Paris Review interview extravaganza
A benefit to perusing the The Paris Review's redesigned website? The treasure trove of interviews with monumental poets, novelists and journalists. Pick and chose for yourself amongst the smörgåsbord of conversations, but for starters here's a sample platter to whet the appetite for words:
Kay Ryan explains what a deck of tarot cards taught her about poetry, why her recombinant rhymes are like a glow-in-the-dark bunny, and why she lacked patience when it came to getting published:
INTERVIEWER
How did you start to publish your work?
RYAN
Initially, I had no method for sending work out. It was completely chaotic and I was in despair. For years I had towers of work and absolutely no idea of what to do with it. Carol took me in hand and got me organized. She had me send out packets of five poems to ten or twenty places every few weeks. Then we had to endure ten years of agonizingly slow progress. It drove me insane to be as patient as I had to be. I didn’t have any choice. I wasn’t patient, but I couldn’t find any shortcuts. I didn’t know how to make things go faster.
Sending work out did change my work, though. When I knew that the poems were going to be read by a stranger, I cleaned them up. And when I got them back rejected, I could see them with a really cold eye.
Charles Simic talks cities: his childhood in Belgrade, why Chicago reminds him of a "coffee-table edition of the Communist Manifesto," and his undying love for New York:
INTERVIEWER
You’ve often said New York is your favorite city: Was it love at first sight?
SIMIC
It was. It was an astonishing sight in 1954. Europe was so gray and New York was so bright; there were so many colors, the advertisements, the yellow taxicabs. America was only five days away by ship, but it felt as distant as China does today. European cities are like operatic stage sets. New York looked like painted sets in a sideshow at a carnival where the bearded lady, sword- swallowers, snake charmers, and magicians make their appearances.
Mary Karr shares her inebriated brushes with fame—drinking with the Ramones, buying Seamus Heaney a beer—and how she delves deep into the minds of her characters:
INTERVIEWER
In the first section of The Liars’ Club, you inhabit the mind of a seven-year-old to an uncanny degree. How were you able to capture what it was like to be a child?
KARR
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. One of my favorite poems, by Nicanor Parra, is called “Memories of Youth”: “All I’m sure of is that I kept going back and forth. / Sometimes I bumped into trees, / bumped into beggars. / I forced my way through a thicket of chairs and tables.”
Our little cracker box of a house could give you the adrenaline rush of fear, which means more frames of memory per second. Emotional memories are stored deep in the snake brain, which is probably why aphasics in nursing homes often cuss so much—that language doesn’t erode in a stroke.
And finally, Billy Collins just wants to set the record straight:
BILLY COLLINS
I’d like to get something straightened out at the beginning: I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.