Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i The Paris Review

Months before world events made 2020 a remarkable—and remarkably difficult—year, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and I had a conversation about something that happened in 1997. That year, The Paris Review dedicated its Spring issue to the theater. The team assembled a tall stack of Art of Theater interviews and held a contest for verse drama. (According to George Plimpton, plenty of submitters were unaware of the verse stipulation, but the editors considered their work all the same, and lucky for us: one of the winners was a young Martin McDonagh.) They published three plays and five interviews, and a magazine that fairly adamantly avoids themed issues had, if not a theme, then an organizing principle for the quarter. As 2020 began to take its unfortunate shape, I called Branden again. While…

GYÖRGY DRAGOMÁN Olgi says she’s going to take me somewhere and show me something I’ve never seen before. We walk through a door into an inner courtyard, then from there into another one, then into a third one, where there is a wire fence. Olgi knows where the fence can be lifted, she picks it up, holds it, I slip through, then I hold it up while she slips through the fence. We are now in front of two large iron doors. No matter how much I ask Olgi where she’s taking me, she doesn’t answer, all she says is that I won’t regret coming. We are about to see something we’ve never seen before. She places the palm of her hand on the iron door painted blue and beats…

DANTIEL W. MONIZ He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things. He wasn’t handsome, but his light skin, wavy hair, the polished gleam of his fingernails, and the bills pressed tightly in his wallet almost made him so. As he entered the Albatross he stopped in the doorway and imagined his body filling the width of the frame, giving the occupants time to look and wonder who he was. The jukebox played the Temptations and threw colored light onto his face, and a…

EVERYTHING THAT RISES One after another the angel of historyWomen: rural, 9, 1536, 1547, 1550, the angel of history1551—52, 1559; in business, 147; and the angel of historyathletics, 245—46, 565; and education the angel of history266, 1533, 1536—38; and flowers, 340, the angel of history385; folkways among, 451, 452; per- the angel of historyI can no longer hear the music the angel of historySingings, all-day 1039—40 the angel of historySit-ins: and civil rights movement the angel of historySouthern Literary Messenger, 909, 933, the angel of historyBig Thicket 335, 350, 377 the angel of historyA cast-iron farm bell the angel of historyThe bell rust friable the angel of historyIn the fricative air between tolls the angel of historyMake a basket of kudzu twines the angel of historythough these forms are less…

STAGE DIRECTIONS FOR APPROACHING AN O’KEEFE There was a triangle in her face. An elbow. A triangle, emerging from a morass of black puffy coats. So many people jammed together, pretending they were alone in space. She tried to press her head backward to escape, but an orange parallelogram pressed her forward into the elbow, which by way of some shuffling was now a purse. She looked up at the eyes looking down on her and held her breath. She glanced around, then slid out a white rectangle and looked again at the time printed on it. She was golden. It was all going to be worth it once she got to the show. She was on the wrong train. She was on the right train going in the wrong…

MELISSA FEBOS 1. always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; butwhat if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?;you mean to say that after all you are really goingto be the kind of woman who the baker won’t letnear the bread? —Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” In the eighteenth century, “slut’s pennies” were hard nuggets in a loaf of bread that resulted from incomplete kneading. I imagine them salty and dense, soft enough to sink your tooth into, but tough enough to stick. What could a handful of slut’s pennies buy you? Nothing—a hard word, a slap in the face, a fast hand for your slow ones. A slut was the maid who left dust on the floor—“slut’s wool”—or who left a corner of the room overlooked in her cleaning—a…

SUZAN-LORI PARKS There are few living writers—and fewer playwrights—as celebrated, cited, and studied as Suzan-Lori Parks. In three decades, Parks has become a staple of both the American theater and university syllabi, with a body of work that includes nineteen works for the stage—including a reboot of Porgy and Bess and a cycle of 365 short plays—widely read essays on style and form, three films, a novel, and a TV series inspired by the life of Aretha Franklin. She has received any number of honors and recognitions, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Windham Campbell Prize. In 2002, she was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for her play Topdog/Underdog (2001). Parks was born in 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the second of three…

THE FIRST REALLY COLD DAY Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I rememberedThe braziers under the round table at the finca you brought us toIn the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like roomWe sat with the sisters who worked there, the tablecloth pulled over our thighs…And we might all have been knitting together, or divvying provisions;It was a sudden, short-lived society, and in between envisioning all the accidentsBorn from live embers near legs and beneath cloth, I experienced the littleMiracle of it, the conversation—bright and unintelligible to my schoolroom Spanish—You, chatting easily, as engaged as a car in third gear, making your own jokes whileAgreeing enthusiastically, and I could follow the music of it, the lead-up andThe laughter,…

