August Wilson
Theater Communications Group ($200)

by Justin Maxwell

If you have any interest in theater, odds are that you’ve read something by August Wilson, seen one of his plays, or have a copy of Fences or Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on a bookshelf somewhere. This boxed set, however, showcases the power of Wilson’s oeuvre in a unique fashion. Presenting Wilson’s “century cycle”—ten plays, each dramatizing a different decade of African American life in the 20th century—as a unified whole, the boxed set looks and feels like it could indeed hold a century of cultural memory inside of it.

While the ten-volume collection itself is hefty, it is also well designed and well-made; each book is comfortable in the hand and readable on the page, signifying that these editions are meant to be read, not archived. Many boxed sets are merely repositories that seem to say, “Look, I contain the collected works of ____.” The Wilson boxed set, by contrast, says, “Come and read me.” Those who accept the invitation will discover hidden layers to Wilson’s achievement, seeing how each separate play in the cycle informs the others.

Adding to the reading experience is the fact that each volume gets a heartfelt introduction by a contemporary writer, such as Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner, or by another artist with ties to Wilson’s work, like actors Phylicia Rashad (Tony-nominated for her portrayal of Wilson’s iconic character Aunt Ester) or Laurence Fishburne (the film star who has repeatedly returned to interpret Wilson’s characters on stage). While I would have liked to see introductions by other theater professionals such as Paul Carter Harrison and Lou Bellamy, their absence doesn’t detract from what is there. Most notably included is a lyric introduction to Radio Golf written by Suzan-Lori Parks, where she is at her poetic best.

Of course, this fulsome set does come with a large price tag, but since each hardcover volume is listed individually at $25, the triple-digit price isn’t the trip to the dentist that it seems—in fact, it’s a bargain. And when you can get so much of the most important African-American literature of the 20th century in one place, which of these plays would you give up?

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

 

 

by Noah Eli Gordon

The year 2008 saw the ubiquity of two not so mutually exclusive terms: maverick and change. While the implication of the latter more thoroughly captured the public’s attention, the former is indeed an integral component to its success. Charles Olson’s famous opening to "The Kingfishers" seems as relevant as ever: “What does not change / is the will to change.” Such a will requires at the very least a modicum of the maverick spirit. While we were busy taking in the requisite reductive rhetoric of the campaign season, poetry chapbook culture quietly continued to grind its maverick gears, churning out numerous works that both map and facilitate change in the art form. In an effort to honor the numerous contributions to the growing community of chapbook publishers, Rain Taxi offers this year-end recap, a small sampling of some of the most active and interesting goings-on in the world of the chapbook.

Cosa Nostra Editions made a strong debut with the release four high-quality, hand-stitched chapbooks with letter-pressed covers: Simone dos Anjos’s Comedies, Crystal Curry’s Logotherapy Pant, Jon Leon’s Alexandra, and Elisabeth Whitehead’s a pilgrim's traveling kit. With the release of Renata Ewing’s Frankenstein Poems and Anne Heide’s Specimen, Specimens, Etherdome Press continued its tradition of publishing work by women writers without previous books or chapbooks; Etherdome editors Elizabeth Robinson and Colleen Lookingbill also helped bring Beverly Dahlen’s 1976 chapbook A Letter at Easter back into the world through the discovery of copies sitting unmade in a box in the author’s San Francisco home. Ugly Duckling Presse brought more of its distinctive design sense and high-quality craftsmanship to a half dozen chapbooks worth tracking down: Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto, Nancy Kuhl’s The Nocturnal Factory, Daniel Staub’s Small Tales: Twelve Two-Part Tunes, Carlos Blackburn’s The Selected Poems of Hamster, Leonard Schwartz’s The Library of Seven Readings, and Christine Hume’s Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense, which features an accompanying CD by James Marks Hume.

Slack Buddha Press offered space to poetry, prose, performance texts, and verbal-visual work in the form of several chapbooks, including Christopher Mattison’s No Bridge to Kentucky, Nils Ya’s An Awkward Alphabet, David Baratier’s after Celan, Tom Orange’s American Dialectics, Aaren Yandrich’s Except Me, On Which Seldom I Am Gazing, Mel Nichols’s Bicycle Day, and Susan M. Schultz’s Dementia Blog: September, 2006. Launching an auspicious new series, Little Scratch Pad Editions's recent output of colorful chapbooks calls for more attention. Their new titles include Kristianne Meal’s TwentyTwo: First Pallet, Jaye Bartell’s Ever After Never Under, Michael Basinski’s Of Venus 93, Douglas Manson’s at any point (to becoming normal), L. A. Howe’s NTR P C E ST R, and Tom Yorty’s Words in Season. Fewer & Further Press continued documenting some of the country’s stellar experimental poets with the release of John Coletti's Same Enemy Rainbow, Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson, Shannon Tharp's Determined by Aperture, and Andrew Mister's Hotels.

Each of the six chapbooks recently released by Faux Press displays a photograph of the author bisected by strips of color, along with a signature, lending a twist to the distance with which most of these poets approach expressive subjectivity. Available as a set, the run includes Stacy Szymaszek’s Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane, C. A. Conrad’s (Soma)tic Midge, Alan Davies’s Odes, Jeni Olin’s The Pill Book, Brenda Iijima's Subsistence Equipment, and Jack Kimball’s Pathologies. Transmission Press published a handful of chapbooks by younger practitioners already making a name for themselves: Michael Slosek's Interdiction, Aaron Lowinger's Open Night, Dorothea Lasky’s Tourmaline, and John Sakkis’s The Moveable Ones. Ypolita Press recently published a pair of exceptional chapbooks: Gina Myers’s Behind the R and Barbara Jane Reyes’s Easter Sunday. Bonfire Press used their Vandercook SP15 letterpress and photopolymer plates to create Eleni Sikelianos’s The Abstracted Heart of Hours & Days, one of the year’s most beautiful chapbooks.

Counterpath Press blurred the line between chapbook and trade edition with the release of the perfect-bound, 31-page collection Autobiography/Oughtabiography by Anthony Hawley. New Michigan Press followed suit with two 40-plus-page, perfect-bound chapbooks: Marc McKee’s What Apocalypse? and Rachel Moritz’s Night-Sea. The Cupboard, launching their quarterly pamphlet series dedicated to prose, published Jesse Ball’s Parables & Lies, whose near 70 pages of Baudelairean, Kafkaesque narrative allegories and absurdist fiction are everywhere on the cusp of bursting from the confines of the chapbook as we know it. Texture Press released Edward Foster’s A History of the Common Scale, another of this year’s perfect-bound chapbooks. Toadlily Press published a perfect-bound, trade edition book called An Uncommon Accord: Poems, which collects under one cover chapbooks by George Kraus, Marcia Arrieta, Pat Landreth Keller, and Michael Carman.

Noemi Press continued their line of solid titles, including both poetry and fiction, with the release of Camera Obscura by Rebecca Bednarz, The Evening Papers by Matthew Kirby, Closed Histories by Sara Veglahn, and David Galef’s A Man of Ideas and Other Stories. Buffalo’s Sunnyoutside brought Michael Kriesel’s beautifully produced Moths Mail the House into the world, while Cincinnati’s Cy Press added Anselm Berrigan’s stunning Have A Good One to the conversation. Allison Carter’s Shadows are Weather and Emily Abendroth’s Toward Eadward Forward were published by Horse Less Press. House Press continued their tradition of gorgeous, necessary work with the release of Dana Ward’s Goodnight Voice and Roberto Harrison’s Reflector. Teppichfresser Press brought out Karl Saffran’s hilarious though elegiac Dead Wrestler Sonnets. Fastened with industrial-sized nuts and bolts, G. C. Waldrep’s One Way No Exit, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, must have done some damage à la Debord’s sandpapered Mémoires to neighboring titles on chapbook collectors' shelves.

Kitchen Press launched several exciting titles: Joseph Massey’s Out of Light, Thomas David Lisk’s Tentative List (A), Jon Leon’s Hit Wave, and Mathias Svalina’s Why I Am White. Anyone passing through Boise was bound to pick up a copy or two of Martin Corless-Smith’s Free Poetry series of chapbooks, including Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s The Evening Hours of a Hermit, Paul Hoover’s The Windows (The Actual Acts), and Sally Keith’s On the Painting of the View. Mitzvah Chaps debuted with the release of three remarkable chapbooks: Chuck Stebelton’s A Maximal Object, Anne Boyer’s Art is War, and Mike Hauser’s Psychic Headset. Octopus Books published Matthew Rohrer’s They All Seemed Asleep. Adam Clay’s As Complete as a Thought Can Be was recently released on Cannibal Books.

