Wondering what some of those past online contributors to TriQuarterly have been up to? Well, they have been busy doing amazing things:

Meena Alexander (“Red Bird” and “Impossible Grace”; issue 141) recently addressed the Yale Political Union and has a book of poems forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in August 2013, Birthplace with Buried Stones.

Jeffrey Allen’s ("other people's poems"; issue 139) chapbook was recently published from H_NGM_N Books alongside Issue #15 of the online journal. The issue can be accessed at http://www.h-ngm-n.com/cur_ent-i_sue. The chapbook is available at http://www.h-ngm-n.com/storage/ALLEN-bone.pdf.

Ian Bassingthwaighte ("The Cardboard Dress"; issue 139) has written a novel about his experience in Egypt (after finishing his Fulbright in fiction there), and the manuscript has since been picked up by the Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency. His short story collection has also been completed. It includes an edited version of his story The Cardboard Dress, which first appeared in TriQuarterly. Ian has also had a short story appear in the Winter 2013 issue of The Southern Review (the story is called "The Elephant Walk") and a short short appear online at Tin House (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/14666/master-plotto-week-two-winner-ian-bassingthwaighte.html). In addition, he was also recently admitted into the Helen Zell Writer's Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He has a new photography/writing website up at www.igbass.com.

Hadara Bar-Nadav ("How Soft This Prison Is", "What Care the Dead for Day", "A Brittle Heaven"; issue 139) has had two new books come out in the past year: Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (Saturnalia Books, 2013); and The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize. Both are available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Frame-Called-Ruin-Hadara-Bar-Nadav/dp/1936970082 and http://www.amazon.com/Lullaby-Exit-Sign-Hadara-Bar-Nadav/dp/098336866X/ref=sr_1_2?s=booksandie=UTF8andqid=1368307392andsr=1-2.

E. Louise Beach ("Homage to Messiaen", "Ophelia's Flowers", "Come, let me love you"; issue 139) was recipient of an Individual Artist's Grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland. She has had publications in The Antigonish Review, The Texas Review, The Santa Clara Review, Barrow Street, Main Street Rag, damselfly press, Pinion, Women Arts Quarterly Journal, Trigger, Basalt, The Flagler Review and NIMROD and readings at The Writer's Center, Bethesda, MD; St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY; HearArts, Rockville, Maryland. Her chapbook, Sine Nomine, was published by Finishing Line Press. She was a finalist in the May Swenson Poetry Award, 2010. Her song cycle, Ophelia's Flowers, was performed at the Eastman School of Music and at St. John Fisher College. Requiem - Elegy was performed at Dickinson College. "Dusk," the first of The Edith Poems, was performed by baritone and CAG winner Mischa Bouvier at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall and during a broadcast of WQXR, New York's classical music station.

Garrett Brown (“The Agony of St. Martin”; issue 139) recently had a nonfiction piece, “Galileo in the Uecker Seats,” published in Black Warrior Review. He also has a chapbook of poems, Cubicles, forthcoming this fall/winter 2013 from Finishing Line Press.

Thea Brown (Cleaning Up the Verbal Situation (Hello, Valery)", "An Illustrated Almanac"; issue 142) released a chapbook called We Are Fantastic, published by Petri Press this spring. She also has a few forthcoming pubs scheduled for release by the summer.

Brittany Cavallaro ("Tautology", "Leitmotif"; issue 142) has had her poems, "Censored History" and "Liebestod" appear in Tin House 54, Winter 2012. Other poems are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Barrow Street, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Salt Hill.

Susan Comninos (“Deconstruction Workers” and “Italian for You”; issue 139) has published poetry in Subtropics, The Cortland Review, Tulane Review, Literary Mama, and Tablet Magazine. Her poetry was recently anthologized in The American Dream published by Blue Thread. She has poetry forthcoming in J Journal: New Writing on Justice.

Carlos Cunha ("The Frenchwoman's Letter"; issue 139) has an essay published in The Manchester Review, the online journal put out by the New School of Writing at the University of Manchester in England. The piece is entitled "The Traffic Noir" and can be found here: http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=2496

Spencer Dew ("The Process of Discovery"; issue 141) had his first novel, Here Is How It Happens, published by Ampersand Books in March. http://ampersand-books.com/here-is-how-it-happens-by-spencer-dew/. The book was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9841025-9-4. It was the May feature at http://crowdthebook.com/.

Brian Doyle ("The New Bishop"; issue 141) is the new electric columnist for The American Scholar, and he has two small collections of essays coming out this fall (The Thorny Grace of It, spiritual essays, from Loyola Press, and Reading in Bed, bookish essays, from Corby Books), and a whopping novel called The Plover out in April 2014 from St. Martin's Press.

