WRB—Mar. 19, 2025

“You’re Hemingway!”

Purity of heart is to will one thing (managing to edit the Washington Review of Books)

N.B.:

March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”

Links:

• Two in The Paris Review:

  • Jessica Laser interviews Adam Plunkett about his new biography of Robert Frost (Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, February) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 12, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Feb. 19, 2025.]:

    Laser: Would you say that there’s a direct correlation between Frost’s familiarity and the fact that he’s fallen so out of favor with people who are serious about poetry today?

    Plunkett: One thing that has been interesting about working on Frost is that so many people come out of the woodwork who turn out to be incredible admirers of him. But he was really far outside of the circle of poets who I was taught when I was in college. This has a lot to do with the fetishization of what’s difficult, especially as both poetry and criticism professionalized. Frost’s difficulties are of a different kind. His genius is harder to see. A lot of his poems tap into something like common culture and common problems, these very basic conflicts that were also the stuff of Greek drama. Those difficulties are different from that of a line break, and they are not the favored difficulties of professional criticism.

    [For “the fetishization of what’s difficult” cf. the notes on “brodernism” in WRB—Feb. 26, 2025. If we go to that most familiar of Frost’s poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” what, exactly, is “the sweep / Of easy wind”? The sibilants sound like snow blowing across other snow, but what makes the wind easy? And why does the speaker only think he knows who owns the woods in the first line before speaking in the fourth line as if he’s certain? The speaker’s jump to an easy (heh) certainty makes the poem less certain.

    And, as the problems of line breaks go, consider these in “Out, Out—”:

    . . . Then the boy saw all—

    Since he was old enough to know, big boy

    Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

    He saw all spoiled. . . .

    Two lines separate “all” and “all spoiled,” and those lines move from “boy” to “man” and then regress back to “child.” The last two of those words are separated from the first by another line break. This withholding of disfigurement and death until after the line break calls back to the source of Frost’s title:

    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

    And then is heard no more. It is a tale

    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

    Signifying nothing.

    Death delayed by line break, but nevertheless inevitable. Fools have light (line break) for the way to dusty death. Life is on the stage (line break) and then is heard no more. It is a tale (line break) told by an idiot. Its sound and fury (line break) signify nothing. Writing poetry that seems so simple is a complicated enterprise, and with those two lines between “all” and “all spoiled” Frost one-ups Shakespeare. —Steve]

  • Bela Shayevich interviews Ludmilla Petrushevskaya about her life and work:

    Shayevich: Did the women mind your using their tales of woe?

    Petrushevskaya: My husband Zhenya, who read all my early stories, would get very stressed and say, “What if your friends read this?” But, you know, people don’t always understand what’s happening to them. Sometimes they can’t even see the tragedy of the situation in front of them. After I wrote “Nets and Snares,” about a young woman who moves in with her lover’s mother when he gets her pregnant, to coerce him into staying with her, the friend I’d written it about called me and said, “Liussia! You’re Hemingway!” She hadn’t recognized herself at all.

    Other times, I was less successful at covering my tracks. I got into hot water after “Our Circle” came out. I’d met the people in it through Zhenya, who was a physicist⁠—they were his college friends. I didn’t really fit in, but I was a girl with a guitar, and who doesn’t like that? After Zhenya died, being with them became the only way I could hold on to him. I wrote “Our Circle” years afterward, and we were barely in touch by the time it was published, but they were all furious. One of them said she wanted to shoot me, and I’d written only one sentence about her. These were very prideful people.

Reviews:

• In Review 31, Jack Barron reviews a collection of J. H. Prynne’s most recent work (Poems 2016–2024, 2024) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 28, 2024.]:

  The missed rhyme is a stab to our inner child: a treat denied, perhaps even a paradise lost: you’ve got to be kidding. In so doing, Prynne alienates our deepest acoustic familiarities and makes a nightmare—“gleaming teeth” and all—of our playroom imaginary. Snooty Tipoffs (2021) is therefore a space of endless potential which is also its deepest vulnerability, and Prynne shows the dangers even minor rhythmic manipulation might have for our being in the world.

  That is, these poems, extending out on either side of Snooty Tipoffs, take us back to what may be the most political period of our lives: language-acquisition. In his published lecture Stars, Tigers, and the Shape of Words (1993), Prynne discusses what he calls “nursery consciousness” in the poem “The Star”: the moment at which the universal-seeming babble which constitutes our first noise on earth falls away, and we are told where we are.

  [Prynne’s weirding up the nursery rhymes calls attention to the strangeness of the things that have stuck in our head. Attempts to interpret them as somehow being “about” something—“Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and medieval taxes, “Ring Around the Rosie” and the plague—are, while interesting, missing the point because they attempt to make sense of something beyond sense. Nothing about the plague explains why we all know “Ring Around the Rosie,” why it sticks in our heads, why it gets passed down (either adult to child or child to child), or even what the words mean. We figure out to all fall down at “we all fall down,” but the purpose of the rest is unclear. It is a stark reminder that language is something we inherit and not something we make. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Sally Rooney, Jane Eyre, sex, and desire

• My final thoughts on an essay collection by Guy Davenport, featuring Charles Ives and Indian arrowheads

• Grace on a Poem by Stephen Vincent Benét about John James Audubon

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

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—Steve]