Paris Review Research Articles

American literary minimalism

Although a handful of books and articles have been written about American literary minimalism during the last forty years, the mode remains misunderstood. When in a 2011 interview in The Paris Review author Anne Beattie was asked how she felt about being classed as a minimalist, she began her answer: none of us have ever known what that means. Her response brings into focus the lack of agreement or clarity about the sources and definitions of literary minimalism. Robert C. Clark's American Literary Minimalism fills this significant gap. Clark demonstrates that, despite assertions by many scholars to the contrary, the movement originated in the aesthetic programs of the imagists and literary impressionists active at the turn of the twentieth century. The genre reflects the philosophy that form is thought, and that style alone dictates whether a poem, story, or novel falls within the parameters of the tradition. The characteristics of minimalist fiction are efficiency, frequent use of allusion, and implication through omission. Organizing his analysis both chronologically and according to lines of influence, Clark offers a definition of the mode, describes its early stages, and then explores six works that reflect its core characteristics: Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time ; Raymond Carver's Cathedral ; Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City ; Susan Minot's Monkeys ; Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo ; and Cormac McCarthy's The Road . In his conclusion, Clark discusses the ongoing evolution of the category.

The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data

The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data Sven Birkerts (bio) What I want to talk about, in the narrowest sense, is the place of the literary magazine in a culture that has, in terms of information and communication, as well as many other things, completely transformed itself in the last forty years—in the span of my adult lifetime. The fact that I’ve been present and interested for the whole duration gives me a vantage to speak from. This context of decades is important, since the literary magazine today, existing on paper and online, is still completely shaped by the idealism of its origins in the pre-digital world. I can try to characterize some of that idealism—or was it my idealism?—by looking back at what these journals were like when I was first coming up as a literary wannabe. At the very end of the sixties I lived in suburban Detroit, where we were served by a good public library and two decent little bookstores. I frequented both, knew their stock inside out. But it was not until I was seventeen that I first saw a lit mag. That happened not in my suburb but in downtown Detroit, near Wayne State University, in the beatniky area that my friends and I fled to whenever we could. We would go there to find coffeehouses, record stores, what were called head shops (do I need to gloss that?)—and it was there, in the far back of one of those places, on a revolving metal rack, that I saw my very first copies of New Directions and City Lights books, and my first literary journal—the Evergreen Review. I pause here to try to get back inside the moment. For it remains completely distinct in memory. That one magazine, thin as an average trade paperback, with a photo cover that I can’t quite recall, except that it was completely existential, that being, in my small circle, code for sophisticated, radical, against the mainstream, creative. The thing was, as they say, auratic; it was completely unique to me, as itself. It also became—in the way things could more easily happen before complete informational ubiquity—a doorway into another kind of culture, another way of living and looking at the world. It’s hard to imagine a correlative for this in our day, when everything is available, and a single search cue can put you on to the most arcane materials. For one consequence of such saturation and ubiquity is the complete erosion of that idea—and feeling—of the other. Which I will maintain was, those four decades ago, one of the distinguishing features of the little magazine. It was other. At the same time, or maybe for that reason, it had [End Page 224] an air of transgression. It seemed that it might give the real inside view of things that the mainstream media had airbrushed. This is subjective reminiscence, but I’ll stay with it for a bit. I jump forward five years to the early seventies. The counterculture has by now had its impact and is already waning. I have finished college and am living in the minor literary Mecca of Ann Arbor, Michigan, working in a bookstore, more keen than ever to find my way into the writing world. With the flourishing of good bookstores (it was the era of the first Borders) came the flourishing of the magazine culture—or so it seemed in that big college town. Alongside the staple mainstream publications you could find magazines like Ramparts, Rolling Stone, Creem, a renovated Esquire. And also new (to me) a whole array of very exciting little magazines: Paris Review, of course, Antaeus, Salmagundi, the Iowa Review, Kayak, Stand, a few others. They exuded independence and intensity—they were in the most seductive and covetable way literary. Some part of what I was picking up, of course, was my own projected obsession: I so wanted to be in one of those magazines, to be part of a table of contents, to be typeset, to be broadcast far and wide on paper. What could be finer than to be listed as...