Continuing their series of high-quality chapbooks pitched toward a centrist aesthetic, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries' ongoing chapbook imprint, Parallel Press, published Austin Smith’s In the Silence of the Migrated Birds, Lisa Marie Brodsky’s We Nod Our Dark Heads, and Carl Lindner’s The Choreographer of Raindrops. Finishing Line Press continued their voluminous output, including the noteworthy collections Faith by Susie Meserve, Savage Machinery by Karen Rigby, and Lesley Wheeler’s Scholarship Girl. The Poetry Society of America’s annual Chapbook Fellowship brought out Dream of Water by Kate Ingold, Dear Wild Abandon by Andrew Michael Roberts, The Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c. by Carey McHugh, and Monster Theory by Lytton Smith.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? Fret not. The scarcity of the chapbook is one of its key delights. Of course, the sheer abundance of chapbooks published each year prevents anyone from having a complete handle on the scene, but the truth is there is no handle, no single scene; we’re faced with micro-communities that constellate around particular aesthetics and social ties. This is postmodern pluralism at its height—the prismatic way a fly sees the world. Buzz! Buzz! Happy New Year.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter, 2008-2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

by Grant Jenkins

Mark McMorris is associate professor of english at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1997 and directs the University's Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. With both an M.A. in creating writing (poetry) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown University, McMorris has authored four books of poetry: The Café at Light (Roof Books, 2004), The Blaze of the Poui (University of Georgia Press, 2003), The Black Reeds (University of Georgia Press, 1997), and Moth-Wings (Burning Deck, 1996). His scholarly work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Contemporary Literature, Calabash, Paideuma, Tripwire, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. With new poems to appear this spring in the Norton American Hybrid Anthology, McMorris’s next volume of poetry, Entrepôt, which he discusses here, is slated for publication in 2010 with Coffee House Press.

Grant Jenkins: I think I would like to start with some biography. Tell me about yourself, background facts.

Mark McMorris: I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and lived there through high school. My parents are still there, as well as my brother and sister. My father and mother both were civil servants. My father still is a civil servant. Really what my father did was cricket. He had a day job [laughs], but he was an international cricketer when he was younger. Played for the West Indies, the International Cricket team, through the mid-1960s and was also the captain of the Jamaican regional team. So, anyway, I am a Jamaican.

GJ: Why did you come to the United States?

MM: I came to go to college. I needed a change of pace.

GJ: Did you think you would stay, or did you imagine yourself going back to Jamaica?

MM: I never thought about it. It was a new experience, obviously. I’d been to the United States before, but being in New York and being in college was astonishingly jolting to me. I’d always been somebody who did math and science—I went to Columbia to do engineering—and I’d always hated literature. Can you imagine having to read Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy in Kingston? [laughs] It literally made no sense to me. But I had some really good teachers at Columbia. Living in New York, finding out about shows, learning about painting and philosophy ... I was completely drawn into that.

GJ: By the end of your college career, were you writing poetry?

MM: No, no. I was trying to every now and again. I lived in Paris for a summer on a grant and spent a lot of time in Shakespeare & Company, now on the Place San Michelle by Nortre Dame. If you stand at Shakespeare & Company and you look across the river, you can see the cathedral. Anyway, there’s a writer’s room that George Whitman from America created where there’s a first edition of Ulysses in the original Aegean blue cover, plus other rare books and a real good collection of poetry. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking and making notes in that room that summer.

GJ: When I first told you about my African American poets project, you said, “Wait a second, I am not African American, I was born in Jamaica.” How is your sense of yourself as Jamaican different from what you see as African American? How do you see that working for your writing?

MM: My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That’s more my sense of it. To go back to the ’60s and the ’70s for a little bit, whether rightly or wrongly, I closely identified the making of poetry, music, dance, and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit, by writers like Frantz Fanon. But not just Fanon, because Fanon himself is transmitting a link between something called “culture,” especially the verbal arts, and national identity that arguably goes all the way back to [Johann Gottfried] Herder in the 18th century. So, there’s a very old partnership between the core of a nation and its language. And Fanon makes that partnership into a weapon in the service of de-colonization. So for him, the writer, the playwright, the novelist, the poet seek a form of their work that will play a substantial part in midwifing the nation—political resistance in the service of nation-making. So the Caribbean is steeped in all this during the 1970s. This is the assumption behind what to value in poetry, what to value in the arts.

GJ: Do you see that as essentially different than what’s happening in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

MM: I think that production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution. This mindset believes there is an emancipatory role for art that doesn’t simply stop at liberation, but wants to make an identity or to install an image of identity, let’s say. The verb that one uses is really crucial. To “reveal” an identity is different than to “discover” or “make.” We know now that it’s constructed, but thirty years ago we’re talking essences, aren’t we? We are still thinking about essences. So art’s function is to make visible, legible, and audible the essence of an identity that is fundamentally hybrid and, importantly, African. That’s how I would understand the program of art for art, including poetry.

To me, I just hated that. [laughs] I hated poetry generally, especially the poetry that these guys would offer. Now mind you, I teach a course on African Diaspora folk poetry and poetics and it centers on the Caribbean, mainly the Caribbean, and I teach these guys that I grew up hearing and hating. [laughs] Anyway, culture and nation are partners, inextricable from each other. National culture and nation, they are reciprocities. That’s the Fanonian idea, and it animates artistic practice in Jamaica in the 1970s. When I started to try to write my own poems, I thought ... actually it is only quite recently that I have been able to understand the quandary that I was in. I suppose I need to find a way to talk about it. There is a thesis that Fredric Jameson famously advanced in the 1980s that, in its crude form, basically says that all third world literature is about nation, that identity is the fundamental literary problem in the third world. The writer’s identity is insecure because the nation’s identity is not secure. The nation doesn’t provide the third world writer with a secure identity, because the nation is colonized, it’s oppressed, it’s part of somebody else’s empire. You can argue that there are problems with that formulation, not the least of which is how can you make a claim that is so universally valid. Anyway, the nation as the horizon of an identity that you want to come into being as a fundamental absence of something that is compromised, something that needs to be rescued or made—these matters preoccupy the third world writer. It is seductive for a Marxist understanding of literary practice and production in the sense that it says that material culture determines literary output. And you know, as you start to say, yes, you know economically the third world is relative impoverished, relatively subject to the whims and dictates of other places and people and so on.

So to go back to this whole problem of writing for me: I think that is one of the messages that I absorbed to a point that it became very crippling. I think the way that I would put it is that I was preoccupied with that problem of how to make my writing serve the nation. I wouldn’t have put it that way fifteen years ago, because that’s just arrogant. You know, to somebody starting to write, you can’t begin the question that way. But when you read the critics and when they talk about Kamau Brathwaite or V. S. Naipaul or C. L. R. James or Derek Walcott, this is the message of the poetry. Apparently this is our common project, to create a West Indian tradition and to participate in it; it is a great thing and quite powerful thing, and it’s West Indian and West Indian and West Indian. And really and truly it’s not—I found it to be stultifying to have to think in those terms.

GJ: How do you think of it?

MM: [laughs] Maybe we can come at it from this direction: when I was in France, I read a lot of Wallace Stevens. I read a lot of French poetry. I read a lot of Yeats and Hart Crane. I was mesmerized. I didn’t have to try. I didn’t have to say to myself, “this reading is making me a better human being.” Or, “I am becoming more cultured and intellectually cultured by reading this poet.” Or, “I am so proud of my fellow West Indians that they can make fine, fine poems.” I could just luxuriate. I just loved that stuff. It has to do with the aesthetics of the work. Pound, I read a lot of Pound, Stevens, Hart Crane ... who else was I reading at the time? I loved Joyce.

GJ: Eliot? Stein?

MM: No Stein. I couldn’t understand Stein. I loved “The Four Quartets,” but really it was Stevens and Yeats I read a lot. And when I thought I would like to try my hand at poems, those were the writers that I thought I would try to follow. I was really interested in poetic form, rather than in the transmission of a particular lived environment. This lived environment didn’t interest me that much. Vernaculars are indices of lived environments. Then you also have images, and you have a way of having your thoughts unfold, which is one aspect of vernacular. Okay, you have your vernacular, you have your images, and you have the problem that the poem takes up and handles. All of those things tell you you are reading an American poem, a poem from the South, a poem from New Zealand, a poem from the Inuit, a poem from the Caribbean. None of those things interested me. Whatever the indices of a lived environment were, those did not interest me. What interested me was poetic form. The handling of language, or as Pound says, “the dance of the intellect” on words. That’s what I was interested in. Why it interested me is because I felt it. The things I was reading were very compelling. So, in terms of the relationship I have in my writing to the subject of nation-making, I was aware of the problem, tried to address it, and couldn’t. It was crippling and in the end I went elsewhere.

