January 24, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Are a Threat Loving Yourself By Sarah Kay 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 week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am a young woman living in New York. I am the daughter of an alcoholic. When I was twelve, my mom stopped drinking, and we began a long conversation about the nature of addiction. We spoke about our genes and the importance of drinking cautiously (if at all). Two years ago, I went through my first breakup (we were together for five years), and I have since surrounded myself with new friends (many who drink heavily). I feel as though I am starting to depend on alcohol to bring me the comfort that my partner once provided. There is a large part of me that would love to be sober, but it seems there is a larger part of me that enjoys the instant gratification and social ease that alcohol brings. I am searching for a poem that will encourage me toward sobriety and/or capture this dual nature within myself. With gratitude, Afraid of My Own Addiction Read More
January 24, 2019 Arts & Culture When Diderot Met Voltaire By Andrew S. Curran François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a Voltaire, and Denis Diderot. In mid-December 1776, the eighty-three-year-old Voltaire pulled out a piece of paper and dashed off a note to Diderot. Having been exiled from Paris for more than twenty-five years, the now wizened and virtually toothless philosophe lamented the fact that the two men had never laid eyes on each other: “I am heartbroken to die without having met you … I would gladly come and spend my last fifteen minutes in Paris in order to have the solace of hearing your voice.” Fifteen months later, Voltaire rolled into the capital in his blue, star-spangled coach. Quite ill with prostate cancer, the famous humanitarian, essayist, and playwright nonetheless organized a feverish schedule for himself. In addition to finishing work on a five-act tragedy—he lived long enough to attend the premiere—Voltaire spent most of his days holding court in a friend’s hôtel particulier on the corner of the rue de Beaune and the quai des Théatins. Here, for hours at a time, Voltaire received visits from a long list of adoring friends and dignitaries, among them Benjamin Franklin and his son. Sometime during Voltaire’s three-month stay, Diderot also came to pay his respects. Journalists who wrote about the meeting hinted that some relationships are best conducted solely by correspondence. Diderot and Voltaire had first exchanged letters in 1749 when the “prince of the philosophes” had invited the then up-and-coming Diderot to dinner. In addition to hoping to get to know the clever author of the Letter on the Blind, Voltaire had presumably hoped to help the newly appointed editor of the Encyclopédie rethink his atheism. Diderot decided to dodge both the invitation and the sermon. One might wonder what kind of young writer turns down lunch with the most famous public intellectual ever to live. The answer, in 1749, was pretty clear: a proud and unremorseful unbeliever who had no interest in having his philosophy questioned by an unbending deist. Read More
January 23, 2019 Look Nature Redescribed: The Work of Vija Celmins By The Paris Review Although she’s been friendly with artists from both coasts of the United States throughout her five-decade career, Vija Celmins has remained agnostic regarding trends and movements; like nature itself, her discipline operates on its own terms. “When I’m working,” she says in a 1992 interview with Chuck Close, “my instinct is to try to build and to fill. To fill something until it is really full.” She has referred to her meticulous, overflowing portraits of the natural world as “redescriptions,” a word that implies paraphrasing rather than pure invention. But this perhaps minimizes her genius—nearly as expansive and awe inspiring as the night skies and desert floors they depict, Celmins’s works demand to be experienced firsthand. In that setting, they close the distance, enveloping the viewer in gloriously rendered detail. The first major North American exhibition of her work in more than twenty-five years is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 31, after which the show will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario (May 4–August 4) and the Met Breuer (September 23, 2019–January 12, 2020). Below, we present a selection of images from the book Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, which accompanies the show. Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969, graphite and acrylic ground on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968, graphite on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Read More
January 23, 2019 YA of Yore What Was It About Animorphs? By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing. What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?” For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap. But then there was Animorphs. Read More
January 23, 2019 Arts & Culture The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths By Ha Jin Collage. Li Bai painting: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, a painting in Gu Lang Yu museum, Xiamen, Fujian, China. Moon photo: Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)) / https://Lucnix.be. He has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime (A.D. 701–62), he had other names—Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage. Numerous liquors and wines bear his name. Indeed, his name is a ubiquitous brand, flaunted by hotels, restaurants, temples, and even factories. In English, in addition to “Li Po,” he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai “Rihaku” because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan. Pound’s loose translation of Li Bai’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” has been included in many textbooks and anthologies as a masterpiece of modern poetry. It is also one of Pound’s signature poems—arguably his best known. For the sake of consistency and clarity, let us stay with the name Li Bai. He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then. In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death. In January 764, the newly enthroned emperor Daizong issued a decree summoning Li Bai to serve as a counselor at court. It was a post without actual power, in spite of its high-sounding title. Yet to any man of learning and ambition, such an appointment was a great favor, a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence and magnanimity—and, in Li Bai’s case, a partial restoration of the high status he had once held in the court. When the royal decree reached Dangtu County, Anhui, where Li Bai was supposed to be located, the local officials were thrown into confusion and could not find him. Soon it was discovered that he had died more than a year before. Of what cause and on what day, no one could tell. So we can say only that Li Bai, despite his renown, passed away in 762 without notice. Read More
January 22, 2019 Redux Redux: Mary Oliver and Francine du Plessix Gray 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. This week, we bring you our 1987 Art of Fiction interview with Francine du Plessix Gray, who died on January 13 at age eighty-eight, and “The Swan,” a poem by Mary Oliver, who died last Thursday at age eighty-three. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Francine du Plessix Gray, The Art of Fiction No. 96 Issue no. 103 (Summer 1987) Our lifetime friendships can be more steadfast and trustworthy than any marriage, and considerably more treasurable. Those few persons whom I gained as friends before the age of twenty-five, for example. Nothing they would ever say or do would diminish my love and esteem for them. It’s as if they were grafted upon me. Read More