Soon I will become an elephant.
My ears will grow and begin to droop.
They will turn grey and floppy.
A string of a tail will sprout
gently behind me. My arms and legs
will thicken and turn to fat stumps.
I will drop to all-fours against the earth
where I belong. I will pad the soft dust.
Little hairs will cover my rough rumpled body.
And, most miraculous, my nose
will lengthen beautifully, glistening
in the warm sun like a splendid python.
I will kiss the tops of trees, delicately
sniff at aromatic leaves, rest it
on a warm stone before I sleep
in quiet bassoon snoring. With it
I will lift great tree trunks
from the backs of wounded tigers.
I will blow soothing breezes
against the wilting mid-day flowers.
I will hold water in my trunk
and bring it to the city streets
and shower black-glistening children
better than a million fire hydrants.
My trunk will curl in laughter
snort in ecstasy as I bring it
fondling to the great grey breasts
of beautiful elephant women. O,
you elephant women standing in knee-high grass,
please wait for me, elephants, elephants, elephants,
because very soon now, I will become an elephant.
Suggested Reading
On Nate Lippens
By Eileen Myles“The spiky poetic homelessness of My Dead Book is in relation to a devotion to not fitting in, not anywhere ever.”
The Daily
On Books
The Art of Editing No. 4
By Lewis Lapham
Photo by Matthew Septimus, courtesy of Harper's Magazine.
It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. For the past half century, he has been getting pretty much equal esteem in a pair of distinct roles: editor and essayist. As an editor, he is hailed for his three-decade career at the helm of Harper’s, America’s second-oldest magazine, which he reinvigorated in 1983; and then, as an encore a decade ago, for Lapham’s Quarterly, a wholly new kind of periodical in his own intellectual image. As an essayist, he was called “without a doubt our greatest satirist” by Kurt Vonnegut.
By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books. He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America, a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark, trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.
Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s, a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.
Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.
I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.
—Jim Holt
From the Archive, Issue 229
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.
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