The Paris Review, Issue 141, Winter 1996

by George Plimpton (Editor), Peter Matthiessen (Editor), Donald Hall (Editor)

Gary Snyder discusses Zen, the environment, and the Art of Poetry.

Helen Vendler on Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, and Shakespeare.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez instructs the next generation of Latin American journalists.

Stories by Eight New Writers: Chris Adrian, Peter Ho Davies, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyce Hackett, John Hodgman, Michael Knight, Rob Owen, and J. David Stevens. Poems by Agha Shahid Ali and Eric Ormsby.

308 pages, Perfectbound

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, actor, and gamesman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.

He was the grandson of George A. Plimpton.

Reviews

[m · Rating 2 out of 5]

Helen Vendler quotes:

[Poems] help me to know what I’m feeling. Out of the depths of my heart will come a quotation completely unbidden. And then I will think, Oh, so that’s what I am feeling today.

Shakespeare was the most easily bored writer that ever lived, and once he had made a sonnet prove out in one way, he began to do something even more ingenious with the next sonnet. It was a kind of task that he set himself:

I think of the reviews I’ve written as a continuing self-seminar in contemporary poetry. A new poet would appear, and I would want to track the progress of that person, see what happened next.