Redux: Seventy Memories

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.

Allen Ginsberg, ca. 1979. Photo: Michiel Hendryckx.

This week at The Paris Review, as National Poetry Month winds down, we’re continuing to celebrate Poets at Work, our latest anthology of interviews. Read on for work by three of the writers included in the book: Allen Ginsberg’s Art of Poetry interview, an excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” and Derek Walcott’s poem “The Light of the World.” You can also read Paris Review poetry editor Vijay Seshadri’s introduction on the Daily.

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. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8
Issue no. 37 (Spring 1966)

You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation … And the hypocrisy of literature has been … you know like there’s supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from—in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives.

Photo: Avinash Bhat. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://ift.tt/UbRXBT), via Wikimedia Commons.

from Defenestration of Prague
By Susan Howe
Issue no. 86 (Winter 1982)

Skeletal kin

tilt
italic lunacy

long illness of little difference

Seventy memories
masks

singing and piping
to be

(half words)
beginning and begetting …

CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://ift.tt/nyd3RQ), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Light of the World
By Derek Walcott
Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986)

Marley was rocking on the transport’s stereo
and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
streaked and defined them, if this were a portrait
you’d leave the highlights for last, these lights
silkened her black skin, I’d have put in an earring,
something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
wore no jewelry …

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:

On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China

Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED . When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discu

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