{"id":86972,"date":"2015-06-23T20:49:11","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T00:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86972"},"modified":"2017-06-28T15:40:50","modified_gmt":"2017-06-28T19:40:50","slug":"i-have-wasted-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"I Have Wasted My Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"d4263876x\"<\/a>

Niels Frederik Schi\u00f8ttz-Jensen, An Afternoon\u2019s Rest<\/i>, 1885<\/p><\/div>\n

The narrator of \u201cYancey<\/a>,\u201d Ann Beattie\u2019s story in our new Summer issue<\/a>, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows up to audit her. Toward the end, she recites a poem to him\u2014James Wright\u2019s famous \u201cLying in a Hammock at William Duffy\u2019s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota\u201d:<\/p>\n

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
\nAsleep on the black trunk,
\nBlowing like a leaf in green shadow.
\nDown the ravine behind the empty house,
\nThe cowbells follow one another
\nInto the distances of the afternoon.
\nTo my right,
\nIn a field of sunlight between two pines,
\nThe droppings of last year\u2019s horses
\nBlaze up into golden stones.
\nI lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
\nA chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
\nI have wasted my life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As it turns out, that poem first appeared in The Paris Review<\/em>; it was published some fifty-four years ago alongside his \u201cHow My Fever Left\u201d in our Summer-Fall 1961 issue<\/a>. Since then, that last line has inspired reams of analysis and debate\u2014is it a lament? Is it a joke, a kind of boast? Did Wright intend to undercut or to bolster his pastoral scene with it? Could it be a winking response to Rilke, whose \u201cArchaic Torso of Apollo\u201d concludes with the imperative \u201cYou must change your life\u201d? Beattie\u2019s IRS agent isn\u2019t sure what to make of it: <\/p>\n

\u201cIs that really a poem?\u201d he finally said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat else would it be?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never heard anything like that. The last line comes out of nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think so. He could have said that from the beginning, but he gave us the scene so that we\u2019d be seduced, the way he\u2019d been, and then he changed the game on us\u2014on himself\u2014at the last moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the kind of guy who\u2019d stick a pin in a balloon!\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But David Mitchell, who keeps the poem above his desk and wrote about it last year for The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, begs to differ. Reading that last line, he hears the narrator \u201cexhale it with a wry laugh\u201d:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve wasted my life! He\u2019s kind of smiling. I\u2019ve done it again, all this wasted time<\/em>, he thinks\u2014but at least I know it<\/em>. Though he hasn\u2019t really wasted all of his life\u2014he knows that, too. You have to enter the hammock, put the world on hold, to really see things clearly the way the poem does. He\u2019s been to this hammock before, and he\u2019s had moments like this before, and it\u2019s mostly positive. It\u2019s self-deflating, but not depressing. It\u2019s sad, and longing, and nostalgic, and wry\u2014the ironic half-bark of a laugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thom Gunn took a dimmer view of it. \u201cThe final line is perhaps exciting because we are surprised to encounter something so different from the rest of the poem,\u201d he wrote in The Yale Review<\/em> in 1964, \u201cbut it is certainly meaningless. The more one searches for an explicit meaning in it, the vaguer it becomes. Other general statements of different import could well be substituted for it and the poem would neither gain nor lose strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, Wright\u2019s friend Robert Bly retorted: \u201cIt is clear Gunn does not understand the poem, or rather, it is not the poem he doesn\u2019t understand but the emotion.\u201d Gunn\u2019s ego, he thinks, has erected too many compartments:<\/p>\n

Other people, chaotic ones, may have wasted their lives, but not he. What prevents Gunn from understanding is his habit of discursive reasoning, his rationalism \u2026 In poems the deepest thoughts are often the most painful thoughts, and they come to consciousness only despite the rationalist road-blocks, by slipping past the defenses of the ego. In most men, the inner thoughts are never able to slip by these defenses of the ego. The ordinary mind has pickets everywhere, who make an impregnable ring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what of the poet himself? In an interview published two years before his death, Wright told Bruce Henricksen that he thought the line was \u201ca religious statement\u201d:<\/p>\n

