Volume 23 issue 1 spring 2011 by Yale Literary Magazine

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Note from the Editors Each semester of the Lit we like to play with how we present our student writing and art. This spring issue we decided to combine poetry, prose, and photography on every page. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank the writers, our photographer, Isabelle Chaffin, and our designer, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. It's been a wonderful year. Sincerely, Christine and Andrew

Contents THE TONGUE-CUT SPARROW, alice hodgkins DIVIDE, hannah loeb

6 7

CLINAMEN noah warren DELUGE, kate orazem

THE CHOSEN, BY CHAIM POTOK, jacob paul CENTERFOLD

DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS, jacque feldman RABBIT HUNT, orlando hernandez INTERVIEW WITH CARL PHILLIPS

20 23

EDITORS-IN -CHIEF: andrew saviano and christine kwon, LITERARY EDITORS: gal-yid bloomfield and aliee hodgkins and kenneth reveiz, MANAGING EDITORS: orlando hernandez and noah warren, SENIOR EDITORS: helen tsykynovska and nieolas niarehos, ASSOCIATE EDITORS: jana avner and zeynep pamuk, ARTS EDITOR: susan Feldman, CIRCULATION AND DISTRIBUTION: max de la bruye,re, PUBLISHER: david curtis, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: sebastian caliri, EVENTS COORDINATORS: clayton erwin and jacque Feldman, PUBLICITY: juliana hanle and samuel 'tuber and cora lewis, DESIGNER: rachel kauder nalebuff

THE TONGUE-CUT SPARROW alice hodgkins I asked only for the simple things— Figs, roses, a month of drinking mead. In the night, Performance: A male moth with dark markings Recrosses the lamplight. The days billow In and out of fantasy— Rice cooking in the red wooden bowl, The woodpile growing and shrinking. (I made the rice, I chopped the wood.) I left the house when he went out, And sat on the stile, A house sparrow angling toward me on the fence. Returning, I noticed the dry ground— When mud cracks, it shrinks, The grass fossilized inside it

The sky filling with cloud Plumes orange, and umber, Casting the backwater. It must be progress, another day Passingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;evening, now, I put away the dishes, The water pitcher Upside-down on the sill board. The orange hibiscus closes, The cat licks the plate of warm mil kâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

DIVIDE

hann.ah loeb

It was an old bicycle wedding, tin cans alongside, she a modernist & he waiting at the kettle corn, before they knew it, etc. 41.

Gifts probably included: 1 goat his grandfather used to milk, which may yet yield, & 2 handsome charm bracelets, matched and engraved. Certainly I am jealous! Someone will scoop you up is how he soothed me â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in fact I remember the first scoop, which was surprising, to spring aloft, ribs crushed against his forehead when I had just wondered at how perfectly twinned our toes were, now rent maybe eight feet apart. Do not patronize me is how I shrieked, and kept shrieking, thinking how dizzy we could be, and how quickly cleaved.

eat

one night the wind heaves down the nest and places it on the street. then morning makes altars everywhere. recovering it. mind the bright shards enfolded there, the fisherman's snapped line. mind the scene as it was when you saw it first: the almonds just blooming above the wet pavement daubed red. remember the world when it had still a measure of emptiness.

DELUGE

kate orazem

It rained like it could hold off winter . It rained until the world was a mir ror the sky was trying to break. We had so much time we spat mou thfuls of it. Birds survived on the stumped, straw necks of sca recrows.

God took nothing into his hands, and held it until it sle pt, and it dreamed of water, like a mother of her child moving, inside. Lat er, the water trying at touch, and finding its elf a killer, remembered being dreamt, an d wanted to know how it wa s done.

This is what the water found: the ten modes,the names of flowers, what to say to his Lift up your hearts. Birds fly ing away: its sound, entering. Ever and ever am en.

IV 째We stood and pocketed things floating in the pantry. The lights went bright, out, back on. We were surrounded by apples in water, like the old game.

4.;

There were new possibilities now, it was very exciting, there were fences to be mended, and furrows sown, clutches of eggs found and stolen, new maps made for the new fenced places, ditches sunk and dredged.

VI Almost anything can be a boat. The water shows you, helpful in spite of itself, like anything with so many hands.

THE CHOSEN, BY CHAIM POTOK A SHORT STORY BY jacob pa ul

"It's a book club,"