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia by Julio Cortázar

Fiction Julio Cortázar. Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia. David Kurnick, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. 2014. isbn 9781584351344 In 1975 Argentine writer Julio Cortázar returned home to Paris from Brussels, where he had been participating in a meeting of the Second Russell Tribunal, an international body charged with investigating humanrights abuses in Latin America. Later that year, Cortázar’s novella Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales was first published . Now, at last, Semiotext(e) has made it available in English. The novella opens with “the narrator of our fascinating story,” unnamed but clearly Cortázar, in Brussels where, having completed work with the tribunal, he rushes to catch a train to his home in Paris. To while away the upcoming journey, he buys “The Mind on Fire,” an issue of the Mexican comic book about a caped, masked superhero , “Fantomas, the Elegant Menace.” As he reads, the narrator discovers Fantomas’s mission: to find and thwart an evil genius who is destroying the libraries of the world and threatening writers with death if they ever again put pen to paper. In the comic, Fantomas contacts many living writers—including, to the narrator’s (and our) surprise, Julio Cortázar and American critic and political activist Susan Sontag. In the novella, Sontag contacts “our narrator ” (Cortázar), urges him to finish the comic then call her back, and mentions that she expects to talk soon with Fantomas. World Literature in Review Christian Wiman’s searing intensity. Verse, page 124 Philip Teir’s wintry war. Fiction, page 118 Elise Musomandera’s powerful memoir. Miscellaneous, page 127 106 wlt may / august 2015 Before long, Fantomas, Sontag, and Cortázar are working together to thwart an evil far greater than the comic’s “bibliocide.” If this seems complicated, just wait. In our world there is a (fictional) character named Fantomas. He first appeared as a criminal mastermind (named Fantômas) in a series of forty French pulp novels published between 1911 and 1947. In 1969 he was resurrected as a gentleman thief and defender of the downtrodden in the Mexican comic-book series Fantomas, la amenaza elegante. In his novella, Cortázar includes panels and pages taken directly from issue 201 of this comic, “La inteligencia en llamas” (February 1975). Readers acquainted with Cortázar’s work will find the storytelling in Fantomas and the Multinational Vampires familiar. In his dauntingly experiential novel Rayeula (1963; Eng. Hopscotch, 1966), Cortázar used collage as a structural principle for pure prose. He later extended this technique to visual material, such as engravings , designs, and photographs in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967; Eng. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1986) and Último Round (1969). And by 1975 Cortázar had published an overtly political novel about Latin American politics, Libro de Manuel (1973; Eng. A Manual for Manuel, 1978), which included extracts from newspaper articles. But the tone of the later work is nothing like the playfulness of Fantomas and the Multinational Vampires. To some, addressing human-rights abuses in this way, via a character born of French pulp novels and Mexican comics, may seem incongruous or even inappropriate. But such is Cortázar’s way: in an interview in the Paris Review, he remarked, “For me, literature is a form of play . . . it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.” The production values of this slim book are up Semiotext(e)’s usual high standards. David Kurnick’s translation—and especially his essential afterword—are firstrate . In an appendix, Semiotext(e) includes excerpts from the findings of the tribunal. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Filip David. Kuća sećanja i zaborava. Belgrade. Laguna. 2014. isbn 9788652117499 Over the past decade, several excellent post-Yugoslavia novels have been published on genocide and the Holocaust. This indicates a strong writers’ need for reconstructing the past and analyzing the present. Filip David is a renowned author, known and translated abroad. What distinguishes his new novel, Kuća sećanja i zaborava (The house of memories and forgetfulness ), from Bosnian and Herzegovinian...

Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara by Thabiti Lewis

Reviewed by: Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara by Thabiti Lewis Pauline Baird (bio) Lewis, Thabiti. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. “Without a doubt her work from her screenplays to her short stories and essays are infused with an uncompromising determination to tell us the truth about ourselves” says Thabiti Lewis in his edited collection of interviews called Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (xx). The life of Toni Cade Bambara, who as a child changed her name when she learned that she was named after her father’s employer in plantation tradition (112), can be read as intuitive, rebellious, and candid. Thabiti Lewis, a scholar in African American literature, Multi-Ethnic literature, and American Studies, pens a compelling synopsis of the interviews that showcase contexts—the streets and small towns, national and international—for this work that is a cultural expose of the woman behind her works such as The Salt Eaters, The Black Woman, and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is a book that complicates discourses on community literacy, ethnic studies, decolonial work, and the writerly self. The book draws from genres similar in form to interviews found in The Paris Review except that in 143 pages of print, Lewis offers eight interviews of Bambara by as many interviewers. Many of the interviews are previously unpublished (Interview with Akasha (Gloria) Hull) or are reprints of individual audio interviews published elsewhere (Kay Bonetti). Lewis’s personal reasons for editing this book include his desire “to learn one more thing from her” and to thank her, posthumously, for giving him an understanding of feminism, the black arts movement, vernacular culture, and the self (xxii). Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is a compilation of interviews conducted with Toni Cade Bambara at different stages of her career over a thirteen year period (1979–1994) by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kalamau ya Salaam, Kay Bonetti, Claudia Tate, Justine Tally Zala Chandler, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Louis Massiah, and presents Bambara as a consistent, deliberate craftswoman of stories and film. The book is most successful in its arrangement by themes rather than by chronology. As such, readers can begin reading any chapter. Nonetheless, readers can find five pages dedicated to the chronology of her life and work (xxvii–xxxi) if needed. Unless readers are familiar with Bambara’s seven books and two films, references to them in the interviews themselves will be challenging. Thus, it is useful to read the introduction as a reference. Roughly eighteen pages long, the introduction offers notes, synopses, or brief blurbs on Bambara’s works that are mentioned in the interviews. That said, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is an easy read, but readers may need to stop often to digest her stories and theories. One such theory is that the writing life is purposeful and informed by the community and is for the community. She sees the benefits to this theory in Vietnam, Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, and America where ordinary women and men engage in community projects that defy their social conditions. When pressed to speak about racism and race relations in feminism, as well as relations between men and women, she is frank in her thoughts about “net social effect” (Interview [End Page 202] with Sheftall 15). After Sheftall’s interview, readers can come away with the understanding that in her writing life she chooses to engage what is “usable” (Interview with Kay Bonetti 37; Interview with Louis Massiah 133), a term she uses in several interviews. Lewis succeeds in showing Bambara the woman, activist, spiritualist, and mother, who appears dedicated to the use of herself and her resources to social change. She notes, “I am concerned primarily with usable lessons . . . I can offer a usable something for someone else.” She says, “it is not for me to make comparisons . . . I am simply more interested in the caring network that exists between men and women, men and men, women and women, children and elders” (15–16). Although she is known for her work in fiction, Bambara writes as an observer and transformer of life. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara complements her body of work on community, culture, and...

