{"id":166802,"date":"2024-02-21T11:14:56","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T16:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166802"},"modified":"2024-02-22T11:15:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T16:15:26","slug":"stopping-dead-from-the-neck-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/02\/21\/stopping-dead-from-the-neck-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Stopping Dead from the Neck Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald<\/em>, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz.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<\/em> Partisan Review,<\/em> he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems<\/a> and letters<\/a> were published in the <\/em>Review in the eighties and nineties.<\/em>) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable <\/em>for its recasting of Robert Frost’s<\/em> \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d from an alcoholic’s perspective.\u00a0This 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know.
\nI bought it several weeks ago.
\nIt stands there stolid on the shelf
\nMaking me feel lower than low
\nReminding me how I am low,
\nMaking me think of Crane and Poe.<\/p>\n

My fatlipped mouth must think it queer
\nTo stop without a single beer,
\nTo stop without a single <\/em>beer
\nThe deadest day I ever spent
\nIn boredom and in self-contempt,
\nSober, sour, discontent.<\/p>\n

My fingers have begun to shake,
\nMy nerves think there is some mistake.
\nThe only other thought I think.
\nIs how I failed to be a rake,
\nA story which should take the cake.<\/p>\n

The booze stares at me like a brink.
\nBut I must wait for five, I think.
\nLong hours must pass, before I drink;
\nLong hours and slow, before I drink.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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