The greatest thing that ever happened to me was hearing Susan Howe read from Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. Now, New England is everywhere in her work, but what I got out of it was the articulation of sound forms in time. [laughs] That’s the part that got me so fired up, so excited. I am still living in the wake of that reading I heard in 1988. Palinurus Suite—that’s an early book of mine from Paradigm Press—was written shortly after I heard her give that reading. It’s very, very influenced by a certain attitude towards reference that you can find in her work. More so than some of the other writers we’ve been talking about. Lyn Hejinian is another person who completely blew me away when I read My Life. The way she handles the sequence of sentences. How she moves from one sentence to another. How the sentence becomes, how she makes a unit out of a sentence. That was completely eye opening for me. At least in terms of my conscious interests, these are the things that compelled me, as opposed to. . . you know, this is how we talk about it now, if I were going to make a neat story out of the inevitable mesh that all our lives are—the accidents, the half-truths, the errors, the meaninglessness—I would say something like this: that the liberation provided by language writing is a liberation from nation, a liberation from national culture, the fracturing of the strain, the effort to make that, to have it, to transmit it, to participate in it, to find the form of it, the poetic form of it. Language writing for me is a freeing of myself from a whole set of postcolonial problems that at the time I couldn’t articulate. I had to do a lot more reading to articulate it in the way that I am articulating it now.

GJ: Does that “freeing” allow you to return to a certain lexicon, to a certain set of places or problems like you do in The Blaze of the Poui or “Peninsula, Sea Brush,” to take up some of those figures again without that baggage? It’s not like you have left the Caribbean behind. It still informs your work, right?

MM: Absolutely. I didn’t realize how preoccupied I was; it took me a while to realize that. The Black Reeds was an initial attempt. At the time I was writing The Black Reeds I was also writing The Café at Light, which came out later from Roof. And that book has some Caribbean landscape in it and places. But it’s also European, North American. There is a landscape. But, I thought, I don’t want to be restricted to that. I don’t want to be fixed into place or pinned down in this way. To be located in terms of a set of already existing problems that poetry from the West Indies addresses and has addressed and that originate with certain writers. I want to be my own writer, but at the same time I also felt very strongly—you mention “Sea Brush”—I remember I wrote that when I went back to Jamaica after being away for a very, very long time, and it was one of these poems that just writes themselves. I heard some men pouring concrete and they were speaking and I got that idiom in my head. And, clearly, I am not working out of any formal tradition in Caribbean literature in that poem. If somebody says, this is writing that might be found in the company of Rosmarie Waldrop, I would much prefer to hear that. The point is that I didn’t know any Jamaican writers or West Indian writers. I wasn’t hanging out with them. I wasn’t in correspondence with them. I wasn’t particularly reading them. I went through a period where I stopped reading Derek Walcott altogether.

GJ: Are you still in that period?

MM: Well, I recently met him and gave a lecture on him when he was sitting in the audience. And we’re now in correspondence, and I am hoping he will come back to Georgetown next year. So, I find this to be very curious. But a writer like Derek Walcott, you cannot spend too much time with him. I’ve read him very, very closely. But if you want to write yourself, then you have to get away. You have to do something else. You cannot try to do what he does. Again, it took a body of writing as original—and I use that word with the full understanding of what I am saying—as what Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Susan Howe produced to dislodge that very, very deeply considered realism of genius, basically, that you have in Derek Walcott’s work. He invents the West Indies, to use Benedict Anderson’s sense of the word. Invents. This is my answer to Grenier’s “I hate speech”: I hate culture. [laughs] What I would say is this: form is paramount. Form is what distinguishes one genre from another and what distinguishes poetry from journalism. And maybe, one way of saying it is that the handling of form is where the effort is. That is where I put the effort, and that’s what I try to learn from these other writers that we’ve been talking about. And it’s possible that to learn, to be in the process of learning about the handling of form, it might be an advantage not at the same time to be trying to handle the problem of identity. I would think of the form/culture dichotomy for difference, along the lines that Pound thought of matter and form. Matter wobbling when you try to invent it for yourself versus not wobbling when you are translating. So that’s how I would think of it. Let’s go back to this false opposition, as you quite rightly point out, between identity and form. Identity isn’t always implicated in what one is writing; it’s that I am content to have identity go its own way, do its own thing, manifest itself however it wants, while concentrating on arrangement, sequence, pacing, accentuation, line length, sound cluster, consonants, those elements.

GJ: Are there any other formal procedures or operations that you have in mind consciously as you are writing your latest work?

MM: It is just about done, I think. But I am having a little trouble with the title. I am calling it “Entrepôt,” as a figure for a space of transition. A place for trans-shipment. From the French word that means “between.” It is a place that is in between other places. But I am thinking of the form of a poem as an entrepôt. This is my way of trying to come to terms, come to grips with Lyn Hejinian’s excellent exposition of open and closed form. That one form of open form could be an entrepôt that does not imply origins or destinations but only other entrepôts. That feels to me to be something like my experience, my own experience. That question of origin is a preliminary question, and after addressing it as a preliminary question, it changes from being preliminary to being one question in a whole set of questions. In the sense of the origin that ceases to be a source and instead becomes a transitional space, a transitional location. It is a very important question in Caribbean literature.

GJ: That brings us back to identity and nation.

MM: Yeah, Glissant is working on these problems. He is very good at that. You know, for thrashing through the difference between the rhizome and the root and what that means for world culture now in his Poetics of Relation. So, “Entrepôt” would be the title and a name for what I hope the poem would be doing formally. Language as migration, but not immigration. But I am interested in immigration, or course, and integration. English has that distinction; I don’t know if American has that distinction. "Im-" is out of, "in-" is into. In integration, migration, immigration, movements. A geography for historical and contemporary signs. Where past and present go into each other and constrain each other. At most a resting place, not a destination, not an origin. So these are some of the thoughts that I have in my mind, and we’ll see.

Click here to purchase Blaze of the Poui at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Black Reeds at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Café at Light at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

by Kevin Smokler

The work of Anne Fadiman is one of the best rebukes in contemporary letters to the moldy myth that a subject’s size is the best measure of its importance. She first rose to prominence as a journalist via her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the story of an epileptic Hmong child and her family’s interactions with the health care system in Merced, California, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997. She’s now equally well known for her two subsequent essay collections, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and At Large and At Small, which came out in paperback earlier this year. Those books (compiled from Fadiman’s tenure as a columnist for the now defunct Civilization Magazine and as editor of The American Scholar) do for subjects like libraries, coffee, sleep, and ice cream what M. C. Escher did for the staircase: they take a pedestrian aspect of our lives and gently insist we have more to glean by seeing it in three dimensions.

Anne Fadiman is the inaugural Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University. I spoke with her at her home in Whately, Massachusetts, while her dog Typo dashed around our feet and her teenage son Henry practiced guitar in the next room.

Kevin Smokler: I had no idea you and Wendy Lesser were roommates at Harvard.

Anne Fadiman: We were roommates for two years, my sophomore/junior, her junior/senior. We’d met in the fall of 1970, when I was a freshman, in a very small dorm at Radcliffe that had just gone co-ed the year before. Benazir Bhutto and Kathleen Kennedy were in the same dorm. The housing office at Harvard must have been up to something that year.

Wendy and I had a lot in common. We were both literary. We were both from California. But unlike me, Wendy was a mixture of the keenest intellect and the most appealing verve. She had bright red hair and many freckles. She seemed fearless as she moved through the world. She was interested in urban planning and talked a lot about Lewis Mumford. It wasn’t clear whether she was going to follow the literary path or the urban planning path.

KS: I have the sense from reading Threepenny Review that she’s the kind of reader who would be less inclined to leave muffin crumbs in her books, and you more.

AF: I think that that’s probably right. I remember that when she was a senior, on her one day off between final exams, she read Pale Fire for fun. She also went to graduate school in literature and I didn’t. So I remained a kind of dilettantish amateur and she became the real deal.

KS: Something I’ve always admired about your work is that it treats lighthearted subjects like ice cream and coffee seriously, and yet also treats serious subjects lightheartedly without being dismissive of them. Being someone whose career and public image has been shaped so much by being dedicated to literature, do you feel sometimes that you are called upon to defend a position that is not you—to speak to those bemoaning that literature is not taken more seriously?

AF: I don’t ever feel I have to defend anything. I don’t feel that literature has maintained the place in the world it once had, and I wish that would change, but I’m not sure that bemoaning that fact is the best way to make it change. The best thing you can do is just write as well as you can.

I’m not a polemicist. My first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is the most serious thing I’ve written. The story of Lia Lee and the larger story of the Hmong are authentic tragedies, and I spent a lot of time in tears during the eight years I wrote about them. But despite what they’ve been through, the Hmong themselves have a wonderful sense of humor. Hmong folk tales, even though they’re full of violence and death, are very funny. Humor keeps on poking through like little green shoots coming up through the snow. The Hmong sensibility made me feel it was okay for parts of my book to be comic, even though most of it was sad.