The mid-morning su n was un- tiful woma n Linda had ever seen. co mf ortably bright to Li said Mrs. Roosevelt."For nda, who "You will find rrg hous ladies in had not yet e across ,left her home that da the neighborhood. And y. the street from yours, we'd like Linda did " sai d Mrs. no t care for sunlight â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Ro you to become a memb osevelt. She turned arou er. This her eyes we nd re very sensitive an and means you would read the d pointed to a house tha books we had been t Linda had ever since she was a read and attend our meet lit- never noticed before ings and tle girl. In , but supposed the mornings, after he discuss them with us.Th r had always been part of e books,I son left for the street's school and her husban mean. Discuss the books. d general landscape. "T With us. for work, it here," she was Linda's custom to The other members of th said. "The meeting wil e club." go about he l be there." r housework with th Peering out at the porc e h from blinds draw n. Now, with the sunbehind the half-open door That night, Linda told he , Linda light reflec r husting off of Mrs. Roos realized that she had se - band about Mrs. Roosev en Mrs. evelt's large elt's offer teeth as she stood on Roosevelt before. At th as the two lay reading in e Garden bed. LinCommittee luncheon,an da' s husband was reading a co d the Easpy of ter Parade, and...there ha Angler's Journal that he d been a ha No d t sto ev len er third. Dr. Shelby's office y lady is from Dr. Shelby's office , that was , an d Li nit. Linda had been waitin asked to join. Only da was beginning The Ch g for her os en , by teeth cleaning appointmen those chosen by exChaim Potok. t and had seen Mrs. Roosevelt sittin "So long as they aren't g across isting members of th trying from her, reading a bo e to sell you anything," said Li ok Linda club. All are chosen nda's didn't recognize. And husband,"then I have no now Linda pr ob lem un remembered how she ha animously. with it. Mrs. Roosevelt d thought is fin e la dy it uncommon for a from a fine family.To ha woman to ve ha d her bring her own book to th as my wife would have be e dentist's en a great office, rather than just ch honor, but to have my wif oose from the front po e be part rch, Linda found herthe provided selection of of her book club is also an newspa- self strugglin honor." g against the blinding pers and magazines. An "I guess so," said Lind d not any rays. a, "I do book,but a book Linda feel honored. Mrs. Roos didn't rec"I have here a fruit basket evelt said ognize. An obscure book ," said that not all ladies . It stood Mrs.Roosev ca n be pa rt of the el t,"which I present to cl out. Another thing tha ub, only the upper crust. t stood you as a form I hadn't al offer of member- ev out were Mrs. Roosevelt en heard of the club until 's teeth. ship into th today." e club, and as a sign of They were the whites "Well," said Linda's hu t, bright- my goodwill. sband, In it you will find var- "w est teeth Linda had e are making our way up ever seen. ious fruits in so, as well as the book tha Maybe Mrs. Roosevelt wa t ciety, and that is th s waiting will be dis e Am er ican cus sed at next Wednes- Dream. to have her teeth photog raphed so day's club me " et ing. The Chosen, by that they could be displa But Linda was still unsure yed in a Chaim Potok. . Mrs. The meeting will be Roos textbook. evelt read rare and ob he ld at ele scure ven a.m. at my house." "More broadly," sai books,and Linda hadn't d Mrs. Abnormal photosensitivit even gone Roosevelt, "membershi y was to college. Coul p in the one reason d she really expect why Linda hid behind book club connotes pre to fit in? Chaim Potok.Li stige. An the front do nda closed or the way she did. Anntree into the neighb her eyes and tried to fig orhood's other reason ure out wa s that Mrs. Roos- wher ost desirable crust: th e a name like that could e upper evelt's presen have ce made Linda feel co ust. Not every lady is me from. Chaim Potok. Ve asked to afraid. Mrs. ne zuRoosevelt, realized ela in. Only those chosen by , maybe. Or the past, more existing Linda as she likesquinted away from ly. mbers ofthe club. All are It seemed like a very old chosen yet another ref book, lected ray of sun- a ve imously." ry old name. Chaim Poto light, was the most striki k. A ngly beau- very old Venezu elan name.

In preparation for Wednesday's meeting,Linda had baked the various fruits from the fruit basket into a pie. She now stood on Mrs. Roosevelt's front porch holding the pie, with The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, wedged under her armpit.With no arms free,Linda wondered how she would manage to ring the doorbell and let Mrs. Roosevelt and the other ladies know she had arrived. At that moment, however, Mrs. Roosevelt opened the front door and rang the doorbell for her. "Linda!" she exclaimed. "Welcome to the book club meeting!" "Thank you," said Linda, "I've made a pie and read The Chosen,by Chaim Potok." "You have!" said Mrs. Roosevelt. She took the pie from Linda. "I'll put it in the kitchen with all the others. Won't you come in?" Mrs. Roosevelt's house was a good example of the American Dream. â&#x20AC;˘The walls of her living room were oak paneled and had moose heads hanging on them. Above the large chestnut fireplace was an oil-on-canvas portrait of Mrs. Roosevelt's husband in full cavalry uniform. "When do the other ladies arrive?" Linda asked when Mrs. Roosevelt returned from the kitchen. The house seemed empty except for the two of them."Have I come too early? Or has the meeting been canceled?" "Please take a seat," said Mrs. Roosevelt. She gestured to a chair beside the coffee table."There,for example." She gestured to a different chair. "Or there." Linda sat down in one chair and Mrs. Roosevelt sat in the other. On the coffee table was an enormous leather-bound copy of The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. "The meeting of the book club to order," said Mrs. Roocalled is sevelt. Using both hands, she opened the book on the table. The title page featured a magnificently colored wood block print of the Amazon jungle. Linda's paperback

