First Lines
Also: "Black Sabbath—The Ballet," a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s "The Betrothed," life as a chef in Antarctica, and more.
In The New York Times, Elisa Gabbert writes about first lines in poetry, and I have to agree with her that there is something about first lines—how, as she writes, they “come out of nowhere”: “There’s a shock to this unveiling. All the emails I get begin with some variation on ‘I hope this finds you well,’ but a poem can begin in any kind of way. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.’ ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness.’ There’s a Wallace Stevens poem that starts ‘Hi!’”
The first lines of a poem seem to contain all the “energy” of the whole: “I often have the sense that the beginning holds all the information of the project. If I can start, I can finish; the next move will become clear, but only once I’ve made the first move. In this way the poem is a miniature determinist universe, but one (like ours) so chaotic as to be unpredictable, even to the writer.”
I don’t know if “information” is the right word, but I get what she means. What I love about first lines is the possibility they contain. A poem could go—can go—anywhere after a first line.
I have just received Dana Gioia’s latest collection of poetry—Meet Me at the Lighthouse—and he is a master of first lines or first sentences (which sometimes take more than one line). The words feel carefully chosen and offhand at the same time. They have a precise casualness, a serious informality, which is a touchstone of Gioia’s work. He never tries for what Frank O’Hara called (with respect to Charles Olson) “the important utterance.”
Take the opening phrase of “At the Crossroads,” for example, where Gioia writes: “Here are the crossroads where old women come / Under the quarter moon to cast their spells.” Or the opening lines of “Map of the Lost Empire”: “Live long enough, and you become a Victorian, / part of you always dressed in black.” Or “Psalm of the Heights”: “You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles / Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.”
It’s not a seeming profundity that makes a first line great. It is its concrete simplicity.
Speaking of first lines, Billy McMorris starts his latest column in Spectator World this way: “The wife is upstairs packing. I can vaguely recall hearing a child say, ‘she has a marker’ as the sliding door closed, but my cigarette is already lit.” You have to read on after that, of course, as Bill argues that having children is actually good for writers—and for writing: “Back in 2018 Michael Chabon recalled a conversation with a famous author who advised him that children are the enemy of the writer. Writing requires travel and time, and children hamper both, according to the author. Sound reasoning as far as it goes and while it did not convince Chabon — his Care.com bio would say, ‘four children, Pulitzer’ — it has caught on among the writers I’ve encountered in recent years. They all have freedom to travel and plenty of time. Which is why our childless literary set sounds so repetitive and monolithic these days . . . Having children has never interfered with my literary aspirations. I always hated travel and never did make good use of my time. But I have always needed money, and children are a great motivator.”
Also, here’s a great opening paragraph from Gustav Jönsson on Italo Calvino: “At a party in London recently, an Italian man asked me what I was working on. To my reply that I was writing a review of Italo Calvino’s nonfiction, he said the mere thought of reading Calvino gave him an erection. ‘That’s very Italian,’ I thought. Italy loves its authors. Two years ago, when a German newspaper printed a column criticizing Dante, the outcry among Italians reached the Cabinet in Rome, with the minister of culture urging people to ignore the column. And when Calvino died in 1985, the whole country went into mourning. Gore Vidal recalled that the Italian president had visited Calvino to say his farewells and that ‘each day for two weeks, bulletins from the hospital at Siena were published.’”
Star conductor Gustavo Dudamel will leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic for New York in 2026: “Dudamel said in an interview that the decision to leave when his L.A. Phil contract expires was extremely complex and difficult. He has three seasons remaining as music and artistic director in L.A., he said, and his focus — and heart — will stay here. But by the end of his L.A. run, Dudamel said, he will be 45 years old and have been music director here for 17 years — the right time for a new challenge.”
