March 11, 2020 At Work A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield By Ilya Kaminsky Jane Hirschfield (PHOTO © MICHAEL LIONSTAR) I first met Jane Hirshfield about fifteen years ago, after one of her readings in San Francisco. She reads her poems with intensity, but not loudly. Her voice is even, quiet. I was struck by the many tonalities of her silences. Still, there is a distinctly recognizable passion in her quiet moments. Speaking with her, I was fascinated by how much I was able to gather from the moments between her sentences, by the way those sentences follow one another, surprising at each turn. This is also true of her poems: reading her work, I catch myself thinking that Hirshfield is the poet who orchestrates silences, which is perhaps fitting for someone who says that her medium is lyric poetry. It isn’t easy these days to find a poet who can do this while being also perfectly articulate and clear. Reading Hirshfield, I find myself coming back to Mahmoud Darwish’s idea that clarity is our ultimate mystery. Jane Hirshfield’s nine books of poetry include The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. She is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and four books collecting and cotranslating the work of world poets from the past. Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, newly published this week, is Ledger. This interview took place by email. INTERVIEWER Auden called art “clear thinking about complex feeling,” and in your 2015 book of essays, Ten Windows, you speak about the “extra pressure of meaning that infuses” Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”—a poem written in December 1938, a time of deep political crisis. I see a strong element of the poetics of engagement in Ledger. This isn’t new. I think of your 1994 poem “Manners/Rwanda,” for instance. Yet the element of engagement comes across more strongly in this new book. So, I want to begin by asking about the way you relate to those “extra pressures” of our own crisis today in the U.S., about how they have impacted your work and this book. HIRSHFIELD A poem, a poet’s life, and the larger world are one continuous fabric. Ledger is a book of stock-taking, a registration both of the personal and of the grievous era all our lives are now visibly part of. As you say, I’ve written poems for decades that speak of the environment, social justice issues, what feel like unceasing wars. What’s changed in this book is the urgency and centrality of these subjects. The time line for swerve feels shorter, the precipice raised to heights fatal not only for individuals, but for the planet. I don’t know how a poem can touch the catastrophe of the biosphere and what feels like a breakdown of the basic social contract—that we care for one another and that we care for future beings’ well-being. It may be that poetry’s speaking is essential but preparatory, oblique. That our work, yours and mine, is the tilling that precedes planting. That our images and metaphors and statements are like the multitude of tunneling earthworms that keep the earth’s microbiome alive, its structure lightened and turnable, viable for crops. Any one earthworm seems not to matter, yet the existence of earthworms matters. An ethics of preparation means also that poetry’s work may be less to solve than to speak of, to speak on behalf of, that which needs solving. Our human capacities for imagination and art-making, for grief and joy, exist in the service of survival of the single, solitary self and of the whole. Poems sustain the complexity, multiplicity, and peculiarities of lives, not their erasure. They carry the sense of wholeness and unblind us to connection. These allegiances are currently desperately needed. Goethe wrote, “Do not let what matters most be at the mercy of what matters least.” The two, though, are not separate. An ants’ nest comes into a poem, and reminds that what may seem small—noticing it, wanting its continuance on this perishable and fragile planet—is what matters most. No part of existence is discardable. Read More
March 10, 2020 Inside the Issue A Story in One Picture By The Paris Review To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue, which hits newsstands today, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, c. 1851 I don’t know if “evokes” is exactly the right word for this painting, but I thought a lot about Ophelia by John Everett Millais and the mythology of dead women in art and fiction. To some extent, I felt like I was writing in the opposite direction of this painting. It loomed in my brain all the same. —Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead” Kate Elizabeth Fowler, Untitled, Family Photographs, 2019 A pure baby shining in white at the center of the frame, being held by a shirtless, barefoot boy. Something about it all is so sacred. I believe my main character in “An Unspoken,” Clara Parker, would have seen this in a dream and felt happy, or could just as easily been haunted by it. And this is everything the story truly hinges on. —Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, “An Unspoken” This is a photograph of the Angel Makers of Nagyrév, a group of Hungarian women who killed many men in their village. I believe this was taken after their eventual arrest. My story was very loosely inspired by theirs. —Rebecca Makkai, “A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons” Vasily Vereshchagin, A Resting Place of Prisoners, 1878-1879 This painting by Vasily Vereshchagin, painted from 1878–79, depicts (according to the Brooklyn Museum where it hangs) Turkish war prisoners freezing to death while being marched to Russian war camps during the Russo-Turkish War. I can imagine the characters in my story going to see this painting while in the midst of their War and Peace reading group and drawing comparisons between Vereshchagin’s project and Tolstoy’s, their various attempts to bring the reality of Russian history home to their audiences. The characters might have wondered, like I do, whether Tolstoy saw this painting, and what he thought of it. Guessing he would have hated it, but maybe he wasn’t in that phase of his life yet. —Andrew Martin, “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” Lord Kitchener as a baby on his mother’s lap, with his elder brother and his sister. (published 1916 in The Illustrated War News) This photograph does not evoke the story for me. But there is something in it. That the man who would go on to be the origin of such immense butchery–the famous British hero Kitchener–can rest this way on his mother’s lap. We go from here to there—from there to here, or do we? What is a person? —Jesse Ball, “Diary of a Country Mouse” Edvard Munch, Melancholy II, 1898 This 1898 woodcut, “Melancholy II,” by Edvard Munch. The landscape is a little abstract, but I think the woman is sitting beside the water. The coastline looks like a creature, doesn’t it? I love, especially, that you can’t quite tell where the horizon is. —Clare Sestanovich, “By Design” Keep exploring our Spring issue here
