Redux: I Lost the Time of Day about Three Weeks Ago

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about the art of losing. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Hebe Uhart’s short story “Coordination,” and Terry Stokes’s poem “Losing the Time of Day.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27

Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981)

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever had any poems that were gifts? Poems that seemed to write themselves?

BISHOP

Oh, yes. Once in a while it happens. I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter.

 

 

Coordination

By Hebe Uhart

Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

We were gathered in a small conference room at the book fair. A lot of people were there. To my right, a very elderly writer was reading an excruciatingly long story. She kept pausing because she kept losing her place on the page. She had the voice of a convalescent—no, it was more like the voice of someone who had lived alone in a cave for a long time without speaking to a soul. I would have offered to read the story for her, but her handwriting was so cryptic that only she could make sense of it.

 

 

Losing the Time of Day

By Terry Stokes

Issue no. 145 (Winter 1997)

I lost the time of day about three weeks ago

right after the siesta in the trembling rain,

right after the blue dream in the saffron forest,

right after the day of purple spotlights

in the auburn bathroom of pain …

 

If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published.