JACK LIVINGS My wife, my daughter, and I live on the bluff overlooking the river. The river is wide, and it is swarming with crocodiles and hippos. Courtesy of our unique ecosystem, they have developed a taste for each other’s flesh, and some days the banks are thick with pink froth. Sometimes the crocodiles are up, sometimes the hippos. It’s your standard vicious cycle. There are inhabitants on the other side of the river. Some people say that we are the same, those of us on this side of the river and those on the other side, but the people making those statements all reside on this side of the river and tend to be members of fringe groups dedicated to inventing unsettling concepts. My brother is one of these…

DAVID ADJMI’s play Stereophonic is scheduled to premiere on Broadway next season. A memoir, Lot Six, was published in June. SARA DENIZ AKANT’s first book, Babette, won the Black Box Award in Poetry and her chapbook Parades won the Omnidawn Chapbook Prize. She is a doctoral candidate at the cuny Graduate Center and teaches writing at Baruch College. RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of many books, most recently Conjure, Wobble, and Partly: New and Selected Poems. PETER BALAKIAN’s Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate, won the pen/Martha Albrand Award, and a new book of poems, No Sign, will be published next year by the University of Chicago. BHISHAM BHERWAN I is the author of three poetry books and many essays on…

CLAUDIA RANKINE CHARACTERS NARRATOR Writer, professor at prestigious university, fifties WHITE MEN 1–20 Men are all wearing some kind of suit SETTING Liminal spaces of airports and airplanes TIME 2020 ACT 1 SCENE 1 The Narrator speaks to the Audience. NARRATOR I’m here—not as I— but as we— a representative of my category— The approximately 8 percent of the U.S. population known as Black women. Within this category, there are a lot of names for me. In fact, Hortense Spillers, a Black woman and friend to all Black women, said, Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” “God’s Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium.” Ultimately, whatever name…

FOUR HOURS IN FRANCE We look at the map. When we arrive in France from King’s Cross the fields are striated with barbed wire and it is raining. At the station in Lille we contented ourselves with two mediocre sandwiches from a stand and a visit through the back to Notre-Dame de la Trielle. We had our bags, so took turns, circling around to the great doors of the church and admiring the stained glass and the general feeling of use and mishap. Newspapers left in the stalls, where someone had come in to read or to get out of the rain. Across from the church, a woman leaning out of the window smoking, the smoke curling above a window box filled with fuchsia geraniums. I thought: I will never…

REQUIEM What remains of you beloved to haunt Selflike the tangled script of an ancient kingspeakingacross time: memory-scarscascadingover red rockaddressing arid, unpeopledlands; body-terrainriven, overlaidwith later scripts, later battles foughtin later tongues. Like the king who expressesremorsefor the battlein whichhe destroyed, and deportedand severedhundreds and thousandsfrom the beloved, Like the king who inscribeshis sorrownot in the placehe has scarred— that is,not in Kalinga, Self toowrites her sorrowelsewhere.…

DAVID ADJMI CHARACTERS (appearing here) OSCAR LEVANT, late forties to fifties GEORGE GERSHWIN, thirties THE NURSE, twenties SETTING There are three primary settings for the play: the theater in which the play is performed, a private room in Mount Sinai Hospital, and the inside of Oscar’s mind. TIME Now. And varying points in time between the 1930s and the 1970s. This play is a ghosting. People vanish and appear as if by magic. The space should feel uncanny. Transitions should be effortless and lightning quick. Punctuation should be treated as indicators of rhythm rather than grammar. Lights up on Oscar in pajamas and hospital slippers. He’s holding a pack of cigarettes and a lit cigarette, which he smokes over the following. He’s high—not flying, but a few feet off the…

from “1976: A LYRIC, A MEMORY, A LIE, THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH” In my family, a silver cupis called a goblet. A room with books, however small,a library. I had to wait for this—to wade through heart attack and heart attack and heart disease, brain tumor and old age, the mysteries of the body flung back on its own tongue—a new language that doesn’t use e’s or t’s, that clucks and purrs in place of the perfect “what,” the perfect “gee.” Does it matter if I talkto myself(only myself)? You never cared before. And why did I everleave you? Love, you never left me. You formed my lips like the mother wrapping silk bands aroundher daughter’s feet. Now, we are boundwhether or not I speak of youor you of me. In…

