WRB—July 15, 2026
“write a better book”
The Washington Review of Books came in because of a great sensibility.
[After—years—there is finally again some truth to the name of this newsletter; today’s edition comes to you from Washington County, Maine. —Steve]
Links:
In The Paris Review, an essay adapted from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s introduction to a collection of César Aira’s work (Five: Novels, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, July 28):
And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages.
And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.
[I know what people mean when they refer to writers characterized by “rigorous observation,” but we need another term for it, since the words actually refer to all good writing. Not all rigorous observation manifests in precise description of objects. —Steve]
Two in the TLS; first, Douglas Field on Allen Ginsberg:
Ginsberg shares his reading habits—“when I read a page of someone’s poems, I look for minutiae”—and praises the unadorned language of the poets Charles Reznikoff and Whitman, the latter the subject of “A Supermarket in California,” one of his most compelling early poems. His lectures demonstrate an impressive breadth of reading; they dart from Milton to Dylan, by way of Blake and Indian poetry, before reminding students of the iconoclasm beneath his jacket and tie, a professorial look he adopted during the 1980s. “If hypertrophic imagination takes over”, the poet explained, “it’s like an acid-head taking off his clothes and running into traffic.” Readers expecting sustained insights into Blake’s poetry are likely to be disappointed, however. Ginsberg’s discussion of The Book of Urizen (1794) is instructive, but he excels at distracting himself from the conventions of literary criticism. Ah!merica nonetheless contains some thought-provoking observations, including the claim that “Western art favors novelty rather than a stable, unvarying method”, a theory he extends to a comparison between Blake’s visual art and Tibetan paintings. Both, he claims, privilege repetition with variation over stylistic evolution.
[As far as I can tell, Ginsberg’s most valuable contribution to culture was backing vocals on Leonard Cohen’s “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On.” The line about looking for minutiae is good, though. —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Emily Berry reviews a book about poets and suicide (The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets, by J. T. Welsch, April):
Though this global study might itself seem to offer a rather bleak impression of poets’ susceptibility to the allure of death (“a gilded thing to which he hourly strove,” in Roach’s words), Welsch points out that a persistent statistic claiming suicide rates among poets are five times higher than average is actually based on dubious research methods. This alarming figure is in fact a bold extrapolation from a sample of just thirty-six eighteenth-century poets. Since I know a lot of poets, and none of them have killed themselves, I could just as well argue that as a group poets are remarkably immune to this major public health concern. (Of the two poets among the thirty-six reckoned to have died by their own hand, the best known today is Thomas Chatterton, and recent research suggests that even his much-depicted death may have been accidental.)
If The Poetry of Suicide has a shortcoming, it is Welsch’s primary focus on poems by those who died by that means over poems by those left behind (though of course Berryman, whose father killed himself when the poet was eleven years old, encompasses both). Having a personal stake in the latter, I would have been interested in hearing more from that side and, given that the book’s subtitle contains the phrase “Lessons in Grief,” it seems a striking—perhaps deliberate—omission. “Poetry . . . records the voices of those lost to suicide,” Welsch writes. In citing the words of the “lost,” he allows those whose lives and deaths are so often luridly portrayed in their absence to speak for themselves, calling them back from the dead.
[Berry quotes Keats’ “Half in love with easeful death,” and the editor chose it for the title of the review, but I can never read it without thinking about Christopher Ricks’ response: “But only half.” And Keats’ “Sonnet to Chatterton” could just as well be about a poet who died of any other cause. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
A Poem by E. A. Robinson and the poetry of absence
The Hardy-Brontë English landscape thought nexus
Bob Dylan and the Great American Songbook
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.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
