June 22, 2018 On Film Witches, Artists, and Pandemonium in Hereditary By Dorothea Lasky Still from Hereditary. I had been sitting in a lovesick fog, waiting to see Ari Aster’s Hereditary, ever since I first heard about it. I don’t usually follow new movie releases too closely, but I found out about the movie back in January, when people at the Sundance Film Festival lost their minds about how good it was. As soon as I saw the words The Exorcist and The Shining attached to the film’s publicity materials, I knew I had to see it. I spent six agonizing months memorizing its trailers, watching YouTube fan movies (and considering making my own), talking to my friends about it until they began rolling their eyes, and dreaming about its possible endings. I fell madly in love with the idea of what it could be and what it might do to my imagination. For a poet, this is a movie’s greatest gift. The film came out on June 8, and I’ve already seen it twice. The first time, I saw it only through my fingers. I kept my hands plastered on my face, trying to avoid any jump scares (something I wish I had done when I first saw The Shining nearly twenty years ago and the ghost of room 237 began her lifelong emblazonment on my psyche). The second time, I wrote notes in a green notebook in the dark, scribbling half-words that I can barely read now. It reminded me of the way I first started writing poems in the darkness of my bedroom when I was a little girl. Read More
June 22, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Eileen Chang By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The 1940s wartime Shanghai in Love in a Fallen City, a book of short stories by Eileen Chang (1920–1995), is a bitter and glamorous world of cruel relatives, opium addicts, poor and angry students, Japanese invaders, and young women discreetly selling themselves in “jaunty, clopping” wooden clogs and beautiful clothes. These stories were written when Chang was enjoying a burst of literary stardom in her twenties and are considered to be some of her best. But even at the time, the world they captured was “being pushed onward … breaking apart already, with greater destruction still coming,” as Chang writes in the introduction to the book’s second edition. And of course it was wholly destroyed. The Communist revolution followed the war, and there was no place in Chinese letters for Chang, who was an impoverished daughter of the Chinese elite. She immigrated to Hong Kong in 1952, and though she never stopped writing, she died in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1995. Read More
June 21, 2018 In Memoriam In Memory of Stanley Cavell By Patrick Mackie While driving back from a party through the warm London night last Monday evening, I decided to tell my girlfriend about Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Macbeth. The story does not reflect any better on me, if you know the essay in question. It centers on a description of the Macbeths as a portrait of a marriage gone perfectly, metaphysically wrong, one where the sharing of thought and passion has become ghastly and vampiric. But the play was on my mind because I was due to see it the following night, so maybe I can be forgiven my conversational choice. The production felt strikingly close to Cavell’s account. So I was thinking the next day about emailing him about it; instead I heard the news of his death. I am still reeling from that news as I write these brief thoughts. Read More
June 21, 2018 In Memoriam A Space Cowboy’s Curriculum By Gary Lippman Ten things I know about John Perry Barlow: 1. John Perry Barlow died this past February at age seventy, but people have been trying to describe him for decades. Among the attempts: “Internet guru,” “the thinking man’s Forrest Gump,” and “an oracle of the unusual” (this last phrase from his dear friend Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, one of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters). His New York Times obituary described him as “a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet.” Barlow himself, on one of his business cards, presented his job title as “Peripheral Visionary,” which was typically waggish of him but too modest. His vision, as he grooved through cyberspace and “meatspace” (which is what he called real life), could be direct, just as it could be X-ray or cosmic. 2. The first time I hung out with my friend Barlow, the year was 2008, and he was cavorting around a party in Manhattan, cackling like a bedlamite as he shot colored lasers from the knuckles of the high-tech black leather gloves he wore. Witnessing this, I thought of the chorus to a song he’d written, a chorus I already knew by heart: “I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.” Read More
June 21, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: A Poem Not About Sex By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I have finally settled with the great love of my life. I have been with him through joys and losses, both in my life and his, and we have reached the place where our paths merge and become one. We have a home together. We have made promises to each other—long-term promises that I would never have thought possible to fulfill. I feel full, overflowing, for possibly the first time in my life. Is there a poem for this feeling, like the road ahead is paved in gold? Like a large piece of the puzzle of my life has finally clicked into place? Yours, Love Is Wonderful Dear LIW, Congratulations to you on your glorious fullness, the impossible luck that has found you. I just got married last weekend and can very much relate to the feeling of “a large piece of the puzzle” finally clicking into place. It’s a load-bearing gratitude in my life, as it sounds to be in yours. For you, I offer “Errata” by Kevin Young, a poem I’ve been reading and rereading since my wedding. It begins, Baby, give me just one more hiss We must lake it fast morever I want to cold you in my harms In the speaker’s great love fugue, “You make me weak in the knees” becomes “You wake me meek / in the needs.” It’s a deeply clever, desperately hopeful love poem that shows language buckling under the weight of desire. In A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno writes, “The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” For Young’s speaker, the gravity of desire is strong enough to pull apart his medium, creating a new constellation of private language native to his specific love. Great affection often produces this: invented vernacular to accommodate unprecedented love. In this way, “Errata” exemplifies Horace’s pronouncement that a great poem should delight as well as instruct. I hope it might do a bit of each for you and your partner. —KA Read More