Ending Poetry Month with Updike

Today marks the end of National Poetry Month. Treat yourself by taking the time to listen to John Updike read one of his early poems, "Seagulls" (scroll down the page a bit for the audio button).

Seagulls

A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.

Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.

At that hour on the beach
when flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.
It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.

Michigan Poetry from Bill Hicok

The poetry night at Literary Life was a wonderful evening, not least because of Heather Sellers--writer, poet, and professor at Hope College--who served as judge for the poetry competition and also offered a reading of her own work. Sellers is not only a witty, observant writer, she's also an outstanding reader (those two things don't always happily reside in the same person). I thought this was demonstrated most powerfully by how well she could read the work of others. In particular, I'm deeply grateful that she introduced us to this wonderful poem by Bill Hicok (from the New Yorker)--and did so with a reading whose cadence and charm made the poem come to life.

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Rushdie's Storied Tract: The Enchantress of Florence

I was a Rushdie virgin before recently reading The Enchantress of Florence (though Midnight's Chldren remains very high on my to-read list). But the combination of Italy and India--a commerce between East and West--was too much to resist.

You'll have to forgive the cliched pun, but the book really is quite spell-binding. Central to the tale is the power of story, and the book is layered with stories upon stories, as well as some delightful miniatures packed into the story (such as the marvelous tale about the royal painter, Dashwanth). It is also concerned with competing stories and competing story-tellers who constitute the world by their stories (and thus constitute different worlds by different stories). Story-telling is world-making. Rushdie's exploration is concerned with both the power of mythologies but also the power of the artist--the story-telling power of the prophet as well as the world-making power of the novelist.

But he's also exploring the dangers of stories, their enchanting spell, their seductive ability to lure us into illusions. In fact, the book performs this very quickly: one feels swept into a dizzying array of narratives with charms that steal the ground from beneath us--and yet this narratival vertigo is so enchanting, we delight in our disorientation. And yet, this only works to the extent that Rushdie is an enchanter.

I wouldn't have expected that such a ruthless secularist could create such an enchanted, magical world. The prose is blazing without being precious, and as Christopher Hitchens has recently pointed out, Rushdie is a brilliant humorist.

My only gripe is that the book at times devolves to a propaganda-like tract--a move that is death for art. (In this respect it reminded me of a similar tract posing as a novel, Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy). Here we have a descendent of Ghengis Khan with the emerging irenic, democratic sensibilities of, well, Salman Rushdie. We have women from sixteenth-century Hindustan who imagine the world like Susan Sontag. In short, at times the novel is so concerned to be an apologia for a de-religionized, "secular" and liberal world that its anachronism becomes just a bit too much to swallow. Nonetheless, the power of Rushdie's story-telling opens up worlds that repay revisiting.

For Poetry Lovers in Grand Rapids

Literary Life, my favorite bookstore in Grand Rapids, is hosting a special event this Thursday, April 9, 7pm as part of National Poetry Month. It will include a reading by Heather Sellers, poet and professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, MI. Sellers also served as judge for the 1st Annual Literary Life Poetry Contest and the winners of the contest will be announced that night as well. (I had the audacity to submit two poems but have absolutely no illusions about winning a thing.) I am looking forward to hearing Sellers and, I hope, hearing the winning poems as well.

Then on Thursday, April 16, 7pm, Literary Life's Third Thursday event will once again feature Grand Rapids Poet Laureate, Rodney Torreson. Torreson gave a reading last month and was delightful. He is wonderfully unassuming, almost timid, but his poetry sparkles. It is quintessentially "midwest" poetry--accessible, earthy, homespun, sacralizing the mundane. He finished that reading with "Don Larsen's Perfect World Series Game," from his collection, The Ripening of Pinstripes--a fantastic cresendo packed full of allusions. He is also a wonderful encourager of young poets (and even had one of his students, a freshman in high school, read five of her poems). I'm looking forward to introducing my son, Coleson (a gifted and--I hope--aspiring writer), to Torreson.

If you're in the vicinity, I'll hope to see you there!

Updike: A Month of Sundays

While on a trip last week, I took along an old paperback edition of John Updike's mid-70s novel, A Month of Sundays. Penned in the first-person, the story recounts the misadventures of Rev. Tom Marshfield who writes the memoir as part of his rehabilitation while exiled in Arizona, banished from the ministry because of his adulterous habits. A grumpy Barthian (must be a Princeton grad! ;-) with no patience for the soppy humanism of Tillich and his ilk, Marshfield is nonetheless an unabashed, unashamed, and unrepentant worshiper in the temples of lonely, middle-class suburban women. Indeed, one must be struck by the difference between Marshfield and, say, Graham Greene's adulterers: the latter at least seem to think they ought to be penitent; Marshfield doesn't ever seem bothered by such notions.

The novel is a curious little time capsule, a peek into the swirling mores of the early 70s--though generally as viewed from a WASPish distance. It's also classic Updike: page-turning, unctuous prose laced with a strange eroticism that was probably more titillating than it ought to be. In fact, as I was reading it, I was concious of how the power of the story could so quickly create its own plausibility structures, a world in which Marshfield's behavior doesn't seem reprehensible. Perhaps Updike means to make us guilty by association, but I think more likely he means to create a world where there should be no guilt associated with such behavior. It the protagonist is a professing a Barthian, the ethos of a story is nothing other than "express-yourself" liberalism.

