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.

On a cutting board were resting chocolate bread from Chambelland, a slab of Comté, a “beautiful” radish Jean had brought, and chips: “I have chips because you said there must be chips for the feuilleton,” Emma said to me, referring to my plan to write about the evening. Having touched down that morning I was making such demands on top of being welcomed back. Stefania, who came late, brought sticks of crabmeat, olives, and a two-liter bottle of Coke.

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.

Between the world and the universe, a woman is thinking. Unlike the man in the street—and I think gender is important here, echoing back to the earlier “he”—she is thinking about it. At its heart, this poem describes a compressed moment in time, put into stark relief by her contemplation of the great organism of being. The moment contains a droplet of eternity; Avenue A is metonymic for “the Universe.” I hear an echo of William Blake’s infinite grain of sand, in which we see writ minutely a whole world.

The poem is full of contrasts. A wife and a husband. The thinking woman in the window, the unthinking man in the street. Men, who are bestial (they don’t think, and they throw stuff), versus women, who are philosophical. The “3 large books” parallel the “handful or 2 of hard, tight rain.” Books, which serve as both a symbol of their fight and their source of reconciliation. The organism, which is all contradiction: its “life-death” shoots up and plunges down at the same time. The word all in the title and first line, which functions as both a singular and plural noun. The word itself, broken into “it-” and “Self,” self and world. She describes the weather as gray when she’d been in despair, but today “happily” as pearl. The poem’s palette is all contrasting brights and darks. Tiny lights twinkling in a Christmas tree, her chiaroscuroed hand against a luminous sky.

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).

But when I first read Alice Notley’s sprawling, twisting, hilarious, and deadly serious poem “The Prophet,” I regained a certain measure of belief. The poem, written in the late seventies, stretches across a dozen pages in long lines alternating with short, a little like Whitman’s exultations spilling over the margin. Who’s speaking? Hard to say—you feel the voice, but lines ricochet in different directions. Take the first two: “They say there is a dying star which is traveling in two directions. / Don’t brood over how you may have behaved last night.” Nearly opposite ideas—one cosmic, one personal—but somehow fusing. Then language rains down like brimstone. It seems to never stop, never waiting for you to “place” it—it’s the difference between a prophet in a white beard and white robes and another speaker who is at once more ordinary, more elusive, and more terrifying. Commands (“You must often luminously tell / The grossest joke you know to all those stiffs in the other room”), suggestions (“Perhaps you should / Call money ‘green zinnias’ ”), declarations (“Science has almost made it that you yourself hardly ever perceive / anything”), questions (“Why must your / Husband occasionally seem to think other women are more wonderful / than you?”), and observations (“When you / do the mistaking, / The taco-&-vodka man laughs wickedly”) intertwine and contradict, throwing up scenes and ideas and dismantling them just as fast. The poem is studded with New York scenes and TV-show flickers, but it’s also a mind voyaging through and beyond the quotidian, held together with confidence from a place you can’t observe.

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”

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.

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.

How does one find the missing character, the hidden part, the middle—where things still grow, actions remain possible, and the heart recovers its appetite? It is in this ambiguous, breathable space that you’ll find Shoptaw’s practice of ecopoetics. Against the timelessness of traditional nature poetry, ecopoetics takes place in a crisis-ridden present that is populated with individuals and mixtures, not symbols or binaries. The nonhuman characters of these poems are not allegorical but fellow imperiled travelers whose earthly wisdom and survival instinct are one with our own. This can be seen in “For the Birds,” the very first poem in Shoptaw’s forthcoming book, Near-Earth Object. The visiting birds are transcendent, but they are also familiars, and in a few cases even have names. Where a bird in a nature poem might be an impersonal stand-in for immortality, these are mortal neighbors and refugees from the wildfire smoke that the poet breathes too. The poem is simultaneously ode and elegy: a line perfectly capturing the personality of chickadees is immediately followed by the mournful observation that “the chickadees once came to my feeder in bunches.”

With Shoptaw as their human agent, many nonhuman denizens of the world speak to us in Near-Earth Object: Max the cat, garden ants, squirrels, the crickets chirping the temperature. Perhaps one of the most important messages they impart has to do precisely with declinism. It is in the nature of Nature to try to flourish; to give up on life is unnatural. In “After a Cricket,” a cricket has

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haptographic Interface” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?  

This poem took wing, or distilled itself, during a conference on “Writing Practice” at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in September 2022. I started writing while listening to the closing remarks. The scholar Andrew Bennett had given a talk on Keats vis-à-vis haptographics, a term I hadn’t heard before—that was one spur. Keats is someone I’ve read and thought about for a long time (in one wing of my life I work on Romantic-era poetry). Bennett had spoken about Keats’s handwriting—how moving it can be to encounter it—and his letters, and the matter of “literary remains.” Some months after the conference, I looked up haptographics—one of the first hits on Google tells you that “haptographic technology involves highly sensorized handheld tools”—is a pen such? Haptography is a technique for “capturing the feel of real objects”—is this what Keats was up to, capturing the feel of things (experiences, emotions, movements of thought)? I think so. Is this still poetry’s aim? These are questions the poem implicitly pursues, but I can only say that having written the poem. There was no thesis-in-advance.

