May 28, 2019 Arts & Culture What Makes a Poet Difficult? By Stephanie Burt Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. T. S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,” because modern life was confusing and difficult, too. The idea that new poems should be harder to read than prose, that serious poems pose a challenge to most readers, may seem like it began in the twentieth century, with the writers called high modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein), who distanced themselves from prose sense in new ways. And yet some poems have seemed hard to read for a while. Eliot made his announcement in the course of his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” about John Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible: Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion” …….(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version …….Of his new system to perplex the sages; ’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion, …….And may appear so when the dog-star rages— And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. Most readers who try The Excursion do find it hard going; almost all think it’s too long. The earlier, more influential Wordsworth—the one who liked daffodils—can be a challenge, too. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) consisted mostly of poems about peasants and rural scenes; its plain language seemed groundbreaking—or disturbing—for its apparent simplicity, like a Chuck Berry single on a playlist full of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. It might have seemed, even, literally revolutionary: Wordsworth’s new ways of writing about peasants and other low-status people came out of his sympathies with the French Revolution, which he and his friends first supported, then came to oppose. Read More
May 28, 2019 Mess With a Classic Proust and the Joy of Suffering By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). Marcel Proust. Hulton Archive/Stringer. One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic—I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon. I considered writing about Moby-Dick, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I’m saving Moby-Dick for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves—a long sea voyage, my deathbed. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven’t read Proust suggests you’ve read everything else. I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking—it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust. Over the next couple of nights I read the “Overture” chapter. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust,” having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. When friends asked what I was reading, I said, “I’m reading Proust, actually,” acknowledging the improbability. “Wow,” said my friend Kathleen, who knows me well. “Do you think you’ll finish it?” “I highly doubt it,” I said. It was more readable than I’d expected, but it wasn’t exactly light reading. That first paragraph was deceptive, in part by virtue of being a paragraph. Later I read that Proust hadn’t wanted In Search of Lost Time to have paragraphs at all. He wanted it to appear as one volume, with no sections, chapters, or even margins. It’s as though he wanted it to be unreadable, more a gesture than a text. Read More
May 24, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Satire, Suzi Wu, and Starling Days By The Paris Review Ma Jian. Photo: Flora Drew. © Flora Drew. Ma Jian’s China Dream, translated by Flora Drew and published earlier this month by Counterpoint Press, is a short, sharp-toothed satire of Xi Jinping’s China. The novel depicts a corrupt bureaucrat’s attempts to implement a new government initiative to overwrite people’s dreams. Ma, a dissident writer who lives in exile in London, portrays a contemporary China in which consumerism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism, and memories of the Cultural Revolution surface at the most inopportune events. China Dream is funny in a kind of hopeless way—the title itself comes from a slogan popularized by the Chinese government in 2013, and a Red Guard–themed orgy scene halfway through reads like a nightmare—and it raises questions about political violence and the suppression of memory that stay with you long after the book has ended. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
May 24, 2019 Arts & Culture In Praise of Travel, Particularly on Horseback By Antoine Compagnon Carolus-Duran, Equestrian portrait of Mademoiselle Croizette, 1873, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Michel de Montaigne is best imagined on horseback; firstly, because that was how he traveled around his own lands and between his estate and Bordeaux, as well as elsewhere in France—to Paris, Rouen, or Blois, and even farther afield (during his great journey in 1580 he traveled through Switzerland and Germany all the way to Rome). But he should also be pictured this way because he never felt more comfortable anywhere than in the saddle; it was here that he found his equilibrium, his seat: Travel is in my opinion a very profitable exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein, neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am, without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together. First of all, traveling enables us to experience the world’s diversity, and Montaigne insists that there is no better education. Traveling shows us the richness of nature, proves the relativity of customs and beliefs, and shakes up our certainties; in short, it teaches us skepticism, which was Montaigne’s fundamental doctrine. Read More
May 24, 2019 Look Tim Rollins and K.O.S. By Angel Abreu TIM ROLLINS and K.O.S., On the Origin of Species – Instinct (after Darwin), 2015 (Courtesy Studio K.O.S., Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein) “Today we make history.” This was the constant refrain from Tim Rollins, as a group of teenagers filed into the South Bronx studio every afternoon after school. The group had named itself Kids of Survival and the lofty idea of making history became ingrained in the fabric of our collective consciousness. Our aim was to change our lives and become immortal through the creation of art. Today, Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival, the longest running art collective in history, is included in over 120 museum and public collections. Since its inception in a junior high school classroom in the Bronx, it has exhibited hundreds of times at major galleries and institutions worldwide I was fortunate to have grown up in the South Bronx in eighties. Yes, there was violence. No, it wasn’t necessarily the safest neighborhood. Drug dealing and prostitution were rampant at the time, and the AIDS epidemic hit our neighborhood especially hard, but there was an energy ignited by music, fashion, and the visual arts. The South Bronx was the epicenter of hip-hop and its effect on the community was palpable. Despite the abject appearance of the abandoned buildings and vacant lots, there was a certain defiance born from genuine pride in the community. If you had some sort of special talent, like drawing for instance, you garnered respect, including respect from drug dealers and other rough entities. They left this nerdy kid alone. In ways both physical and metaphorical, the making of art provided me safety. Read More
May 23, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Then the Letting Go By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This column has run weekly for over a year, and now, our dear and busy poets must slow it down to once a month. Never fear — they’ll still be here, just a bit less often. This month, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, Two years ago, I came out of the closet to my family by introducing them to my girlfriend. They responded fairly negatively, expressing their disbelief (“we would have known if you were gay”) and disapproval (“it’s not something we believe in or support”). I have pushed back in many ways—bringing my girlfriend to family functions, being hypervisible online, and proclaiming the steadfastness and validity of my relationship in frequent and intense fights. In the wake of this, my relationship, which did not have a strong foundation to begin with and shouldered the normal fears and anxieties that accompany any romantic partnership, suffered greatly. The more unstable my relationship became, the more strongly I held on to it—I fought for her so hard in the public arena that I didn’t know how not to in the private one. At times, it was volatile and abrasive, yet I fought for it still. After two years of what felt like pushing the boulder of “us” up a mountain, we decided to call it quits. Now I am both heartbroken over losing her and losing myself. In her absence, I am struggling to find mooring. How do you mourn a relationship whose primary purpose was to validate your queerness, both to yourself and others? How do you maintain an identity in the absence of the person it was formed around? Perhaps most of all, can I keep her in my life without making her my compass? Sincerely, Broken Heart, Broken Self Read More