* Like most people who sense that their love affair is going to pieces, Anna Karenina and Prince Vronsky try a few desperate measures to check the disintegration. One of these measures – available only to the upper classes – was travel. They go abroad, to Italy, and there they make the acquaintance of an…
"Like a rock in the sea, she was islanded by fields, the heavy grass washing about the house, and the cattle wading in it as in water. Even their gentle stirrings were a loss when they moved away at evening to the shelter of the woods. A rainy day might strike a wet flash from…
Our conversation began by wandering into the visual arts. Knowing Mark Strand had painted, and had come to Iowa from the M.F.A. program at Yale, I asked if he kept up with the work of contemporary art. S: I follow the work of a few friends and sometimes write art catalogs or brochures, but I…
We were trudging along the dry road toward the dunes and I was telling Octavio Paz about DeWitt Henry's issue of Ploughshares (2/2) devoted to realist fiction. "Realist fiction!" His eyebrows arched in mock surprise. "This is a logical contradiction, no?" * * * If Ploughshares has, as we like to hope, come of age, it…
A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear…
"Chris? Is Wystan somewhere about?" I am twenty-two years old and never in the realm of fact or fancy have I heard five words more difficult to "take in." The cherub at the top of the stairs who has just uttered them turns away. His voice resounds in distant murmurs through the length of the…
[ Translator's note: What follows is a selection of passages from E1 Mono Gramatico (literally, "The Monkey Grammarian," but not to be taken literally: to be taken freely, calling up all the puns, associations, analogies that flood our minds when we juggle mono, mono, gram-, grammar, grammarian of monads, monkish keys, graminivorous appetite for semantics…
Charles Simic, whose most easily available collections of poems are Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974), spoke on a Friday afternoon in March, 1975 with George Starbuck in a New Hampshire kitchen. Much of the conversation centered on another book, White, (New Rivers…
The reason I am keeping a journal this season of the hearings and the horses is to put down those "bits of the mind's string too short to use," as Joan Didion once said. Things tie themselves together with little quote marks and perhaps the string crosshatches itself into a statement in time, who knows?…
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