#paris review poetry

[letterkive]

Cheswayo Mphanza, “Frame Six” found in the Paris Review, issue 234

Alt ID:

These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life. I am often a stranger to myself; I have no place of origin, no home. I keep remembering everything in two time zones at once. Who knows, maybe I myself am called something other than myself. Not so much a name, but the result of a name. It’s a strange sensation to yell out: This is me! In every place I’ve watched caravans of sorrow— I run like all the other men, chasing my shadow down alleys. Sometimes in the spaces, there is fear— my mind deepens into them. From calm to fear my mind moves, then moves— in light part nightmare and part vision fleeing. The voice rises on a storm of grackles, then returns—half elegy, half serenade.

[luthienne]

claire schwartz, from poetry rx as featured in the paris review

[according-use]

https://frances-594.tengp.icu/dr/ZtSYdcV

[soracities]

Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 (interviewed by Alfred Mac Adam)

[Text ID: “INTERVIEWER: Is this why the language of mysticism is so erotic?

PAZ: Yes, because lovers, which is what the mystics are, constitute the greatest image of communion. But even between lovers solitude is never completely abolished. Conversely, solitude is never absolute. We are always with someone, even if it is only our shadow. We are never one—we are always we. These extremes are the poles of human life.”]

[garadinervi]

Etel Adnan – Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, Translated by Ethan Mitchell, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2023

Excerpt: Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan, by Laure Adler, The «Paris Review», October 4, 2023

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Interview from The Paris Review

W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38 Issue no. 102 (Spring 1987)

INTERVIEWER

Do you see a connection between poetry and prayer?

MERWIN

I guess the simple answer is yes, if only because I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it.

[Follies of God]

[the-shooting-star]

The Art of Poetry No. 111, with Ted Hayes (from Paris Review issue 241)

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Lee Harwood As Your Eyes Are Blue As your eyes are blue you move me—& the thought of you— I imitate you. & cities apart, yet a roof grey with slates or lead, the difference is little. & even you could say as much through a foxtail of pain            even you when the river beneath your window was as much as I dream, of. loose change & your shirt on the top of a chest-of-drawers. a mirror facing the ceiling & the light in a cupboard left to bum all day           a dull yellow probing the shadowy room              “what was it?” “cancel the tickets”—a sleep talk whose horrors razor a truth that can walk with equal calm through palace rooms chandeliers tinkling in the silence as winds batter the gardens outside             formal lakes shuddering at the sight of 2 lone walkers                          of course this exaggerates small groups of tourists appear & disappear in an irregular rhythm of flowerbeds you know even in the stillness of my kiss that doors are opening in another apartment on the other side of town             a shepherd grazing his sheep through a village we know high in the mountains the ski slopes thick with summer flowers & the water-meadows below with narcissi the back of your hand &— a newly designed red bus drives quietly down Gower Street a brilliant red                     “how could I tell you …” with such confusion                               meetings disintegrating & a general lack of purpose only too obvious in the affairs of state                              “yes, it was on a hot July day with taxis gunning their motors on the throughway a listless silence in the backrooms of paris bookshops why bother                           one thing equal to another dinner parties whose grandeur stops all conversation but    the afternoon sunlight which shone in your eyes as you lay beside me watching for … — we can neither remember—still shines as you wait nervously by the window for the ordered taxi to arrive               if only I could touch your naked shoulder now                     “but then … ” and the radio still playing the same records I heard earlier today                                             —& still you move me & the distance is nothing “even you …

[cyberdank]

[vlindervin7]

from “will this thought do” by jim gauer

[metaphrasis]

A leaf falls here/there, now/then

behind the rain, a curtain of rain,

the trees in their own time.

I see now that time falls in layers.

— Elisa Gabbert, "Life Poem I," featured in The Paris Review

[ashtrayfloors]

Pure Poison You are the toy that dies you are the movie & the theatre & the movie star you are the cow that gives birth to an unutterable fantasy you are the jelly & you are the come blanket you are busted you are in trouble you are the target for the prod

—Harris Schiff, from The Paris Review (issue 52, summer 1971)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Begonia :: Zou Chuan'an (b. 1941) @Yenisey5

* * * *

Entangle Tony Hoagland ISSUE 219, WINTER 2016

Sometimes I prefer not to untangle it. I prefer it to remain disorganized,

because it is richer that way, like a certain shrubbery I pass each day on Reba Street

in an unimpressive yard, in front of a home that seems unoccupied: a chest-high, spreading shrub with large white waxy blossoms—

whose stalks are climbed and woven through simultaneously by a different kind of vine with small magenta flowers

that appear and disappear inside the maze of leaves like tiny purple stitches.

The white and purple combination of these species, one seeming to possibly be strangling the other,

one possibly lifting the other up—it would take both a botanist and a psychologist to figure it all out

—but I prefer not to disentangle it, because it is more accurate.

My ferocious love, and how it repeatedly is trapped inside the fear of being sentimental;

my need to control even the kindness of the world, rejecting gifts for which I am not prepared;

my inextinguishable conviction that I am scheduled for some kind of destination.

I could probably untangle it, yet I prefer to walk down Reba Street instead,

in the sunlight and the wind, with no mastery of my feelings or my thoughts,

purple and ivory and green not understanding what I am and yet in certain moments remembering, and bursting into tears,

somewhat confused as the vines run through me and flower unexpectedly.

[via Paris Review] [alive on all channels]

[processes]

[onecontinuoussigh]

[gridbug]

“The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.” —Czeslaw Milosz