Salman Rushdie’s gives his first interview since his nearly fatal stabbing: “Just before Christmas, on a cold and rainy morning, I arrived at the midtown office of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s literary agent, where we’d arranged to meet. After a while, I heard the door to the agency open. Rushdie, in an accent that bears traces of all his cities—Bombay, London, New York—was greeting agents and assistants, people he had not seen in many months. The sight of him making his way down the hall was startling: He has lost more than forty pounds since the stabbing. The right lens of his eyeglasses is blacked over. The attack left him blind in that eye, and he now usually reads with an iPad so that he can adjust the light and the size of the type. There is scar tissue on the right side of his face. He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.”
“Black Sabbath—The Ballet” to premiere in Birmingham in September: “It will feature eight Black Sabbath tracks plus new music inspired by them. Iommi told Radio 4’s Today he hopes the ‘rags to riches’ tale will attract ‘both our fans and ballet fans’.”
What is it like to be a chef in West Antarctica? “‘As people are outside in extremely cold temperatures and harsh conditions, I like to make something nice and heavy for the body, like fondue and raclette. Lots of it,’ says chef Thomas Duconseille, who mans this remote Antarctic post for several months each year. When there’s a group of cold scientists around 3,100 miles from the nearest city and at least 9,900 miles from home, it makes sense that hot cheese goes a long way. If only the rest of Duconseille’s culinary duties were this straightforward – cooking in these conditions comes with unique challenges.”
“In 2020, on Perry Street in Manhattan’s West Village, there lived a woman named Madeline Kripke, and her books. Kripke was 76, and she had been collecting dictionaries, and books about dictionaries, most of her life, almost since her parents gave her Webster’s Collegiate when she was 10.” She now has what may be the largest personal collection of dictionaries in the world.
Alberto Mingardi praises Michael F. Moore’s “epic translation” of Alessandro Manzoni’s huge novel The Betrothed: “Like many others in Italy, I first read Manzoni in high school. We read chapters serially, which then became the subjects of weekly tests. But approaching the novel, as we did, like a chemistry textbook invariably blinds the reader to its beauties. Umberto Eco used to say that the best way to make Italians appreciate I promessi sposi would be to make it illegal, so that people could rediscover reading it as a guilty pleasure. For some of us, reading The Betrothed now becomes the ultimate pleasure, many years after we suffered through it in high school. If a novel ought to be ‘the one bright book of life,’ Manzoni’s certainly is. Moore’s translation is lively and does justice to Manzoni’s language.”
Trieste in five languages: “For Chateaubriand, the port city Trieste was the shore where the last breath of Italy expired and ‘barbarism’ began. Stendhal mainly remembered ‘the abominable bora,’ the tumultuous winds that rush, typically in winter, from the Slovenian Karst over the Gulf of Trieste. Of all these (often French) chroniclers who made famous their ambivalence about the city, perhaps only Valery Larbaud glimpsed something of Trieste’s liminal enchantment. In his 1913 novel The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth, speaking through the alter ego of a wealthy South American on a grand tour, Larbaud immediately remarked upon the ‘Italianness’ of the city. This Italianness was notable given the frequently shifting borders that cut across the city’s long history; it had been under the voluntary protection of the Austrian Habsburgs since 1382—when it joined the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—and was later formally annexed to the Austrian Empire at the Congress of Vienna. ‘With pleasure I find myself in Trieste, capital of the Adriatic, as Italian as Venice, but more accessible to us, with something coarse, something new,’ Barnabooth observes. His comparison was provocative. Though the Triestine dialect is a Venetian one, distinguished by its lexical admixtures of German, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Greek, it was from the Republic of Venice that Trieste—several times ruinously occupied by its maritime neighbor—had long fought for its freedom. Barnabooth comments on the everywhereness of the place, ‘the commingling of the Italian names of the streets, the Slavic names of the signs, the German inscriptions on the front of monuments, and the Austrian uniform, which is of a piercing blue in this light, sums up the political situation.’ A formidable polyglot with a broad knowledge of European literature, Larbaud described Trieste’s consummate Europeanness just when the city’s peace was about to unravel, and with it the liberal democratic hopes of the long nineteenth century.”