Bedroom

Bedroom John Poch (bio) Like a woman writing Arabic marginalia around all four sides of an English sonnet in red ink, kiss my skin in the dark, covering me fast and slowly like dew lifting at first light. Before the squash flower of our bed twists closed trying to hold the memory of a rapt bee, be thirsty for something in me between my voice and tongue, perhaps a moan you can translate, distilling it into the honey of your morning and a little poison for those who would intrude on our correspondence with their cement and the dull rage of routine. Create with me and then never wake me, but define some obvious part of me in ridiculous terms on behalf of the next holiday. Grind a lens for squash flower and bee, and bend over God’s idea, jealous as the grave. [End Page 187] John Poch John Poch’s fourth collection of poems, Fix Quiet, received the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize (St. Augustine Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in the Nation, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, and other journals. Copyright © 2015 Middlebury College Publications

5 Poems

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsCharles Harper WebbCharles Harper Webb, PhD, has published ten books of poetry, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, and his most recent, What Things Are Made Of, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. Webb's awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. His poems have appeared in many distinguished journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry:An Expanded Anthology and recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the CSULB Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing there. Correspondence:Charles.Webb@csulb.edu.

American Rules and Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the book’s subsequent cultural ubiquity led Karl Taro Greenfeld of The Paris Review to comment recently that “if Oprah Winfrey had had a book club in 1989 she surely would have selected it” (13). Yet it is perhaps precisely because that powerful arbiter of middlebrow taste did not yet exist that The Joy Luck Club became as much of a sensation as it did, for in many ways, the book club and the novel fulfill similar functions. Just as Oprah’s Book Club has been lauded for its remarkable ability to transform obscure novels into overnight bestsellers and expose its largely white middleto upper-class female demographic to a plethora of so-called minority works, The Joy Luck Club has been praised in both the popular and critical milieux for its ability to foster a “sister-centered” (Welsch 29) sense of community both within and beyond the text itself. Yet it is this very same talent that has earned both Tan and Winfrey the derision of numerous literary critics; Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, remarked that “[t]here is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about [Winfrey’s] book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). In similar fashion, Asian American literary critics have, on the whole, taken umbrage at Tan’s penchant for constructing a bridge to and among her “predominantly white and female” readership (Wong 180), resulting in a loyal following that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has derisively dubbed a “sugar sisterhood” (181). Like Stossel, Wong and many like-minded Asian American critics have argued that Tan’s novels are far too “soothing” to be “serious”: their “exoticizing” (191) depictions of China and traditional Chinese culture, in particular, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers” (181). The aim of this essay is neither to endorse nor refute such perspectives. What strikes me as especially interesting about the extremely polarized response to The Joy Luck Club is rather its persistent preoccupation with the serious and the playful—whether defined as the popular, the “easy,” the “palatable,” or the ......

Allen Ginsberg’s Kind of Psychiatrist

Allen Ginsberg’s Kind of Psychiatrist

Transnational Displacement: "Native American Material" in Paul Muldoon's New Weather