here I am and I\u2019m not straining myself and yet I\u2019m happy at this moment, and perhaps I\u2019ve been wastefully unhappy in the past because through my arrogance or whatever, and in my blindness, I haven\u2019t allowed myself to pay true attention to what was around me. And a very strange thing happened. After I wrote the poem and after I published it, I was reading among the poems of the eleventh-century Persian poet, Ansari, and he used exactly the same phrase at a moment when he was happy. He said, \u201cI have wasted my life.\u201d Nobody gave him hell for giving up iambics. You can\u2019t win.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m tempted, in a somewhat narrower vein, to read the line as a quip on poetry itself, a means of expanding the poem\u2019s reach by subverting what I guess would have to be called its very poem-ness. In the latest LRB<\/em>, Ben Lerner writes about the popular disdain for poems<\/a>, and the surprising varieties of this disdain. \u201cWhat if we dislike or despise or hate poems,\u201d he asks, \u201cbecause they are\u2014every single one of them\u2014failures?\u201d He takes Marianne Moore\u2019s self-abnegating \u201cI, too, dislike it\u201d as a starting point, but \u201cI have wasted my life\u201d could serve just as easily\u2014as could Auden\u2019s \u201cpoetry makes nothing happen\u201d or any number of despondencies that have shrugged their way into verse. Citing the poet and critic Allen Grossman, Lerner notes that \u201cthe poem is always a record of failure\u201d:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an \u201cundecidable conflict\u201d between the poet\u2019s desire to make an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, \u201cresistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed\u201d \u2026 actual poems are foredoomed by a \u201cbitter logic\u201d that can\u2019t be overcome by any level of virtuosity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of that bitter logic infects Wright\u2019s final line. Even if, as Mitchell writes, \u201cthe poem\u2019s pastoral scene is timeless, universal,\u201d one that carefully defies any attempt to date it, and even if its images are impeccably realized, the poem is still a limited thing, composed of the ungainly materials of language and so destined, as Lerner puts it, to be \u201ccompromised by the finitude of its terms.\u201d The narrator, in his hammock, seems achingly aware of that: his attempt to transcend, to put a scene of plain timelessness into words, is, perforce, a miscarriage. Understandably, by the end he\u2019s grown contemptuous, or at least weary, of the whole damn project. The best he can do, as Lerner writes, is to \u201cclear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.\u201d And so\u2014why not?\u2014he sticks a pin into the balloon.<\/p>\n

For more reactions to Wright\u2019s poem, read Modern American Poetry\u2019s compilation of criticism<\/a>. And read Beattie\u2019s \u201cYancey\u201d by subscribing to The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The narrator of \u201cYancey,\u201d Ann Beattie\u2019s story in our new Summer issue, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows up to audit her. Toward the end, she recites a poem to him\u2014James Wright\u2019s famous \u201cLying in a Hammock at William Duffy\u2019s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota\u201d: Over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[1392,3263,14748,18161,13169,11585,18545,2006,7221,165,4278,11726,18544],"class_list":["post-86972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-ann-beattie","tag-ben-lerner","tag-failure","tag-issue-213","tag-issue-26","tag-james-wright","tag-lying-in-a-hammock-at-william-duffys-farm-in-pine-island-minnesota","tag-marianne-moore","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-robert-bly","tag-thom-gunn","tag-yancey"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn James Wright\u2019s \u201cLying in a Hammock...\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The poem\u2019s last line continues to inspire spirited debate.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Have Wasted My Life by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 23, 2015 \u2013 The narrator of \u201cYancey,\u201d Ann Beattie\u2019s story in our new Summer issue, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows up to\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"432\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"I Have Wasted My Life\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\"},\"wordCount\":1204,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Ann Beattie\",\"Ben Lerner\",\"failure\",\"Issue 213\",\"Issue 26\",\"James Wright\",\"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy\u2019s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota\",\"Marianne Moore\",\"poems\",\"poetry\",\"Robert Bly\",\"Thom Gunn\",\"Yancey\"],\"articleSection\":[\"On Poetry\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\",\"name\":\"On James Wright\u2019s \u201cLying in a Hammock...\u201d\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00\",\"description\":\"The poem\u2019s last line continues to inspire spirited debate.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"I Have Wasted My Life\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\",\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/6fde7ced443ba5b52db3b06239dca8a2eaeff111fccecd7bf483663c99d2762b?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/6fde7ced443ba5b52db3b06239dca8a2eaeff111fccecd7bf483663c99d2762b?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Dan Piepenbring\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/dpiepenbring\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"On James Wright\u2019s \u201cLying in a Hammock...\u201d","description":"The poem\u2019s last line continues to inspire spirited debate.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"I Have Wasted My Life by Dan Piepenbring","og_description":"June 23, 2015 \u2013 The narrator of \u201cYancey,\u201d Ann Beattie\u2019s story in our new Summer issue, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows up to","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00","article_modified_time":"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00","og_image":[{"width":600,"height":432,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Dan Piepenbring","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Dan Piepenbring","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/"},"author":{"name":"Dan Piepenbring","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8"},"headline":"I Have Wasted My Life","datePublished":"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00","dateModified":"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/"},"wordCount":1204,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg","keywords":["Ann Beattie","Ben Lerner","failure","Issue 213","Issue 26","James Wright","Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy\u2019s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota","Marianne Moore","poems","poetry","Robert Bly","Thom Gunn","Yancey"],"articleSection":["On Poetry"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/","name":"On James Wright\u2019s \u201cLying in a Hammock...\u201d","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg","datePublished":"2015-06-24T00:49:11+00:00","dateModified":"2017-06-28T19:40:50+00:00","description":"The poem\u2019s last line continues to inspire spirited debate.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/d4263876x.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/i-have-wasted-my-life\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"I Have Wasted My Life"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8","name":"Dan Piepenbring","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/6fde7ced443ba5b52db3b06239dca8a2eaeff111fccecd7bf483663c99d2762b?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/6fde7ced443ba5b52db3b06239dca8a2eaeff111fccecd7bf483663c99d2762b?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Dan Piepenbring"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/dpiepenbring\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86972"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112132,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86972\/revisions\/112132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}