October 2, 2024 First Person The River Rukarara By Scholastique Mukasonga Map of Richard Kandt’s expedition to find the source of the Nile, from Caput Nili. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother. The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday. Read More
October 1, 2024 Bookmarks An Excessively Noisy Gut, a Silver Snarling Trumpet, and a Big Bullshit Story By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, from books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic: I lie, I say I’m going to the hairdresser, secretly I’m off to see you, I am on my way right to the day when the Question peeps up, I no longer know which day that was. Dispatched on the instructions of Time, of Age, like a sprite ready to demand the Shadow’s identity card, proof of domicile, like the spirits of dates delegated to persecutions, of retirement dates, of warrants of life, of entry into silences, of fateful anniversaries Day broke, the tale was back on the road, I followed it Read More
September 27, 2024 A Letter from the Editor Hannah Arendt, Poet By Srikanth Reddy Hannah Arendt, 1958. Photograph by Barbara Niggl Radloff. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them. Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue. Read More
September 26, 2024 First Person Control Is Controlled by Its Need to Control: My Basic Electronics Course By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J. D. Daniels. Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing. What is left of it now, my electronics project, other than the names of these things? A solderless breadboard, and another one, and another one. A fifty-foot roll of twenty-seven-gauge insulated copper wire. Tactile switch micro assortment momentary tact assortment kit, not clear to me what that means. All these jumper wires with their connector pins, I tend to blank on their correct name and call them pinner wires. (When I was a kid, a pinner was a tightly rolled joint. Its opposite was a hog leg.) All the resistors in the whole world, and enough alligator clips to fill the Everglades, and a couple of bags of fuses, and a sack of capacitors, and a box of transistors, and my multimeter. Read More
September 25, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Sara Gilmore on “Safe camp” By Sara Gilmore From Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” appear in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. The poem she discusses here, “Safe camp,” is published on the Daily. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Originally this poem began with the lines “Delay and pressed the reeling available / Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.” It never troubled me that the words together didn’t make sense or that I didn’t yet know what they were pointing to—I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with. As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word “reeling”—the “real” along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of “reeling,” Anne Carson’s notion “under this day the reel of another day.” This figure of reeling gave into the poem’s circuitry as a whole—the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating. This is one of the poem’s anxieties—the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I’m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven’t lived yet at all. The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. “I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.” I like to think the original lines are still there—what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we’re no longer standing on but got us here. Read More
September 25, 2024 Poetry Safe camp By Sara Gilmore Photograph courtesy of the author. I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by. In the quiet permission I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough. Can’t in cannot, the backwater was canceled So a quiet commercial Could play inside instead. An artifact Gathered and became immobile, and even so Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself. I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself. In everything To see a circular tape, again and Again I see it, determining the summer was suddenness Netting how images can melt, can melt the video lengthening some dream Because exhaust is unmanageable and so released. I push in the tape, Iridescent and wet. I’m soggy and failing at no end in sight And just figures on their way, where are they going, What is their position. Let me place you inside the deer To keep you warm. You can read two more poems by Sara Gilmore, “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249. You can also read Gilmore’s thoughts on writing “Safe camp” here on the Daily. Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.