Transnational Displacement:"Native American Material" in Paul Muldoon's New Weather Andrew Fox In a 2004 interview with the Paris Review, Paul Muldoon explains his use in certain of his works of "Native American material" by citing a perceived Irish and Native American political and cultural comparability rooted in a similarity of historical relationship with an occupying power. "The fact of the matter," Muldoon says, "is there's been a certain amount of experience in 'dealing with the natives' that had been gained in the Irish situation, that stood the English in rather good stead when it came to dealing with the natives over here."1 Beginning in his first full-length collection, New Weather (1973) and continuing throughout his career in such poems as "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants" (1983) and "Meeting the British" (1987), as well as in the verse narrative Madoc: A Mystery (1992) and the libretto Shining Brow (1993), Muldoon has found enduringly fruitful, though never stable, imaginative and intellectual ground in the points of contact between Ireland and Native America. The poet's numerous encounters with, and deployments of, "Native material" have been well documented by a number of scholars and critics. Jacqueline McCurry, for one, sees in them a "refusal to recognize the validity of perceptions which underlie Northern Ireland's sectarianism," while Cathleen McCraken identifies an attempt "to give a presence, and a voice, to Native America."2 Scholarship by Native intellectuals, however, has seldom been called on to consider the potentially troubling politics of Muldoon's recourse to Native cultures.3 [End Page 55] For many Native intellectuals—most notably Vine Deloria Jr. and Craig S. Womack—even well-intentioned representations of Native cultures by non-Natives cannot help but be embroiled in a deeply problematic history of appropriation and manipulation. Such representations risk serving to make of Native experience not an original site out of which Natives themselves might speak, but a discursive device freely adaptable to Euro-American poetic projects.4 On the other hand, many critics have argued that the rigidities prescribed by primordialist, essentialist, or protectionist approaches to national or ethnic identities might themselves be argued to circumscribe efforts toward artistic individuation or cultural transformation.5 One of the more problematic dimensions, in this discussion, is a practice that Philip J. Deloria has called "playing Indian," which may be defined as the performance by non-Natives of a notional, stereotyped Native American identity, often for the sake of the carnivalesque or to suit political purposes. In literature, Indian "playing" typically encompasses the adoption by non-Natives of Native points of view, or the employment of forms of writing or of literary techniques that stress certain features conceived of as being of Native provenance, such as modes of oral address or nonlinear constructions of time. In the United States, as Deloria explains, these performances historically have clustered around two paradigmatic moments—the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life. . . . Whether aimed at British officials or colonial landlords, misrule traditions, often performed in Indian dress, remained a vital mode of American political protest for more than a century.6 Probably the most well-known example is that of the protestors of the Boston Tea Party, many of whom attired themselves in wool blankets and darkened their [End Page 56] faces with soot, not only to disguise their treasonous acts but also to perform an identity conceived of as being in the image of the New World and resolutely in contradistinction to that of Britain—a negotiation of historical, physical, and ontological location echoed two decades later in Philip Freneau's "The Indian Burying Ground" (1787).7 In terms of modernity, Indian play is perhaps most readily apparent in such Romantic primitavist poetry as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and in the as-told-to autobiographies of the early twentieth century such as John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932), both of which stress to varying degrees the fundamental alterity and the inevitable disappearance of Native experience and...

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and “Thank You for the Light”

The publication of new writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald is always an o ccasion for commentary and interpretation. The most recent piece of unpublished fiction to appear from Fitzgerald’s hand is “Thank You for the Light,” a fift een-hundred-word vignette that was published for the first time in the 6 August 2012 issue of the New Yorker. (The story appeared simultaneously in the online e dition of the magazine at www.newyorker.com and can now be p urchased as a Kindle e dition for ninety-nine cents.) In the paragraphs below I will supply some b ackground about Fitzgerald’s story and offer a few possibilities for its interpretation, in cluding the suggestion that Fitzgerald intended “Thank You for the Light” as an answer of sorts to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933).

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Rosemarie Morgan (bio) A few weeks ago in Dublin, on a misty August dawn, a great poet died. He was acclaimed by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." But for Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney, it had been, from early boyhood, Thomas Hardy who first filled his heart and mind. Heaney's aunt had owned every single copy of Hardy's novels and from the moment of reading the opening chapters of Return of the Native, I was at home with him—something about the vestigial ballad atmosphere, the intimacy, the oldness behind and inside the words, the peering and puzzlement and solitude. He was there like a familiar spirit from school days. I remember [End Page 384] hearing the poem "Weathers" read on the BBC radio when I was eleven or twelve and never forgetting it. "The Oxen" I learned by heart around that time also. I loved the oddity and previousness of the English in it. "The lonely barton by yonder coomb"—that can still make me feel sad and taken care of all at once, le cor au fond du bois with a local accent. (The Paris Review, "The Art of Poetry," p. 75) Hardy and Heaney are paired together, on the GCSE (2012) English Literature course for high school students in Britain and the resulting span not only gives measure to Heaney's "familiar spirit" but also reflects an unusual mirroring of minds. Both poets share an indelible Celtic heritage, a deep sense of communion with the earth—with the natural world—a profound respect for dialect and folklore, and a readiness to take "a full look at the worst," to borrow Hardy's famous phrase. The GCSE curriculum asks for a comparison of Heaney's "Blackberry Picking" with Hardy's "Wagtail and Baby"—poems that share, thematically, a rural setting, a child's encounter with nature and the discoveries that can be made by quietly attending, with close watchfulness, the minute activities of the natural world as it yields up its mysteries and marvels. Young GCSE scholars must also discern how structure, rhythm, point of view, and tone distinguish each poem, one from the other. Additionally, Hardy's "Overlooking the River Stour" is suggested as a mirror to the darker aspects in Heaney's "Blackberry Picking," where a sudden underlying violence takes the shape of a "A rat-grey fungus" which turns "the sweet flesh sour," and where, in Hardy, the swallows, flying in figures of eight, take on the look of menacing weapons: The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam:Like little crossbows animate. Aside from these three poems the complete selection for GSCE comprises Heaney's "Thatcher," "At A Potato Digging," "Last Look," "Trout" and "An Advancement of Learning." In Hardy's case the chosen poems for comparison are "The Old Workman," "A Sheep Fair," "An August Midnight," and "At Castle Boterel"—a poem which poignantly evokes the loss of selfhood, loss of the past youthful self which is now no more than "a phantom figure," rapidly receding, "shrinking, shrinking . . . for my sand is sinking"—in stark contrast to the surrounding rugged landscape, the primaeval rocks and their seeming permanence. [End Page 385] "At Castle Boterel," also featured recently on The Thomas Hardy Association's Poem of the Month. Phillip Mallett opened the discussion with the observation that in one of the best-known discussions of Hardy's verse, Donald Davie's essay on 'Hardy's Virgilian Purples' (Agenda 10, 1972), Davie asks whether the poem claims 'only that he will remember Emma, and the quality of this moment he shared with her, until the day he dies. Which is touching, but hardly worth saying at such length.' What justifies the poem, Davie insists, is that its claim is not psychological, about 'one mind,' but metaphysical: that the poem's 'time of such quality' is 'truly indestructible,' and its 'quality' will survive the poet's death. (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/poetry/potm/?p=242) Of the dialogues that followed Mallett's introduction the main points of interest fell upon Hardy's...

