July 1, 2016

Hink pink is a word game in which synonyms, circumlocution, and micronarratives provide clues for rhyming phrases. Check out Dylan Hicks’s forty hink-pink riddles here.

Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Russell Jane Willoughby, who got out thirty-seven of forty really difficult hink pinks. She gets a free subscription to the Review and a copy of Dylan’s new novel, Amateurs. Congratulations, Russell! Below, the solutions.

From the Archive

Genesis

By Geoffrey Hill

Photo: Clara Molden.

The English poet Geoffrey Hill—a lifelong contributor to The Paris Review—has died at eighty-four. His first poem for the magazine, the aptly named “Genesis,” appeared in our second issue (Summer 1953). In his memory, we’re republishing it today. Read More

July 1, 2016

On the Shelf

Clouds Are the New Fireworks, and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

Marketing materials for Khmer Cloud Making Service.

The poet Geoffrey Hill has died at eighty-four, “suddenly, and without pain or dread,” according to his wife. “The word accessible is fine in its place,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “That is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word. In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honor of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.”

Scotty Moore, who played guitar in Elvis’s original band, died this week, too. Alex Abramovich writes: “He started out a country guitarist, a finger-picker in the mode of Chet Atkins. But slathered in echo, that country style translated remarkably well to a rockabilly/rock and roll context, while the context brought something extra—something ecstatic—to the style … Scotty Moore brought something different to the table. Not quite diffidence, but a perfectly worked out sense of proportion. Moore didn’t wail, or break from the pack: understated on stage and in person, he played to frame the frontman.”

A certain founding editor of ours would have me fired for writing this, but: fuck fireworks. They’re loud, they’re volatile, they do violence to the sky. If you’d prefer a more peaceful Fourth, you should ditch America, catch a flight to Phnom Penh, and send some clouds into the sky instead: “This isn’t Bubble Machine BGSP #5 by the early Filipino conceptual artist David Medalla, it’s Khmer Cloud Making Service, a Phnom Penh business offering customizable foam-printing services for events … The company offers ephemeral works for events and corporate programs. They are most frequently hired to deploy cloud art at the openings of new businesses … Khmer Cloud Making Service currently employs four people, working near Boeung Keng Kang Market. You can rent out their services for $500 an afternoon.”

Hilton Als tells the long, harrowing, ecstatic story behind Nan Goldin’s The Ballad: “The Ballad was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call ‘being.’ In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to The Ballad’s operatic sweep.”

From the makers of dirty realism, infrarealism, surrealism, and hyperrealism, it’s ultra-unrealism, China’s newest school of cultural thought: “The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by chaohuan, which we are rendering in English as ‘ultra-unreal.’ The literal meaning of chaohuan is ‘surpassing the unreal’ or ‘surpassing the imaginary.’ It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality … The word ‘ultra-unreal’ is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least 30 years. Maybe 50 years. Maybe even 100 years.”

June 30, 2016

From the Archive

Babyland

By Kathleen Ossip

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Marcelle Roulin, 1888.

Kathleen Ossip’s poem “Babyland” appeared in our Summer 2002 issue. Her latest collection is The Do-Over. Read More

June 30, 2016

Our Correspondents

The Whole Rigmarole

By Anthony Madrid

Ben Jonson bares all.

From left: Ben Jonson, William Drummond.

Pretty soon it will have been four hundred years since Ben Jonson (1572–1637) walked from London to Edinburgh. I don’t know the whole story. I know he stayed at some length with William Drummond of Hawthornden, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Jonson was around forty-seven at the time; Drummond was around thirty-four.

Both of these guys were poets, were into languages, bought a lot of books. Jonson was of course right in the middle of things in London. He knew Shakespeare, knew Donne. Drummond, meanwhile, had money.

People still read Jonson, with how much love I don’t know. There are a number of famous lines. “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” “Though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.” Drummond got a boost with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861), eight items to Jonson’s three. Still, these days, if you love Drummond’s poetry (I do) you pretty much feel you have him all to yourself. Read More

June 30, 2016

At Work

The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner

By Michael Clune

What do we want from poetry? To read a poem is, on some level, to loathe it—both poem and poet aspire to fulfill a set of impossible expectations from the culture. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner argues that a disdain for poetry is inextricable from the art form itself. Earlier this month, Michael Clune spoke to Lerner at Greenlight Books, in Brooklyn. The exchange below is an edited version of that conversation. —Ed.

INTERVIEWER

One of the most striking things you do in The Hatred of Poetry is to reorient our sense of value. Your canon is “the terrible poets, the great poets, and the silent poets,” as opposed to the merely good or the mediocre. You write about the worst poet in history, McGonagall, and his horrific masterpiece, or antimasterpiece, “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remembered for a very long
time.

LERNER

Wikipedia says that he’s widely considered the worst poet ever. Read More