That book ended up saying some pretty strong things—I guess you could call them political statements—about cross-cultural communication. But any good it has done has been more or less by accident, since I had no idea it would ever be read in medical schools and anthropology classes and so on. I was aiming at a general audience—a very small general audience—and I never imagined it would have any influence on anybody.

My essays have had even less lofty aspirations. They’re not written with any grand purpose in mind, they’re written to entertain me. They are a selfish pursuit. For example, I love the essays of Charles Lamb, the great early 19th-century English Romantic writer. A few years ago, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could spend a couple of weeks doing nothing but reading essays by Lamb and biographies of Lamb?” That wouldn’t feel like work, it would feel like a vacation. Was I thinking, “Charles Lamb is underappreciated and my essay about him will raise his status in the American academy?” Not on your life.

Not all the essays in At Large and At Small are lighthearted. The last essay in the book, about a drowning I witnessed when I was eighteen, could hardly be more serious. But most of the time, my own view of life eventually reasserts itself. And my view of life just isn’t very solemn.

KS: It sounds like a directed form of goofing off.

AF: That’s a very good way of putting it. Essays are a guilt-free way of spending time doing something I really enjoy that otherwise I’d feel bad about because it would take time away from my work. So I simply make it my work. Teaching is another form of play. When I became a teacher, my husband said, “You have such a naturally didactic personality, you might as well get paid for it!”

KS: There’s a wonderful tradition of turning goofing off into achievement in literature. The example that comes to mind for me is George Plimpton.

AF: Of course Plimpton did reportage, not essays. He’d go out and become a football player or professional golfer or whatever for a while, and then he’d write about it. He’d actually do it, whereas when I’m in essay mode, I just read about it.

My information-gathering method is more like making maple syrup. Up here in Western Massachusetts we tap our trees every March. To make one gallon of syrup, you have to gather 40 gallons of sap and boil off 39 of them. My essays are like that. I read and read and collect a ton of material. That’s my sap. Then I boil and boil, and the result is often a very brief piece.

Most of the essays in both Ex Libris and At Large and At Small started out as columns for magazines. Those have to be a set length. It’s like writing a sonnet: it can’t be 15 lines, only 14. I like that sense of constraint. The result is that the essays are dense—not dense as in hard to understand (I hope!), but dense in that a lot of stuff has been boiled out of them. What’s left is the stuff I consider the most fun.

KS: Do you think if you hadn’t had the opportunity to, say, write about ice cream for a magazine, you would have still written these essays and found a home for them afterward?

AF: No. I like to have a permanent, or at least semi-permanent, home. Before I write I like to know who the audience is, when I have to turn in the piece, and when it’s going to get published. Despite everything I’ve said about my work being my play and vice versa, I do find writing difficult in some ways. I’m not one of those people who can be galvanized to action without an external push.

My husband [George Howe Colt, author of The Big House] and I take turns writing. One of us does a book and the other has a job with health insurance. He’s currently writing, and I’m teaching. So during this phase of my life, my only time to write is the summer. By my own choice, though, my main project this summer has been editing the first few chapters of George’s current book. It’s terrific, so I’ve enjoyed that tremendously. We’ve always been each other’s first readers and edited each other’s work.

I consider my teaching, in a way, to be as creative as my writing, just as I considered my editing to be as creative as writing when I was at The American Scholar. During those seven years at the Scholar I wrote the essays that became At Large and At Small, but mostly I was editing. And people were always asking me, “Don’t you miss writing?” Well, no more than I missed editing when I was writing! And now that I’m teaching, that’s what interests me most. At this point, to write one more essay and see it published in a good magazine would be pleasant, but it wouldn’t steepen my learning curve. I’m still learning how to teach, so that learning curve hasn’t yet flattened out.

KS: I get the sense you like to focus on one thing at a time.

AF: I tend to get confused and unhappy when my mind has to focus on many things at once. I like to move in a deep, narrow track in which I can get really obsessed with something and do nothing else. Sometimes I’ll take a detour and look at something by the side of the road, but when I’m writing an essay, it pretty much fills my life.

It’s easiest for me to stay focused at night. All the essays in At Large and At Small—including “Night Owl,” which is about being a night owl—were written at night. When I’m writing an essay, I stay up a little later every night until I’m staying up all night, and then I’m in another zone where the phone never rings and nothing can distract me and all I’m thinking about is, say, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When I was writing my essay on Coleridge, it was just me and him for a couple of weeks.

KS: Do you feel lucky that your body clock is such that you can work at night and not have it be disruptive to the rest of your life?

AF: I don’t feel lucky that my body clock is out of sync with the rest of the world and out of sync with my family. Life would be easier if I had a more conventional circadian rhythm. I don’t enjoy lying awake all night while my husband is peacefully sleeping.

KS: I’d like to revisit this idea from earlier that many of us who love books and literature walk around with: it’s this idea that there was a time when books were at the center of our culture and of popular consciousness. I’ve always felt like that period of time, despite the romanticism we might have about it, came with certain cultural liabilities which we forget when discussing why things are no longer that way.

AF: Such as?

KS: That those places at the center of our culture were largely occupied by white men of a single class. And the impetus to read a canonical set of books was largely based on a mid-century drive for upward mobility in a hierarchal society that thankfully no longer exists—at least not in the same way.

AF: When I was growing up and becoming a reader, I had no sense of what was going on in the wider culture. I had only a sense of what was going on in the mini-culture of the Fadiman family. Which was exactly what you just described—but in our family, I never viewed it as a downside.

My father was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and he was exactly the kind of upwardly mobile person that you just referred to pejoratively. One of his best-known books, still in print, was The Lifetime Reading Plan. Nothing could be more canonical. It was an annotated list of 100 or so classic books written by long-dead white males that you were supposed to read over the course of a lifetime in order to become an educated person. That sounds terribly narrow, but the fact is that if you read and thought about all those books, you would become a well-educated person. It might be nice to read some other books as well to add a bit of diversity to the pot, but it’s still a wonderful list.

I have an older brother who, if anything, is a better writer than I am. He chose not to become a writer and I did. My family’s emphasis on white males obviously didn’t cripple me. In fact, maybe it provided something useful to react against. In the preface to At Large and At Small I quote my father saying that there are few women essayists. Maybe I became an essayist in order to say, “Says who?”

But I always felt encouraged by both my parents to do whatever I wanted to do. And growing up in a house with zillions of books was absolutely great.

KS: I get the sense that, in that house, you were raised with the idea that reading was a tactile, lustful activity.

AF: Oh yes, lustful to the core! My father thought books were meant to be handled. He dog-eared the pages and wrote in the margins. After our parents died and my brother and I inherited their library, it was like hearing a voice from the other side to read the notes our father had written next to passages he particularly liked.

My parents were both professional writers, but they also did a ton of reading for pleasure. My father was a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club for 60 years. And while I’m sure many people thought of that as a form of selling out, he was sometimes able to identify a great book like Catcher in the Rye or And the Band Played On before it was published, and to help it gain the success it deserved. He wasn’t a snob. He got just as excited about a good thriller or sci fi novel as about a literary biography.

Many people are still excited by reading. So I don’t count myself among those who think that literature is dying in the United States. Your own book [Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times] is encouraging—it shows that there are young people out there who will take literature in new directions that I can’t even guess at, many of them Internet-based. This may not be the sort of thing that I would write myself, maybe not even read myself. But it’s going to be vital, it’s going to be exciting.

One example is the blog. At the moment, most blogs are terrible. Of course they’re terrible! The form is in its infancy. People who used to write in their journals are now writing in their blogs, and they haven’t yet learned the art of self-editing. But I think that in future, the blog may become what the personal essay was in the past. And I find that a hopeful prospect.

It’s fair to say that the average American is reading and writing more words a day now than he was twenty years ago. Things that used to be handled by phone are now handled by email. Now everybody knows how to type. In the most basic sense, everybody is writing all day long. So it would be wrong to say that as a society we are sliding toward illiteracy—we’re simply sliding toward a different kind of literacy. I can’t say I like it as well as the old kind, but that’s not the same thing as saying that literacy is dying.

I concede that an electronic book might have certain advantages. The search function might be helpful if you were reading a book without an index. I might appreciate it if I were reading a Russian novel because I can never remember the characters’ names. That said, I love the physical book, and if it were replaced, I would mourn deeply. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, but I may live long enough to see the writing on the wall, or on the screen. We’d lose a lot. For one thing, you can’t scribble in an electronic book. If I’d inherited a Kindle from my father, it wouldn’t contain his handwriting.

KS: You say in Ex Libris that the best place to read is in bed. I happen to agree, but my body also associates the bed with sleep. So I’m constantly caught between wanting to read more when I’m into a really good book and dropping off to sleep because I’m in bed.

