standout as Danielle’s mother, Dianna Agron is tension incarnate, and Sennott makes good on the promise of her Twitter bio: “sexy in a weird unconventional dreary way.” —Christopher Notarnicola Read More