(And it should be noted that this is just the sort of novel that is rife with material to substantiate the claim that Updike is a misogynistic objectifier of women. While I know he always bristled at the charge, and though he'd likely offload the blame onto his first-person narrator, it's very hard to come away from the book and not share a sense of taint.)

Finally, it seems to me that Updike is never willing to not be "Updike." That is, Updike is never willing to relinquish the aestheticism that is his defining voice, even when he's writing in the first person of another. So the book--like any first-person work by Updike--is beset with a problem of voice and authenticity; in short, in Updike's hands, everybody sounds like Updike.

The Man Behind the Paris Review

As Donald Hall puts it, when a young poet is 16, he wants to be the next Dante; when he's 25, he wants to be published in the New Yorker.

Well, when a young novelist is 16, he wants to be the next Proust; when he's 25, he wants to publish a story in the Paris Review. A literary quarterly of mythical status (rivaled only by Granta, I think), the PR has introduced generations to new voices that would go on to become the voices of a generation. So I was delighted to find a sort of 'biography' of George Plimpton, one of the co-founders of the Review, on the "new arrivals" shelf of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

George, Being George, edited by Nelson Aldrich, is either a brilliant experiment in biography or a half-baked substitute. The subtitle gives some indication of the book's approach: "George Plimpton's life as told, admired, deplored, and envied by 200 friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances, rivals—and a few unappreciative observers." The book is a collection of vignettes from Plimpton's friends, associates, and even a few enemies--which, given his stature and charm as a "networker," pretty much amounts to a who's who in American letter and New York "Society." I have to admit, I had a hard time getting through the first chapter, but only because I have such visceral negative reactions to the lives of privileged East Coast Brahmins. And yet one can't help feeling that if you ran into Plimpton outside these contexts, you'd never guess he was heir to such privilege--that he was equally comfortable among the bohemians in post-war Paris and in the environs of the Vanderbilt mansion. Indeed, even if a few of his "detractors" are heard here, one comes away with the impression that Plimpton was just a helluva nice guy. But most interesting to me were the chapters that charted the emergence of the Paris Review in post-war Paris, after Plimpton had spent some time in Cambridge--on a shoe-string, regularly hanging of the precipice of collapse, torn between a Paris office and a New York center of gravity, but then growing into a stable, flagship quarterly.

At times the book's methodology felt like a punt--that this collection of reminiscences is really just the raw material that should have been the spine or skeleton of a proper biography. And yet the methodology completely sucked me in: you can read this stuff all day, and there is a certain rawness to these reflections which have an immediacy that feels almost oral. So perhaps rather than being a punt, the book hits a home run.

(Perhaps) The Saddest Poem I've Ever Read

Isn't it odd how the loss of an author all of a sudden makes his books come to life on my shelf? Over the past several days I've been dabbling and sampling from the Updike on my shelves, including a small collection of his early verse. But then today Gina Barreca's blog pointed me to an Updike poem I had never seen before, and it might just be the saddest thing I've ever read:

Dog’s Death

By John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

"Literary Life" in Grand Rapids

I know that I sometimes whine about how thoroughly midwestern Grand Rapids can sometimes be. Yesterday morning I was once again beset by self-pity, feeling exiled in a cultural backwater, when I discovered that neither Waltz with Bashir nor Revolutionary Road were playing in a single cinema in the Grand Rapids area. (You must read, by the way, James Wood's stunning piece of criticism on Yates in the recent New Yorker.) Having lived in Los Angeles for a few years, I got used to movies being "open in select theaters" just meaning, "open in the theater around the corner." Turns out--surprise, surprise--that Grand Rapids was not "selected."

But also as per usual, my wannabe-Manhattanite, cold snobbishness was gradually thawed through the day. While reading and working at Common Ground, I grinned to myself when I noticed a fellow patron reading Saul Bellow's Herzog. This was then capped with a wonderful evening at one of my new favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the "Literary Life" Bookstore at the corner of Wealthy & Eastern, within walking distance from my house.

Deanna and I finally "discovered" Literary Life before Christmas. While it's been on our radar, I'm embarrassed to say I never made it inside until just last month. What a wonderful literary oasis! I immediately ended up in a back corner of the store that was loaded with books to sustain a writing life, then migrated into a rich poetry section, and only teased myself with the fiction shelves that looked so different from the chain store offerings. All of this clearly demonstrated a staff that knows what matters in the world of literature, poetry, and writing.

And last night was the beginning of a new Literary Life tradition: "Third Thursdays" will feature local artists and writers in a casual venue, enjoying coffee and LitLife's fabulous selection of teas. (The Harney & Sons "Paris" blend found tastebuds I didn't know I had before.) The opening act was the Kilpatricks, a wife/husband duo whose acoustic sound was somewhere between folk and a kind of "blues." (Great covers of Belinda Carlisle and Leonard Cohen/Jeff Buckley's "Broken Hallelujah." I'd love to hear Amber cover Rosie Thomas.) While listening, and afterwards, we could browse the shelves and I was once again impressed: somehow I got locked in the Ws (oh yeah, I was looking for Yates) and found a trove of David Foster Wallace and Evelyn Waugh. Hallelujah, indeed.

