September 7, 2017 At Work Writing Roundabout: An Interview with Sam Stephenson By Nicole Rudick Mary Frank and Sam Stephenson in Frank’s studio on West Nineteenth Street, New York, 2010. Photo: Kate Joyce Sam Stephenson’s biography, Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, was published late last month. Its subject, the photographer W. Eugene Smith, should be familiar to longtime readers of the Daily: since 2010, we have run Stephenson’s chronicles of Smith’s myriad photographic projects and exploits with the luminaries of the midcentury New York jazz scene (Stephenson is also the author of The Jazz Loft Project, which was excerpted in issue no. 190) as well as—and perhaps most importantly—stories about the somebodies and nobodies who populated the margins of Smith’s life. Over sixteen essays, Stephenson tracked his subject across six decades, from his childhood in Kansas through the American South to rural Japan and Saipan. And through these essays, Stephenson discovered that he could not untangle his work as Smith’s biographer—a job that has consumed him for the past twenty years—from Smith’s narrative. The very process of writing a life became part of the story in which that process unfolded, and versions of the Daily pieces found their way into his very unconventional biography. Nearly seven years to the day of our first correspondence, Stephenson and I talked on the phone about collaboration, the importance of digression, and, of course, Gene Smith. INTERVIEWER You wrote me with ideas for blog posts in September of 2010, the month I started at the Review. One of them was on the artist Mary Frank, another was on the musician Dorrie Woodson, and another was on the musician Joe Henry. All of those ideas turned into pieces on the Daily, and versions of the Frank and Woodson ended up being chapters in your book. STEPHENSON We got off to a strong start. If you look at the body of work we’ve done together over seven years, it marks a span of time over which my outlook and my style and the final form of Gene Smith’s Sink evolved and took shape. The book became something much different than what I proposed and what Farrar, Straus and Giroux signed up for. I can now articulate that evolution to some degree, and working with you was critical to that development. Read More
September 7, 2017 In Memoriam “Korean Soap Opera” By John Ashbery This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More
September 7, 2017 Document Notes from India, 1962 By Joanne Kyger Joanne Kyger in Nara, Japan, June 1963. Photo by Allen Ginsberg. © Allen Ginsberg LLC. In 1960, when she was in her late twenties, the poet Joanne Kyger (1934–2017) joined Gary Snyder in Japan. From there, the two traveled to India, together with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, where they met the Dalai Lama. Below are entries from Kyger’s journal, written in India in March 1962. March 2, 1962 Moved across the Ganges to Swarg Ashram. Two rooms, for Peter & Allen, Gary & I. Afternoon walk down to sand and rock point of Ganges—white glittering sand. A few orange robes spread on rocks to dry. Everyone strips to undershorts, launders and bathes in the river. Sadhus sitting in meditation, red eyes, matted hair up by the bridge. How can they sit so still says Allen. Gary changes last of my color film exposing by accident last pictures. Losing the following: Portrait of Gary with wet hair, Allen behind in the Ganges. Peter swimming, Allen & Gary bathing. Gary meditating in sand, Allen standing on tall rock in background. Allen, Peter, Gary sitting on bathing steps on Shivananda’s side of river. View from lodging across to other side of river from hill where we spent the first night at Rishikesh. Gary in front of Agra Fort Pearl Mosque. Read More
September 6, 2017 Arts & Culture The Ashbery Files By Lorin Stein John Ashbery was a prolific contributor to The Paris Review. Over the years, we published forty of his poems, plus two long prose pieces, a series of collages, and an Art of Poetry interview. From an early age, he started cropping up in other people’s interviews, too. Already in 1966, Allen Ginsberg was comparing Ashbery to Alexander Pope (“I was listening to him read The Skaters, and it sounded as inventive and exquisite, in all its parts, as The Rape of the Lock”). By the 1980s, Philip Larkin could use Ashbery as a stand-in for all that was hip and threatening in American poetry: “I’ve never been to America … And of course I’m so deaf now that I shouldn’t dare. Someone would say, What about Ashbery, and I’d say, I’d prefer strawberry, that kind of thing.” Whether we were interviewing Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Edmund White, Helen Vendler—it turned out to be impossible to discuss their work without at least mentioning his. And it is worth pointing out that this was post-edits. Often, at least in recent years, Ashbery’s influence or example seemed too obvious to discuss, so his name ended up on the cutting-room floor. Here, in no particular order, are some Ashbery sightings from the Writers at Work interviews: Read More
September 6, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Postsurgical Reading, and Other Questions By Lorin Stein Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? Email us. Dear Paris Review, My writing mentor said that if I want to raise my writing to the next level, then I have to learn to write suggestively in addition to writing descriptively. Is this true and where can one learn to write suggestively? Yours, Stuck in the Basement Dear Stuck, Suggestive is good! Suggestive is a plus. Your mentor’s advice has the weight of the entire modernist movement behind it—all the way back to Paul Verlaine’s 1882 verse manifesto “Art poétique,” “Give us more nuance, / Not color, nothing but nuance!” It sounds better in French. And it’s easier said than done. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s advice on how to write a suggestive short story: If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit. A story in this book called Big Two-Hearted River is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war … So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted. The river was the Fox River, by Seney, Michigan, not the Big Two-Hearted. The change of name was made purposely, not from ignorance nor carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry, and because there were many Indians in the story, just as the war was in the story, and none of the Indians nor the war appeared. As you see, it is very simple and easy to explain. See issue no. 70, Spring 1981 for the rest (including Hemingway’s definition of “beat to the wide,” which I omitted in the spirit of the thing). Read More
September 6, 2017 In Memoriam “Soonest Mended” By John Ashbery This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More