April 30, 2018 On Poetry Nabokov Reads “The Ballad of Longwood Glen” By The Paris Review Vladimir Nabokov. As a capstone to National Poetry Month, we bring you a 1964 recording of Vladimir Nabokov at 92Y reading his poem “The Ballad of Longwood Glen,” which he describes as “a short poem I composed in Wyoming, which is one of my favorite states of existence, and it is also one of my favorite ballads.” Nabokov was quite particular about pronunciations, particularly that of his own name. As Matt Levin, who spent long hours at the Morgan Library listening to the archival audio of our Writers at Work interviews for our podcast, wrote recently: The four-beat leitmotif that George Plimpton conjures out of the name Nabokov never fails to delight me in its voluptuousness—Nǝ (pause) Beau (pronunciation drawn out like an arch gossip columnist) Kavv (the fricative subtle, fading away like a comet tail). It corresponds perfectly to the wily quote that Nabokov himself gives about the pronunciation of his name—“My New England ear is not offended by the long, elegant middle o of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.” In the recording below, there are precisely zero despicable gutterisms to be found:
April 30, 2018 Look Flowers Not Grown Anywhere Else By The Paris Review Anna Zemánková, Untitled, second half of the sixties, pastel and ballpoint pen on paper. Like most artists, Anna Zemánková was encouraged, from a very young age, to pursue a more lucrative career. From the age of fifteen to eighteen, she studied dentistry and then worked as a dental technician until her marriage, when she forwent paid labor in order to care for her children. In 1948, she and her family moved to Prague, and when she found herself increasingly depressed, her son, a sculptor, implored her to pursue the creative work she had previously disavowed. Early in the morning, before anyone else arose, she’d sketch pastel and ink onto large swaths of paper, creating botanical dreamscapes all her own. As a self-taught artist, Zemánková tends to be described as art brut, but her art brut is of a mysterious and magical strain. She believed her inspiration was derived from a divine source: “I am growing flowers,” she said, “that are not grown anywhere else.” Following a major retrospective of her work at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Switzerland last summer, Kant Books has released a stunning three-hundred-page monograph. Read More
April 30, 2018 Arts & Culture The #MeToo Poem That Brought Down Korea’s Most Revered Poet By Bo Seo Choi Young-mi (left) and Ko Un (right). The accusation came in the form of a poem. Six stanzas. Twenty-seven lines. Don’t sit next to En The poet ‘K’ advised me, a literary novice He touches young women whenever he sees one Choi Young-mi wrote the poem in Korean, her native tongue. It is a language that tends first to cool its emotions, then to assimilate them; unruly drama and dialogue, in their retelling, take on the muted affect of melancholy. This poem, largely unbroken by punctuation and carried by winding lines, swirls like a river. A handful of English characters litter the poem and stand out like islands, insistent and unyielding. They are mostly names: ‘K,’ who warns the young poet about En, an older poet some thirty years her senior, who gropes the young poet and women like her. There is one English phrase, too, isolated on its own line in the poem’s second stanza: “Me too.” Forgot K’s advice and sat next to En Me too The silk blouse borrowed from my sister got rumpled When Choi Young-mi published these lines under the title “Monster” in December 2017, the #MeToo movement had already toppled Harvey Weinstein and rippled through the centers of American power. In Korea, it had barely registered a presence. For a couple of months after its publication, Choi’s poem seemed fated to inconsequence. The newspapers carried an anonymized and qualified apology from “the elder poet identified as En” and moved on. Read More
April 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Smugglers, Lovers, and Dead Husbands By The Paris Review Some of the stories in Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, Belly Up, take place in a world that we could call real, and others take place in a world we could call supernatural, but in the hands of a craftswoman like Bullwinkel, both are somehow equal in their strangeness. While reading, I would arrive at the end of a story in which nothing truly paranormal had happened and be nonetheless filled with a sense of disquiet, a sense that I was looking at a photograph of my own world, the light and color settings tweaked ever so slightly. Reality, in Bullwinkel’s hands, is subverted with nuanced strokes of the surreal, in much the same way that David Lynch tilts our perception with his depictions of suburbia. The forms of the stories vary, and Bullwinkel is just as good in a longer traditional narrative as she is in a two-page piece of poetic prose. They’re joined by a macabre thread, peopled with dead husbands, teenage girls obsessed with the idea of cannibalism, and zombies. But even stronger is the sustained interest in the mystery of human connection; in “Harp,” a wife tests out a double life after witnessing a fatal car accident, and “Phylum” interrogates selfhood and intimacy. As much as Bullwinkel asks us to reconsider the strangeness of our external reality, she asks us to question our internal reality as well; this collection, which absolutely heralds an exciting new talent, takes place at a four-way crossroads between the mind and the body, the reality we can know and the reality adjacent to our own, which we can only glimpse through fiction. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 27, 2018 At Work Technical, Tactical, and Merciless: An Interview with Marcus Wicker By Alex Dueben Marcus Wicker. Although both his books are influenced by the rhythms of hip-hop and spoken word, Marcus Wicker’s second book of poetry, Silencer, is a noticeable departure. His first book, Maybe the Saddest Thing, looks at Dave Chappelle, RuPaul, and Kenny G in an exploration of masculinity and pop culture. But after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and so many others, Wicker decided to turn his second book toward the conversation around race and blackness in America. In Silencer, Wicker explores fear and rage, the need to be hyperaware of one’s surroundings, and the worlds of suburbia and academia—worlds that can sometimes lull people into a false sense of security. His poems find joy in language and nature, comfort in religion, and express both pride and vulnerability—often all in the same poem. In his first book, Wicker writes, as many writers do, about his faith in the act of writing. In Silencer, there are no such poems. Instead, he refuses to be silent and refuses to settle for easy answers with the confidence of a poet saying what matters most. I reached Wicker by phone in Memphis, where he teaches at the University of Memphis M.F.A. program. We spoke about code-switching, prayer, the power of individual experience to address political topics, and the Wu-Tang Clan. —Alex Dueben Read More
April 27, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Angela Carter By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The writer Angela Carter (1940–1992) had many guises as a novelist, fairy-tale writer, and feminist theorist but was always occupied with archetypes of womanhood; her heroines undergo dark, gory, and magical processes of becoming brides or lovers, wolves or girls. I’ve loved Carter since first encountering her book of cultural theory The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography at Brown in the nineties (for a course entitled History 99X: Pornography and the Politics of Culture!). In it, she argues that the work of Marquis de Sade has liberating feminist underpinnings, and in the process takes something dark and frightening, like being a young woman in a world where one’s body is a porn object, and molts it into something slightly better, a promise that sexuality can offer freedom too. Along the same lines, the book I’ve chosen to cook from this week, Carter’s 1967 novel, The Magic Toyshop, is a fable about a girl, Melanie, stepping out of the sane, safe, and sexless world of childhood and into the world of womanhood, which is “as distorted and alien as its miniature in the witch-ball.” She ultimately survives this dangerous transformation but only after being mock raped by the patriarchy—represented metaphorically during a puppet show where she plays Leda and her evil uncle controls the puppet strings of a swan described as having an “empty body … white and light as meringue.” After this climatic scene, Melanie burns the house down and escapes with her siblings, her lover, her abused aunt, and her self-respect. Read More