Rebecca Dunham ("Insomnia Ghazal"; issue 142) recently won the Lindquist and Vennum Prize for her book, Glass Armonica, which will be published in November 2013. (The poem published in TriQuarterly is in the book, too.)

Joan Frank (“Never Enough”; issue 139) is a finalist for the 2012 ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Writing for her recent book of collected essays, Because You Have To. The winners will be announced during the American Library Association Conference in Chicago, June 28, 2013. She also has become a weekly blog contributor to the online magazine, AUTHOR.

Ben Greenman ("Letterhead"; issue 139) has a novel, The Slippage, coming out from HarperCollins.

Fady Joudah (“In the Picture” and “Into Life”; issue 141) has been shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize for the Yale translation, Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me and also has a new poetry collection, Alight, recently published by Copper Canyon Press.

EJ Koh (“Antti Revonsuo”; issue 140) has just released her debut novel, Red, from Collective Presse.

Tyler Mills ("Penelope's Firebird Weft"; issue 140) is happy to announce that her first book of poems, Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, SIU Press) came out in March 2013. Also, she is going to be at the Vermont Studio Center this summer on a work-study/artist grant.

Brenda Miller (“36 Holes”; issue 140) has co-authored with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, published in 2012. The second edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, co-authored with Suzanne Paola, was also published in 2012.

Jacob Newberry ("Origins"; issue 141) was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Jerusalem in Creative Writing (Poetry) for 2011-2012. His essay "What You Will Do" won the Ploughshares 2012 Emerging Writers' Contest in Nonfiction. His short story "The Long Bright World" won the Southwest Review's 2012 McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Best Fiction. He was awarded a Tuition Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He was awarded a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. In addition, his essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and the North American Review.

Brittany Perham ("Afterlove", "Father", "Escape"; issue 139) is the author of the poetry collection, The Curiosities. She is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. In the winter of 2013-2014, she'll be a writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington Connecticut. Her poems have recently been anthologized in the audio archive From the Fishouse, and new work is forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review.

Dian Duchin Reed (“Reincarnation”; issue 141) has poems forthcoming in Spillway, Texas Review, and TriQuarterly. Reed will also be completing the translation of Tao Te Ching from Chinese into modern English poetry in 2013. Two of the poems can be found in Salamander’s June 2013 issue.

Evie Shockley ("sound effects", "backsliding", "the people want the regime to fall"; issue 140) will be reading at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Benefit Reading in Sacramento, CA on June 21 at 7:00 p.m. and in the Bryant Park Reading Series in NYC on August 20 at 6:30 p.m. Her book The New Black was awarded the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry

Christine Sneed ("The River"; issue 140) published her second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury USA) along with a paperback edition of her first book, the story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry. The Chicago Public Library Foundation announced that Christine will be receiving the 21st Century Award on October 23, which is when they will present Isabel Allende and Michael Lewis with the Carl Sandburg Award. The 21st Century Award has been given in past years to Aleksandr Hemon, Rebecca Skloot, Audrey Niffenegger, and a number of other writers with ties to Chicago.

Rebecca Spears (“Beauvoir, at the Louisiane”; issue 141) recently had an essay, “Christopher’s House and the Moon Tower,” published in the 2013 winter issue of Ars Medica. She also participated in a poetry reading at University of St. Thomas and continues to work on the board of Mutabilis Press.

Joseph Spece (“Dear Postmodern Girlfriend”; issue 141) has published his first book, Roads, by Cherry Grove. His recent publications can be seen in The Bacon Review, Orion, Salamander, and Guernica.

David Starkey’s ("Taliban Kill 10 on Aid Trip in Afghanistan); issue 140) new book of poems, Circus Maximus, is out from Biblioasis: http://www.amazon.com/Circus-Maximus-David-Starkey/dp/1927428203 And the second edition of his textbook Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief has just been published: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/catalog/Product/creativewriting-secondedition-starkey.

