The New Yorker & Me: Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Joseph's "A Fable"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Joseph's "A Fable"

Lawrence Joseph’s "A Fable" is one of my favorite New Yorker poems of the last decade. I remember reading it when it originally appeared in the January 25, 2016 issue. Like a great jazz solo heard for the first time – Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love,” say, or Gerry Mulligan’s “Lonely Town” – it blew me away. It’s like a gorgeous double helix – a strand of city beauty (“a bench in the shadows / on a pier in the Hudson”) wrapped around a strand of abstract dystopia (“the flow of data / since the attacks has surged”). And the colors – “great bronze doors of Trinity Church,” “a red / tugboat pushes a red-and-gold barge / into the narrows” – are exquisite, right down to that final inspired, delightful touch (“Gauguin / puts a final green on the canvas // of the Self-Portrait with Yellow / Christ, to complicate the idea”), so surprising that it makes me smile every time I read it.

Interestingly, the “A Fable” included in Joseph’s 2017 collection So Where Are We? (2017) subtly differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. For example, the comma after “now” in the lovely “The café / on Cornelia Street, the music, / now, whose voice might that be?” is deleted from the later version, slightly changing its rhythm and meaning. In fact, a total of seven commas are deleted from the second version. I like it slightly better without all the commas.

Another notable change is the dropping of “the” from “The future, the past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?” The line now reads, “Future, past, cosmogonies, // the void, are in whose vision?”

I find such changes fascinating – a glimpse into Joseph’s compositional process. To my eye (and ear), the rhythm of the So Where Are We? version is a shade more free-flowing. Both versions are brilliant!