This week, a new production of the composer John Adams’s oratorio El Niño opened at the Metropolitan Opera, where it will run until May 17. El Niño is Adams’ rewriting of the Nativity story, and his libretto—cowritten with stage director Peter Sellars, in one their many collaborations—draws on source texts as wide-ranging the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Mexican poetry written in the sixties. The text of the libretto reminded me of an assemblage poem as much as an opera. I spoke to Adams, who has composed some of the most notable contemporary operas, among them Nixon in China, for our Art of The Libretto series. We talked over Zoom recently about the joys and pains of collaboration, learning and then setting Spanish text to music, his life as a Californian, and his attempt to write his own Messiah.

INTERVIEWER

How did El Niño begin for you?

JOHN ADAMS

I ruined a dinner party ten years ago in Phoenix. Among the guests was a judge who said abortion was an issue that reasonable people could disagree on, and I opened my mouth.

At that time, Richard was teaching at the sprawling university in Tempe. We were at the home of two people we were lucky even talked to us. The woman in the couple was a brilliant sculptor. She built whole cities out of clay, where invisible inhabitants take refuge from the “everlasting no” I often represent. The man was a tenderhearted and sexy archaeologist, who was heading a big fat famous institute on human origins and the kind of primate behavior that accounts for actions like mine. He was, like me, a Jew from the East Coast, and he recognized in me a collegial form of urban unrefinement he liked.

Throwing a dinner party where strangers meet other strangers shares the same risks as social media; wolves and chickens may find themselves seated next to each other. Before the judge said the thing about abortion, I was having a great time talking to his wife, who led the education department of one of the local art museums. The drinks were good. The starters were good. These people knew how to lay a spread.

The hosts had come to our house a few months earlier, and I’d served meat loaf as the main course, and to this day Richard says the meat loaf killed that evening. Something was off in the chemistry of the group. We’d invited another couple we liked, and the couples knew each other. The thing that was off might have been in their history, some kind of disappointment or weariness, or a fleeting, weird energy.

This originally appeared in our Today in Books daily newsletter, where each day we round up the most interesting stories, news, essays, and other goings on in the world of books and reading. Sign up here if you want to get it.

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When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists.

I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him?

To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors.

I. Light and Shadows Beneath a Half-Open and Half-Closed Window

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, let’s talk about a stellar sophomore novel from Lisa Ko.

Earlier this year, several users began to note that the “News” tab on Google was disappearing. It wasn’t one time here or there. It was noticeable enough that several outlets reported on the issue. Indeed, Google’s experiment in disappearing the “news” feature wasn’t a bug. It was a goal.

Since when, Google, does refining a search mean that I would like loads of results that do not include the news I’m looking for? Apparently, to Google, this is the future of search.

There are pages of results from foreign, questionable websites that are nothing but “deals” on book titles. Repeating the search a day later, the results looked similar, with pages of links to individual Barnes & Noble stores and their upcoming events. None of this is news, and indeed, none of this even shows up when you do a general Google search — the news tab specifically has become completely garbagified (or, as Cory Doctorow would note, enshittified).

Welcome to the wonderful world of horror poetry! What’s horror poetry, you ask? Well, it’s more or less what it says on the tin. It’s poems that incorporate elements of horror into them, whether that be a terrifying monster, a psychological scare, or a chilling setting, much in the same way a horror movie or horror novel might. These poems come in all different forms and lengths too, from a Shakespearean sonnet to a pages-long free-verse to anything in between. The Bram Stoker Awards, run by the Horror Awards Association, even have a category for superior achievement in poetry!

Some classic examples include Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” which I’m sure many of us had to read in English class at one level or another. A more recent example is “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Burlee Vang, a poem about survival and adaptation to a new world. There are many more examples out there for anyone who might like to explore this fun and frightening intersection of horror and poetry.

For anyone wanting to check out a collection or two in this realm, check out these eight horror poetry collections to get you started!

Last weekend was one of my biggest holidays of the year: Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon. It happens biannually, in April and October, and I have been doing it every year since 2012! This time really snuck up on me, though: I thought it was later in the month. Still, I had a low-key readathon — I definitely didn’t stay up all 24 hours — where I managed to make some progress through some 2024 Read Harder Challenge tasks, so I’m counting it as a success.

Today, I have updates on what I’ve been reading and which tasks I’ve checked off lately. I also want to hear from you! What’s the last book you read and the last task you checked off? Let me know in the comments!

I also have some more recommendations from the comments section for Task #8: Read a book in translation from a country you’ve never visited. Let’s get into it!

What’s the last book you read and the last task you checked off? Let’s chat in the comments!

Check out all the previous 2024 Read Harder posts here!