In short, Literary Life helps me to imagine how one might sustain a "literary life" right here in Grand Rapids.

Severance: The Problem with "Conceptual" Fiction

I take special delight in happenstance book acquisitions. For instance, this week I found myself on the campus of the University of Central Florida, in their bookshop--"book"-shop being a bit of a stretch, since the store was more like what one finds in so-called "Christian bookstores;" namely, an overwhelming amount of logo-emblazoned merchandise with a few books hidden in the corner. In any event, one doesn't come to the campus of the University of Central Florida expecting much in the way of intellectual stimulation. But passing some time, I did find a bargain bin and hit upon a wonderful little surprise: Robert Olen Butler's 2006 experiment, Severance--an irregular sized offering from Chronicle Books, in a squat edition with blackened and deckled pages (the materiality, I think, being integral to the book's experimentality).

The book could be described as a concept-driven collection of "stories" which feel more like stream-of-consciousness poems, a sort of prose haiku. And the concept that drives them is the product of a morbid mathematics. This is staged by two "epigraphs" which, it turns out, are essential to the performance of the book:

After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation. -Dr. Dassy D'Estaing, 1883

In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. -Dr. Emily Reasoner, A Sourcebook of Speech, 1975

Coupling these two "facts" or hypotheses, Olen undertakes his experiment: to narrate the last 240 words worth of consciousness of severed heads across history, from Mud, a man beheaded by a sabertooth tiger, 40,000BC to Tyler Alkins, a civilian truck driver beheaded by insurgents in Iraq, 2004. In between we hear the sentient last-moment ramblings of St. Valentine and Marie Antoinette and Nicole Brown, along with a host of "unknowns" variously decapitated by elevators, executioners, and jealous husbands, sons, and even daughters.

Like alot of movie trailers and Will Ferrell films, the idea is better than the execution. (One might even have reservations about the concept insofar as it feels like publishing the fruits of what could be an outstanding creative writing exercise, but not necessarily a book of stories.) Granted, some of the pieces are exquisite (such as the last thoughts of St. Valentine or Claude Messner, a homeless man decapitated by an Amtrak train in 2000). The stories jolt from very different contexts and take up different voices, and suffused through most is a kind of eroticism (perhaps growing from a Freudian assumption about links between sex and death). And Butler is a master of language: attention to rhythm and lexicon gives these "stories" their poetic feel.

But at the same time, the collection suffers on two counts:

First, from the very first story, I found myself perturbed by the matter of voice. (It's James Wood who taught me to ask these questions of a story.) For instance, right out of the gate there's prehistoric man, thinking his last thoughts in English, and with a pretty decent vocabulary at that. Throughout the collection, while Butler at times tries to get closer to the voice of his lolling heads, it always feels like--all of a sudden, having been severed from their bodies--all heads become poets.

Second, the stories actually shrink from the concept. In almost every case, with only a few exceptions, what we get is not the 90 seconds of consciousness after the guillotine drops, but more like the 87 seconds just before the slice, with a blip after words. And oddly, almost all of these last glimmers of consciousness turn out to offer replays of the life that has preceded them (think of Lester Burnham's final musing after the gunshot in American Beauty). But this feels like both a cliche and a cheat. One wonders whether the head in the bucket, instead of recalling glistening wheatfields in the Kansas sun, doesn't--oddly and tragically enough--worry about whether it left the stove on that morning.

Favorite Poet(s) of 2008

This year was one of discovery for me, finding poets that have long been familiar to others but hidden from my parochial, provincial vision. For instance: while Donald Hall had been on my radar, it wasn't until 2008 that I finally dove into his work. And according to my notes, I first discovered Charles Wright in the summer of 2007, but this year I enjoyed lingering with Negative Blue, with its alternate evocations of Italy and Virginia, Rorty and Dante.

But what's most remarkable for me is that, one year ago, I had never read a poem by Ted Hughes. That's what it means for me to "find" a poet: I don't know how I inhabited the world without him (or her). I simply can't imagine how my imagination looked before I read Anne Sexton; and I can't imagine how I perceived the world before Franz Wright.

And I don't know how I heard the world before reading Ted Hughes. His is the poetry of a Yorkshireman: earthy, wet, gutteral, alliterative, rolling and rocking. I can still remember being in our flat in York and being riveted by "The Hawk in the Rain":

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.

The very syllables are knee-deep in the muck of English winter while the word-hawk feels like it inhabits a vacuum, slipping streamlined as if the world were nothing, though threatened by that looming earth.

Or consider "The Thought-Fox" in which the poem sneaks up on both the poet and reader:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I'll also not forget finding a used copy of Hughes' New Selected Poems, 1957-1994 at Blackwell's in Oxford on Maundy Thursday, then reading it during a lonely Indian dinner before Maundy Thursday worship at St. Mary's.

I have much for which to be grateful in 2008; Ted Hughes is no small part of those graces enjoyed.