Chris Adrian: “kind of like Sesame Street”

Chris Adrian: “kind of like Sesame Street”

The Donegal Hock

November–December 2013 • 33 I finally realized how much we have shortchanged ourselves when it comes to electronic reading one day not too long ago when an announcement arrived in my in-box. It wasn’t another press release touting the e-book’s so-called “rise.” Such a meteoric ascent could only inevitably be followed by a subsequent fall. As Schiller said of Albrecht von Wallenstein, one of the great generals of the Thirty Years War: “No one could stand where he fell.” The announcement concerned instead the creation of the German Digital Library, one of a host of new national endeavors to create digital libraries as counterparts to the paper-based kind, including the recently established Digital Public Library of America. These are highly significant ventures. They are revolutionizing our textual heritage in no uncertain terms. More people will have access to more texts, fulfilling the library’s historic mission as an information conduit. But “access” is still understood too narrowly. The German Digital Library is in fact a library of PDFs—really other libraries’ PDFs (it aggregates German libraries’ book scans). The German Digital Library interface presents you with an image of a book that is presented by the Bavarian State Library’s image of a book, underneath of which is presumably a book. We have layers of visual representations of books piled on top of one another—image libraries, but not text libraries. Texts aren’t static pictures. They are things that you can do things with, like Augustine who played Virgilian lots with the letters of Paul as part of his conversion to Christianity or the medieval intellectual, Ramon Llull, who devised a spinning wheel to answer all the truths about the universe drawn from scripture. There are more and more books in the world every day, and yet we can do increasingly less with them. We need to reverse this trend. Google Books made us think in terms of everything: digitizing every book ever, even though hundreds of thousands of books don’t exist anymore. This is too imprecise to tell us anything except in the most general terms, a point that also holds true for the error-laden texts that exist beneath the image scans. What we need now are well-curated selections of texts according to both broad and creatively imagined categories. The contemporary literature collection, the history of memoir collection, the collection of books about left-handed detectives. Like books, these collections will cost a not-inconsiderable sum of money to create, preserve, and distribute. But unlike e-books, they will allow for a great deal of personalization. Data is the new marginalia. There is a tremendous commercial, social, and creative value lying around in all that data. Yes, data. The raw material, the clay, the molecules and atoms of texts. Words aren’t everything. But they are too important to bury in a pretty picture. McGill University The Donegal Hock James McManus Our dad carves rare slices of rump roast, lays down his new cordless knife, takes a drag of Old Gold. He centers the goblet and picks up the platter, and it’s like we’re all hearing this drum roll. So no slices slide off the end, he tilts it just enough to let roast-blood trickle down into glass etched with crisscrossing diamonds. The Donegal hock, our mom calls it, but hock as in big fancy wine glass, not as in hock up a loogie. “Our Jimmy’s eleven?” says Gramma, even though she just frosted “11” on top of my cake. “Oh, good Heavens!” She passes the hock by the stem, like a cup of translucent red juice is too sacred for a woman to handle. Holding it up to the light makes the glass look encrusted with rubies. “Hoc est calyx sanguinis mei,” I joke. “Hic est enim,” she tells me. “Not hoc.” The blood’s gone lukewarm, so I knock it back past my tongue. “Mysterium, uh, um, fidei?” James McManus is the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and fact, including Cowboys Full and Positively Fifth Street. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, Paris Review, The Atlantic, and twice...

