Redux: Plates Collapse

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of The Paris Review Podcast Season 3 and lowering the paywall on four pieces featured in the first two episodes. Read on for Robert Frost’s Art of Poetry interview, Yohanca Delgado’s short story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” Antonella Anedda’s poem “Historiae 2,” and Molly McCully Brown’s essay “If You Are Permanently Lost.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Robert Frost, The Art of Poetry No. 2
Issue no. 24, (Summer-Fall 1960)

 So often they ask me—I just been all around, you know, been out West, been all around—and so often they ask me, “What is a modern poet?” I dodge it often, but I said the other night, “A modern poet must be one that speaks to modern people no matter when he lived in the world. That would be one way of describing it. And it would make him more modern, perhaps, if he were alive and speaking to modern people.”

Fiction
The Little Widow from the Capital
By Yohanca Delgado
Issue no. 236 (Spring 2021)

The widow arrived at LaGuardia on a Sunday, but the rumors about the woman who had rented a big apartment, sight unseen, had taken an earlier flight. We had already reviewed, on many occasions and in hushed tones, in the quiet that comes after long hours of visiting, what little we knew about the widow and her dead husband.

Poetry
Historiae 2
By Antonella Anedda
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

The book rotted by the rain, the clay that’s slipped,
the earth screeches, plates collapse,
the walls lose their grip on the paintings,
nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.
Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogs
their muzzles pointing toward an imaginary swarm of bees
the floor slides toward the void. We, too,
run away in the wake of a memory of the species
(oh, storm made of fire and basil,
of lamps and beds askew
and you, mountain, gulping water and air)
while the house breaks up and disappears.

Nonfiction
If You Are Permanently Lost
By Molly McCully Brown
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

Even on a much smaller scale, space makes no sense to me. I walk all the way around the perimeter of a room to reach a door that’s immediately to my right, and I set my glass down half an inch from the edge of the table with such frequency that anyone who knows me well gets used to nudging it back again and again over the course of an evening in this small, choreographed two-step.

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