I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
Whatever happens with us,
your body
will haunt mineβtender,
delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-
curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in
forests
just washed by sun. Your
traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face
has come and comeβ
the innocence and wisdom of
the place my tongue has
found thereβ
the live, insatiate dance of
your nipples in my mouthβ
your touch on me, firm,
protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue
and slender fingers
reaching where I had been
waiting years for you
in my rose-wet caveβwhatever
happens, this is.
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own --
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
I can see myself years back at Sunion,
hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes
in womanβs form, limping the long path,
lying on a headland over the dark sea,
looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl
of white told me a wave had struck,
imagining the pull of that water from that height,
knowing deliberate suicide wasnβt my metier,
yet all the time nursing, measuring the wound.
Well, thatβs finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.
When Harry Wylie saw his father's ghost
As bearded and immense as once in life
Bending above his bed long after midnight
He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow
Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns
To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.
The smell of his father's leather riding crop
And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.
Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost
If not to prove it came on serious business?
His father always had meant serious business
But never so wholly in his look and gesture
As when he beat the boy's uncovered thighs
Calmly and resolutely, at an hour
When Harry never had been awake before.
The man who could choose that single hour of night
Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;
Mortality would quail at such a man.
.
An older Harry lost his childish notion
And only sometimes wondered if events
Could echo thus long after in a dream;
If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.
But why the actual punishment had fallen,
For what offense of boyhood, he could try
For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say--
Even the ghosts of fathers--comes obscurely.
What if the terror stays without the meaning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMaMgU3ds88
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of lightβ
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a cam
Today in Birthdays: Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012)
Adrienne Cecile Rich, born on this day in 1929, was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of America's foremost public intellectuals" by the Poetry Foundation and credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse" by the New York Times.
Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum," which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives. Notable works of Rich include "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence" (1979), "Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose" (1986), and "The Dream of a Common Language" (1978).
Today in Labor: Minneapolis General Strike (1934)
The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 grew out of a strike by Teamsters against most of the trucking companies operating in Minneapolis, the major distribution center for the Upper Midwest. The strike began on this day in the Market District (now called the Warehouse District), launched the career of Farrell Dobbs, a Trotskyist union leader, and led to widespread unionizing throughout the city of Minneapolis.
The strike was remarkably effective, shutting down most commercial transport in the city with the exception of certain farmers, who were allowed to bring their produce into town, but delivering directly to grocers, rather than to the market area, which the union had shut down.
The worst single day of violence was Friday, July 20th, known as "Bloody Friday", when police shot at strikers who were blocking off the delivery of company merchandise, killing two and injuring sixty-seven. Ensuing violence lasted periodically throughout the summer before the strike was formally ended on August 22nd, with most of the union demands being met.
Today in Rebellion: Battle of Alamance (1771)
The War of the Regulation, also known as Regulator Movement, was an uprising in British America's Carolina colonies, lasting from about 1765 to 1771, in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials, whom they view
... keep reading on reddit β‘Good discussion of the master doc on this sub. Thought folks might like to know where the notion of compulsive heterosexuality came from. Here's the original essay written by poet and Second-Wave Feminist Adrienne Rich:
"Adrienne Rich's essay constitutes a powerful challenge to some of our least examined sexual assumptions. Rich turns all the familiar arguments on their heads: If the first erotic bond is to the mother, she asks, could not the "natural" sexual orientation of both men and women be toward women? Rich's radical questioning has been a major intellectual force in the general feminist reorientation to sexual matters in recent years, and her conception of a "lesbian continuum" sparked especially intense debate. Does lesbianism incorporate all support systems and intense interactions among women, or is it a specifically erotic choice? What is gained and what is lost with the second, narrower definition? Rich's assumptions also usefully raise the more general theoretical question: Is adult sexuality so closely associated with the infant bond that genuinely satisfying sex relations are likely to be structured primarily around nurturance?.... http://users.uoa.gr/~cdokou/RichCompulsoryHeterosexuality.pdf
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the childβs older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isnβt revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
Youβre wondering if Iβm lonely:
OK then, yes, Iβm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If Iβm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawnβs first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If Iβm lonely
itβs with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows itβs neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
Seems like from what people have said online her family on owned only a small portion of those casino/hotels. Not to say that this was not a lot of money. But, it always seems like LVP was the breadwinner of RHOBH.
Her net worth online ranges from $50-$300m.
Meteorology (after Adrienne Rich)
.
A jumble of stars, maroon dots,
Constellate, skinning a cloudless body.
.
Iβd like them to say what I will not.
Words, so often, the tiresome choice.
.
