May 2, 2024 Dinner Parties Emma’s Last Night By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. There had been concern when Jean and Emma got together that he was too serious, macho. I perhaps had it wrong that he had in art school driven to Chernobyl, uprooted a tree, and brought it back to France—a foreigner, I was capable of wild misunderstandings—but this was the story that had come to seem defining. Now he made a dance out of crumpling a wrapper, hopping up to throw it in the trash. He snapped his fingers to the music. It was cheerful music, music from my country though not from my era. In a city famous for ways of living developed, cultivated to exquisiteness, over centuries, we were engaged, that night, in a rare shabby tradition, that of the apéro dînatoire. Emma was throwing one ahead of moving in with Jean. Possibly the tradition was not exclusively Parisian. “They do it systematically in Greece,” Jean said. Read More
May 1, 2024 On Poetry Between the World and the Universe, a Woman Is Thinking By Sara Nicholson Poem by Alice Notley, in the collection Grave of Light. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press. Photograph by Sara Nicholson. Poets have always known how inadequate language is. The speaker of this poem knows it well. No matter how hard she tries to capture the sublime or primordial essence of being, words fail her. Alice Notley herself has written about this in an essay, first published in 1998, called “The Poetics of Disobedience”: “I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language.” Her poem “The World, All That Live & All That Occur” rubs up against the edge of the unsayable. Notice that it begins with “the world” and ends with “the Universe,” that its very structure points to the poem’s origin in and return to an infinite space beyond language. Paradoxically, impossibly, the poem is bounded by boundlessness. The poem’s situation is simple. A woman is looking out a window on a rainy day in New York City, 1977. She remembers a fight from the week before. She watches a man cross the street. She is also contemplating the nature of being, what she calls “the one organism.” This is how she defines it: “A monstrous life-death living not-dying / Caving-in upthrusting all over it- / Self like pits & mountains forever thing.” She’s speaking fast. These lines have a powerful rhythmic velocity. As she struggles to articulate an ontology, the words get squished together into a hilarious pileup of modifiers. It’s funny, awkward. She knows her definition is inadequate, but it’s the best she’s got. Read More
April 30, 2024 On Poetry Alice Notley’s Prophecies By David Schurman Wallace ALICE NOTLEY AT HOME WITH HER SON ANSELM, NEW YORK, 1984. PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN CATALDO, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems. I was not raised with any religion. We weren’t told that God was dead; having never existed, he’d had no opportunity to die. Instead, the material world had its own beauty, if occasionally cold or mathematical: the paradox of particle and wave, the litanies of astounding facts and figures (do you know how a snake sheds its skin?). It was a view of life ruled by information: sensible, finite, hard. And so, when poets find the confidence to prophesy, I often doubt. If someone tells me in so many words that they are about to deliver me another Book of Luminous Things, as Miłosz memorably titled one anthology, my brow furrows, even if I remain curious. When I was in college, I was in a workshop with a poet who was writing their dissertation on “vatic” poetry of the twentieth century. After looking up the word, I always found it slightly amusing. How easily the mystic could be isolated, another device in the poet’s bag of tricks. Poets are used to the idea of other voices speaking through them (don’t get them started on the etymology of inspire), but an overreliance on a private line to a higher power can begin to feel cheap. There’s a reason Berryman called Rilke a jerk (though of course, pot, kettle). Read More
April 29, 2024 On Poetry On Being Warlike By Joyelle McSweeney IN FRONT OF SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL IN PARIS, 2005. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX DUPEUX, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems. This is another useless plaque for you all including the schoolchildren my brother may have accidentally mortared. —Alice Notley, “The Iliad and Postmodern War” We’ve long set aside the notion of “greatness” in literary studies because it smacks of (male) cultural hoarding, an analogue to the practices that allowed and allow some men on earth—be they emperors or billionaires—to extract the resources that would have otherwise sufficed whole populaces—see: the conquest of the Americas, with its genocidal and ecocidal sequelae; see: the forced mining of rare earths by endangered child workers in Congo so that ever-newer models of iPhones might succeed each other like a procession of pale and feeble heirs. (As for me, a poet and mother writing this essay in the Rust Belt with one window open on the latest end of the world—a February day nearly thirty degrees warmer than the historical average—I don’t want to crouch in some bolt-hole like a prepper Scrooge McDuck on a tin-can pile of greatness. I can’t afford it. Then I read some billionaire is sending the world’s first cargo of junk to the moon by private rocket. Proof of junk concept.) Read More