heard herself cry. "We pray to you, Chaim Potok!" Lindafelt a cried Mrs..Roosevelt."We pray to you and your great book, The Choqueer terror rise sen, by Chaim Potok! You are this h. in her stomac week's subject, and so our club must appease you!" From inside the coffee table drawer, Mrs. Roosevelt took out a small film canister. copy of The Chosen hadn't includShe opened the top, and poured ed this. a white powder onto the table's "Part One of the meeting!" surface. shouted Mrs. Roosevelt. "Discus"AHI!" yelled Linda. sion of The Venezuelan Themes! And so: we chant! AHI! AHI! AHI!"From inside the coffee table's drawer, Mrs. Roosevelt took out a box of matches."AHI! AHI!" She struck a match and set it on top of the page. "AHI!" Linda watched the page shrivel up into ash as it burned. Magnificently colored smoke billowed up to the ceiling, diffusing into a haze of turquoise, orange, pink, and green. "AHI!" Mrs. Roosevelt leaned into the Linda felt a queer terror rise in powder and snorted. Her eyes were her stomach. She was very afraid red."Linda!"she shouted. "Chaim and yet calm. She did not move Potok has chosen you!" or speak. She watched the smoke "Chaim Potok has chosen me?" and listened to the chant. She asked Linda. She couldn't believe breathed in. it. It was just incredible. "AHI! AHI!" "You are The Chosen!" She glanced over at the por- screamed Mrs. Roosevelt."You are trait of Mrs. Roosevelt's husband The Chosen, by Chaim Potok!" that hung above the mantelpiece. Linda leaned forward on the taHe wore a long sword and a head- ble and snorted.What did it mean? dressâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;she hadn't noticed these be- She sat back and felt the queer terfore. She lay back in her chair and ror begin to burst inside of her. breathed in more ofthe smoke. She What did it mean to be the chosen? started to chant along with Mrs. She felt very afraid. She felt very Roosevelt. "AHI! AHI! AHI!" pleasant. Who was Chaim Potok? She didn't know what it meant, Where was Venezuela? What did it but felt a power in the sound of her mean to be a member of the club? own voice. "It's unanimous!" shouted Mrs. "Part Two of the meeting!" Roosevelt. "It's unanimous! We shouted Mrs. Roosevelt. "It is the have chosen unanimously!" final part! It is Part Two! Consumption of Venezuelan Themes!" Mrs. Roosevelt stood up and shut the book. The fire extinguished and the smoke stopped billowing upwards. "Consumption!" shouted Mrs. Roosevelt, "is the Equal and Opposite of Discussion!" "Equal and Opposite!" Linda

AHI!AHI! AHI!

* 25 째RAMA of UY PRO TKIn Pm OW 1.5 SA!ofiAr

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PLAYGROUND Laughing children hold their fingers like guns. I approach the tallest. "No,like this," he says, and takes my hands.

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alexis steele

sarah matthes

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haley thurston

alexis steele

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ach. Not her stomach as in her belly as in her uterus, but in her stomach. Casey spent her mornings heaving over the toilet and her afternoons standing on her head (the doctor said the baby was upside-down and would be more comfortable that way).

nd when they finally got to Riverhead he would boost her into the back ofthe Nabisco truck and kneel down among the boxes of Oreos and Fig Newtonsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;would she marry him?

But he climbed back into the cab of his 18-wheeler, alone. Julia.

lindsay gellman

he Egyptian goddess faceted her studio with mirrors, multiplying angles on her studied still-life. With cameras flashing though beloved windows, paparazzi hijackers now captured that great beauty's every aspect. "It's a trend," mother tells me. Now our goddamn house is filled with mirrors, and the cat keeps running into shit.

Michael continues to speak with the mosquito.

will zeng

But you know, bug. It's like, like I need two older women in my life. One is enough. Everywhere I go, there she is. In my laundry, in my room. I'm a great listener. Ooh, you're filling up.

; zacharyfuhrer 1

DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS NON FICTION BY jacque feldman a farmer in Provence and my host for a stint of volunteer work, that I was planning to travel to Paris, she called her daughter right away. I protested politely but was secretly thrilled, hoping to make a friend in Paris. However, when Laurent was able to extract the invitation from her daughter, it came with a warning. "It will be... an experience, to stay with Danielle," she said to me, in slow French. "It is just a squat. She is very alternative. Her milieu is very.., against the state. Do you understand?" "Oui," I said. My French comprehension had improved, and I liked the idea of running with a crowd of young bohemians. But I hadn't understood窶馬ot fully. Manet lives in three very small rooms. The door, heavy with three functional deadbolts and a handful of other, broken locks, opens onto the kitchen, where a metal, industrial-sized sink, the apartment's only sink, holds toothbrushes as well as dirty dishes. There are a handful of mismatched plates, two dishtowels, a hotplate and microwave for cooking, and a single, grimy half-size refrigerator covered on its sides with magnets and bumper stickers and on top with clamshells brimming with cigarette butts and ashes. Manet's toilet and bathtub are 窶｢ also in the kitchen, each encased by walls she has built from pilfered plywood tied together with string. You cannot take a shower without first undressing in the middle of the kitchen. When you sit on the toilet, you need to hold its casing closed from the inside. From the outside, the plywood is decorated with lively graffiti, which Manet Thad stumbled into living with Manet for three commissioned from a friend. Manet found this .1 days. When I told her mother, Sylvie Laurent, apartment vacant through a tip; she has a net

anielle Manet is squatting an apartment in Paris' 13th arrondissement, which is to say, she does not pay rent. The 400- or 450-euro sum the government gives her monthly for being unemployed does not support her lifestyle, she explained to me, so she steals as well. Bulky things, like dog food and toilet paper, she needs to buy, but smaller items, like cheese, she slips into a big bag. She is seldom caught, but when she is, she benefits from being young, female, white, and French. "I don't like how that works," she said last July, from the other chair of her kitchen, "but I... profit from it anyway." Her use of profit rang French, but her accented English was otherwise precise, occasionally colloquial. ("Fucking pigs," she said, when we passed a police station.) "So," she continued, "You are vegetarian? Do you eat fish?" I do. "Good. Then we will have fish tonight." I told her that sounded good and we sipped yin aux peches, listening to the ice clinking in our glasses and the American rap music she'd turned on. The hot afternoon seeped in through the kitchen window, past potted basil and tomatoes, pushing against walls busy with skulls-and-crossbones, postcards, placards that read L'Anti-France and Assassinonsles, maps, graffiti, a gas mask. "So," I ventured, after some seconds, "are we going to steal the fish?" We were.