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky Jason Koo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 152] Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Dorothea Lasky has emerged over the last few years as one of the most important poets of her generation. Her bold, unmistakable voice, both on the page and in person at her booming public readings, somehow brings together the comic and demonic, wonder and horror, sincerity and irony. Underneath the seemingly artless, accessible surface of her poems lies a sophisticated play with speaker and audience. Lasky has published three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Thunderbird (2012), as well as Black Life (2010) and Awe (2007), all with Wave Books. She has also published five chapbooks: Poetry Is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker’s Wife (Braincase Press, 2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005) and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in many venues, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Boston Review. She holds a BA in classics and psychology from Washington University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, an EdM in Arts in Education from Harvard and an EdD in Creativity and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn. This interview was conducted at the interviewer’s home on August 5, 2012. Jason Koo: When did you start writing poetry or thinking about writing poetry? Dorothea Lasky: I don’t have a clear memory of when or what caused me to start writing poems. I try to resist this narrative because I don’t really believe in it, but as a girl, I did see it in a very muse/divine intervention/mystical way—I felt as if something were writing through me. My mom was a painter, and my dad was a very brilliant judge—so I came from people talking a lot, and obviously that had a lot to do it. For whatever reason I just started writing poems. It was late at night, and I didn’t want to go to sleep, and I had a notebook and I would just write [End Page 153] poems and lines. At some point I told my parents that I was writing these things, and I showed them. And they started getting me poetry books. Koo: So your experience came as a writer first. You were conscious of writing in lines? Lasky: Yes, I was conscious of writing in lines. But I do remember having almost a possessed feeling. And that’s how I perceived it for a very long time. And probably a large part of me still sees it that way. Koo: Has anything changed? Is that still the feeling you trust when you write a poem today? That you want to feel as though it’s being channeled through you? Lasky: I guess—sadly—a little bit? I know I resist this, because I think it’s a brain process. When you’re being creative you’ve been storing up and processing. Especially when you’re a poet, you’re always processing language, talking. Right now I’m saying these sentences, I’m practicing language, and you’re giving me language; I’m always calculating stuff. So when a poem comes out, it’s not like it really is out of the blue; it’s been germinating for a long time. But I do somehow trust that “channeled” feeling. Koo: What happened when you went to college? Did you start taking workshops and showing poems to peers and teachers? Lasky: When I went to college, I really wanted to be a scientist. Or a psychiatrist—that was all kind of bundled together. Then I took a workshop my freshman year. And it was like an explosion. I had been writing poems consistently my whole life, but I remember that first year it was insane. There was something about the experience of the classes, having free time. I had this workshop where we read poets and went to museums and wrote poems; I wrote so much. I was...

His Illusions (A Cento), and His Narcissism (A Cento), and Vigil

His Illusions (A Cento), and His Narcissism (A Cento), and Vigil Larry Bradley (bio) His Illusions (A Cento) Shadow & act, shadow & act —John Berryman, Dream Song #119 Now Apollo Now Narcissus But neither, and yet both Re-forming Both gods and men For the same purpose and effect Now Bacchus Now Telémakhos Forever at war within a single body All things are in his power The undying, the ever-new And now Zeus Now veteran Of being immortal [End Page 187] His Narcissism (A Cento) Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong —John Berryman, Dream Song #145 He chose to cherish water On hearing this, the river Filled and filled again Pure, without taint of earth And with his words, the music Of his infatuation Enwrapped him Pleased by each purling note And shining like a god He lacked nothing at all And facing sunrise No less amazed The earth could say no more Except his name [End Page 188] Vigil The last watch begins. The watch on your wrist begins to check breaths, once in, then once out, each end and beginning seems new. Your wrist- watch marks his slow breaths— this time gasps seep out— then, once you begin to check his slim wrists, their width with their breadth— flesh: our last means out— where IVs begin their slow track, his wrists marked like those last breaths and gasps time seeps out, your remorse begins, for his slim scars, wrist- timed—one tap one breath— for flesh, through code, out- ranking you, beginning IV’d with wrists and lasting to breath which Morse code tapped out. [End Page 189] Larry Bradley Larry Bradley’s work has appeared in the New Republic, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review, and previously in New England Review. He has received the Morton Marr Prize, the Reginald Shepherd Memorial Prize, and scholarships to both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Copyright © 2013 Middlebury College Publications

Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Art: A Misunderstanding

Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Art: A Misunderstanding Jamie Hilder (bio) Within the Anglo-American critical tradition, concrete poetry and conceptual art largely disavow each other. When representatives of one speak of the other, it is often to dismiss it or undercut its legitimacy as a poetic or artistic movement. For example, here is Lucy R. Lippard, in her text Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: Certainly there are at least twenty people using either words or written things as vehicles for their art, but there is a distinction between concrete poetry, where the words are made to look like something, an image, and so-called conceptual art, where the words are used only to avoid looking like something, where it doesn’t make any difference how the words look on the page or anything. (157) Here is Joseph Kosuth, quoted in the same text: Most of the concrete poets are now starting to do theater and getting out of concrete poetry (Acconci, Perreault, Hannah Weiner, etc.). They realize the sort of decadence that follows from that sort of materialism [treating words as material]. They are trying to say things about the world that are illogical in terms of language. (132) Here are Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, in the glossary of their widely assigned textbook, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (concrete poetry is not mentioned anywhere else in the book): [End Page 578] As a historical term, Concrete poetry identifies the postwar resurrection and academicization of the linguistic and poetical experiments of the radical avant-gardes of the teens and twenties that had been conducted in the context of Russian Futurism, and the practices of international Dadaism in Berlin, Zürich, Hanover, and Paris. . . . The concrete poets of the postwar period typically emerged in areas that had been both remote and protected from the cataclysms of World War II, both privileged and disadvantaged with regard to the naivety of their early rediscovery of these avant-garde projects. Thus we find early resuscitations named Concrete poetry in the context of Latin American countries and in Switzerland in the forties, often working in tandem with the academicization of abstraction (for example, Eugen Gomringer and Max Bill). Here the celebration of a newfound ludic irrelevance and of typographical gamesmanship displaced both the political, the graphic, and the semiological radicality of the originary figures. (482) Here is Liz Kotz, in her 2007 book, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art: In the postwar era, various types of concrete and visual poetry, in particular, promised to probe the space of the typographic page and link contemporary literature with the visual arts. Yet a reliance on rather quaint illustrational or pictorial modes—as in poems that take on the shape of their subjects—left much concrete poetry out of touch with changing paradigms in the visual arts and the wider conditions of language in modernity. (138) And here is the Italian poet and critic Sarenco, in a 1971 Lotta Poetica editorial co-written with Gianni Bertini, railing against the disproportionate attention granted to conceptual art: the recent publications (edition n. 3 of the paris review «vh 101» autumn 1970—the catalogue of the exhibition «information» at the museum of modern art in new york, in summer 1970) while analyzing the phenomenon of «conceptual art» intentionally missed to mention in any way the visual poetry. . . . we intend to exemplify in the next numbers our statements by publishing the product of « conceptual art » showing beside the visual poetic matrix from which it was copied. for example: joseph kosuth copying from timm ulrichs, ben vautier, jean [End Page 579] claude moineau etc. carl andre copying from all northern concrete poets richard artshwager copying from heinz gappmayr and so on (12) The preceding catalogue of slights and insults illustrates a long-standing conflict between concrete poetry and conceptual art, a conflict fueled by willful misunderstanding and cavalier dismissal on both sides. The purpose of this essay is to orchestrate a rapprochement, in order that they might begin speaking to each other again. Concrete poetry, despite its conventional reception as a postwar poetic eccentricity, is...

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Yaeger Kaplan

“Fragments d’un discours amoureux: les Huguenots et le roi au premier XVIIe siècle”, montre qu’ils ont toujours prêché la soumission, puisque la souveraineté est d’origine divine. Quand ils se sont rebellés—ce qui s’est produit à plusieurs reprises—ils visaient les “mauvais conseillers” et non le roi! Certains historiens ont cru que les journées d’émeutes d’octobre 1789, à l’issue desquelles le roi, sous la pression populaire, a quitté Versailles pour Paris, marquaient la rupture entre le peuple et la royauté. Dans “Les derniers feux de l’amour: les journées d’octobre 1789 revisitées”, Monique Cottret rejette cette idée en expliquant que cette émeute exprimait au contraire l’amour du roi et sa perception, assez traditionnelle, comme père nourricier. Paradoxalement ce roi guillotiné avait été, avant d’être détesté, particulièrement aimé. Dans “De la haine du roi à la communauté des affections: les ressorts d’une politique républicaine selon Saint-Just”, Pierre-Yves Glasser et Anne Quennedey s’intéressent à la vision du souverain chez Saint-Just. Pour celui-ci, le roi doit être haï, non de manière viscérale, mais parce que la raison et la justice l’exigent: tout roi est en effet un usurpateur de la souveraineté qui appartient de droit au peuple. Bien que le volume n’offre pas une présentation méthodique du sujet, abordé selon les intérêts variés des auteurs, cette variété même pourra intéresser un lectorat aux multiples spécialisations. University of North Texas Christophe Chaguinian KAPLAN, ALICE YAEGER. Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 2012. ISBN 9780 -22642-438-5. Pp. 272. $26. Of the three biographical sketches, the most complete is the first. From a childhood spent in an uncertain family environment, Jacqueline Kennedy could construct a quest for the romanticized French roots of the Bouviers. Kaplan finds that her skill in French gave the future First Lady a source of power and prestige, independent of the President’s. On another level, Kaplan’s book is predicated on the idea that for all three of her subjects, a similar type of quest brought them to France in their youth. However, Kaplan can present little direct evidence that the quest was personal. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s (born Bouvier) letters are not in the public domain; Susan Sontag’s journals are fragmentary; Angela Davis, the only surviving person of the trio, refused to be interviewed. Throughout the postwar period, the image of France as a cultural center continued to evolve in the press and the arenas of foreign and domestic affairs. The book opens with Jacqueline Bouvier embarking for a junior year abroad, which would include a voyage to Vienna and, in the summertime, car trips in regions of France where automobiles were then scarce. Sontag’s experience of France started when she traveled from Oxford to visit a friend who was living in Paris. Kaplan tells us Sontag never went back to Oxford, and that she abandoned her studies to enjoy life there. Jacqueline Kennedy’s experience of French is more extensive, and Susan Sontag’s is the least easy to compare with the others, yet Kaplan wants to include both as part of a single category. If Sontag is exceptional in this group, Angela Davis’s experience of a junior year abroad is perhaps the last of a line. Since then, college programs are perhaps less selective and their organization has transformed them into very different experiences. Kaplan herself spent a junior Reviews 1047 year abroad in Bordeaux, a story she told in an earlier book, French Lessons: A Memoir. People who mingled with Jacqueline Kennedy and her classmates—here Kaplan’s account is vague—included young men who were to become famous, such as George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review. Kaplan discusses the knowledge and French accent that her three subjects managed to acquire. She examines their ability to write in French and to express themselves verbally with the eye and ears of a connoisseur. Kaplan, who recounts her own experience learning to pronounce...

