August 30, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our New Editors By Emily Nemens My first few months as editor have flown by, and I’m excited to share the fruits of this busy summer soon—the Fall issue will go online just after Labor Day. Much of this summer has also been spent getting to know colleagues up and down the masthead. There are a few people I’ve yet to track down for a meal or a Skype date, but talking shop with the staff, city editors, advisory editors, and the board has been lovely and informative. Through those conversations, I’ve also identified several opportunities for growth, as well as several key editors to help us with that growing. Prime among them is Hasan Altaf, who will start as our managing editor in September. Hasan and I are both excited about his editorial expertise and his commitment to bring new voices to the magazine. We’ve also appointed novelist Christian Keifer to fill the newly added role of West Coast Editor. Christian’s inveterate energy, good taste, and large network have already proven valuable to my first issue, and we should all be thankful that he connected us with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Art of Poetry interview is now underway. The ranks of Advisory Editors have expanded. Some of the new additions, like Poetry Editor alum Robyn Creswell, have been contributing to the magazine for years. Others, like new advisory editor Saskia Hamilton, brought us content—unpublished Elizabeth Bishop!—that will appear in my first issue. Christopher Merrill is already working to expand our international reach, so stay tuned. As a means of introduction, I asked each editor for a bio and a favorite piece from the archive. —Emily Nemens Read More
August 30, 2018 On History The Unburied Stone By Matthew Komatsu Manazuru peninsula, Japan Hanōkizawa-san tells me to stop the car, and from the backseat points at an anonymous granite cliffside ten meters away. “There,” he says. “That’s where it came from.” We are driving south along a paved road built against the cliffs that fall into the Pacific outside the Japanese village of Yoshihama. He wants to show Yu Wada-Dimmer, our interpreter, and me the origin of the tsunami ishi, or “tsunami stone” that appeared on Yoshihama’s beach when the high waters of the 1933 tsunami receded. The stone, once used as a warning to low-living villagers, was then buried by man in the sixties, only to be unburied when the ocean surged inland once more on the afternoon of Friday, March 11, 2011. I can just barely discern the scar of a large boulder ripped clean from the crag, but it could be the former home of any rock that has since tumbled to a saline grave. Eighty-five years have passed since 1933. Hanōkizawa is now 89, which means he was a child, four or five, when it happened. “How do you know this is where it came from?” I ask. “Because my father told me,” he replies. Read More
August 30, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: This Gloom is Someone Else’s 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, My birthday is coming. It’s not a “big” one—not twenty-one or fifty or a hundred or any other special number—just a regular number in the middle. Honestly, there’s no particular reason I should feel this year is so much more painful than others, but I do. I’m not sure I can describe the feeling—it’s not something to wear purple for, per se. It’s more of a lost feeling: How did I get old? This body is mine and yet surely must also be someone else’s. I want to age gracefully and, most of all, I do not want to become invisible—to myself or anyone else. And I could use some encouragement, a vote of confidence, to know that this is possible. Is there a poem that could help? Sincerely, Me Read More
August 29, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Walter Mosley By Walter Mosley In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. The champagne is something I’d never drink alone. I like having it there to remind me of something missing in my social life. It’s been there for over a year, gathering the chill but always welcoming. An ostrich egg was something I’d always wanted, but I didn’t know where to get one. Then I was at Whole Foods and there it sat among the turnips and beets in the produce section. That was three years ago. I’d leave it to my heirs if I had any. The ground beef and rib-eye steaks are always there, but like the river—never the same. My refrigerator, I now realize, has a past with little concern for the future. It could be a writer. You can read the rest of the entries in this series here. Walter Mosley is the author, most recently, of John Woman, out September 4th from Atlantic Monthly Press.