work of similarly ensconced friends. She met my train that day, taking the cool, heavy bag of her mother's cheese and wine that I handed over. I had expected her to kiss me upon introduction, but she held back, and I took my cue from her. In the end, we just stood for a moment, taking each other in. Manet had a wiry frame topped by a bleached blonde ponytail, a nose ring, a face clear of make-up with more wrinkles and yellower teeth than I had expected in a 27-year-old woman, a tattoo of a hand grenade on her left bicep, and black fingernails: she had come from working on her car. I followed her out the doors to a nearby bus stop, struggling with my bags. "Do you want to buy a ticket?" she asked. I asked if I had a choice. "You could just get on," she shrugged, in the deadpan I was soon to recognize as characteristic. For a moment, I hesitated. I decided that since Manet was my host, as long as I stayed her guest, I would follow her rules. I went along for the rideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one that took me from the warren of a metro running below Paris to a hill overlooking the rest of the city, bringing me into contact with Manet's friends and fellow squatters, including Anne Chambers, a British woman studying history at a French university whose name she asked me not to disclose. Much later, Chambers would tell me that squatting "comes from a very human belief: why should people be on the street when there are places to live?" She would make clear that I was in over my head and demand that I change names in writing. Recognizing the precariousness of my subjects' lives, I have. When I first met Chambers, however, at Manet's squat on my first day in Paris, she told me none of this. We made small talk, and I was struck only by how soothing I found her native English.

hen I visited her, Manet had lived in her squat five years, largely uninterrupted because the apartment's missing bathroom made it impossible to rent. Others are not so lucky. On July 31, video leaked online showing police roughly removing squatters, most of them undocumented African immigrants, from a makeshift camp in northeast Paris. On October 23, police again expelled 32 squatters from a mansion near Place des Vosges that had stood empty since 1965. This second group comprised a demographic very different from the immigrants'; as the story goes, months before the police intervened, when the old proprietress of the mansion banged on its door to find it opened by a group of intellectuals and artists who'd banned smoking in the rooms with antique art, she calmed down and sat with them to drink tea. The squatters at Place des Vosges were believed to be members of a group called Jeudi Noir, Black Thursday, one of several loose associations formed to protest the problem of housing in Parisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;often, though always unofficially, with squatting as statement. "We have many, many ideas," says Jean-Luc Alpigiano, a Parisian affiliated with Jeudi Noir. "We have many, many actions," all intended, he says, "to make people think about the stupidity." As their Web site explains, they make it their mission to remind politicians of a duty to aid people in need of housing. A nous de leur rappeler, reads the site, "It falls to us to remind them." Under one header, Qui Nous Sommes, "Who We Are," an illustrated man puts a hand out his window to catch raindrops joyously, as though he feared he'd be thirsty forever. "For young people in search of housing," the page reads in French, "Thursday is a black day: the day of looking through classifieds. Housing is increasingly expensive... It's also the day when one envisions alternative solutions: renting jointly,

subletting, living with family, squatting, returning to one's parents' house." Like the Parisian revolutionaries of two centuries ago, the members of Jeudi Noir fight for certain principles—liberte, egalite, fraternite—as they take a stand against each Thursday's housing crisis. When I reach Alpigiano over Skype, he is sitting in front of a metal bookcase stacked messily with slim books and papers. Though he calls himself one of Jeudi Noir's 50 or so core members, Alpigiano does not himself live in a squat. He pans the camera up so I can see his books. "I wrote some articles," he says, "so if you want to know more about me, you can look at my name on Google, and you will see a few things." In fact, Alpigiano holds Master's degrees in engineering and film as well as a certificate in theater. He used to manage a theater."Which one?" I ask. "It's not known," he answers. "It's a very small one." He will insist: "It's not important where I come from and so on. I have nothing to say about that." "Do you live with a family?" I ask. "No,I'm a poor guy with no family, no mother, no father." "You're kidding." "Yes, yes. I think it's that—it's more interesting to speak about where we want to go, than where we come from." The consummate revolutionary, Alpigiano avoids his own story, preferring conversation that shifts between gentle humor and thoughts of Paris's problems housing its poor. "The mission—for me, it's a little bit religious," he says of Jeudi Noir, whose actions include clownish stunts documented on YouTube and champagne parties in empty apartments listed at prices the group finds exorbitant. "We try to make people laugh, and after, they come,and we say, look, we are funny, but let me explain the problem." As he explains, I listen. According to Alpigiano, ten

percent of buildings in Paris are unoccupied, and housing prices have doubled or tripled in recent years. Students can't afford to live in the city where they study. "You have people sleeping in the street, and just in front of a building which is empty," Alpigiano points out. "You understand the problem?" Squatters in Paris have historically created whole communities of gritty beauty; historians suggest that the Court of Miracles, immortalized by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was originally a squatter settlement. I know only Disney's film version of the book,and I can conjure fortune-tellers, twinkling coins, beautiful women. Like the squatters at Vosges, the Court of Miracles was disbanded by government siege. This was the world that seemed to open to me when Manet and I arrived at her squat, greeted by her two huge, friendly dogs, named Sativa, after the Latin for the marijuana plant, and Carnage, which means the same in French as English.

ate in the afternoon of my first day with Manet, I found myself in the backseat of a car without air conditioning or door handles, sweltering in the traffic of the Periphgrique, the circular highway surrounding Paris. A friend of Manet was giving us a ride to Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the tourist attraction; Manet, in exchange, had shimmied under his car to check it out, emerging dusty and holding a small piece of pipe. There was a casual reciprocity to all her friendships. At the cemetery, she called another friend, Robert Lefebvre, who was squatting nearby and knew the plot well. He took us efficiently to each famous grave: Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Moliere—all for my benefit. When I asked Manet to take my picture kissing Oscar Wilde's grave, she complied, smiling.

