February 8, 2024 A Letter from the Editor A Winter Dispatch from the Review’s Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy Illustration by Na Kim. In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.” Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window. Read More
February 6, 2024 First Person My Brush with Greatness By Laurie Stone Joan Collins in Drive Hard, Drive Fast (1973). Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame. The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience. Read More
February 5, 2024 On Nature Essay on the Sky By Vincent Katz Praia Brava, 2015. Photograph by Isaac Katz. Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine? Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right. Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004] At this time of day (the day has experienced enough and gone through transformations, travels even), a glow from the sky embraces the neighborhood, and as it goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, takes in the whole city in its look, and that glow is comforting. One realizes it is raining lightly, and the rain too takes part in the glow that several angled clouds have hooked into lower down. [São Paulo, Brazil, February 24, 2005] All day not really a cloud in sight—a still blue sky one could see and not feel threatened by. The day would not go very far, not splinter into challenges and excitement. Then, suddenly, they move in and begin to change the sky’s outlook. One large, potato-shaped cloud hovered over the tree line. Much later, at dusk, an out-of-focus cloud echoed the land’s bared curve. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 2, 2006] A bit of sunlight touched the sky’s lining, and there was sun setting in the sky, but mainly it was a sky full of clouds. Their textures could be made out overhead and extending far into the distance, over the water and other islands’ darkening outlines. Much farther out, the sky lightened. Out there, white clouds instead of gray, and the mind’s imagination of a clearing for travelers by boat. The full moon half appeared through banks, a lemon sherbet over mountains along ocean edge. Then it disappeared from view. Later, while the moon itself remained hidden, its light could be seen projecting high into the sky against cloud shapes, stage-lighting a place known as heaven. [Praia Brava, Ubatuba, Brazil, April 2, 2007] Read More
February 2, 2024 The Review’s Review The Frenchwoman from Indianapolis By Rosa Lyster Janet Flanner, ca. 1925. Berenice Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog. Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.” Read More
February 1, 2024 Paragraphs Too Enjoyable to Be Literature By Helen Garner Photograph by Jane Breakell. I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature. Read More
January 30, 2024 Writers' Houses At the Britney Spears House Museum By Emmeline Clein Photograph by Emmeline Clein. Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street. I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.” The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots. Read More