April 26, 2024 The Review’s Review On Elias Canetti’s Book Against Death By Joshua Cohen Evert Collier, Vanitas – Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull, 1663, oil on panel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Read an excerpt from The Book Against Death on the Paris Review Daily here. Quixotic is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’s novel was his favorite novel but because Canetti, too, was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was re-spelled, and settled in Adrianople—today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders—before moving on to Rusçuk, known in Bulgarian as Ruse, a port town on the Danube whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to Manchester, UK, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in England, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. It was in Vienna that Canetti acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after—in chronological order—Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine but spent most of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices. At the time, his primary influence was journalistic—the feuilletons of Karl Kraus—which might have been a way of giving himself the necessary distance from the German-language novels of the Viennese generation preceding his own, the doorstops of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both of whom were known to him personally. His own contribution to fiction—his sole contribution to that quixotic art—came in 1935 with Die Blendung (The blinding), which concerns a Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who winds up being immolated along with his library. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto da Fé—a preferred punishment of the Inquisition—though Elias’s original suggestion for the English-language title was Holocaust. In nearly all the brief biographical notes on Canetti, this is where the break comes: when he abandons the theater, publishes his only fiction, and escapes the Nazis by leaving the continent. Exile brought him to England again, and to nonfiction, specifically to Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), a study of “the crowd,” be that in the form of an audience, a protest movement or political demonstration, or a rowdy group threatening to riot—any assemblage in which constituent individuality has been dissolved and re-bonded into a mass, as in the chemical reactions in which Canetti was schooled, or as in the atomic reactions that threaten planetary existence. Canetti’s singular study of collective behavior, published in 1960, stands at the center of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell or touch was ever completed, and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book “against” death, a version of which—the only available version of which—can be found on the pages that follow. Read More
April 26, 2024 The Review’s Review “Choose Hope or Despair”: On John Shoptaw By Jenny Odell A flock of sanderlings in San Francisco, California, in 2011. Brocken Inaglory, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0. In 2007, the same year I was taking my third undergraduate poetry class with John Shoptaw at UC Berkeley, I wrote a short story for a fiction seminar. It involved two estranged friends driving a route familiar to me, between Cupertino and the sparsely visited San Gregorio State Beach. Halfway through the story, we learn that there has been a nationwide pandemic of debilitating anxiety and that everyone has received government-issued Ativan pills. We also learn the reason for the friends’ strained conversation: the Ativan is not working for one of them. When he looks at the world, all he sees is loss and future agony. The friends have a final showdown at the beach, which is littered with dead bees. One friend insists that everything is fine (though his denial is wearing thin), and the other skulks off to a boat that he plans to launch recklessly into the slate-gray, unfriendly surf. This was of course an argument with myself, one I failed to resolve in my life as much as in the story. Thanks to Shoptaw, with whom I reunited eleven years later, and whom I count as a close friend and mentor, I’ve learned a word that helps me understand the problem I faced. It came up one hot day a few years ago, in a sliver of redwoods at a local botanical garden, where we were discussing our respective projects involving time. The term is prolepsis, a figure of speech in which a future event is represented as having already taken place. An oft-cited example of prolepsis is in Keats’s “Isabella,” in which two men and a man they plan to kill are described as “two brothers and their murder’d man.” For many of us, especially those of my generation and younger, there is a serious need to address something like a habitual prolepsis, a feeling that we inhabit a(n already) murdered world. Read More