I wanted something to show my friends back home. After, to thank Lefebvre, she bought us beers at a nearby café. We ate free peanuts at an outside table; they smoked and threw the shells under their feet. It felt good to sit and let the sweat steam off our bodies. Lefebvre mentioned he was planning to move to Romania, where the price ofliving was cheaper, while continuing to collect unemployment in France. Later, they took me to a nearby park with a view of Paris spread out below us, tiny—this was the first time I had seen the Eiffel Tower. We parted ways to prepare for dinner, Lefebvre to his squat, Manet and I to an expensive organics store where I watched her slip the meal's ingredients, including a bottle of white wine, into her bag and leave without paying. We walked to a subway stop, where she gave me her subway pass—paid for by the government, since she is unemployed—and told me that if anyone asked questions, I should pretend I couldn't speak. I laughed and said in French, "I don't speak French," accentuating my bad American accent. No, no, she corrected. I should pretend to be deaf and mute. As Manet cooked the fish, her friends arrived—her boyfriend, another Parisian; Chambers again; Lefebvre. "I want your shoes," Chambers told me, pointing at my sandals. I thanked her and she said,"No, you don't understand. I want them." If I ever got tired of them, she wanted me to pack them up and mail them to her. "I get a lot of my clothes that way," she said, telling me she had found her brightly colored sweatshirt on the street. After dinner, as we walked Manet's dogs around her neighborhood, I asked Chambers what she planned to do with her history degree and she said she didn't know. She was almost 30, she said—she felt it was too late to begin a career. A window had

closed, leaving her out. That night, however, it didn't seem to matter. We walked with Lefebvre to a corner store, where he bought a beer, and then stood around a bench, taking in the night. It felt even hotter than that afternoon, and the red-and-yellow LED display of a sign above the road switched between government warnings for Paris's citizens to drink water and to stay indoors—but we were just fine drinking and splashing ourselves with water from a nearby fountain. It felt fresh and clean, the drops catching the light of the streetlamps above.

he next day, Manet was busy working on her car, so I met Allie Bauer, a friend from college who was studying abroad, at one of Paris's department stores. There, they were celebrating the beginning of France's annual soldes, government-mandated sales. The central gallery had a domed ceiling roofed with stained glass like a cathedral's. Bauer and I chatted as we wound our way through racks of soft fabrics, vibrant colors, and smooth wooden hangers. We tried on silk dresses and lace tights, imagining where we'd wear them once the school year started. After my time on Manet's mother's farm, I enjoyed how strange they felt against my skin. As Bauer told me about her coursework, I sampled perfume liberally. We were on an escalator when I told her where I was staying. As the words came out, I felt a little silly for my fascination with what had been, really, mostly shoplifting. "It's an interesting experience," I finished weakly. Bauer agreed nicely, told me not to do anything illegal, and reminded me that I was welcome to .stay with her. I thanked her and said no, searching for a reason. "I mean, I left my computer there today," I tried, realizing, for the first time, the leap

4:"

•

of trust I'd made."I feel pretty safe there." When I returned to Manet's that night, instead of showing her my purchase, I wedged the white-and-grey stockings, decorated with bows, into a corner of my suitcase. A good guest, I did the washing-up after dinner, and as I put away Manet's chipped, mismatched kitchenware, I marveled at someone from a reasonably comfortable background choosing to live this way. "The problem in France," Alpigiano says, "is that the city hall, she is afraid of people who will stay" in abandoned places—perhaps because they depend on a certain anarchic resourcefulness. Chambers told me she shared one squat with an undocumented immigrant woman with two children and a man addicted to pharmaceuticals whose irrepressible behavior "was really making our life a total hell." Because Manet and Chambers are unemployed and believe Paris's social housing program to be corrupt, they consider themselves squatters by necessity. Chambers told me they look down on members of Jeudi Noir and other "rich kid students" who often come from moneyed parents, backed by lawyers—like the founders of a collective of artists at 59 Rue de Rivoli, Paris. For these types, squatting is a political statement or an expression of creativity. The group at 59 Rivoli maintains a Web site with sidebars listing artists-in-residence as well as artists permanently installed there, naming its occupants Electrons Libres, "Free Electrons." In physics, a free electron is one unattached to an atom and therefore free to move whenever an electric field acts in its vicinity—whenever it's so galvanized. Although 59 Rivoli is no longer a squat, its inhabitants still proudly term their home an "aftersquat," and their site's "History" page describes life there before its denizens gained legal ownership, listing in bold three goals of the squatters who founded the group

in 1999: "to reanimate an uncultivated place," "to permit artists to create, accommodate themselves, and exhibit," and "to demonstrate the good foundations of an alternative political culture." "From my perspective, it's a scene," says Simon Chaffetz, a classmate of mine who comes from Paris—just next door, in fact, to 59 Rivoli, whose bright signs emblazoned with radical slogans he calls an "eyesore" in his historic neighborhood. At home,friends of his might say,"Oh, we went to a party in a squat the other night." "Is that cool?" I ask. "Oh yes. It's definitely cool."