August 29, 2018 Arts & Culture An Ovidian Taste Test: The Old Verse Translations of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ By Anthony Madrid All right, let’s do this as a speed round. Quick in, quick out. No diddling. Fact: there were, between 1550 and 1750, exactly three supremo-supremo English versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are as follows: Arthur Golding, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, A work very pleasaunt and delectable, 1567. George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d, and Represented in Figures, 1632. John Dryden et al., Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books, Translated by the Most Eminent Hands (sometimes called the “Garth” Ovid, after its editor, Sir Samuel Garth), 1717. Much could be said about each of these. Golding was read and pilfered by Shakespeare. Sandys wrote part of his version in what is now the State of Virginia. Dryden is the father of English criticism. Golding writes in what are called fourteeners. Sandys provides notes (and supplementary essays) like a Victorian eccentric. Dryden wrote “Absalom and Achitophel.” We could spend all day on this kind of thing. Instead, what I want is to put you in a position to judge between these guys’ versions. We’re just gonna do a simple little comparison. I’ll throw down a couple of judgments, and point out what you might otherwise miss. You probably know it’s no easy thing, judging between rival verse translations, especially when they were produced before the 19th century. The good news has always been that it hardly matters how hard a task is, when no one’s gonna do it. Easy, hard—comes to the same thing. Yet somebody has to go in there. Somebody born after 1960. How ’bout you? You don’t have to read the whole Metamorphoses three times; I’ve done it for you. The main thing is you gotta concentrate on the three exhibits presented below. If you read ’em carelessly they will seem more or less the same to you. And here’s the hideous part. They might seem the same to you, even if you concentrate. But at least you’ll know where you stand. You’ll be able to say with conviction “To hell with all of ’em.” Read More
August 28, 2018 At Work The Answers Are Not Important: An Interview With Catherine Lacey By Yevgeniya Traps Catherine Lacey (Photo by Daymon Gardner) I read Catherine Lacey’s first novel, the gorgeously despondent Nobody Is Ever Missing, in a gulp. It unfolds like a hungry gasp. Nothing much happens really: one day, Elyria takes off for New Zealand to visit a poet who had once extended an offhand invitation. In sentences that hurt you with their icy precision—that make you envious of their implacable beauty—Lacey stages a woman’s internal disintegration as though it were an especially potent bit of performance art. Her second novel The Answers has an almost sci-fi premise: an actor hires women to play out distilled threads of a relationship, i.e., the Anger Girlfriend, the Maternal Girlfriend, the Intellectual Girlfriend, the Intimacy Team of Girlfriends. Mary signs up for the “income-generating experience” of playing the Emotional Girlfriend, because she needs to generate income. Like Elyria, she is desperate—for a cure, for reprieve, for release. In many ways, The Answers is a more plot-driven novel than Lacey’s first, but its title is ironic: answers are not possible, resolutions a misbegotten fantasy. In her new collection of short stories, Certain American States, Lacey’s characters are in mourning, aggrieved, disappointed by life and hurt by death. “You are still alive, so you have to keep living. That’s all you can do,” the narrator of the story “ur heck box” is told by a friend after her brother dies. But the insight of the eponymous story may be more true: “The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.” I recently spoke with Lacey about the new collection, which includes several stories written before Nobody Is Ever Missing, about her sense of herself as a writer and about the meaning and politics of “certain American states.” INTERVIEWER Where do these stories intersect with the timeline of your novels? How has writing stories been different for you than writing novels? LACEY There’s a big difference, although I will say that when I first started writing, I wanted to write essays and profiles and nonfiction. As an adult, I had pretty much been just doing that for a while. And then—I’m not really sure when it started—I started writing fiction a bit more seriously. I started by writing a bunch of short stories. That was really all I had time for, all I felt I had enough stamina for. The stories all belonged together, and they needed to talk to each other in order to find their cohesion. So I had a series of stories that ended up turning into Nobody Is Ever Missing. I backed into writing that first novel by just repeating the same perspective. I hate the phrase “finding my voice,” but inevitably, when you are a younger writer, there’s a period in which you are straining, and you just throw everything at the wall and see what comes out that is meaningful to you. Two or three of the stories in the new collection were first written around the same time that I was writing my first book. They were outliers, they didn’t fit in Nobody. And that’s been true the rest of the time that I’ve been writing stories. There have been stories that I either finished and published, or finished and didn’t publish, or finished and even believed were going to be in the collection until another story showed up and was just a better fit. The oldest story in Certain American States is the title story, but at the point of writing that story I had no sense of working toward a collection, I was just writing stories that were appealing to me. Read More