September 6, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Your Naked Back in the Mirror 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 week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My family and I are what the newspaper headlines would deem immigrants. Living in a city where people of my kind are under constant scrutiny and threat has caused me to lose hope. I used to find solace in the community of poetry nights until I found myself subject to the same questioning stares there because of my headscarf. There are small acts of hatred that take place that don’t make their way into newspapers. My parents drop me off at university and their breath is suspended in the air until I text them, ‘reached alright.’ And again, they hold their breath till I walk through the front door at night. I no longer think about my big dreams of writing or research. I pray for safety, for me and for everyone in need of it right now. Do you have a poem for this? For this feeling of being like a lost spaceship, floating with no promise of a return? Sincerely, Lost in a Big Crowd and Scared Read More
September 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Grief By Rainer Maria Rilke Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926) wrote letters to close friends as well as individuals who had read his poetry but did not know him personally. At the time of his death in 1926 at the age of 51, Rilke had written over 14,000 letters which he considered to be as significant and worthy of publication as his poetry and prose. Among this vast correspondence are 23 letters of condolence. For nearly 100 years, most of their sometimes bracing and always powerful insights have been hidden in plain sight, or rather buried in a disorganized and partly irretrievable set of publications and archives on two continents. They have now been gathered for the first time into a short volume that offers Rilke’s highly original and accessible reflections on loss, grief and mortality. Together they tell a story leading from an unflinching and honest acknowledgment of death to transformation, just as Rilke’s well-known Letters to a Young Poet recounts the story from unflinching self-reckoning and the acceptance of solitude to serious self-transformation. Taken individually, each of the letters on loss, which Rilke wrote to different recipients but with the same single-minded intent to assist someone in mourning, may offer solace for anyone dealing with a personal loss. What can we say in the face of loss, when words seem too frail and ordinary to convey grief and soothe the pain? How can we provide solace for the bereaved, when even time, as Rilke stresses over and over, cannot properly console but only “put things in order”? These letters offer guidance in the effort to recover our voice during periods of loss and grief, and not to let even the most devastating experiences overwhelm, numb and silence us. —Ulrich Baer Read More
September 5, 2018 On Photography We Are the Subject: Diane Arbus, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Lisette Model By Yevgeniya Traps Rosalind Fox Solomon, Seattle, from “Portraits in the Time of AIDS”, 1987 (© Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York) “We are the subject,” the title of the show currently on view at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, cites Lisette Model’s notion of the photographer’s subject matter: “We are the subject,” she writes in one of her teaching notebooks, “the object is the world around us.” There are nearly forty images—dense, intense, almost claustrophobic—included in the show, which brings together the work of Model and two photographers who had once been her pupils, Diane Arbus and Rosalind Fox Solomon. (The three women were first—and last—shown together in 1977 at the Galerie Zabriskie in Paris.) “Photograph from your guts,” Model advised her students, an injunction to harness instinct, to channel, through the camera, anything—everything—with its pains and its triumphs. The camera was a conduit, a channel connecting the heart to the stomach to the brain and then short-circuiting the whole setup. The camera was also, Model said, a detection device. “We are the subject” makes a compelling argument for the camera as Geiger counter, picking up and making visible the atmosphere’s radioactivity, the nuclear fields we carry around and travel through in our banal daily lives, the toxicities that make us human in the first place. Read More
September 5, 2018 Arts & Culture For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes By Lauren Elkin Virginie Despentes. Photo: Jean-François Paga. Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. —Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself. Despentes is a legend in France, especially among young women. Much of this reputation rests on her first novel, Baise-moi (1994), a taboo-shattering book about a pair of young women, Nadine and Manu, who go on a killing spree across France. One has worked as a prostitute, the other as a porn actress; in between murders, they have graphically described sex in hotel rooms with a series of men. In 2000, Despentes codirected a film adaptation with Coralie Trinh Thi that starred Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson, all three former porn actresses; because the sex scenes were unsimulated, the film was hotly controversial and was initially banned in France. But it wasn’t the violence or the graphic sex that stopped me from reading her work. In Baise-moi, I got as far as this description of Nadine’s roommate, Séverine: Read More
September 5, 2018 At Work Trump Is a Performance Artist: An Interview with Eileen Myles By Shoshana Olidort Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles’s stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show Transparent, in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones is based on Myles. But while Myles’s stint on television—in addition to serving as poet-muse, Myles made a cameo on the show—may help to explain their rise to a level of celebrity usually out of reach for even the most successful poets in America, Myles’s stature has been decades in the making. In addition to producing more than twenty books, Myles famously ran a write-in campaign for presidency in 1992. Among their most cited poems is “An American Poem,” in which Myles identifies as a Kennedy, one who forsook the wealth and comfort afforded by a famous, successful American family for a life of poverty and obscurity as a poet in New York. In real life, Myles grew up in an Irish Catholic blue-collar Boston family. Much of their work, including the legendary Chelsea Girls, reflects on Myles’s childhood and the poetry scene of New York in the seventies and eighties. The last few years have been especially prolific for Myles, whose new collection, Evolution, comes on the heels of last year’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), which had in turn followed another book of new and selected poems as well as a new edition of Chelsea Girls. I’ve long admired Myles’s work, and I taught their poems in a course on feminist poetry earlier this year. Current events and our political milieu made me especially keen to speak with them. We spoke over Zoom, a video-conferencing program—Myles from their living space in Provincetown, where they were teaching, and I from the living room of my Stanford student-housing unit. Myles was totally present, forthright, and willing to engage with me but also pushed back more than once. When I asked about the intersection of poetry and politics, Myles responded, “What do you mean?” They forced me to reconsider not only how I was formulating my questions but what, in fact, was behind those questions in the first place. Read More
September 4, 2018 Redux Redux: If You Can Hoe Corn for Fifty Cents an Hour … 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. Yesterday was Labor Day, so this week, we bring you Jim Harrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Richard Yates’s short story “A Wrestler with Sharks,” and Henri Coulette’s “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.” Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104 Issue no. 107 (Summer 1988) If you can hoe corn for fifty cents an hour, day after day, you can learn how to write a novel. You have absorbed the spirit of repetition. When you look at my wife’s garden you understand that; the beauty of the garden—the flowers and the vegetables—that’s how an artist is in his work. And I think the background that at first nonplussed me—that rural, almost white-trash element—stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into, the hunger to do things. Read More