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...

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