2008 Retrospective Reading List

Tis the season for literary retrospectives. Around this time of year, my retrospection is always tempered by a certain amount of guilt and a sense of failure (alas, the plight of a Calvinist who loves literature). As I pass by our bookshelves--in the living room, in the front hall, above my desk, behind my desk, in the bathroom--I'm always a bit overwhelmed: even in my own rather humble libraries, there are volumes and volumes of "classics" calling my name: from the Odyssey and Dante's Vita Nuova to yet more McCarthy, Updike and Julian Barnes. There's half a shelf of Wodehouse, a collection of Sir Walter Scott novels, and twentieth-century landmarks like Bellow's Adventures of Augie March and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. From across the pond, I'm still looking at James Joyce and piles of Evelyn Waugh, and the remaining volumes of Proust seem to turn up their nose in condescension when I walk past.

And here we are at the end of another year and my shelves are still weighed down with books I've yet to read. So I thought I'd do a little inventory; ranging across the shelves with my notebook, I recorded the books that I actually did manage to read (entire books, mind you; I'm the master of sampling, but that doesn't count). And it turns out that, though there are all those uncracked spines staring back at me, I did manage to wade into a decent number. (I've not done this before, so I don't have any comparative "sample.") Most importantly, there are books on the list that I've wanted to read for a long time and finally had the opportunity (our time in England was a change of rhythm that made this possible). Closer to the end of the year, after grades are submitted, I hope to comment on five or ten of my favorites from this past year (some I've already blogged about). Until then, in no particular order, here's my 2008 Retrospective Reading List:

• Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites
• Alice Munro, Runaway
• Gary Wills, Venice: The Lion City
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1
• Walter Pater, The Renaissance
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours)
• George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
• Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
• Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
• Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
• Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
• Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage
  
• Christine Meldrum, Madapple
• Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone
• Donald Hall, Unpacking Boxes
• Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
• Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses
• Gore Vidal, The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, ed. Jay Parini
• David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames
• James Wood, How Fiction Works
• Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

[When I'm looking for more excuses to avoid grading, I may comb through my periodicals, magazines and collections and come up with a list of short stories read this past year.]

Books, "Book Talk," Grand Rapids...and Wendell Berry

Reading The New Yorker is both pleasure and pain for me. The pleasure comes from the stimulating content, including excellent commentary, criticism, fiction and poetry. The pain comes from the fact that I actually work through "Goings On About Town" each week--the pages and pages of fine print summaries and highlights of all the concerts, plays, exhibits, and films on offer in New York City. Reading about the cultural riches of NYC from afar usually deepens a sense of cultural exile here in the so-called heartland, in podunk Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But on other days, I'm reminded that we have our own little intellectual province here in Grand Rapids. This past Saturday, for instance, I took a stroll to one of our local used book shops, Redux Books. There I bumped into one of the sales executives of one of our local publishing houses, and along with the proprietor, we enjoyed a lovely conversation about publishing, books, and theology. I then made my way down into some of the far recesses of the basement holdings and emerged with a book of poems by Marianne Moore, the third edition of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry, and a first edition of Donald Hall's Remembering Poets. That's a pretty delightful Saturday morning in any city.

Then this past Wednesday night was another wonderful "literary" experience. My friends Matt Bonzo and Michael Stevens, both professors at another local Christian university, have just published a wonderful new book, Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide (Brazos--another one of our local publishers). The book launch was Wednesday night, at one of my favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the Ryerson Auditorium in the Grand Rapids Public Library downtown. The reception was hosted by the Vanderveen Center for the Book and was an evening of interesting, provocative conversation--on top of the fact that Bonzo and Stevens have also written a great book (which I'm now reading).

When I daydream (and night dream) about being a "writer," New York looms in my imagination like Nashville does for the young country musician, or the way Los Angeles tempts the aspiring actress. And the desire to make the pilgrimmage can make "small town" Grand Rapids feel cramped and provincial. But on other days, like these, I'm grateful for this little corner of the midwest in which are buried our own little cultural treasures.

NYC, of course, would also come with its price (as do Nashville and Los Angeles!). Not a few writers (especially southern writers like Faulkner and Walker Percy) found distance from the Eastern seaboard to be a necessary space for their work. Perhaps instead of pining for Manhattan or, in turn, resenting it, we should be working on fostering a literary and cultural regionalism. The Podunks of middle America can be home to "small, good things," too.

Unpacking the Boxes: More Donald Hall

I recently noted the poetry of Donald Hall which has nourished me over the last few months. I think his verse has a cunning simplicity about it. In that earlier post I perhaps gave the mistaken impression that Hall was (just) a "nature" poet--the next Robert Frost or something like that. Such an impression would be misleading. While he hymns New Hampshire and Eagle Pond, he also pens verse about urinals and baseball. (He has suggested that "Love, Death, and New Hampshire" would be a good title for his collected poems.)

Given this immersion and appreciation, I couldn't resist reading his new memoir, Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry. The prose of poets is often both curt and intense. Hall's prose exhibits this in flashes, with passages that have the density of poetry, making you wonder whether the paragraphs began with line breaks and pauses. But other long sections are conversational. Hall lacks pretention, even though such would be warranted. This little volume tracks his childhood and his early love of poetry (both reading and writing), through his college years, time in Oxford and at Stanford, and then his longish tenure teaching at the University of Michigan. It then follows him to New Hampshire (though omitting the long illness and death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, which he's addressed elsewhere). Perhaps most poignant, even jarring, is the final chapter on "The Planet Antiquity"--the poet's honest chronicling of what it means to grow old, the body's cricks and creeks and general stubborness resisting desire. It is an account that gives pause to (relatively) young folks like me who continue to think of themselves as invincible.