AF: I never feel myself dropping off to sleep because I’m always in bed before I’m sleepy. If George is away and I don’t have to get up to take Henry to school, I’m likely to read until three in the morning. That’s what I call luxury. It’s the literary equivalent of being able to eat an entire pint of ice cream straight from the carton because there’s no one around to say you’re being a pig.

KS: I remember you saying that when both of your kids are in college, you could see yourself doing another heavily reported book like The Spirit Catches You. Do you keep that on the horizon?

AF: Yes, I’ve actually got a topic, which I won’t mention here, on which I’ve been collecting information in a desultory kind of way since 1991. There are also some shorter reporting projects that might take a summer.

I used to think I’d be a reporter forever. I started writing essays during a fragile pregnancy, when I was put on eight months of bedrest. They were the only thing I could write in bed. But even after Henry was born and I was vertical and ambulatory again, all I wanted was to keep on writing them. Essays felt comfortable and natural. I’m not a comfortable or natural reporter.

KS: How come?

AF: An essay is always about something I’m already interested in and already know at least a little about. The path of information-gathering is somewhat predictable. With reporting, the scary and fabulous thing is that you’re in the hands of another human being, and you can’t predict what she’s going to say or do. You don’t know whether she’s going to respond well to you or badly. You don’t know whether you’ve prepared enough, or whether you’ve over-prepared and the interaction is going to be stiff. You don’t know if she will be offended by what you write and if you’ll feel guilty afterward.

Reporting has all the excitement and mess of any human relationship. It could be an interaction as short as fifteen minutes, or it could last for years, as it did when I was reporting The Spirit Catches You. Reporting brings fresh air into my life, it expands me, it makes me a larger person. But for all those reasons, I also find it very challenging.

KS: In looking at your work, I get the sense that you enjoy a topic unveiling itself to you instead of saying, “My next six books will be as follows.” For instance, Spirit came about through a conversation with an old friend and Ex Libris was the product of your tenure at Civilization Magazine.

AF: You’re right, some of my projects have been serendipitous. I got the idea for Spirit from an old college friend who was a doctor in California. The editor of The New Yorker happened to pick that proposal—which was full of mistakes—from the six or seven story ideas I’d sent him. Before the piece could run, the editor was fired. I ended up turning the piece into a book so at least it would be published somewhere. In other words, I didn’t plan that book—it happened to me.

But sometimes I do plan ahead. I have folders in my office in which I jot down ideas I want to write about. When I have a column or regular gig, I’m always filling those folders with ideas for future pieces. I clip things and print out stories from the web. When a folder achieves a certain girth, I know its pregnancy is nearly full term. At that point all I need is ten or twelve days of reading and note-taking, and I’m ready to write.

I may plan ahead before I write, but when I’m writing I focus only on the present. Of course, since I’m a parent, I can never devote all my energy to what I’m writing—and thank heavens that’s the case! I had my first child at 35. I’d been writing for a lot of years before then. But when I reread the earlier stuff, it just doesn’t have as much depth or focus as what I’ve written since I became a parent. I learned that every minute counted. I had to stop procrastinating. A day I could devote to writing was a gift I wanted to be sure I used well.

KS: I read somewhere that William Carlos Williams used to scrawl his poems on prescription slips between visits with patients and remained a physician his whole life. There’s something about that pressure that compels us to a kind of greatness.

AF: “Greatness” is hardly the right noun in my case, but that everyday pressure has certainly compelled me to a higher level of intensity. That’s not the only thing that a family gives you. Falling in love, marrying, and having two children have shoved me more fully into the tide of humanity. That doesn’t mean you can’t write well if you’re single and childless, but I’m certain that in my case, marriage and children have made a better writer.

KS: In thinking about the role literature played to your father’s generation, it served not only as a tool for social advancement but also as an object of lust, of pleasure. It was both functional and hedonistic. Somehow, as a culture, we’ve split those two things: the pleasure we get from reading is somehow divorced from the good it might do us. The thing I admire about your work is it seems to bring those two things back together.

AF: It delights me to hear you say that because it’s an idea I introduce to my students on the first day of each of my classes. I tell them: “The purpose of this class is to erode the line between ‘Ought’ and ‘Want.’”

Here’s an example: One of my classes is called Writing about Oneself. Each week we read two first-person works on a given theme, and then the students write on that theme. In the Angst week we read a section from John Stuart Mill’s autobiography about the nervous breakdown he had at age 20, and then we read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation about the breakdown she had at 20. Mill and Wurtzel sit together on my students’ bedside tables that week. They’re peers. I don’t want my students to think that Wurtzel is “Want” and Mill is “Ought.”

I emphasize this sort of thing in my classes because that’s the way I live. My bedside table is the strangest jumble of everything from crap magazines to Dickens.

KS: I think that portends a very bright future for the written word.

AF: As if I were in charge!

Click here to purchase Ex Libris at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase At Large and At Small at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

by Emanuele Pettener

John Domini’s short stories have been published in leading literary magazines such as Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and many others. His first novel, 2003’s Talking Heads: 77, was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler as "both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable ... a flat-out delight." Over the last half a decade or so, Domini has been working primarily on a sequence of novels set in Naples after the next earthquake; these seem poised to bring him a far wider level of recognition. The first, Earthquake I.D., appeared in 2007 from Red Hen Press; the latest, A Tomb on the Periphery, has just been published by Gival Press. The early endorsements include Jay Parini’s, who says, "This is a delightful crime novel, with a setting to die for, and at the same time a moving story that should interest a wide range of readers.”

Emanuele Pettener: Who has influenced your writing the most?

John Domini: A perfectly natural question—yet next to impossible to answer. I could argue that nobody’s meant more to me than Dante. A dip into the Inferno at age 23 or 24 spat me out, smoking, into my first fully realized fiction. The way he coined a fresh myth for the culture, if not three or four, remains the great challenge for me.

On the other hand, what I write is nothing like 13th-century terza rima. More pertinent might be Donald Barthelme, in all his urbanity and sting. Barthelme became a mentor, even a friend, recommending my work around New York. But he never was much for novels, and I feel at home in longer forms, not just the novel but also the story sequence.

Thus I owe another mighty debt to those who’ve demonstrated the pace and tonal control needed to work at length, as well as how wide the hinges can swing. Tolstoy and Nabokov were the first. More recent inspirations, to name three very different cases: García Márquez, Morrison, Sebald.

And how can this crazy quilt reveal any significant pattern if I leave out people more or less my own age, always a spur to do better? Where would I be without Richards I, II, and III: Price, Powers, and Moody? Superb influences.

Look, every approach to storytelling offers its own exemplar, and creative vitality requires remaining open to those exemplars, no matter how distant from your own work they might seem. I’m not comfortable with any neat cluster of influences. I recall that Hemingway (another influence, sure) expressed his frustration over the issue by saying there were artists in other media, painters and musicians, who’d taught him as much as anyone he’d read. As I write this, I’m listening to Coltrane and Monk.

EP: Why do you write?

JD: To take on this calling, you’re born with a verbal fluency. In your ear, your mind’s ear, the sonic and conceptual interplay of language takes on body and weight, rendering even the least detail—say the scent of madeleines—with a liveliness far beyond the conveyance of meaning. Linked to that, for my sort of writer, is the dramatic imagination, the instinct towards story possibilities. The head is forever running Coming Attractions: snips of situation, conversation, more. These often combine in two or three different ways, suggesting alternative meanings.

Born with such a skill set, and given a decent education in a culture that still esteems literature, if with a wheeze and a cough—anyway, born with such luck, a person becomes a fiction writer. I was at it by age 11. I wrote my first novel (an awful one, certo) during the year my father relocated the family from New York back to Naples, trying to make a go of his business from the Italian end.

That first time, in other words, came out of dislocation. It offered a long view that revealed the world’s diversity, a view in which I could only begin to make a place for myself by inventing a story. Such a startled overview remains with me, another major motivator.

As for lusting after fame, bucks, the best table at Chez Bibliotheque—sure. Naturally. It doesn’t take a Maslow to see that we all seek actualization. The question, however, was about writing: why take on such a vocation, when you want to live as well as you can?

EP: What do you oppose through your writing, if anything?

JD: I intend every sentence as an anti-virus to the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that is the refusal to explore the opportunities. Too much fiction rushes to a small payoff, the cluck of the tongue generated by the average New Yorker story. Too much proves lazy about digging into its complication, getting down to the rich and durable.

My complaint pertains largely to psychological realism, granted. A classic case in point would be any love story that merely asserts the “chemistry” between its boy and girl, or what have you, without determining the molecular compound. Delineating the connection these two share—even the quality of the sex, yes—must be part of an honest day’s work, for their creator. DeLillo for instance, does a scrupulous job with unconsummated love in Mao II. His reclusive author suffers a familiar breakdown: an infatuation with the first woman to take his picture.

