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Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966.

Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know.
I bought it several weeks ago.
It stands there stolid on the shelf
Making me feel lower than low
Reminding me how I am low,
Making me think of Crane and Poe.

My fatlipped mouth must think it queer
To stop without a single beer,
To stop without a single beer
The deadest day I ever spent
In boredom and in self-contempt,
Sober, sour, discontent.

My fingers have begun to shake,
My nerves think there is some mistake.
The only other thought I think.
Is how I failed to be a rake,
A story which should take the cake.

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January 25 – March 3, 2024

January 25 – March 2, 2024

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2024 ASME Award for Fiction, marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon’s “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be,” a disarmingly warm portrait of “just another late-forties dyke entirely too obsessed with basketball, dogs, and memes”; “My Good Friend,” Juliana Leite’s English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow’s Sunday-evening diary entry (“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”) that turns into a story of mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun’s “Helen,” in which a man writing about his parents’ upper-class milieu in seventies London—the time of the IRA’s mainland campaign in Britain—stumbles upon the journals of a family friend, a woman who lives in what the narrator calls a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror.” All three stories will be unlocked from behind the paywall this week, and you can also listen to Rivers Solomon’s story on our podcast here. Enjoy!

Paul Yamazaki has been City Lights Bookstore’s chief buyer for over fifty years, responsible for filling the shelves of the San Francisco shop with the diverse range of titles that make City Lights one of the most beloved independent bookstores in the United States. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and once a hangout for Beat poets, today the bookstore and publisher specializes in poetry, literature in translation, and left-leaning books relating to social justice and political theory. Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community and has mentored generations of booksellers across the United States. This interview was compiled from conversations held between Yamazaki and friends of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

INTERVIEWER

What a joy it is to be here with you today at City Lights on this foggy Saturday in San Francisco. Walking in the front door, I feel like I instantly know where I am. How do you choose which books to put in the browser’s line of sight, how to signal what the bookstore stands for?

PAUL YAMAZAKI

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