till, after three days at the squat, I packed my things, having planned to eventually stay with the aunt of another friend from college. She lived in a posh suburb of Paris, like the ones that frequently choose to pay a fine rather than set aside the percentage of their area required by law to be used for subsidized housing. When Bauer met us for champagne kirs, she brought a sleek black box of macarons, the perfect gift to welcome friends to Paris. Back home, as the summer ended and the semester began, my memories of Manet grew distant. I heard from her mother that Manet had spent some time at the farm in the fall, relaxing and taking care of the animals. I heard from Chambers that Manet was planning to travel to Tunisia with her boyfriend and I asked what they planned to do there. Nothing much, answered Chambers. Then, she added something far more worrisome: the owner of Manet's building had plans to sell it. Besides these anecdotes from people close to her, I had a single photograph of Manet, which I'd taken surreptitiously when we visited Pere-Lachaise. It showed her from behind, the sun shining off her bleached hair and

About a month before, she and II others had the gravestones up ahead. that house. Like many of Paris' What remained most mysterious about Manet tried to squat buildings, it belonged to the govwas what drove her to live as she did—though I unoccupied security guards came to check evnever worked up the nerve to ask why she didn't ernment, so two. When they did, Manet and the just get a job. I did hear from her, in the end, ery day or until one day they'd chosen, when in e-mails that answered briefly some questions others hid, a barricade. They had signs: I'd posed. She related that she had no plans of they put up looking for work and described what she was doNO EVICTION ing these days: "I haven't any typical day, someNO EXPULSION time I sleep during all the day, sometime I watch WE JUST WANT A ROOF films, sometime I fix car, sometime I see friends, I cook, I make 'shopping,' I wait for my turn in It took the police half an hour to break that a fucking administration office, I do odd jobs..." said proudly. Resisting evicWhen I asked Manet about her plans, goals, and barricade, Manet ers fled to the attic, where the dreams for the future, she responded that she tion, the squatt ed them, pounding on the door. never planned more than one hour ahead— police follow grabbed one squatter, a friend of which I couldn't quite grasp, as I juggled final The police Manet, as the others began to break through the exams, though I'd still like to. It was raining and the roof In this way, Manet had always puzzled me. I attic onto the roof. they clung there, shouting to a remember thinking that my last night with her was slippery but or."Go on," they said. "Film it, was my chance to satisfy my curiosity. We were watching neighb to kill us." A crowd formed in the walking again, alone this time, except for Sativa they are going and Carnage trailing behind. The more ques- street below. Of course, when the police got them down— tions I asked, however, the clearer it became of firemen and ladders—they that Manet thinks little about the ideals held by with the help and her friends. Instead, people like Alpigiano and the "Free Electrons." didn't kill Manet at the police station for about All she wants is to exist, uninterrupted by evic- they held them released them. Later, the police tion. I asked whether she would live in a squat 24 hours, then house to make it inhospitable, forever and she said she'd rather not; her apart- returned to the interior walls and breaking the ment is small. I asked what she would do if she knocking down d this damage on the squatwere found out tomorrow and she said she'd find roof. They blame ters, Manet said. a new place to squat. I asked Manet if she or her friends ever reWhen it came to the practicalities of finding house. After all, it had seemed a vacant place, Manet was more vocal. There turned to that for. "No," she said flatly, and we are strategies: some qualities of place depend on worth fighting question. people living there. Put a piece of paper in the walked on. Stupid gate to a house, she said, and come back days later to see if it's fallen. Look at the garden. Has someone been keeping it up? As we neared her building, we passed one house, and for the first time, she launched into a story.

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INTERVIEW WITH CARL PHILLIPS conducted by andrew saviano and robert barton

You were in your early thirties when In the Blood, your first book of poems, was published. At what age did you start writing poeins, and what were the precursors of In the Blood? Were there writing teachers who made a particular difference in your early poetic progression? I had written in college, and was on the editorial staff of the Harvard Advocate, but I don't think I was really writing my own poems—more like watery versions of Plath, maybe...1 began writing my own poems somewhere around 1985, when I was 26. No real precursors,in terms of teachers. I was a teacher myself, and working on poems on the side, with no instruction, no background in contemporary poetry. Around 1985,I found a copy ofW. C.Williams's Selected Poems, which made me realize a poem could be written about something very simple—eating plums,for example...By the time I had a teacher—Alan Dugan,the first poet who ever looked at my work in a workshop—I was told to put my poems together into a book. That encouragement was surprising, and invaluable. You've taught Latin, and some of your poems owe a debt to the Classical tradition. What is the relationship between your background in the Classics and your own verse, with its syntactical complexity and sustained (almost "epic") similes? To what extent are your poems lyrics, and is that a helpful category of genre? Are there particular Classical authors to whom you look for inspiration? The main relationship with the Classics is that it was through that literature that I stumbled upon the themes I've ended up embracing in my own work. In the Greek tragedies, there's always a conflict between private feeling/identity and social expectation—and I'd say that's how I started writing,looking at the conflict between how we choose to behave — sexually, in particular, but not exclusively—and how we are told we should behave...As for syntax, I suppose there must be some effect from having studied inflected languages like Latin and Greek, but I think it goes back earlier, to when I lived in Germany as a child, and learned German—yet another inflected language...And as for Classical authors,I don't go back to them very much anymore,to be honest. When I did, though, it wasn't for their use of language, but again for the subject matter—the tragedians, as I mentioned, but also Thucydides and Tacitus, who are experts at understanding human nature. If I had to point to literary influences, it would more likely be Proust, Henry James, George Eliot—for the sentences, and for the penetrating observations of what it means to be human. Oh,you asked about lyric...! guess I think all of my poems are lyric poems,in that they are torsos captured in isolation from the larger body of argument. But I also think they're often meditative poems, which I hope can go hand in hand with lyric. "Let a silence be configured around what hurts most; around that, a style pitched subtly between distraction and an indifference, cool, ambitious, by which the events of story rise steadily, now history, soon a legend" This selection is from "Torn Sash" in Riding Westward. Many of your poems seem to gesture at a negative impulse, as if using language to describe an elision. Is the problem inherent to language? Is poetry a way of processing a traumatic event, on either an individual or societal level? How do the forces of history, which in your work seems at once to symbolize precise, local emotions and to universalize individual experience, play into these questions? Hmm,that's really three questions...Each of them a tough one...I'd say the problem, if it is one, is with the difficulty

