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December 03, 2008

PARIS GIVEAWAY # 3

IMG_0610 Today, we go for a poet - not just any poet but one of our absolute favorites.  See if you can win a complete set of The Paris Review Interviews by figuring it out, and remember the rules please, which you can review here in Monday's post.  (Read them carefully, please - people are still getting them wrong.)

INTERVIEWER: Frost talks about the poet, or himself rather, as a performer, as an athlete is a performer. In what sense do you mean that writing is a performance?

POET: A trapeze artist on his high wire is performing and defying death at the same time. He’s doing more than showing off his skill; he’s using his skill to stay alive. Art demands that sense of risk, of danger. But few artists in any period risk their lives. The truth is they’re not on a high enough wire. This makes me think of an incident in my childhood. In the woods behind our house in Worcester was an abandoned quarry—you’ll find mention of it in “The Testing-Tree.” This deep-cut quarry had a sheer granite face. I visited it almost every day, alone in the woods, and in my magic Keds I’d try to climb it, till the height made me dizzy. I was always testing myself. There was nobody to watch me. I was testing myself to see how high I could go. There was very little ledge, almost nothing to hold on to. Occasionally I’d find a plant or a few blades of tough grass in the crevices, but the surface was almost vertical, with only the most precarious toehold. One day I was out there and I climbed—oh, it was a triumph!—almost to the top. And then I couldn’t get down. I couldn’t go up or down. I just clung there that whole afternoon and through the long night. Next morning the police and fire department found me. They put up a ladder and brought me down. I must say my mother didn’t appreciate that I was inventing a metaphor for poetry.

UPDATE:  The Random Number Generator appears to have more of a heart than we thought.  Sanjay Sipahimalani of Mumbai was one of our readers who identified our mystery poet Stanley Kunitz.  The idea that this website and these interviews can serve as a diversion during such awful times reaffirms why we do this.  Congratulations, also, to our other winner Elizabeth Houlding.  Honorable wrong guesses include Phillip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Paris Review Week |

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Comments

Sabra Wineteer

So, will any of us get a special mention for answering all correctly? Because your random number generator really hates me, Mark, and after my most recent answer, I'm three for three for these things.

Posted by: Sabra Wineteer | December 03, 2008 at 03:46 AM

Roddy

Why doesn't this rocking horse help me pick winners anymore?! First cold night, kindling I tell ya!

Posted by: Roddy | December 03, 2008 at 05:31 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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