Realism, however, isn’t the only mode of fiction that can suffer shallowness. Just now I got in a dig at the New Yorker, but after all, Don Barthelme built his reputation in that magazine. Barthelme kept things skeletal, no question—but he laid out revealing bones. I mean that his best follows through assiduously, if swiftly, on the implications of its setup. Calvino would be another example. In a single page, he takes us to core paradox.

Fiction (and a lot of poetry too) lives in its combinations, what Lawrence called its “subtle interrelationships.” I chafe against any work in this form that fails to exercise this natural strength.

EP: How does writing spring and develop, for you?

JD: When I think about story sources, I come back to the source of my first (bad as that book was). I mean the dislocation at the heart of the impulse. A product of suburban America, I found myself in downtown Naples, exposed to a mash-up of backgrounds, mores, weltschmerz—a German word seems fitting, no? Babel of this kind seems a defining element of our moment, doesn’t it?

Myself, each narrative is a balancing act on shifting cultural tectonics. I’m always fretting over the function of this word or the rightness of that motivation, given the pervading jetlag and mixed signals. When I pull off a story (or a linked sequence of stories, like Highway Trade), it’s as if I’ve founded a new city of meaning, a crossroads and a reference point.

EP: What should a teacher of creative writing teach to their students as a primary rule?

JD: Primary rule? Surely there’s no such thing. Art is always a case of “whatever works,” and few arts offer fiction’s sweeping assortment of what’s worked in the past. For every Pride and Prejudice, efficiently tied off, there’s something like The Trial, riddled with echoing holes.

That said, the Creative Writing curricula nowadays is an arm of the humanities, and any writer who picks up an educator’s paycheck should try to take pleasure in the reengagement with basic principles. Every semester seems to begin, for instance, with a fundamental misunderstanding about plot. Students need a definition, combined with examination of common types, turned inside-out if necessary. Likewise they should get to know characters flat and round (the terminology is Forster’s, but the idea goes back to Aristotle), and tinker with different syntactical styles. Then there’s point of view, a bucket of worms.

More generally, the early efforts of a young talent will have the intermittent effectiveness that John Barth (another mentor and influence) describes as “inchoate authenticity of eye and voice.” The conscientious teacher tries to nurture that authenticity, to move it from inchoate to knowing. The bulk of the learning, over time, is in how to discard, select, anticipate, organize.

Besides that, even the wildest experimentalist in class will be working in some way with the passions. Even a gifted student will struggle to separate their own feelings from those of the characters, or of the “implied author.” So there’s another aspect of learning a teacher can’t ignore: psychology. It’s always personal.

EP: Give us some names of authors that young writers need to read if they want to learn how to write.

JD: Again, I’m leery of getting prescriptive. Apprentices in the craft needn’t work with my list. Dante may leave them cold, while Tolkien, one of several who leave me stone cold, may fire them up. The authors they need to read are the ones who set them twitching with the need to write. The particular forms the storytelling impulse embraces, as the generations wobble on, need to vary and transmogrify.

EP: Your stories have been published by some of the most important American magazines. Can you describe your path toward publication? And what should new authors do to see their writings published?

JD: Well, those same important magazines have turned me down, plenty of times. Serious authors hear few words more often than “no,” and the encouraging rejections can be as baffling as the form letters. Richard Ford writes movingly about the “fervent, dodgy chaos” he perceived in his responses, during the years when no one would publish a word he wrote.

Thus while I have a publishing history, in outline it isn’t particularly interesting. A lot of editors sent the stuff back and a few kept it: basta così. In one or two happy cases I had a contact on the magazine masthead, but in other cases an inside connection actually prevented me from getting a fair reading. In one instance an agent helped a bit. As for my upcoming Italian publication, with Tullio Pironti, I worked that out myself, over lunch in Piazza Dante.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t achieved a bit of insight into the process. I’ve learned it helps to stay alert to new developments. Catching wind of some startup press or magazine has resulted in some important publications. The most significant case for me would be Red Hen Press. First called to my attention by the often-brilliant author Stephen Dixon, the Red Hen people have proven literary angels. They’ve done a lot of good for other authors, growing more each year, but when I look over their Domini shelf, it makes me think of what Black Sparrow meant to Bukowski and Fante. A young writer, perhaps with Ask the Dust in his drawer, shouldn’t turn up his nose at some inconspicuous house, not if they’re showing real warmth.

The opposite also applies, for the under-published. I mean they shouldn’t ignore the industry. Shouldn’t give up on the New Yorker, or the New Yorkers. Nothing will come of nothing—that’s Lear, a great writing mentor.

EP: What do you like and dislike about the American world of publishing?

JD: The question seems to concern American commercial publishing. If so, I must emphasize that over the past couple of decades such publishing has become, more than ever, an arm of the manufacturing industry. In the 1980’s Reagan removed certain tax protections for publishers’ backlists, and so left those houses slaves to the bottom line. Editors lost much of their motivation to fight for literary quality. They couldn’t take time for work that would require decades to start turning a steady profit—never mind that, once such books found their audience, they in fact proved commercial successes.

That’s the tragedy of contemporary U.S. publishing. A yardstick for “the mainstream” that was once at least reasonably reliable has become an empty signifier. A reader who picked up Augie March in 1953 could be assured that its New York imprint indicated some degree of worth, but 50 years later no book on Viking can be counted on to have an intrinsic advantage over one on SMU Press.

Recently a writer asked if the Naples trilogy I’ve now got underway (Earthquake I.D. was the first book, A Tomb on the Periphery the second) were intended as a new version of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandra Quartet. Nodding, I pointed out: “these days, Durrell would be on a small press.”

Now, I don’t deny that the guys at Knopf and Scribner turn up some terrific stuff. Earlier I mentioned Richards Price, Powers, and Moody, and they’ve all produced superb novels with the mainstream houses. But their backlist, too, is vulnerable. Their books may wind up on Dalkey Archive.

Still, this much is merely the news. Anyone can see what’s happened. Thus the truly confounding aspect of American publishing now is how few of our critics have noticed! Nearly every issue of the New York Times Book Review (a place I’ve written for, and admired) carries some sneering comment about small presses and authors who don’t make the bestseller list. Recently Mario Puzo was dismissed as “a journeyman author” until he brought out The Godfather. Excuse me? Puzo’s best books by far were the two that preceded the Mafia blockbuster, in particular The Fortunate Traveler. Too many American reviewers, however, lack any criteria for distinguishing worth outside of sales. They’re blind men feeling some lovely Siamese, or even a potent unicorn, and saying: “It’s not an elephant.”

Small wonder that the memoir, a limited form and therefore easy to assess, has gotten so much critical attention. Small wonder that Janet Maslin has such an impact, as a reviewer who specializes in mysteries and thrillers. She at least knows the standards for her subject matter.

EP: How do your Italian roots affect your writing?

JD: As I look over my answers, they seem suffused by Italianità. I’m not just talking about Dante, Fante, and the occasional Italian word. I’m talking about the qualities I celebrate, the ambition and richness I expect of winning work, alive with interrelationships and fine language. The old expression “Oriental complexity,” suggestive of the Moorish maze that is downtown Naples, might help communicate what I value in literature. At least, it’s a substantial part of what I value.

Gilbert Sorrentino, in one of his sharpest essays, argues that Italian art is defined by “the brilliance of formal invention,” itself rooted in a distrust of any authority, any Establishment version of reality. Again, that’s not the whole story. Da Vinci and Buonarotti, for all their formal exactitude, were nothing if not alive to human suffering. Still, Sorrentino’s correct. Myself, every time I start to mouth some assertion that rings of the “too true,” the Authorized, etc., this author’s eyes glaze over.

Literary stature can’t be prescribed ... But, listen to that. It’s turned me into a curly haired ad for brio, for che sarà, sarà, the most vicious sort of Italian cliché. The most tarnished piece among the tin-plated offerings tacked to the reliquary wall. The only remedy is to scrape off the tarnish and boil it down into ink. I needed to refill my printer cartridge anyway.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

In an age when most writers hone their abilities, applying them toward highly specific ends (e.g., the topical book-length poem, magical realist flash fiction, etc.), Kevin Killian stands as an alternative model for the wordsmith: relentlessly exploratory, unbound by generic proscriptions, and unsettlingly inclusive. Killian is the author of, among many other things, Argento Series, a beautifully nightmarish threnody in verse; Shy, a roman à clef documenting the communal malaise of arty and confused Long Island youths; and dozens of plays, which have been produced across the U.S. and Europe. He is also known for his often brash and always entertaining essays on subjects ranging from unconscious sexual desire in George Oppen’s poetry to the films of Whitney Houston. Many citizens of the internet will recognize Killian as one of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers, where he gives his undivided attention to everything from the newest book by vanguard poet Leslie Scalapino, to a Clearly Charming Monkey Smiling Italian Bracelet Link.