of being a human being, or the complexity of it, and language can only go so far in containing, sustaining, enacting that complexity. Which I suppose does suggest a problem inherent in language, but I don't think it's language's fault that it's got limitations—every medium of expression does, because each of them is generated by human beings, as we try to grapple with something we aren't ourselves quite capable of expressing. Every poem, it seems to me,is a record of how something true to human experience was briefly pinned down, before it drifted elsewhere again...So in that regard, maybe a poem is a way of processing human events, though I don't know that they all have to be traumatic. The forces of history...Everything that happens to us is experience, and we are only capable of examining the world through the various lenses of our own experiences—both the private ones and the larger ones in the world, including those we may not have any personal experience of, except through reading about them—but to have read about an earthquake in Japan,for example, is to have included the knowledge of that event among the many bits of information in our heads, and that knowledge changes our experience, adds to it, and how we see the world afterward is different, in ways that we ourselves may be incapable of tracking. Your use of the hyphen is particularly idiosyncratic - sometimes it is a typographical gesture to extrapolate, sometimes a grave moment to pause, or to change direction. Do you have a particular effect in mind when using a hyphen in a poem? No,I have to say it's pretty much intuitive, a place where something stops for a moment, psychologically, maybe because the mind has balked at getting any closer to something and would rather change the subject, maybe because the mind is acknowledging its own limitations, I don't know. I'm not that conscious of it. How does faith play in your work? Is God a muse? A burden? A shepherd or source of constant questioning? I'm not especially interested in faith, in the religious sense, except when it comes to the psychology of it, what it might mean,to give oneself over to something that can't be proven to exist. And I am interested in how this same dynamic plays itself out in the sexual arena, or any arena of heightened risk. As for God,I have never been involved with any religion, wasn't raised in any faith, I guess I pretty much think of myself as some sort of agnostic. I am intrigued by monastic ritual, and have read a lot of Merton - but what most intrigues me about his work has nothing to do with faith, but about solitude as something worth embracing, contrary to what the media tell us about social networking...Finally, about questioning, I would say it has nothing to do with God,shepherds, etc., but with the human quest to know the self- that's at least what my poems are questing for, I think. "I think the trick is one neither of joining or not joining, but of holding, as long as I can, to some space between, call it rest for the wary" This is from "Cotillion" in Cortege, an example of one of your poems dealing with themes of same-sex attraction and the gay community. Are there particular difficulties inherent to describing non-heteronormative relationships in poems? To what extent is it possible to reinscribe these relationships in terms of something like a "cotillion," that is, a traditionally heterosexual courtship rite? Do you feel political pressure when writing such poems, or poems like "Passing" which specifically address race? For me,there are no difficulties in describing gay relationships in poems, because I'm gay, so it doesn't strike me as anything unusual. The cotillion described in the poem is an actual cotillion, which I've never attended, but it was described to me by someone who had attended it himself—and I went on to imagine myself at such an event...If there are difficulties, it's on the part of the audience. I quickly learned that what I took for granted was in fact shocking to many straight readers—this may be less the case, now, in a time of same-sex marriage, gay characters on television, student GLBT groups on campuses, things which didn't exist when I was starting out... I don't feel political pressure when writing about sexuality, but maybe that's because I don't write with a consciousness of audience. I think there are political ramifications to the poems,though. Just to write openly as a gay man

