Photograph by Isabel Dietz Hartmann. Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound.  It was February of 2020, and I was a few months into living on Lopez. I had moved from New York City, where I was from, so that I could help start a restaurant there. This restaurant, which would open in a dockside bar, had existed in many incarnations before our ..read more

Adania Shibli. Photograph courtesy of Adania Shibli. Smoking might be banned at book fairs, while one doesn’t expect books to be banned from book fairs. Even if a character in one of the books exhibited at a fair is smoking, this wouldn’t lead to a ban on characters smoking in books, or to a ban on that specific book. The simple, obvious reason is: literature does not equal reality. Fiction, especially, has its own way of working and should be examined on its own criteria. Smoking in real life has negative impacts on one’s health and the health of others, and banning it can prevent people f ..read more

Vincent Van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888. Public domain. I. Jill Price has remembered every day of her life since she was fourteen years old. “Starting on February 5, 1980, I remember everything,” she said in an interview. “That was a Tuesday.” She doesn’t know what was so special about that Tuesday—seemingly nothing—but she knows it was a Tuesday. This is a common ability, or symptom, you might say, among people with the very rare condition of hyperthymesia—excessive remembering—also known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. All sixty or so documented cases have a particular, visu ..read more

From Alice Notley’s zine Scarlet #1. Digitized by Nick Sturm as part of Alice Notley’s Magazines: A Digital Publishing Project. “We asked our contributors to send us their dreams; most did not. A few did. One sent us some & then withdrew (“censored”) one. Dreams have gossip value—containing what didn’t happen that was so salacious. We offer this column as a random sampling of events in the night world; if you want to use it to remark on the nature of the poet’s (or the painter’s) soul, that’s your concern. We’re afraid that dream happenings are mere more of what goes on,” wrote the edito ..read more

Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. 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 ..read more

Poem by Alice Notley, in the collection Grave of Light. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press. Photograph by Sara Nicholson. 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 T ..read more

ALICE NOTLEY AT HOME WITH HER SON ANSELM, NEW YORK, 1984. PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN CATALDO, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. 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 bea ..read more

IN FRONT OF SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL IN PARIS, 2005. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX DUPEUX, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY. 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”   We ..read more

Evert Collier, Vanitas – Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull, 1663, oil on panel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 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. H ..read more

A flock of sanderlings in San Francisco, California, in 2011. Brocken Inaglory, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0. 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 lear ..read more