As the subtitle promises, this memoir focuses on his life as a poet, with reminiscences of poet-friends (including life-long friendships with Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich) and experiences with some of the greats like Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves. (Just this past Saturday at Redux Books, our little treasure here in Eastown, I picked up a first edition of an earlier book of recollections by Hall, Remembering Poets.) Describing his experience as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, I could picture all his haunts and movements (he was a fellow at Christ Church) and was once again beset by nostalgia for England.

But Hall also recounts the work of poetry, the disciplines and regimens of a poet (every morning, for two hours--a Herculean feat), including the life-giving regimen of the 20-minute nap ("I have practiced the twenty-minute nap for half a century"). And the wrestlings of the poet with language, including the "spaces" of language--not just the words, but their arrangement and rhythm, the gaps and silences. Consider this reflection on a transitional phase, where he's grappling with form and meter and resisting the temptation to think of poems as "messages":

With my immersion in form, I found myself writing a kind of poem. It wasn't meter's fault; metrical poems can go anywhere and do anything. For me, these forms came to imply a reasonable poem. It sounds crazy now, but at that time I needed to understand what the poem was going to say before I began it. The better poems I wrote in my twenties--like "My Son My Executioner" and "The Sleeping Giant"--concealed a content I was not aware of. [...] As I was finishing the late poems of Exiles, something in me began to feel stifled, dumb, inarticulate. My grand language failed to express or reveal crucial areas of feeling. I flailed about, looking for other ways to make a noise. I had admired Marianne Moore's syllabics--keeping a syllable count, avoiding metrical feet. Holding on to the count of syllables as to a guardrail, I wrote a poem called "Je Suis Une Table." I thought it was a poem of wit exploiting a language error--tables can't talk--but it wasn't; it was an outcry, complaining of habitual limitation or inhibition. This poem began a journey. Eventually, I no longer demanded that my poems explain themselves before they got written; I learned to trust the impetus, to ride the wave. The wave was feeling, expressed largely in long vowels. I worked by accepting an image compelled by rhythm and sound--without requiring that it explain its purpose (pp. 120-121).

For thirteen years Hall taught English at the University of Michigan (he started when he was 28; finished in his early 4os). While he never saw this as his primary vocation, he did see it as a meaningful and passable way to fund what he really wanted to do, which was write. But one has the sense that, despite his ambivalence, Hall was a master teacher. As he rightly notes, the trick is to teach what you don't know. And to live for those glimpses where teaching and learning hit their stride.

Answering questions was the best part. Everyone who loves teaching has the same experience: Someone asks a question; it's something you never thought of, but the moment you hear the question, you know the answer. Ninety percent of what you say is something you didn't know until you said it.

(These are my favorite moments of teaching, too: when something emerges in the conversation, in wrestling together with texts and ideas. On the best days, in response to good questions, I can venture into new territory. Chalk flies, and sometimes, on a good day, we all learn something. I then stay in the classroom, after the students have filed out, and take down my own notes, recording what I've just figured out on the board for the first time.)

Mostly what shines through is a love of poetry and the poetic life (and Jane, and New Hampshire), with all its friendships and disappointments and anxities and depressions, with no small number of joys and delights. Here is poetic ambition: "the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker."

What I'm Listening To: Shakespeare's MacBeth

I had a long drive, by myself, to Chicago this past weekend, so I was excited to learn that Calvin's library recently acquired a complete set of fully-dramatized recordings of the works of Shakespeare. I took Macbeth along with me, cranked it up, and was pretty much spell-bound--disappointed that I got to Chicago so quickly. A great performance that is very creative in trying to translate the dynamic, multivalent medium of the theatre to the pared-down medium of audio. The score is subtle but haunting, and the dramatization is very good. Highly recommended.

Poetry, Language, and Propositions

Continuing on the poetry theme: in my upper-level seminar on Philosophy of Language & Interpretation, we've been talking about different "registers" of truth that map onto different uses of language. The sort of truth that is effected in poetry and literature is not reducible to the register of truth that is captured in propositions and syllogisms. Poetry does something different than an argument; but that doesn't mean it isn't "true." Only a kind of propositional imperialism would reduce truth to the mode of assertion.

In the course, we're going to work through these issues by reading Wittgenstein then diving into Nicole Krauss' novel, The History of Love. But this poem that I just read in the New Yorker also hints at these issues, in just the sort of way that can't be elucidated in propositional form:

THE WAY
by Albert Goldbarth

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.

The Poetry of Donald Hall

Having posted about poetry over at Fors Clavigera, I thought it might be appropriate to share some recent poetry reading.