ONCE Once I walkedthrough a forest.It was highin the mountains.The air was clear and thin.The stars shone brightly,the outline of the forest canopyin sharp relieflike the backgroundto a stop-motion silhouette fairy tale. The children are awake.Once I knew that.Once I heard their voices.Once I had a voice.I was a child in a forest.I was a tree in a fairy tale.The stars were a flying carpet,its jeweled fabric undulatingwith the rotation of the earthand procession of seasons. Their dreams birthed cloudsand rain and weathered rocksand all that made me grow.I was a tree in a forestunder the cyclic dreaming of seasonsonce. Then the seasons were disrupted.Their fluid motion halted.Magic had been cut,extracted, shot—or flat-out wasn’t allowed anymore. Red-faced they had comearmed with saws, shovels, guns,and something more violent:their own cleverness.It smelled…

DRACULA, BY MARRIAGE One hundred and eighty-two pages spreads her story like disease.They send me one false daughter—Dracula—and then carefully erase the scene. She’s been erected out of thin air—with the thin air of money.In Konya—I scream—in Ulus—I embrace her—while these papers spread her story like disease. So what? So I name my daughter Saddle Bag. I name her L-O-9-15.The Dracula bitch that I Dracula-prayed forcannot carefully erase these scenes. Last night P walked into a bar and screamed—my monster would be nice!It’s true—this poem spreads her story like disease— all along the normal human trajectory:from poet to novelist—from diplomat to topless whore. But who could carefully erase these scenes— of my daughter in striding—my sick daughter—in striding— when once she was—when once, she wasn’t—or this poem spreads her story…

KIRK LYNN CHARACTERS (appearing here) ANN ESPINOZA Early forties, tall, self-possessed. Hiking in the woods in search of her missing sister. CRAIG GORDON A young park ranger, late twenties. Pretty. Slim. Strong. NOTES The play is formatted like prose; however, it is intended for performance. If actors simply perform the dialogue in quotes, the audience need never know about the world-building stage directions presented elsewhere in the text. And, as has been the case in readings and developmental workshops, it is possible that some of this world-building text can enhance productions when performed by an unnamed voice or presence. Most important is that the natural world and our longing for it are portrayed in the theater. 1. As I remember, there were trees everywhere, thick, so they made the day…

CALENDAR Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streetsand in the garden, and on the narrow walk. A bank of haze hung a hundred metersoffshore, perfectly still. While at the end of the long pier, the shallow-bottomed tjalkthat Tomas had restored, good at hauling, bad at sailing, knocked against the pilings.It was regular enough that you began to expect the next knockbut then there was none, or two came quickly together and the effect broke.Marta had been up before us, and made coffee, and laid the table for breakfast.A blue cloth, mugs, plates, and silverware, three zinnias in a…

THE NEW NEW NORMAL It is desirable that as little happen as possible.An aristocrat said this, knowing (I hope) it was hopeless.Inevitably,sporadically (like clockwork,unlike clockwork), somethinggoes thlunk into the pond of you,and the normal expires.Your contract/lease/tour/term was up. You moved across town.The guests departed, or you got a diagnosis.The new normal feels like fresh linen, a little,even when bad. The new normal monkeys finicallywith the sublives where you dream and mate and work; the new normaltweaksthe way you think about the future, light jazz, incarceration, and vegetablecream cheese;about the toupee of dust on the top of the fridge (care, don’t care),about fixing things or tossing them,about the relative merits of an enchanted forest and Rantoul in broaddaylight.Striving and coasting, hating and forgiving.The new normal has backdoor access to all of…

YOU’RE THE ONE I WANNA WATCH THE LAST SHIPS GO DOWN WITH Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell youthis, like this,in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t loveliving. Even actors don’texactly love the spotlight they move through,as your sister, the actor,has told us; they just need to be litfor narrative motionto have meaning. As such it iswith artifice and embarrassmentthat I move through fearto you, tonight, where I had dreams,a short nap ago, about linesof poetry I struck throughwith everyday blues, month aftermonth, in dreamafter dream; an attemptI guess to forget, if I could: defeatsometimes is defeatwithout purpose. The news, at least, tells methat much. I know now,in fact, we don’t have to be brave,not to survive a nightlike any we’ve looked ontogether, seeing…

EDWARD HIRSCH Edward Hirsch is the author of ten poetry books, most recently Stranger by Night (2020). His debut, For the Sleepwalkers, published in 1981 when he was thirty-one, won the Lavan Younger Poets Award. It was followed by 1986’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Wild Gratitude. These first collections set the stage for others, such as On Love (1998) and Lay Back the Darkness (2003), that spotlighted a poet of both emotion and intellect, a poet as able to explore metaphysical subjects as to give voice to the disenfranchised. Gabriel (2014), Hirsch’s ninth book, is a virtuosic confessional sequence in tercets about the life and death, at twenty-two, of his troubled son. The National Book Foundation noted, “Gabriel enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us…