can be a political gesture; and to write in favor of risk, given the reality of AIDS in the world, is political, I suppose. But again,I don't write from perspectives of sexuality, or of race,in a conscious way—I'm always a gay man,always a biracial man,but I'm also always a guy who walks his dogs,likes to cook, dislikes musicals—all of these things contribute to identity, and I have never felt the need to especially privilege any one of them in particular. "Released,she seems for a moment as if some part of me that, almost, I wouldn't mind understanding better, is that not love? She seems a part of me, and then she seems entirely like what she is: a white dog" This passage is from "White Dog" in The Rest of Love. Your poems often describe moments of disillusionment, when an imposed, symbolic reality falls away and leaves the speaker with a reality that is somehow more accurate. What brings about such a moment, which here occurs in the blank space of a stanza break? The verb "to seem,""for a moment,""almost," love's definition as a question—all point to some kind of hesitation or uncertainty. Is such uncertainty fruitful to poetry, or is it an effect of revision? I believe that uncertainty is one of the most resonant facts of what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being. We are deluded, as children, into thinking life is about certainty. The truth is that you can do everything 'right,' and still fail. Or you can make a plan, but something prevents it from being fully executed. We can't plan to fall in love,for example, we can't predict misfortunes, nor do misfortunes always come to the deserving, to the degree that anyone deserves misfortune. So,I tend not to trust a poem that presents life as a series of certainties, because I don't find that's true of life. I have planned a dinner for tonight, but it's not a certainty that I will live to eat it—that's not negative thinking,for me,I would say it's realistic thinking...1 do believe, though, that there are other things in life besides disillusionment. But the moments of disillusionment are the ones that attract me, when I write, because those are the irresolvable ones. I think of a poem as a wrestling with what I can't understand. I tend not to need to wrestle with joy. How often do you write a new poem? What provides the initial impulse—a phrase, an emotion? How does teaching regularly affect your writing? I write maybe once or twice a month—it's a good month if I have produced one poem that I think is worth keeping. The impulse usually comes from a combination of some kind of life experience (which could just be having read about something, having met someone,having overheard bits of a conversation), and then the emergence, out of nowhere, it seems,of some phrase or handful of words in my head—this often happens when I'm doing something very routine, like walking the dogs, or cooking —and I write the words down,and wait for the time when I feel, if I sit. down,I'll be able to generate something from all of it. Teaching exposes me to new voices all the time, and my students challenge me to read widely—ifI am going to be expected to answer a question about Stevens,for example,I need to have read Stevens. And I use teaching as a way to force myself to read things I otherwise wouldn't. I did this sometime ago with Augustine's Confessions, which I had long meant to read. I knew I'd really read it closely, if I had to teach it. And after reading Augustine,I found what I had learned from him filtering into some of the poems in Speak Low... "he starts up singing again, same as every night, same song: loneliness by starlight, miles to go, lay me down by

the cool, etc. - that kind of song,the kind you'll have heard before, sure, somewhere, but where was that, the singer turning this as if watching the song itself and that way, —the words to the song —leave him" Here, in "Riding Westward," you give a vision of the fate of "songs": essentially unoriginal, forgotten by hearers except as vague memories, and lost to the singer. If these things are true also of poetry, where does a poem's redemptive power lie? I guess I don't think of poetry as being forgotten by hearers—readers,in this case. And it's only lost to the singer insofar as the singer must eventually die. But a poem is a record of a particular sensibility having at one time existed, and it turns out that, since that sensibility is a human one, it has the ability to resonate with other human beings than the particular author. At least that's how I feel about poems that continue to mean something to me. I don't think Dickinson set out to write for all humanity, she was just writing her poems, that issued from her own sensibility and experiences. But her particular way of seeing something like mortality, for example, changes and contributes to my understanding of that same subject. And it makes me realize I'm not alone in needing to grapple with issues like that —I may embrace solitude, but nobody wants to feel bereft. That's the redemptive power of poetry. This year you will begin to judge the Yale Younger Poets Competition. The competitions' many judges have envisioned the role very differently. In recent years, Louise Gli.ick has been known for taking an active role in the revision of submitted manuscripts. How do you envision the role? How closely do you expect to work with contenders for the prize? What poets writing today do you admire? I am in the midst of thinking about this very issue, having recently made my first selection. My approach was to ask the winner, Eduardo Corral, to what extent, if any, he would like any feedback on my part. I very much believe that the manuscript should be the one that the poet stands behind as his or her own,and I also like to think that a winning manuscript shouldn't require a lot of work, if it's good enough to win. Having said that, first books can especially have wonderful poems in them, but the poet may not have taken full advantage of the possibilities for arrangement. In Eduardo's case, he said he'd welcome any and all comments,and that he had had some doubts about some of the ordering of the poems. I then sent him a few pages of what I call responses—which are often just questions: what makes poem X essential to this manuscript,for example. That's not a way of saying it is or isn't essential, but of challenging the poet to consider the question. My idea is that these questions can perhaps help the poet to think about the manuscript him or herself. I don't want to be intrusive, but instructive, as I explained it to Eduardo. I've just heard back from him, and we are planning to speak by phone this week about the feedback I gave him. We'll see where it goes. But I think how I work with the various winners is going to change from poet to poet, depending on the manuscript, and depending on the poet's personality. That's my guess. I admire any poet who challenges my notion of what a poem can be—who expands that notion. Frank Bidart, Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky,Jorie Graham, Michael Palmer, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass. Among younger writers, people like Saskia Hamilton, Brian Teare, Emily Wilson...I'm still trying to catch up on younger writers, there are so many of them, which is exciting to see. And of course, thanks to the Yale judging, I get to add to their number each year.

vim

This book was designed using two typefaces.The body text (and text here) is set in Plantin, a traditional serif typeface with uniquely thick letterforms. The titles and headings are set in Knockout, a typeface which its designers at Hoefler & Frere-Jones call the ultimate American sans serif. The designer would like to thank Izzy Chafkin for her fine sense of lighting, composition, and humor.

The editors-in-chief would like to thank J.D. McClatchy and Emily Barton for judging the Frances Bergen prize; Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and Isabelle Chaffin for their sensibilities; and of course, the beautiful LIT board and their mothers and fathers.

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE.# 7-19853-4 VOLUME XXIII, ISSUE I