By the way, did I ever share one of my treasured little "poetic" experiences from York? Well, one of the things that characterizes a robust "newspaper culture" in England is stiff competition; and one of the outworkings of that is an incessant stream of promotional hooks and gimmicks to attract buyers. For example, the Sunday papers will regularly feature DVDs of classic movies, or a series of small glossy booklets on gardening or cosmology, etc. While we were there, my favorite paper, The Guardian, ran a fabulous promotion: "Great Poets of the Twentieth Century." For seven days straight, the paper included a small booklet of poems by some of the greats: Frost, Sassoon, Plath, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot, Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. This was capped off with a CD of the poets doing select readings. Like a boy collecting box tops for a magic decoder ring, I saved up mastheads of the paper to then send away for a free storage box for the set. It now sits here in our living room as a wonderful reminder of our time in York--and a very nice anthology of some great poems.

Over the past couple months, though, I've been enjoying the poetry of former Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, as collected in White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems from 1946-2006. Hall is a laureate of nature, especially New England's nature. But he's not a romantic. In fact, one will sometimes find oneself jarred by his grittiness and honesty about relationships. But he can also just be a charmer, giving us lyric that simply elicits a smile--until you start thinking about it, and realize more's going on here. Take, for instance, a fairly recent poem, "Olives" (apparently you can listen to it here):

"Dead people don't like olives,"
I told my partners in eighth grade
dancing class, who never listened
as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two.

The dead people I often consulted
nodded their skulls in unison
while I flung my black velvet cape
over my shoulders and glowered
from deep-set, burning eyes,
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,
crazy for cheerleaders and poems.

At Hamden High football games, girls
in short pleated skirts
pranced and kicked, and I longed
for their memorable thighs.
They were friendly--poets were mascots--
but never listened when I told them
that dead people didn't like olives.

Instead the poet, wearing the cape,
continued to prowl in solitude
intoning inscrutable stanzas
as halfbacks and tackles
made out, Friday nights after football,
on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms
with magnanimous cheerleaders.

But, decades later, when the dead
have stopped blathering
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacements,
while a lascivious, doddering poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

(Revenge of the poets!)

But most moving in this collection are those poems written after the death of Hall's wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, particularly those collected in "Letters Without Addresses." The letters chronicle a year of mourning that cycles with the seasons as articulated in the rhythms of Jane's garden (an image particularly haunting for me, as I think of Deanna's gardens that adorn our house and life) and the snow that buries her grave.

[...]
Do you remember our first
January at Eagle Pond,
the coldest in a century?
It dropped to thirty-eight below--
with no furnace, no storm
windows or insulation.
We sat reading or writing
in our two big chairs, either
side of the Glenwood,
and made love on the floor
with the stove open and roaring.
You were twenty eight.
If someone had told us then
you would die in nineteen years,
would it have sounded
like almost enough time?
[...]

Gopnik on Mill in the New Yorker

Last year, since we were headed to England for five months, I had to let my magazine subscriptions lapse. Upon returning, I decided to change things up a bit: though I re-upped on Vanity Fair, instead of renewing Harper's (I now get hand-me-downs from a friend) I subscribed to the New Yorker and am loving it (even if it does tend to make Grand Rapids feel very "midwest"). Samplings of cultural happenings in NYC, deeper reflections on the headlines, film reviews from Anthony Lane, regular pieces by Adam Gopnik (who I've praised before)--and it's a weekly. What's not to love?

Take Gopnik's review of a John Stuart Mill biography in last week's issue. Noting that Mill's staggering genius and enduring contemporaneity make any biographer just a bit resentful, Gopnik remarks:

Every time we turn a corner, there is Mill, smiling just a touch too complacently at having got there first. Admiration for intelligence and truth easily turns into resentment at the person who has them; Aristides the Just was banished from Athens because people were fed up with hearing him called Aristides the Just. It is one of the many virtues of Reeves’s funny, humane biography that it brings Mill to life in the only way sententious great men can be brought to life, and that is by showing us what he was like when he lost his heart and when he lost his reason. Both happened to him just once, but that was sufficient. Mill’s is a story of a man out in the pure sun of reason and rational inquiry, lit at night by the romantic moonlight of a little bit of love and just enough madness.

The World according to David Sedaris

For the proverbial "something completely different," I just finished David Sedaris' latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames, the first Sedaris I've read. Having enjoyed some of his NPR spots, I knew I'd be in for a treat. Sedaris is not a "comedian," but rather a humorist--a quirky observer of nooks and crannies of American (and global) culture that are usually ignored by other "critics." After the first night I had to stop reading this in bed because the uproarious laughter it caused kept waking up the kids. But don't be fooled: these aren't just funny little Seinfeldish "observations" (though you have to love lines like his comment on living in Normandy: Normandy "is like West Virginia, but without the possums"). In fact, one might be surprised at how Sedaris can explore the morbid and macabre in the mode of the comedic: from a season spent in a coroner's autopsy room to the human skeleton hanging in their Paris bedroom. I think Sedaris might be best illuminated if we see him in the orbit of Southern Gothic.

While it's a nice breezy, "beach" sort of read, it also feels like a book that should be read again. I'm not sure I've quite got a handle on Sedaris' world, but I have the sense that it's not the pop nihilism of a Seinfeld, nor just the trivialized world of other comedians. Despite the drugs and homosexuality, I have this hunch that if one reads between the lines, there's something sort of "conservative" about Sedaris: that at the end of the day, what matters are significant relationships, including (and perhaps even primarily) family. There might be a sense in which all of Sedaris' weird, even disturbing, stories are implicit love stories. Maybe the distance between Flannery O'Connor and David Sedaris is not as far as one might think.