Julia Story (Red Town #13"; issue 140) recently returned from a trip to SUNY Potsdam where she was a visiting writer at the Lougheed Festival of the Arts. She gave a reading there on April 30 and met with creative writing students to discuss their work. She also started a new position as part-time faculty at Emerson College in January.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain ("Traversing Tiananmen Square from the Underground; issue 142) A new (second) book of poetry, My Funeral Gondola is forthcoming in May 2013 as a Manoa Books title from El Leon Literary Arts in California. She has also recently co-edited the anthology, On Freedom: Spirit, Art and State (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013).www.fionasze.com

http://www.elleonliteraryarts.org/b_my_funeral_gondola.php

http://www.fionasze.com/writings/poetry/my_funeral_gondola.html

David Trinidad's ("Anne Sexton Visits Court Green", "Jacqueline Susann and her husband Ivring Mansfield, Los Angeles, Cal., 1969", "Chasing the Moon (with Anne Waldman)"; issue 139) Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera is forthcoming from Turtle Point Press in September. An excerpt from this book will appear in The Best American Poetry 2013, edited by Denise Duhamel.

Nick Twemlow's ("Wolfvision"; issue 141, "DARPA Grand Challenge"; issue 143) first book of poems, Palm Trees, recently won the 2013 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Lina Vitkauskas (Litmus", "Hypno"; issue 139) released a new book in January called A Neon Tryst (Shearsman Books). She did a kick-off reading at the Dollhouse Reading Series for this book. Very soon, an interview about this book will be out (on podcast) — Radio Free Albion, hosted by Associate Chair of Columbia College's Poetry Department, Tony Trigilio. HTMLGIANT, the Chicago Reader, and New City will be reviewing this book soon as well. In February, she was featured on LitBridge and had a review posted in Montevidayo. In March, she was featured on Chicago School of Poetics website: http://www.chicagoschoolofpoetics.com. In addition, she recently published two poems in Tarpaulin Sky and two poems in Matter and she will have poems coming out in Coconut and The Awl over the the summer. She has a manuscript called Professional Poetry and a chapbook called These Are My Dreams under submission at numerous places, and she’s releasing an epic poem titled SPINY RETINAS on Mutable Sound press. She is involved in a collaborative ekphrastic project called "12 Intrigues" with a dance artist/poet, Tashi Ko (Natasha Marin) from Seattle/Vancouver (September). She also has a shiny new website: Lina ramona Vitkauskas.

Bruce Weigl (“My Dimension” and “My Nymphomania”; issue 139) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2013 for his recent collection of poetry, The Abundance of Nothing published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Daniel Wenger (“The Criminal is Young and Imaginary,” “The Criminal is Young and Invisible,” and “The criminal is Young and Improbable”; issue 139) recently started a job as an editor at a new longform publishing platform called Medium (www.medium.com), a project from Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone. To start contributing, email him at daniel@medium.com.

Patrice Repusseau ("Of Two Stranger Hands: A Reading of William Goyen's 'Precious Door'"; issue 139) has published a collection of poems about the "I" (or rather the "my") and the "Self" in 2011 entitled chansons du moi et de son Même, éditions Les Deux Océans, 19 rue du Val-de-Grâce, 75005 Paris (www.lesdeuxoceans.fr). And a new book has just come out : Ebleui suivi de Inizi, éditions Non Lieu, 224 rue des Pyrénées, 75020 Paris (editionsnonlieu.fr). It is a book about Houat, a small island off the coast of Brittany. Patrice has also translated Charles Chadwick's It's all right now (817 pages) and The voyage by Murray Bail, and, in addition, the recently completed French rendition of the Yoga Vasishtha.

Inscriptions for Headstones
by Matthew Vollmer
OP19 Books

Matthew Vollmer’s newest book, Inscriptions for Headstones, asks: when we die, what will matter most about how we lived? The issue of legacy preoccupies many, especially writers. When they die, they leave their words behind. Authors wonder what those words will say about them when they aren’t able to speak for themselves anymore. So Vollmer is in good authorial company in exploring death. Despite all the writings that have come before his, Vollmer manages to find his own way into the weighty subject.

To do it, he mixes key ingredients from his previous works. In Vollmer’s first book, a collection of short stories titled Future Missionaries of America, he used his skill with detail to create an assortment of lively characters. Then, in the collection of essays he cowrote with David Sheilds—Fakes: Pseudo-interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts and Other Fraudulent Artifacts—Vollmer experimented with unconventional storytelling forms. In Inscriptions for Headstones, he brings together vivid descriptions, believable characters, and a unique format in a take on death that feels fresh, playful and specific.

The book is composed of thirty five- or six-page chapters, formatted as epitaphs. Each one begins with a traditional tombstone platitude such as “rest in peace . . .” or “here lies a man who . . .” Then they spin out into rambling stories, each written in a single sentence. The stories all seem to be about the same man, referred to only as “the deceased.” The chapters float out of chronological order like a train of thought. Sometimes the leaps between chapters seem random and interruptive. Other times it is clear that the theme of one story triggers the next. For instance, a story about the deceased’s mistakes as a father is followed by a story about how his own father never seemed to make any errors.