POSTLUDE Stay by the hearth, little cricket. —Cendrillon You prefer me invisible, no more thana crisp salute far away fromyour silks and firewood and woolens. Out of sight, I’m merely an annoyance,one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night’sdeepening trance. When sleep fails, you wish me shushed and back in my hole.As usual, you’re not listening: time stopsonly if you stop long enough to hear it passing. This is my business:I’ve got ten weeks left to croon through.What you hear is a lifetime of song. NAJI, 14. PHILADELPHIA. A bench, a sofa, anyplace flat—just let me downsomewhere quiet, please,a strange lap, a patch of grass… What a fine cup of miseryI’ve brought you, Mama—crackedand hissing with bees.Is that your hand? Good, I didgood: I swear I didn’t yank or glare. If I…

NOW IS MY TURN TO SPEAK Now is my turn to speak, if Ican claim it, tipping myself forward,letting my tongue fall with a soft,an inward, an almost inaudible click. Now the leaves turn, turn in the wind,tipped by the wind, or the sun, by the windand the rain, by the season, cupping their earsand listening in, listening out for the telltale sharp intake of breaththat happens only every timearound again, my turn again,it’s now, this in-between, or never. The cameras turn expectantly,turn in the wind the satellites make,tipping us off that something isabout to turn, or already turning, and who could raise a hand to stop it,who could clear my throat, excuseme, but events, as it turns outseem as entirely sure of themselves as you do, fast asleep, your…

NOCTURNE After I make my home darkI wander through the fewquiet rooms and letthe bright blinking eyesof the continuing electricitytake me in. The modem, foreverstreaming its signals in and backout again to the air of theliving room, flashes the language ofits six green indicatorsinto the dim, and I’m notuntouched. By the door,the alarm pad keeps its emeraldbeacon of earnest defenseburning on, and I’m notvulnerable. And I rememberevery thing is a thingsomeone made,that somewhere someone’s jobis to place tiny bulbsinside plastic bodies, thatsomeone else’s is to decidethat firefly color, to sitat a table shining under office lightand tell me what vividnessshould tell me I am keptsafe, I am kept connected, evenas loneliness hums its generatorlike a heart in a jar.…

DILEMMA A musician tumbles bicycle handlebarson a sidewalk and makes jangling music;a gardener prunes branches, then shakesthe Japanese maple to drop a few leaves onto the stone path; raking leaves,you focus on the noise of the rake;in a time when pangolins near extinctionfor scales, rhinoceroses for horns, you find tufts of skunk fur in the grass;this is an August with no mushrooms to hunt,where smoke from the Rio en Mediofire stings the eyes; bears swipe suet from bird feeders, ransack garbage binsalong streets; and when you driveto an intersection, a man in a wheelchairglares; before turning, you ponder this chance encounter: as he holdsan upturned hat and cardboard sign,WAR VET, you wonder, is this trulyan illusion or an illusion of harrowing truth?…

SHADOW GRID April 2020 When I came to—crocuses were pushing uppurple in my garden, return of the cooing dove— and when I got out at Penn Station there were no facesalong the tracks— wind blew through 32nd Street with a faint whiff of onionsand hair spray cabs drifted between lanes like bumper cars at Asbury Park crosswinds; crosstown; the uroboric shape of Columbus Circle Etruscan bull’s eye. Minoan nude. The cylinder seals of Ur,stately people on folding stools, at the Met—in the dark,the peace, the peace, the peace. A bird, the stripes of a flag, a floating bridge. The nation’s pleasure myth unspoolingthrough stadiums and supermarkets I see a wavering horizon across bordersfrom the shanked Palisades below Fort Lee, air flows through my open window like any day,innocent coming over…

IS THIS A BAD TIME For how many years have I kept up the lie, the storyof the middle-aged man in the cap and the grayor possibly bluish sweatshirtgaining on me in the night, wrenchingme off the street by my neck, and tossing meinto a ditch, where he had me pinned? I havepaced, I have reflected, I have purposelesslydriven a car to the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateauat the state’s south margin, then circled backto the central till plain, and it has come to me I mustcome clean. It wasn’ta ditch. It was flat. My regrets at having repeatedly dismissed the land’sunimpeachable flushness, or—depending onpoint of view—my congrats to the upstart parcel thereon having been credited with a littledepth. I should specify also this is a guess.It’s not as though I’ve been…