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Poetry Must Still Dance: An Interview with Ange Mlinko

The Spring issue of The Paris Review includes a long poem by Ange Mlinko, “Wingandecoia.” It took me a few rereads, but, after a bout of Google searching, I saw this poem trace its arc in several directions—those of time, of place, and of musical imagination. Along the way to understanding, Mlinko treats the reader to lines that feel both alive and spectral. Some are even like incantatory but welcome earworms.

Mlinko has also published three books of poetry—Matinees, Starred Wire, and Shoulder Season. And this fall her next book, Marvelous Things Overheard, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Between books, she writes on language and the arts for The Nation. 

Like the two poems you published in issue 199 of The Paris Review, “Wingandecoia” contains many unfamiliar words and names. How do you see these poems, and that idea, figuring into your forthcoming book, Marvelous Things Overheard?

The book is partly an exploration of time. The sixth-century brigand poet, the Macedonian general, and the ineffectual managers of the lost colony at Roanoke are allowed a measure of strangeness through the language each poem invokes. It amounts to a kind of foreign language within our familiar one. I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn’t want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not “getting” a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me—in fact, it was a seduction.

And then, obviously, these words are beautiful. Wingandecoia is a beautiful word. So is psittacines. So is pot pot chee. They suggest rhymes, anagrams, and puns. They make music, which I think is an indispensible pleasure. Read More »

The Part About the Helmets

We were thrilled to run across this custom bike helmet, modeled on the 2666 cover designed by Charlotte Strick (who just happens to be The Paris Review’s art editor!). Says Ariel Abrahams, who commissioned the literary topper,

I chose my design because when I read the book 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, I was literally taken aback. I had to sit down, stop my life and just read. I really fell in love. I thought a bike helmet depicting the magical sea-life images from the cover of the third book of 2666 would commemorate these overwhelming, larger than life feelings somehow. If you have read the book, you know the importance of the sea creature images to the tone of the story.

 

Where’s Leo?

Two years ago yesterday I followed a man dressed in black into a small pharmacy in Dublin. Bars of yellow soap covered the shop’s dark wooden shelves and countertops. I watched from across the shop as the man conversed loudly with the pharmacist, gesticulating as he spoke. He ordered a specific type of lotion. He then grabbed a bar of soap, indicating that he’d return later to pay for the soap and lotion. I lifted a bar to my nose and sniffed: lemon. The man waved goodbye to the pharmacist and left. I put down the soap and followed him out.

While I don’t usually stalk errand-running strangers in foreign cities, this was an exception: I was participating in Bloomsday, the annual reenactment of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on the anniversary of day the novel takes place, June 16, 1904. The man clad in black was an actor portraying protagonist Leopold Bloom as he moves through his day in real time, in the actual spots around Dublin where Joyce set his narrative. I was part of a spectator’s group of about thirty people—some dressed in period garb, including an unwitting infant in a lace collar and antique stroller—that trailed Bloom through the streets of Dublin throughout the day. We visited a home on Eccles Street that could have been Bloom’s. The pharmacy was Sweny’s, a Dublin establishment still selling the same lemon-scented soap that Joyce first made famous in 1922. Read More »

Undiscovered Joyce Title? And Other News

An Irish press is publishing a collection of ten short pieces by James Joyce, calling it “almost certainly the last undiscovered title” by the author. But did Joyce want them published at all? Scholars choose sides.
Speaking of cashing in, “for a day celebrating a book many admit to never having read, Bloomsday is a brilliant piece of marketing.”
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has started something nifty called the Library Test Kitchen, dedicated to preserving libraries with new design concepts. Student designs are displayed in—wait for it—a “Labrary.”
After bedbugs were detected in the environs of the Chappaqua Library, a bedbug-sniffing dog was provided to case books from a recent library sale. “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” declared one mom (whose new set of Harry Potter was cleared by the beagle).
Without further ado: the trailer for Salinger.

 

The Dogs of Men and War: Charlie Newman and His Lost Novel

It is best to dispense at once with the salacious stuff of Charlie Newman’s life: he was a drunk, a bastard, and a boor. His marriages did not last. His books did not bring fame. When not poisoning his liver or relations with both family and fellow writers, he taught college, smoked a pipe, and trained dogs.

Only the very last of these facts is relevant when reading In Partial Disgrace, a fantastically odd posthumous novel for those who like their beauty strange, their plots unruly, their ideas ambitious. It has been patched together by his nephew Ben Ryder Howe—a former editor at The Paris Review–and released this spring by Dalkey Archive Press. The book is set in a fictional European land called Cannonia, its history based on that of Hungary but its name quite clearly derived from the Latin for dog, canis. The main character, Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar, is a dog breeder, and there are roughly 0.7 references to the canine species on each page of this gorgeous mess of a novel, which is what Pale Fire (a novel Newman adored) might have read like if given a heavy-handed edit by Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Millan.

