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
September 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Hélio Oiticica in New York By Elisa Wouk Almino Miguel Rio Branco, Babylonests, 1971, digital projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. The late fifties and early sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, who had promised to achieve “fifty years of progress in five.” Musicians were mixing samba with jazz and developing bossa nova, while visual artists experimented with abstraction and participatory sculpture. Modern architecture would revolutionize the face of the country in 1960 with the inauguration of the newly constructed capital, Brasília. Designed by the country’s greatest modern architect, Oscar Niemeyer, the capitol was a symbol of hope and transformation in a poor country that had been politically unstable for decades. But all that was swiftly overshadowed by the reactionary military regime, which overthrew the government in 1964. In response to the new government’s violent, nationalistic rhetoric, artists began drawing even more heavily from cultural trends abroad to create a new, anarchist cultural movement, Tropicália. Like the indigenous cannibals who ate their colonialist enemies to become stronger, these artists wanted to consume foreign culture and to outdo it. For musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, this often meant fusing psychedelic rock with Brazilian beats; visual artists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape melded the handcraftsmanship of indigenous communities with modernist aesthetics. Hélio Oiticica, whose work is currently being celebrated in a massive retrospective, “To Organize Delirium,” at the Whitney Museum, was another actor at the center of this movement. Born into Brazil’s upper-middle class, he studied painting at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and became a vital part of the city’s art scene. Following the military coup, he began working with the marginal classes in the city’s favelas, where he developed many of his ideas of making art in public spaces and designed his famous “penetrables,” freestanding, colorful labyrinths that mimic the makeshift architecture of the favelas. In the best known of these, “Tropicália” (1967), two multicolor structures sit on an island of sand, a clichéd Brazilian setting; Oiticica wanted it to be “the cry of Brazil for the world.” Read More
September 6, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our New Web Editor By The Paris Review Photo: Kate Kornberg After a month and a half of wandering, rudderless, in the deserts of mixed metaphor, The Paris Review Daily is delighted to welcome its new editor: Nadja Spiegelman. Nadja’s memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, was published last year. More recently, she coedited Resist!, a free feminist publication of comics and graphics. A former editor at Toon Books, Nadja has written for New York Magazine, the newyorker.com, Fantastic Man, McSweeney’s, and many others. She also introduced Daily readers to verse in emoji—the first in what we feel sure will be a series of exciting innovations here at your favorite gazette of culture and the arts. Nadja has spent the past five years living in Paris; she will be returning home this week to join us in our Chelsea offices. (Her personal Paris review? Five stars.)