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

Evening Fire

Evening Fire Eric Trethewey (bio) It starts slowly, gutters at the edges,and then the paper flares up fiercelyinto bright flames before subsidingto the slow combustion of damp wood. But it persists in spite of all, multipliesin intensity, until becoming at last allwe expected, warming the room, our faces,our hands, and the chill between our shoulders. What more might we ask for nowbut the blessing of words to hold back the dark,the steady burn, the recollection of sunlight,like memory, stacked up in the rings of wood? [End Page 144] Eric Trethewey Eric Trethewey is a native of Nova Scotia who lives at the foot of MacAfee's Knob in Catawba, Virginia, and teaches at Hollins University. He is the author of six books of poetry. His publication credits include The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review. Copyright © 2012 Berea College

Three poems

Three poems Patricia Smith (bio) Between 1916 and 1970, more than half a million African Americans left the South and migrated to Chicago. Fixed on the Next Star Mamas go quietly crazy, dizzied by the possibilities of a kitchen, patiently plucking hairs from the skin of supper. Swinging children from thick forearms, they hum stanzas riddled with Alabama hue and promises Jesus may have made. Homes swerve on foundations while, inside, the women wash stems and shreds of syrup from their palms and practice contented smiles, remembering that it’s a sin to damn this ritual or foul the heat-sparkled air with any language less than prayer. And they wait for their loves, men of marbled shoulders and exploded nails, their faces grizzled landscapes of scar and descent. These men stain every room they enter, drag with them a stench of souring iron. The dulled wives narrow their eyes, busy themselves with clanging and stir, then feed the sweating soldiers whole feasts built upon okra and the peppered necks of chickens. After the steam dies, chewing is all there is—the slurp of spiced oil, the crunch of bone, suck of marrow. And then the conversation, which never changes, even over the children’s squeals: They say it’s better up there, it begins, and it is always the woman who says this, and the man lowers his head to the table and feels the day collapse beneath his shirt. [End Page 46] One Way to Run from It The damned boll weevil hisses his good-bye while cypresses drip low in steamed salute and satchel-toting travelers multiply, affixed to that bright dream—the absolute reversal of their root. Their gospel hum dissuades the Delta dog, his resolute pursuit of traitors’ souls. The city’s drum, the new unyielding, slaps old backdrops dark. Chicago, frigid siren, murmurs Come while hiding how she fails—December’s stark and violent entry into bone, the ways a factory’s drone can siphon every spark of will. She boldly lures them with clichés: the gilded path, the blur of black and white. Seduced, they set their Southern pasts ablaze. Intent on fresh religions, taking flight without their wings, they’re stunned in hurtling seats. The train moans in a way that ain’t quite right. [End Page 47] How Mamas Begin Sometimes Raging tomgirl, blood dirt streaking her thick ankles and bare feet, she is always running, screech raucous, careening, dare and games in her clothesline throat. Playing like she has to play to live, she shoves at what slows her, steamrolls whatever damn thing won’t move. Aliceville, Alabama’s no fool. It won’t get in her way. Where’s that girl going? Past slant sag porches, pea shuck, twangy box guitars begging under purple dayfall. Combs spitting sparks, hair parted and scalps scratched, mules trembling the back road, the marbled stares of elders fixed on checkerboards. Cursed futures crammed into cotton pouches with pinches of bitterroot, the horrid parts of meat stewed sweet and possible. And still, whispers about the disappeared, whole souls lost in the passage. Frolicking blindly, flailing tough with cousins, sisters, but running blaze, running on purpose, bounding toward away. She can’t tag this fever, but she believes it knows her, owns her in a way religion should. Toes tap, feet flatten out inside the sin of shoes. She is most times asking something, steady asking, needing to know, needing to know now, taking wing on that blue restless that drums her. Twisting on rusty hinge, that old porch door whines for one long second ’bout where she was. But that girl gone. [End Page 48] Patricia Smith Patricia Smith is the author of six poetry volumes, including the upcoming Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, which will be published in April, and Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Her work has been published in Poetry, the Paris Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and the 2011 editions of both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a professor at the City University of New York. Copyright © 2012 University of North Carolina Wilmington