Perhaps, if they see these scars
Theyβll intuit the others.
.
Or perhaps, if this short cropped hair
Began to gray, like ash, or whiten,
.
This pain might be self evident,
Seen, and speak for itself.
.
I never applied to become spokesperson to
A roiling sea of torn bladders, split kids.
.
Nary a briefing on the proper vernacular
For describing a raped childβs agony.
.
Perhaps if I bled more, or peed the bed.
Perhaps if I remembered those night terrors.
.
And even today, with all my gifted, newfound
Tongues, a cloak drapes these shoulders.
.
Invisible rheumatic illness, blank eyed stare.
A host of aching wounds, buried centimeters below.
.
A scalpel dye, for age appropriate coloring.
A papering of pubescent tissue, making the cut seem smaller.
.
A raphe that travels, small of my back
To that damned hole, and up my belly,
.
Past tits I have grown, and been blockaded from.
A thousand compensatory enjoyments stripped,
.
Leaving silent skin.
The difference is: I am able to cry again.
.
Great bouts, quickly habitual.
Like a sunset shower, torrential
.
Then gone, refracted shine, soft and red.
Perhaps, if I keep this up,
.
Quotidian storms will take a shape.
The locals will comment:
.
Another Norβeaster this year β anniversary.
And thus, a great pattern may reveal itself,
.
But only to the aspiringly observant.
Like the first woman to peer at the clouds
.
From space, and remark:
This lightning is no isolated event,
.
This thunder no dislocated limb.
To each monsoon, violent or necessary,
.
A corresponding, requisite drought.
Every flake of snow or sweat, labyrinthine,
.
Scarred, stumbling, angry and gentle,
A great system of moisture and moving heat,
.
From which we, through quiet listening, may
Ascertain a story.
A story of brothers killing sisters
A story of men breaking children
.
A tale of guided growth at all costs
And fossil remains of the ritually sacrificed.
.
A story of boys who became women
A story of the mothers who failed them
.
A story of an arm, held behind a back
A story of the friend who held it there
.
A tragic narrative with, like all good tragedy,
That pulsing vein of historical irony.
.
A story of a desert used for breaking
A story of a haunted house in Utah
.
A sto
... keep reading on reddit β‘The Paris Review is a nonprofit American literary magazine that helped launch the careers of Jack Kerouac, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Mona Simpson, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and countless others. Founded by George Plimpton and friends in Paris (in 1953), the Review soon moved to New York, where it became one of the world's leading outlets for emerging and established writers.
Our Writers at Work series, regarded as "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world" (The New York Times), includes interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, Elizabeth Bishop, and Vladimir Nabokov, among hundreds of others.
After Plimpton's death in 2003, the Review was edited by Philip Gourevitch. Lorin Stein and the current staff relaunched the Review in 2010 and founded The Paris Review Daily, an online gazette that reflects the sensibility of the quarterly.
We are currently celebrating our sixtieth anniversary and just announced our latest issue, The Paris Review No. 206.
We'll be around at 3:00 pm EDT to answer any and all questions. Proof!
Here to answer your questions are Lorin Stein (editor), Sadie Stein (deputy editor), Stephen Andrew Hiltner (associate editor), Clare Fentress (assistant editor), Justin Alvarez (digital director), and Hailey Gates (head of advertising and promotion).
--
EDIT (6:07 pm EDT): That's it for now, folks! We'll poke around tomorrow morning and try to address what we can, but we all wanted to thank you for a fun afternoon! If you're intrigued (and aren't already a reader), we hope you'll consider subscribingβor, at the very least, downloading our iOS app and following us on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr). Happy reading!
The Floating Poem, Unnumbered - Adrienne Rich
I've recorded this erotic poem before, but did not quite do it justice in the past.
Here, I've recorded it again with an emphasis on feeling and reminiscence, as I recall a person very dear to me. I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do.
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mineβtender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous. thighs
between which my whole face has come and comeβ
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found thereβ
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouthβ
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet caveβwhatever happens, this is.
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkmanβs tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last nightβs cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her ownβ
envoy from some village in the moldingsβ¦
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of lightβ ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.
(I love the works of Adrienne Rich, the last stanzas of her poems always leave a reader with blast of thoughts) I feel the poem is about how we live in a free country but lack freedom, trees is metaphor used for people who are missing because of misuse of power by capitalists or so. How we are becoming mute spectators and the revolutionary road has become empty - people are self occupied. The last stanza especially - where she says why do I even tell you anything! because having us to even listen (AT ALL) is necessary)
Last stanza really pinched me!
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
**whose silver, c
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of lightβ
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight
