+ From the Current Issue
     Spring, 2004

Paul Muldoon on Jimi Hendrix and Derek Mahon, Patrick Kavanagh's Ireland, and debunking W.B.
"I don't think anybody should be quite so full of themselves. Even if they're Yeats. Humility is a requisite and I fear Yeats was not strong in the humility department."

Richard Howard on Jean Genet and the Black Panthers, "a life in French," and exchanging mental fluids
"The practice of translation is essentially . . . a matter of erotic submission, and even erotic imposition."

"Ink is Wanted by Raving Brother"—Dylan Thomas's Swansea Years
"He remained the Swansea boy, the provincial. That boy was always there, the one who shocked the girls in the Mumbles when he was fourteen and fifteen by whistling at them and saying, 'That’s a pretty pair of knockers.'"

Sticks & Stones: Architectural America
A Portfolio of Photographs by Lee Friedlander

 

New fiction by Melvin Jules Bukiet, Rick Moody, and Melanie Rae Thon

New poetry by David Baker, Fred Dings, Phillip Sterling, Betsy Bonner, Lance Larsen, Sarah Manguso, and others

                You must be dead at least ten years.
                You must have lived an unremarkable life
                before that: a teacher, say, of unremarkable
                students, a recluse, a furniture refurbisher,
                or the humble liberator of unendangered species...

Read the rest of Phillip Sterling's poem, "Criteria."

+ The Paris Review Revisited
     Selections from the Archives

Isak Dinesen discusses monkeys and albatrosses with Eugene Walter
"'Damn lunch,' I said. 'I can eat lunch any day, but I shan't see albatrosses again.' Such wingspread!"

Forty years ago Henry Miller claimed that America was against the artist—is it still true?
"The artist . . . stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's unAmerican somehow. I think that of all countries—we have to overlook the communist countries of course—America is the most mechanized, robotized of all."

Poetry by James Cummins, Frank Dux, Patricia Ferrell, and Serena J. Fox