In addition to his own writing, Killian has sustained much editorial and critical work on the poet Jack Spicer, who in his brief life gained some notoriety as one of the leaders (along with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser) of the San Francisco Renaissance, and whose reputation since his death in 1965 has continued to grow well beyond the Bay Area—due in no small part to Killian’s efforts. Along with poet and Spicer’s contemporary Lewis Ellingham, Killian cowrote Poet Be Like God (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), a sprawling biography of Spicer and the San Francisco scene in his day. Now, with the poet Peter Gizzi, Killian has coedited one of the most anticipated poetry books of the year, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, $35), a book which will undoubtedly have a large impact on a generation of younger poets for whom Spicer is already a central figure. In the following interview, we discuss things Spicerian in honor of its publication.

Joseph Bradshaw: I was talking with the scholar Dee Morris recently about Jack Spicer's allure. We both agreed that he is a poet to whom readers are drawn instinctively, almost erotically; we also agreed that this attraction is hard to articulate. Why do readers feel such a pull into his texts? In responding, please talk about your own experiences with Spicer: what brought you to his work, what your experience has been and how it has changed throughout the years, and what keeps you engaged with him.

Kevin Killian: Joseph, my answers to your questions are almost embarrassingly personal and anecdotal, and they came to me in bursts like the fireworks in the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses, in flares of melty sentiment! I remember going to graduate school in the 1970s and Louis Simpson advising me not to waste time on Spicer, saying that if I had to go all freaky California I should study Robert Duncan. And no, I couldn't put Spicer on my orals. Absurd notion. Then moving to San Francisco in 1980 and somehow winding up in Robert Glück's workshop along with Lew Ellingham, and falling in love with Lew during a particular spring night on 24th Street—walking alongside him on the pavement, fog low, at the knees of our pants perhaps, and thinking to myself that every step I was taking, and every word Lew was speaking about having known Spicer, and the perfection of Spicer's late writing, was bringing me into an erotic haze that I would never be able to find my way out of, so I barged on despite all the thorns in that wracked forest. He was fifty then, I think—younger than I am now anyhow—and I was in my twenties and thinking I was giving myself up to an older guy for purposes of transmission. (You see, I had a ridiculous mind, but I'm fond of that boy and I never regretted any of it.)

In my experience young people are often drawn to Spicer, perhaps as they are drawn to any brightly colored and mythical artist, and then there will come a moment of revulsion and one moves on to something like the austerities of Michael Palmer. The young are drawn to the legend—the dictation, the radio, the extreme purity, the death drive, the magic workshop, etc. There's a particular eros in Spicer and maybe it's composed of the residue of his own eros, so painfully naked inside the cage of the verse. He wanted love so much, perhaps one can't help but respond? He is also good at speaking directly to the reader, imagining the reader of the future, that young woman with one hand on the wheel, that boy on the farm in Ohio, articulating his readership almost as a sculptor.

My experience has changed over the years, and this I think of primarily in terms of having written (with Lew) that biography, and following helplessly what I subsequently learned were the three stages of biography. Stage one, you love your subject, and everyone else is wrong in some way. A lot of biographies seem to be of this booster sort. Then there's stage two, in which at a certain point you realize, uh-oh, he was just human after all, and he was filled with faults, and this comes as a giant shock—a shock which freezes some biographers into adopting a position in which their books become evidence for the prosecution. I don't know of course, but that's the feeling one gets, isn't it, when one reads Ekbert Fass's book on the young Robert Creeley or Tom Clark's life of Charles Olson, a book I admire a good deal but one that seems needlessly contestatory, like Olson was not the great Oz and everyone should know it. And then there's the third stage of biography, where you seek the balance between the good and the evil in your subject and find the actual person somewhere in there. I don't know, maybe that's how friendship works in regular life? Anyway, that's why I came away loving the new life of [Louis] Zukofsky, because Mark Scroggins had every right to stay in stage one and he didn't—he moved on to the dangerous shoals of stage two and pushed right on through to the bay of stage three.

JB: You mentioned that your friendship with Lew Ellingham began in 1980, and Poet Be Like God was published in 1998. Each time I open the book, I am struck by the sheer volume of voices in collision. Could you talk a bit about the process of collaboratively writing the book? How did it start? How did you sift through the mass of stories, lore, and remembrances of Spicer and the various poetry communities of his day?

KK: I think I met Lew in 1982, because he was already writing a book on Spicer. Basically I joined up full time sometime early in 1990, when Lew had completed the book he wanted to write—an oral history of the Spicer circle in North Beach from 1957 through 1965—a wonderful book in its own right, but publishers wanted (if they wanted something on Spicer at all) a more linear biography. Lew asked for my help because, as a novelist, I had written narrative before and knew how to tell a story from A to Z.

How did it work? Lew gave me carte blanche to all his voluminous materials, files, memories, and contacts. If you’ve looked at the online files for the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD, where Lew’s papers now reside, you know that he interviewed dozens of witnesses, many at great length, as well as securing all sorts of helpful odds and ends—he’d gotten a letter from Frank O’Hara to Jasper Johns for example, not just a copy, the actual letter!—and all of these were mine to plunder. And I had his vast manuscript as well, which he said I could chop and change as I saw fit. My work divided itself into three main areas: turning his oral history into narrative; working in research libraries, which I came to enjoy greatly; and interviewing more people on my own. Lew had done many, many interviews but some he’d avoided, or perhaps been given short shrift by—he had the great advantage of knowing many of the parties involved, but intimacy has its drawbacks, so there were some who knew Spicer who just plain didn’t care for Lew, and vice versa. Whereas I, whom nobody knew, could go where angels fear to tread. So I was looking for people Lew had avoided for one reason or another, and also people who had known Spicer in earlier periods of his life, since Lew had concentrated on the final years. Donald Allen had helped Lew to a limited degree, but he really helped me; the reclusive Jess (whom Lew had hardly dared to approach) gave me hours of his time over several months, admitting that he had sworn to himself never to speak about Spicer, but that now he was putting aside his vow in the service of an ultimate mercy and truth.

I was pretty shameless in pursuing my leads—if there’s an ethical code of biography I punctured it again and again. There were guys who wouldn’t speak to a straight biographer. There were some who didn’t want to deal with a gay biographer. Some expected sexual favors—or wanted them anyhow. I would target specific areas in Spicer’s life and try to bring them to life via human memory. I knew, for example, that he had taught one class at San Francisco State at the same time that he was teaching his magic workshop, but we didn’t know of anyone who was in the class. That was one of my targets, and before long I had spoken to three former students—including Pauline Oliveros, who is a real hero of mine—who knew she was in that class? I found myself with entrée to a lot of my heroes. Sure, I was rebuffed many times, but what’s that in comparison to when they say yes? And the research and the interviews continue, you know. Not long ago Lew and I took a guy out to lunch who had taught in the same department at the same time as Spicer and who had very vivid memories of him. I’m still looking everywhere and occasionally I turn up something very great.

As it happens, as with any cult figure, there were truths so obvious about Spicer that I didn’t want to believe them. His distaste for celebrity, for example, or the myth of his obedience to dictation. Or his misogyny. The facts were there, I just couldn’t see them because I had fallen victim to the myths Spicer spun about himself. I guess we all have that, that side of ourselves that creates its own legend as we proceed in life. The difference is that Spicer was a very great writer with more emotive power than most.

JB: I’m intrigued by your mention of the way that Spicer created a mythology about himself and his work, especially the "myth of his obedience to dictation." How has having a privileged view of Spicer—seeing his working papers, notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, and so on—changed your view of Spicer’s insistence upon dictation as the "purest" form of poetic practice?

KK: Everyone who knows anything about Spicer knows of his theories of dictation, and even before Peter’s edition of Spicer’s Vancouver lectures [The House That Jack Built (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)], we all gathered something of his feeling—you can’t read After Lorca without being sucked into the web of inner and outer space propounded within, the push and pull of the living and the dead, the desperate importation from the outside. I said that Spicer attracts the young, and it’s his dictation that gets them first of all, for it’s a system which flies in the face of common sense and yet, wait a second, it does make sense, more and more so, in the cyborg/robotic/half-"Martian" world we live in when we’re young.

But I don’t know how far Spicer believed in it in practice, and the more one examines his papers, the less one can be sure that he worked via dictation only. You know the extreme case in which two poems in the Book of Magazine Verse are identical, for Spicer was "given" this poem twice? That’s a tough one to swallow, and after a while I began thinking of "dictation" as an instance of willfulness—the very exemplar of the willful. At least when it came to the manuscripts, you can see that, for example, when Spicer wanted to begin Language, the famous poem that begins, "This ocean, humiliating in its disguises," he could summon up, or the Martians helped him remember, a poem he had written four or five years earlier that was then part of a very different series. So we would find a single poem being used in different ways in different series, the way that a single letter will be part of 24-down in a crossword puzzle as well as 42-across. "Thing Language" itself is like a fantastic repository of remnants, I think, of different serial poems that were (perhaps) all being woven at the same time, or within a similar range of months. "A redwood forest is not invisible at night" is indistinguishable from the other "Map Poems" Spicer was writing in 1964, and yet that’s the one he picked out for "Thing Language." Why? Don’t know. Was it the best of the "Map Poems"? I don’t believe so. I hesitate to say that he had genius—but if so it was perhaps that his genius, like William Faulkner’s, lay in collaging already existing texts (or modes) into new combinations that amount to new forms.