March 10, 2020 Redux Redux: The Folded-Down Table 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. Photo: Marcelo Noah, CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting three archive pieces written by authors who appear in the Spring issue. Read on for Billy Collins’s Art of Poetry interview, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline, and Nathaniel Mackey’s poem “Song of the Andoumboulou: 145.” And after you finish those, make sure to delve into the new issue with Billy Collins’s poem “On the Deaths of Friends,” Rachel Cusk’s Art of Fiction interview, and Nathaniel Mackey’s Art of Poetry interview. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry No. 83 Issue no. 159 (Fall 2001) The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone that establishes the poet’s authority. The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value. Read More
March 10, 2020 One Word One Word: Bonkers By Harry Dodge photo courtesy Harry Dodge 1. I want now to investigate bonkers (a word that strikes me as germane to our times), but the word busted (also a fine word) keeps popping into my head. Not at all interchangeable, busted suggests mechanicity and palpability while bonkers seems to indicate something mental and systemic. But they inhabit the same register; both words are punchy (is that a register or a tone?) and both words suggest mitigatability—they’re carrying little hope suitcases. Do you feel that? I wrote the word busted the other day to describe birds I saw in a book of photographs, impossibly bent-up birds captured during liftoff, during landing—weird contorted flight surfaces, tangled wings like flat hands, ruddering volte-face, cartoony dustups apparently necessary to occasion real-life avian landings. I like the word busted—not shattered, not completely demolished. BUSTED!, as in currently unusable: an ugly leg thrown out of the tub too wounded even to soak. But you know what? I’m a repairman. I’m a research assistant! Give me what is busted and I’ll take a look. Here. See how in the break or the torn area, let’s call it the rupture, something truly bent or baffling is sometimes lined with an undeniably fecund matrix, raw lamina where new stuff is now compelled to grow? Read More
March 9, 2020 In Memoriam On the Timeless Music of McCoy Tyner By Craig Morgan Teicher McCoy Tyner in April 2012 [Photo: Joe Mabel] There are many ways to understand the passage of time—it’s not just one thing after the next, the pinhead of the present gnarling the flesh of your foot as you try, impossibly, to balance upon it. Not just peering through the mist of memory. Not just cutting through the ice ahead. Time moves back and forth, slows down, speeds up, it eddies—it does a lot of eddying. It concentrates itself in one moment and becomes diffuse and vague in another. We’re always in the present, though we can never quite get there, nor can we leave. All of this is what the music of McCoy Tyner, who died on Friday at the age of eighty-one, teaches, though as soon as one tries to paraphrase music in anything other than other music, it’s robbed of some of its magic and much of its meaning. Tyner was one of the defining musicians of the jazz period that began in the early sixties and which, I’d argue, we’re still in: pure art music that renews its inspiration in the the last hundred-plus years of pop music. As the pianist anchoring the classic John Coltrane quartet, Tyner’s instantly recognizable style—pendular, percussive, full of melodic flights and returns—created, hand in hand with drummer Elvin Jones, the landscapes across which Coltrane’s solos famously and fathomlessly ranged. I’ve been gratefully lost for years somewhere between the interminable vamp of the 1961 studio recording of Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things” and the pounding sinews of Tyner’s 1976 solo track “Fly with the Wind.” The latter isn’t fusion, isn’t exactly jazz, but is all Tyner: intellect, melody, and abandon. Tyner’s art has guided my imagination, and now that he’s gone, and because the meaning of music is so slippery, I want to take a moment to say why. Read More
March 9, 2020 Arts & Culture Little Fires for the One Who Was Lost By Alejandra Pizarnik Alejandra Pizarnik’s work has long served as a touchstone for Latin American writers. The late Argentine poet has been cited as an influence by everyone from Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar to Octavio Paz, who described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” But this fervor didn’t reach the English-speaking world until some four decades after her death, with the publication of her collection A Musical Hell in 2013. Since then, translations of five more collections of her poetry have appeared to near universal acclaim, and several of her poems have been published in The Paris Review. Ugly Duckling Presse has recently published A Tradition in Rupture, which presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time. In the excerpt below, she ponders the nature of poetry and the pain of revisiting past work. Alejandra Pizarnik. Poetry is where everything happens. Like love, humor, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth. To say “freedom” and “truth” in reference to the world in which we live (or don’t live) is to tell a lie. It is not a lie when you attribute those words to poetry: the place where everything is possible. In opposition to the feeling of exile, the feeling of perpetual longing, stands the poem—promised land. Every day my poems get shorter: little fires for the one who was lost in a strange land. Within a few lines, I usually find the eyes of someone I know waiting for me; reconciled things, hostile things, things that ceaselessly produce the unknown; and my perpetual thirst, my hunger, my horror. From there the invocation comes, the evocation, the conjuring forth. In terms of inspiration, my belief is completely orthodox, but this in no way restricts me. On the contrary, it allows me to focus on a single poem for a long time. And I do it in a way that recalls, perhaps, the gesture of a painter: I fix the piece of paper to the wall and contemplate it; I change words, delete lines. Sometimes, when I delete a word, I imagine another one in its place, but without even knowing its name. Then, while I’m waiting for the one I want, I make a drawing in the empty space that alludes to it. And this drawing is like a summoning ritual. (I would add that my attraction to silence allows me to unite, in spirit, poetry with painting; in that sense, what others might call the privileged moment, I speak of as privileged space.) They’ve been warning us, since time immemorial, that poetry is a mystery. Yet we recognize it: we know where it lies. I believe the question “What does poetry mean to you?” deserves one of two responses: either silence or a book that relates a terrible adventure—the adventure of someone who sets off to question the poem, poetry, the poetic; to embrace the body of the poem; to ascertain its incantatory, electrifying, revolutionary, and consoling power. Some have already told us of this marvelous journey. For myself, at present, it remains a study. Read More