The Practice of Criticism: On James Wood's, "How Fiction Works"

I should say up front that James Wood is living my dream. A staff writer for the New Yorker, chief literary critic for The Guardian, professor of the practice of criticism at Harvard University, and a respected novelist to boot (and he's only five years older than I am!), Wood might be the closest thing we have to a successor to Edmund Wilson. So any criticisms that follow can probably be chalked up to little more than jealousy--the literary equivalent of suggesting that Wood has fat ankles.

How Fiction Works is a compact, even squat little hardcover, the very materiality of which seems bent on recalling an era and ethos of reading "before theory," as it were. Somehow the 4.5" x 7" format--coupled with wide margins, classic font, and running page heads that indicate the content of each page--manage to evoke the sorts of predecessors that Wood himself invokes: Ruskin's Elements of Drawing and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. The materiality of the book primes a certain approach, a certain horizon of expectation for the reader and seems to effect a first shift in readerly stance that Woods' criticism would encourage: attention to the craft.

If the title sounds like a dreary, mechanical textbook for Creative Writing classes the world over, in fact the book is as much for readers as writers. This is a work of criticism, not a Writers-Workshop-in-a-box. Nor is this a book which sets out to demystify the novel as if Wod were a member of the guild willing to share with us the secrets of the illusionist. While it is attentive to concrete realities of mechanics, How Fiction Works is not a disenchantment of the novel, disclosing to us the code or formula that makes fiction work. In fact, any reader will thank Wood for breaking open fiction in new ways in the opening chapter on narration alone. Like all good criticism, Wood names and articulates our intuitions and gut reactions. For instance, he names exactly the discomfort I have long felt about straight-up, confident, magisterial third person narration one finds in someone like Jane Austen (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter?). On this point he cites W.G. Sebald:

Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history.

Wood goes on to provide a breezy but profound analysis of different kinds of narration which almost turns into a reverie on free indirect style. In this context he provides a stinging critique of Updike's failures in this respect in his 2006 novel, Terrorist, where the narrator's language refuses to bend "toward its characters and their habits of speech." Of course, some novels are exercises and experiments bent on seeing the extent to which this is possible. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes to mind, but more recently, something like Kieron Smith, Boy in which James Kelman tries to be the ventriloquist of a boy from working class Glasgow. But such a project is always beset by a bit of a ruse. After all, how likely is it that a tough young Glaswegian is going to take the time to pen a 432 page memoir, even if it is in the dialect that Kelman seeks to reproduce?

Wood is out to explain how fiction works, not in order to provide a template for would-be writers to go enact a formula, but more for readers who appreciate good criticism as a portal into the further enchanting mysteries of fiction (as when we ask ourselves sometimes, "Now, just how does this paper-and-ink artifact manage to do this to me?"). While Wood tips his hat to Barthes, this is not a "theory-driven" account of literature. Indeed, there is something kind of "lunch box"--or rather, "tool box"--about it in its meat-and-potatoes attention to the basic elements of narration, detail, character, language, register, and dialogue (ending with a short theoretical riff on one of Wood's enduring interests: the question of realism).

The range of Woods' interlocutors is almost dizzying (from Homer to Cormac McCarthy), but a couple of heroes keep asserting themselves: Flaubert and Henry James, even thought both were prone to what Wood sees as the persistent temptation of the modern novel--an aestheticist wallowing in detail (see Updike). But Flaubert and James are simply the leading voices of a rich choir that Wood orchestrates, with parts for Cervantes and Defoe as well as Pynchon and Delillo.

It's on this point that I would register one criticism. In what is, without question, a landmark book that I have already profited from quite immeasurably, I do find Wood sometimes wears his learning a little heavily. To be more precise, there are times when he slides from being precocious to being just rather obnoxious. Take, for instance, an opening "Note on Footnotes and Dates" in which Wood feels it necessary to point out that "I have used only the books that I actually own--the books at hand in my study--to produce this little volume." Why tell us that? Perhaps to deflect critics who will decry books that have been ignored--though, in that case, the criticism would still hold, wouldn't it? For instance, one can imagine politically correct assistant professors of English lamenting the "Eurocentric" nature of Wood's book ("Where is the Indonesian, post-colonial fiction?!") and thus Wood trying to head them off at the pass by saying, "Look, I was just working with what I had to hand." But then the criticism would be: "Not only is this 'little book' Eurocentrist and still-colonial, but James Wood is! He doesn't have any Indonesian, post-colonial fiction in his personal library!"

Instead, what is intended as a mark of humble constraints (in producing "this little volume") comes off as backhanded pomposity. This is augmented by the function of several of the scant footnotes in the text which seem like little more than Wood showing off. These includes little asides which catalogue instances of self-plagiarism in Tolstoy, Dickens, James and McCarthy (p. 65); or the convention of allegorical names in Tolstoy, Thackeray, Wordsworth, and Evelyn Waugh (p. 115); or the cast of minor characters with writers' names in Proust, Bernanos, Updike, Jones, Tolstoy (again!), and others (p. 162). Methinks Wood doth indulge a bit. (Read: fat ankles!)

