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
June 20, 2018 Sketchbook Sketchbook: The First Sex-Worker Town Hall By Molly Crabapple Last Saturday, I sat on the floor of a queer art space in Ridgewood, watching a Democratic congressional candidate make his case to an audience of two hundred people who were, for the most part, sex workers. It felt a bit like something historic was taking place. I had been involved in sex-worker activism on and off for over a decade, starting back when I was a naked model inking illustrations for the dearly departed $pread Magazine, and I knew all the usual modes politicians usually used to address this community. At best, condescending pity. More often, sneers and condemnation. Yet here was Suraj Patel, running for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District, talking to a roomful of sex workers as if they had votes he had to win. Read More
June 20, 2018 Arts & Culture What Is Andre Dubus Doing, Anyway? By Ann Beattie Photo by Marion Ettlinger. Andre Dubus and I were once on book tour together. Because he was wheelchair-bound by this time, we were transported by hired car. Outside Boston, actually not so close to Boston, the car broke down. Do I remember correctly that this happened on a holiday weekend, or am I still trying to make sense of it? We sat in the back seat. Andre’s friend Jack was in the seat next to the driver. There were numerous phone calls, many moments when we had, or lost, hope. We reached our publisher’s voicemail. Nobody responded—well, there was talk, but no one did anything, as time passed and time passed. Finally, we tried to get a car by calling 1-800-RENTACAR, but that didn’t work either. A cop car pulled into the breakdown lane, assessed the situation, and raced off, lights blinking. That was the end of that. Hours into this, my husband and his best friend fetched me. They insisted: I must go because they were all going to get down the hill somehow and pee. I’d be seeing him soon, he said. One of the group had finally managed to summon help: a tow truck, another rental car, I don’t remember. I left amid cries of “Good sport!” and “See you next week!” feeling that I should stay. (Yes, I should have.) Read More
June 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Marlene Dumas’s Metamorphoses By Larissa Pham Marlene Dumas, from “Myths & Mortals.” In bed some nights, too tired to read, I lie on my side with my phone plugged into the wall and scroll through Instagram. Lately, perhaps because of the algorithms, process videos of illustrators painting have risen to the top of my feed. My favorites are the ones where the artist begins without a drawing, the canvas blank as a sheet; I like the mystery of the movement of the brush, following its slow dance across the paper. After thirty seconds, a minute, the strokes come together, and on the glowing screen, an image rises up, like an omen out of water. A face, a flower, a still life. I could watch them all night and often do, mesmerized by the startling process of creation. The drawings at the center of Marlene Dumas’s current show at the David Zwirner gallery, “Myths & Mortals,” take their subject from Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis.” That poem is itself a retelling of Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, which is itself one iteration of a classic myth told around fires long before Ovid wrote it down. In this story, Venus, the goddess of love, has helplessly fallen for a young mortal hunter, Adonis. How impossible that the goddess of love could be a victim of love herself—and yet. Pricked by Cupid’s bow, she succumbs. Overcome by passion, desire courses through her body, making her cheeks pale and the sweat stand out on her brow. Read More
June 19, 2018 Redux Redux: A Summer Month Together 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. The summer solstice is this week, so as things heat up and before the days get shorter, we bring you our interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, where he recalls his summer job as a grouse beater for the queen mother; William Gass’s nostalgia-driven short story “Summer Bees,” in which an affair is fondly remembered; and Molly Peacock’s poem “A Hot Day in Agrigento.” Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196 Issue no. 184 (Spring 2008) My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they used to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invite people to shoot on their estate. The Queen Mother and her guests would get into Land Rovers with shotguns and whiskey and drive over bits of the moor from shooting butt to shooting butt. That’s where they would aim and shoot. Fifteen of us would walk in formation across the moor, spaced about a hundred yards apart in the heather. The grouse live in the heather, and they hear us coming, and they hop. By the time we arrive at the butts, all of the grouse in the vicinity have accumulated and the Queen Mum and her friends are waiting with shotguns. Around the butts there’s no heather, so the grouse have got no choice but to fly up. Then the shooting starts. And then we walk to the next butt. It’s a bit like golf. Read More