However, it took some time before one could actually recognize this drift, due to the sheer kryptonite strength of the blinders we were wearing, the blinders which Spicer himself put up with his well-known responses to those who asked him, what happens to a serial poem if the Martians don’t deliver? I throw it away, he would say. Not so, Joseph. Not really. I think the poems were patched up in various ways and Spicer’s inspiration came, not only from the "outside," but from all the usual sources poets have been working with for eons. There’s one amusing turn in the notebooks where Spicer is drafting a response to a want ad for a teaching job, and then he turns the page and uses many of the same business-y phrases from his letter, and makes a poem out of them:

Fifteen False Propositions Against God, IV

Real bad poems
Dear Sir: I should like to—
Hate and love are clarifications enough of themselves, do not
belong in poetry, embarrass the reader and the poet, lack
Dignity.
Or the dignity of a paper airplane
That you throw at someone’s face
And it swoops across the whole occasion quickly
Hitting every angle.
Hate and love are clar—
Dear Sir: I should like to make sure that everything that I said
about you in my poetry was true, that you really existed,
That everything that I said was true
That you were not an occasion
In a real bad scene
That what the poems said had meaning
Apart from what the poems said.
Dear Sir:
My mouth has meanings
It had not wanted to argue.

JB: I’m intrigued by your understanding of dictation as a particularly forceful willfulness, which reminds me of the sixth section of "Graphemics" from Language: "This is an act of will and the flame is / is not really there for the candle, I / Am writing my own will." I’m also intrigued by your mention of the ways Spicer’s private papers contradict the public statements of the Vancouver lectures, especially his re-contextualizing of individual poems into different series. I’m wondering if you could talk more about Spicer’s habits of revision: Did they change throughout the years, or from project to project, poem to poem? What do you think the impact of dictation had on his habits of revision, if any?

KK: The particular tendency in Spicer I spoke of—working in several series at once, to the point of crisscrossing—isn’t my own discovery nor anything new really. Anyone who knows Spicer’s poetry has seen this process in action, watching the 1940s Berkeley poem "Dardanella" turn into the poem "Rimbaud" in The Heads Of The Town [up to the Aether], or finding the Minneapolis poem "All Hallows Eve" emerge in the middle of "An Exercise" (1961) with a new title, "Always in October," and considerable revision. It’s always been there, just hard to recognize as an ongoing practice for Spicer.

Spicer’s habits of revision do undergo a sea change. The manuscript of "Homage to Creeley" is a mess, and yet in the marvelous notebook for "Explanatory Notes," "he never blotted out a line," as Jonson wrote of Shakespeare. After the period of The Holy Grail, he seems to have revised very little. The manuscripts we have of Golem (1962), "For Harris" (1963), Map Poems (1963-4), Language (1963-5), and Book of Magazine Verse (1965) are remarkably clean even in comparison to the projects Spicer worked on immediately prior to this final period—For Major General Abner Doubleday, Lament for the Makers, A Red Wheelbarrow (all 1961). But as I say, all of these projects, bar the Book of Magazine Verse, come with "out-takes," poems which for one reason or another failed to make it into the associated books, and in a few cases, I think, he just forgot he had written them! (The extradiagetical Language poems, or should I say Language-era poems, are, for me, the most precious and surprising, especially if we include Map Poems among them.) But yes, I think that as his theories of dictation developed, his practice followed—or perhaps his reception improved? Even his technical prose, such as the very late (1964) linguistic analysis of Arthur Gates and Miriam Huber’s 1951 reader for children (Splash!), runs for pages and pages and pages with hardly a cross-out or a sign of hesitation.

JB: I’d like to ask you now about how you perceive changes in Spicer’s reception over the years. For instance, I’m sitting here in front of a copy of Acts 6, A Book of Correspondences for Jack Spicer, published way back in 1987, and I’m struck by how it presents Spicer primarily as a San Francisco writer—more than two decades after death, his presence was still tied to the city, as if haunting it. But now, another two decades hence, this isn’t strictly the case. In editing his collected works, what are you currently seeing as far as his reading public is concerned: Who is reading Spicer, and where are they? Are they, as I think you’ve implied, mostly young poets? Are there different Spicers nowadays—a Spicer for San Francisco poets, say, and a Spicer for Midwesterners?

KK: It has been sort of strange watching someone enter the canon, so to speak, since over the years as I have kept working on Spicer—even vaguely and without official sanction—his stock has largely risen, and you see him included in anthologies now, in general histories of the period, indeed he has become a general fact of the weather, a rather different situation to the one that prevailed some years back when an academic reader declined our biography of Spicer on the grounds that he was a "coterie poet," whose work had appeal only to a "handful of California homosexuals." Even in the anthologies in which his work does not appear, there’s a bow to this exclusion—I think of the Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium, and how, when volume II appeared, Pierre wrote me a note assuring me that they loved Spicer and that the inclusion of his translations of Lorca in the first volume was a positive form of "representing" him, and that this view of things enabled them to find space to include Robin Blaser. Which was great, of course. The past twenty-five years have made me wonder if a certain amount of patient slogging and nagging, such as I have done for Spicer, would be enough to put any dead figure into the public mind. The old gnat-in-the-ear theory.

I’m not sure who is reading Spicer nowadays, though I suspect it is not only the very young. When I was introduced to Donald Revell, he picked me up and hugged me—just like Richard Gere picking up Debra Winger at the end of An Officer and a Gentlemen!—in recognition of the efforts that Lew, Peter, and I have made for Spicer’s memory. It was exhilarating; I cried a little. And yes, there are different Spicers. There’s my Spicer, for instance, the man who struggled to overcome his own misogyny and the misogyny that became a social construction for gay males of the period; the man who worked with and encouraged Kay Johnson, Fran Herndon, Joanne Kyger, Jay DeFeo, Helen Adam, etc.; and then there’s the Jack Spicer of Maggie Nelson’s new study Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions—an otherwise excellent book which, infuriatingly enough, presents an unreconstructed, anti-female Jack Spicer on just about no evidence at all, just word of mouth and a cursory cruise through two books by Michael Davidson.

JB: To end, I’d like to ask you about how Spicer has affected you as a writer. I just read an interview you did with Gary Sullivan in which you said: "I've been driven to expose myself in print, to unravel the mystery of my own personality, to discover why and how so many horrid things have been done by a man, myself, whom at bottom I consider as the sweetest soul on Earth!" On the surface, this strikes me as very un-Spicerian. Or maybe, judging from various things you’ve said in the course of our interview, this is precisely Spicer’s influence on you? Talk a bit about how you—being a writer who runs the gamut from fiction to theater to biography and so forth—see yourself in relation to Spicer.

KK: I’m an artist with a complicated relationship to California and to the class in which I was born. I guess I’m more like Spicer than I thought. People got on my case for mentioning (in Poet Be Like God) that Spicer fretted that his genitals were too small—and I was surprised this would be an issue for readers, and it sank in that gee, maybe I’m in the minority here, thinking that genitalia are a legitimate subject for discourse. (To this day, when I meet somebody, they will often bring that up first. Not, "Oh, you’re a poet," or, "Oh, you live in San Francisco," but, "You wrote that book that said that Spicer had a small penis." As though I should be ashamed.) And the truth is that shame, guilt, and hysteria are my subjects and always have been. Maybe I gave the world a Spicer more haunted than he had to be, a man more compromised than another biographer would have painted him. But that’s my New Narrative training where, we were taught, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, then the fact, then the legend," ad infinitum, so that the true and the false become a scrawl of intertangled interpellations calling each other out like faults. In my own writing, I let myself be totally swayed by my received notions of dictation, and I’d write a poem and then have no idea what it meant. But as I look back on my production I see, a bit to my chagrin, that everything has a meaning, indeed usually the meaning a monkey could have read into it. I do see Spicer as—I almost said "more than a poet," but I mean he was not entirely invested with poetry; like his master Aleister Crowley he believed himself capable of writing novels, plays, manifestoes, stories, light verse, how-to books, whatever. Among the most appealing things in the Spicer papers at the Bancroft Library is the sheer insouciance with which he approached, flouted, confounded genre restrictions: "you can do anything" was the whole of his law. And I appreciate that.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009