Poets & Writers Theater

“I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs / before I get too sad.” For the Paris Review’s “Poets on Couches” video series, poet Cheswayo Mphanza reads and discusses the late Gerald Stern’s poem “Leaving Another Kingdom.”

“The life we lead as writers is awful—it’s boring, tedious, lonely,” says Vivian Gornick. “But when it’s working, there’s nothing in the world that compares.” In this installment of the Paris Review’s “My First Time” series, Gornick discusses the experience of writing and publishing her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt.

“Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world / sinks back into twilight,” reads Rita Dove from the poem “My Bird” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Mark Anderson, at her study in Charlottesville, Virginia in this installment of the Paris Review’s Poets on Couches series. Get more inspiration from a writing prompt based on this poem in The Time Is Now.

“I really was thinking like I have to work harder than any other writer in the world. I just wanted so badly to figure this out, to figure out how to write.” In this installment of the Paris Review’s “My First Time,” Sheila Heti discusses writing her first book, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s, 2001), and how she came to write short stories after quitting theater school.

“Dawn in New York has / four columns of mire / and a hurricane of black pigeons / splashing in the putrid waters.” In this installment of the Paris Review’s Poets on Couches video series, Monica Youn reads and discusses “Dawn,” a poem by Federico García Lorca, translated by Greg Simon and Steven L. White.

“We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning / Names in heat, in elements classical / Philosophers said could change us.” In this Paris Review video, Jericho Brown reads two poems from his most recent collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), for which he received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Filmed in 2019 in the woods of Decatur, Georgia, “Poets in Space” was directed and produced by Daniel Grossman and Sean Webley in collaboration with the poet Malachi Black.

“The orchard grew excellent, // Good mass of apples assembling, one angel burned, looped / On the wire fence, in a bowl of gold most satisfactory.” Stephanie Burt reads Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem “Posthumous Seduction,” which first appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of Paris Review, for the new Poets on Couches series where poets read and discuss favorite poems that get them through during difficult times.

“Each book that you write, you swim a long way from the pier at a certain point. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.... If you keep going, you’ll figure out how to shape the thing.” Jeffrey Eugenides recalls his experience writing his first book, The Virgin Suicides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), for the Paris Review’s “My First Time” video series. Eugenides’s first story collection, Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

"Reading and writing allows us to be empathic. And without empathy, I think, our society would be at a total loss. I think in that way, writing can affect great change." Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Cathy Park Hong answer questions from New York City high school students about writing and inspiration at a live Writers at Work event hosted by 92nd Street Y with the Paris Review.

"I kind of always assume that you don't write the poem you want to write...that's actually quite freeing because it means you discover something in the act of composition that you didn't know in advance." Ben Lerner talks about his first poetry collection, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), for the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series. Lerner's first nonfiction book, The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Doctor, you say there are no haloes / around the streetlights in Paris / and what I see is an aberration / caused by old age, an affliction.” For the Paris Review’s “Poets on Couches” video series, Maya C. Popa reads Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation” and speaks about how the poem brings her comfort.

"The difficulty was that different people liked different parts of the book." In the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series, Helen DeWitt talks about the many challenges she faced before the publication of her first novel, The Last Samurai, which was rereleased by New Directions in May 2016.

The contributing editor of Harper's and the southern editor of the Paris Review reads from "The Final Comeback of Axl Rose," an essay from his collection Pulphead, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011.

Appearing on The Paul Holdengraber Show, the former editor of the Paris Review and the author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), A Cold Case (2002), and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Philip Gourevitch talks about archetypes, James Brown, Jonah and the whale, and more.