July 3, 2024 Poetry Rorschach By Diana Garza Islas Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain. Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen. Two cartoon Polish men high-five. Their legs and their heads are red, to accentuate the fact that their heads are like socks. Their eyes are like their mouths, almost smiling at their mischief. They betray a body pact. Two bald women with upturned noses, alien eyes, and prominent oval breasts. The separation between torso and hip through a knee and high heels propping up either two gardeners watering or two amphibians. On either side, fetuses in placenta or ghosts with their fingers to their lips, and with ribbons, evidently red, around their necks. Read More
February 21, 2024 Poetry Stopping Dead from the Neck Up By Delmore Schwartz Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966. Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know. I bought it several weeks ago. It stands there stolid on the shelf Making me feel lower than low Reminding me how I am low, Making me think of Crane and Poe. My fatlipped mouth must think it queer To stop without a single beer, To stop without a single beer The deadest day I ever spent In boredom and in self-contempt, Sober, sour, discontent. My fingers have begun to shake, My nerves think there is some mistake. The only other thought I think. Is how I failed to be a rake, A story which should take the cake. The booze stares at me like a brink. But I must wait for five, I think. Long hours must pass, before I drink; Long hours and slow, before I drink. The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.
August 8, 2023 Poetry Watch Jessica Laser Read “Kings” at the Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review On August 3, the poet Jessica Laser visited the offices of the Review in Chelsea and treated us to a reading of her poem “Kings,” which appears in our Summer issue. The poem, which our poetry editor Srikanth Reddy described as a “dreamy, autobiographical remembrance,” includes memories of a drinking game she used to play in high school on Lake Michigan, and is charged with eros: … You never knew whether it would be strip or not, so you always considered wearing layers. It was summer. Sometimes you’d get pretty naked but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off one sock at a time. A perfect poem to read or listen to in the dog days of August, as summer flings might be coming to an end! Read More
May 16, 2023 Poetry Primrose for X By Fanny Howe London buses moving. Licensed under CCO 2.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas. “Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence. Read More
April 18, 2023 Poetry Faring By Saskia Hamilton Illustration by Na Kim. We at the Review are mourning the loss of our friend and advisory editor, the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton. We recently published her poem “Faring,” part of her collection All Souls, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October; we want to share it again now, along with an introduction by Claudia Rankine. Hamilton will be dearly missed. (June 7, 2023) To read Saskia Hamilton’s “Faring,” the opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen. The morning ticks along as light enters to illuminate both the surrounding structure, window ledge, doves—and the sounds that seep in, wind, construction. To track the light, as the season moves into longer days, is to follow the shadows of others moving here and there behind curtains across the way. The cyclical nature of dawn’s return creates illusions of certainty for future days, though the speaker in “Faring” lives within an illness that names death its cure. This does not prevent love’s negotiation with time, as a child withholds declarations of love in fear of time’s retaliatory embrace. For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it’s the grace we hold. “Faring” builds its rooms against the too-muchness of life, life’s actual, red-hot intensities, for fear that even the caring inquiry “How are you faring?” will no longer be a relevant question, or that the tracking of the gray morning sunrise will be the only relevant answer. Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper, who is called forward in “Faring” by his poem—the book open, perhaps, on the speaker’s bedside table, like table talk—Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life’s weightiness, wariness, worthiness. Three centuries after Cowper, it’s not the countryside but the cityscape that allows Hamilton access to her own inner landscape. The brilliance of “Faring,” as well as its task, resides in its narrative charting of daily moments lived as “a soothing down.” —Claudia Rankine Read More
December 15, 2022 Poetry The Blackstairs Mountains By Colm Tóibín Illustration by Na Kim. In the new Winter issue of The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon interviews the writer Colm Tóibín, author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. Tóibín also writes poetry—“When I was twelve,” he tells McKeon, “I started writing poems every day, every evening. Not only that but I followed poetry as somebody else of that age might follow sport”—and we are pleased to publish one of his recent poems here. The Morris Minor cautiously took the turns And, behind us, the Morris 1000, driven by my aunt, Who never really learned to work a clutch. I remember the bleakness, the sheer rise, As though the incline had been Cut precisely and then polished clean, And also the whistle of the wind As I grudgingly climbed Mount Leinster. All of us, in fact, trudged most of the way up, With my uncle carrying a pair Of binoculars borrowed from Peter Hayes Who owned a pub in Court Street. Read More