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What We’re Loving: Piano Rats, Black Flag, Bolaño

“Pretty Much Every Single Black Flag Poster Designed by Raymond Pettibon” pretty much says it all. This gallery of eighty-two posters, in the collection of Kill Your Idols publisher Bryan Ray Turcotte since 1982, has been keeping me occupied the past few days. I’ve been trying to pick a favorite, but it’s tough. I still remember seeing the Black Flag logo for the first time: it was unmistakable and striking and strangely compelling. It still is. —Nicole Rudick

In the search for Roberto Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policeman, I ran across the New Directions edition of his 1980 novel Antwerp tucked between his better known works. It’s an amalgamation of short, experimental descriptions of conversations and neo-philosophical interpretations of love and life, written when the author was twenty-seven. I haven’t come across something so simultaneously challenging and lucid in a long time. —Ellen Duffer

I was in Chicago this past weekend for Printers Row Lit Festival, where the Review shared the Small Press Tent with a handful of old friends (A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Bookforum) and new friends (featherproof books, MAKE magazine, Midwestern Gothic). Over the course of the festival, I picked up Franki Elliot’s chapbook Piano Rats from Chicago publisher Curbside Splendor and spent a plane ride with Elliot’s brief, deeply personal free verse “stories,” which detail her varied interactions with both strangers and current/past lovers.

the only sound was our breathing
when you cleared your throat and said,
neither loud nor quiet

“I wish there was a God.”
I didn't have to say anything

At times mundane, awkward, offensive, and, ultimately, heartbreaking, it takes a while to warm up, but, by the end, leaves a lasting impression. I didn’t sleep a wink on the plane. —Justin Alvarez

I was one of the many fans devastated this week when Scottish indie band The Pastels canceled their U.S. shows (the first since 1997!) due to work visa issues. At least we can derive some solace from listening to their gorgeous new release, Slow Summits, which is as tender, wistful, and thoughtful as all their albums. (And start saving up for tickets to Glasgow.) —Sadie Stein

 

Fan Fic

When I was a junior in college, I treated my creative writing seminar to a story that was, even by my standards, bizarre. (I don’t mean experimental, or particularly interesting, by the way—just peculiar.) It was a piece of—well, I guess you’d call it fan fiction, or maybe real person fiction, about the later life of Kay Thompson, the performer and author of Eloise. If memory serves, this opus was set in Portofino, and involved Thompson descending into madness. (There was also a gay companion.) It was completely fabricated and also terrible. That story is, not tragically, lost to the mists of time. But I was excited to see that I am not the only one indulging in speculative Eloise fiction! In a piece on “Five Spinoff Novels I’d Love to Read,” Edan Lepucki writes:

When I was younger, I didn’t wonder much about the parents of Eloise, the six-year-old heroine who lives with her British nanny in the Plaza Hotel, putting sunglasses on her dog Weenie and combing her hair with a fork. Now when I read the book to my son, I think about them a lot. It’s wealth that allows Eloise’s mother to neglect her daughter, and it’s the mother’s absence that haunts the book. What do we know of the woman? Eloise tells us that she is 30 and has “a charge account at Bergdorf’s.” Her mother knows Coco Chanel, and has AT&T stock and “knows an ad man whatever that is.” Sometimes she goes to Virginia with her lawyer. Eloise’s father is never mentioned. (Is the lawyer Eloise’s dad, and Eloise just doesn’t know it?) I’d love to read a novel narrated by Eloise’s mother. She’s a rich fuck-up, to be sure, maybe a functioning alcoholic with a penchant for Bloody Marys at breakfast and champagne every afternoon. She loves her daughter, but can’t stand to be around her for more than a few minutes. She jets off to Milan, to Paris, forgetting to remember her offspring back in Manhattan. There would definitely be a strange and/or degrading sex scene involving the owner of The Plaza.

We may be a match made in heaven!

 

A Book Vending Machine, and Other News

A California library introduces a children’s book vending machine!
The perfect number of children for literary success: a slideshow. 
As dirt goes, this seems pretty tame, but: it seems Avril Danica Haines, nominated as CIA number two, used to read Anne Rice (or should we say, A. N. Roquelaure?) aloud at her bookstore’s erotica night.
“Grammar cops are rarely good writers. Imagination always disobeys.” Sherman Alexie starts a Tweet storm.
We have mentioned Japan’s book towers, or tawaa tsumi, before. But I think we can agree that we all need to see more. (Even if the trend has been exaggerated.) 

 

Fighting Words

Thoor Ballylee, Co. Galway. Once owned by W.B. Yeats

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” —W. B. Yeats

 

Off the Grid

As they do every year, the prestigious Cal Hi Sports magazine, an influential prognosticator for gridiron talent, made a list in 1994 of the top prep quarterbacks on the West Coast. Among them were Kevin Feterik at Los Alamitos, who would end up starring for QB-haven BYU; Cade McNown, a lefty from Oregon who later stewarded UCLA’s mini-dynasty; Brock Huard from Puyallup, Washington, who started as a freshman for the University of Washington and is now an ESPN analyst; a Michigan-bound senior from San Mateo named Tom Brady; and me.

At Beverly Hills High School I was that Johnny B. Goode character with “Golden Boy” sewn into the back of my letterman jacket. My favorite t-shirt read “Football is Life, the rest is just details,” and that was an understatement. I wasn’t the fastest or strongest kid, and, with my frame (6’1”), I’d never be considered anything but tiny at the college level, so I determined to be the smartest player in the game. And I studied like a Manning, becoming a geek of the game, a savant who could quote you strings of statistics like a cabalist. In contrast, the only thing I remember from my actual classes at the time is a sign one teacher had mounted near the clock in their room. It read: “Clock watchers, time will pass, will you?” I did, but barely. My devotion to the game was total.

So when, five years later, six months after quitting football for the second and final time, I woke up on a park bench in Berlin with no map, and no itinerary, I had no idea who I was.

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