Finally, let me take up one particular piece of criticism in which Wood, contrary to his otherwise exemplary practice, seems to miss the point precisely because he fails to appreciate a theological point in literature. (In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood has shown his superiority to a critic like Christopher Hitchens precisely in his ability to appreciate theological nuance.) The context is his marvelous discussion of free indirect style. Not surprisingly, he holds up Henry James' What Maisie Knew as a model. Though told from the third person, Wood notes how James' manages to make the narrative bend to the voice and world of young Maisie Farange, who is bounced between her divorced parents and attaches herself to one of her governesses, Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix had a daughter, Clara Matilda, who died tragically just when she was about Maisie's age, and Maisie often accompanies Mrs. Wix to Clara's grave in the cemetary at Kensal Green. Wood wants us to focus on James' ability to write from the third person in a way that invites us to inhabit young Maisie's confusion, torn between her mother (who speaks poorly of the lowly Mrs. Wix) and the governess, but also confused by the absence of Clara Matilda. He hones in on this passage:

Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrasingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave.

Wood suggests that "James's genius gathers in one word: 'embarrasingly.'" Whose word is "embarrasingly," he asks? "It is Maisie's: it is embarrassing for a child to witness adult grief, and we know that Mrs. Wix has taken to referring to Clara Matilda as Maisie's 'little dead sister.'" Wood is exactly right that "embarrasingly" is Maisie's language, and thus rightly notes James' ability to bend the narrative--even in the third person--to Maisie's world so that we hear Maisie and not (just) James. But Wood seems to completely misinterpret just what is "embarrassing" for Maisie. It is not witnessing Mrs. Wix's grief. It is, rather, the theological tension that even young Maisie experiences: how can Clara Matilda be in heaven and in Kensal Green? Wood seems to completely miss the also in the passage. It is the conjunction that is the cause of embarrassment.

These minor criticisms aside, How Fiction Works leaves one eager to read anew.

Flaubert's Madame

I was recently pointed back to Flaubert's Madame Bovary by a bit of a circuitous route. In preparation for writing a review of Julian Barnes' new book Nothing to be Frightened of (the review will appear in the summer issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin), I spent some time in Barnes' "novels," including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Flaubert's Parrot, both of which are fantastic forays in history and biography, contesting our tidy self-assured distinctions between history and the novel. (This relationship and distinction is brought to the fore in what I'm reading right now: the novelist Shelby Foote's monumental The Civil War: A Narrative--but more on that some other time.) Flaubert and his generation are at the center of Flaubert's Parrot, but they also persistently appear as sages of a sort in Nothing to be Frightened Of. Thus I was pointed back to Flaubert's classic (particularly Geoffrey Wall's translation for the Penguin Classics).

The subtitle of Madame Bovary is a signal to us: it promises to narrate Provincial Lives. One might say that Madame Bovary is the first "suburban" novel--opening and anticipating a literary line that peeks into the mundane lives of the petit bourgeois, a line that will eventually give us films like Magnolia and Little Miss Sunshine. "Provincial" in a French context, of course, simply means "not Paris," though the Rouen region of France was perhaps particularly "provincial" in this respect. And yet, Madame Bovary is not the cynical work of a snooty Parisian taking shots at benighted provincials. There is a certain way in which the novel's subject almost hallows provincial life, I'd say: it decides that it's worth looking behind the doors of a village pharmacist and tracking the life of a despondent housewife. No one could read the heart-rending closing scenes of the novel--where Flaubert's stylistic flourish is most evidenced--and conclude that the author despises "provincial lives." (In this respect it calls to mind what is still perhaps the most important novel I've ever read, Jean Girardoux's Choice of the Elect.) If I ever become a writer, this hallowing of the domestic will be my literary mission.

Of course, Madame Bovary is not famous for her domesticity! However, given the scandal of the novels sexuality upon appearance, the contemporary reader will be (pleasantly) surprised at how oblique the eroticism is here (cp. Stanley Fish's recent comments on "the two most erotic moments" in American cinema). Indeed, the explicitness of Madame Bovary will look tame to anyone who just watches the Disney channel.

But most significant about the novel is the way that Flaubert bores into his characters, stopping the camera, so to speak, and letting it hang on their interiority in ways I find quintessentially French. While there is a plot driving the story, we find ourselves reading as explorers of an internal geography. Flaubert is a kind of cartographer, mapping the psyche. And he does all of this in a style that is unmatched--not particularly baroque or flowery, but still in a way that seems to sing. He pauses at just the right moments and describes what is etched on a face or the movement of a hand. Sometimes, as in the closing scenes, this is done with a pace that is breathtaking without being hasty or impatient. Consider just one snippet, quite at random:

But as she was writing, she beheld a different man, a phantom put together from her most ardent memories, her favourite books, her most powerful longings; and by the end he became so real, so tangible, that her heart was racing with the wonder of it, though she was unable to imagine him distinctly, for he faded, like a god, into the abundance of his attributes. He lived in the big blue country where silken rope-ladders swing from balconies, scented by flowers and lit by the moon (p. 271).

It is a small irony that a story which narrates the disastrous frustrations of pleasure-seeking is couched in a style that makes reading sheer pleasure.