The stories are selectively vague. The deceased’s wife, parents, son, and friends appear often in the book. Their actions, words, and settings are rendered with evocative precision. This makes it seem as if the deceased is someone specific, with a full life. At the same time, few of the characters are named or physically described in detail. So it also seems as if the deceased could be any number of people you know.

The chapter-long sentences can be unwieldy. Vollmer must perform awkward syntactic acrobatics to sustain them. Some sections must be read two or three times in order to untangle the subjects, descriptions, and actions involved. For instance: “he had once dressed up in an Elvis costume he’d borrowed from his creative writing professor, a man who’d not only written a novel about an Elvis impersonator but had also become an impersonator himself, as a sort of experiment upon which, thanks to the urging of his publisher, he had based a memoir . . ” Readers have to slow down when they should be thrust forward.

But the single-sentence chapters work more often than they don’t. Sometimes they show flashes of easy, breathless connectedness. Chapter XV gracefully describes a narrowly avoided car accident without even pausing for a comma:

the car spinning in slowmo everything silver and streaks of ruby taillights the car crossing the median and swinging into a lane there the deceased braced himself for the impending impact of an oncoming semi he predicted would crush his body to roadside jelly but suddenly the car after having completed a three hundred and sixty degree turn came to a stop in the middle turning lane facing the direction he had been traveling and he had no words for what had just happened except that it felt like a miracle . . .

The headstone inscription conceit allows Vollmer to display a single life from thirty different angles. The deceased could be judged based on any one of the stories that follow each chapter’s opening clichéd platitude. But the book, as a whole, makes the point that a man is defined by more than one thing. The epitaphs must be layered on top of one another to build a complete story. Together, they portray a man who is nuanced, flawed, and realistic.

In an early chapter, Vollmer describes the deceased as a boy taking a bath. His bathtub becomes the outer hull of Noah’s ark, and the deceased imagines that he is drowning in the biblical flood that wiped out almost all of humanity. The deceased uses his imagination to unlock the possibilities in his ordinary surroundings. Likewise, Vollmer unlocks the rich themes contained in the deceased’s daily life.

Vast ideas about the nature of life and death bloom inside of mundane activities. When the deceased goes jogging, he slips into philosophical anxiety: “his lungs were burning and he could feel his pulse in his temples and the phone was pumping epic beats through his head he would become overwhelmed by the ephemeral nature of life and acknowledge that, at any time, any of these things could be taken away from him . . ”

Occasionally Vollmer succumbs to heavy-handedness. In the last chapter, for instance, he directly asks the question the rest of the book asks more subtly: “please ask yourself what you would say if you knew you only had maybe five or six more breaths before dissolving into oblivion, would you say ‘sorry’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I never loved you enough’ . . .” Fortunately, though, Inscriptions for Headstones doesn’t wallow in grand ideas. The deceased is only ever able to philosophize for a moment or two before his son or his wife or some other tangible concern interrupts him. He easily slips out of touch with the cosmic significance of his life. Vollmer realistically portrays how difficult it is to stay appreciative, connected, and fulfilled. He shows that life barrels forward like a sentence without a period, and ends whether you are finished attuning yourself to the universe or not.

The Cost of Living
by Rob Roberge
Other Voices Books

Both gritty and lyrical, The Cost of Living by Rob Roberge is a drug-fueled emotional rollercoaster ride that mainlines the voices of Denis Johnson, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Carroll, leaving you spent and shaky, looking for your next fix. Roberge shows us the life and times of Bud Barrett, a failed musician, who has fallen from grace. Jumping back and forth from the present to the past, touching down at various crossroads in Bud’s troubled existence, Roberge paints a vivid picture of loss and hope, desire and human frailty, redemption and addiction, that is painful to watch and yet a cautionary tale for us all.

Either Roberge has had a rough life or he simply found a way to channel the authenticity of the junkie experience. I’m guessing a little of both. Part of what makes this such a compelling story are the details, the up-close moments that make us squirm and look away, always coming back to the page to see how it turns out. Even if you’ve never had so much as a beer or a joint, let alone speed, heroin, or morphine, the visceral accounts of euphoria and withdrawal Roberge injects into the story give you everything you need to understand the duality of addiction. This is Bud on suffering and rehab:

The first three days of cleaning out are a pain and suffering you can’t believe are happening. And the suffering gets wrapped up in the awareness that you did this to yourself. That you’ve been doing it to yourself for years. Every cramp, every sandpaper-hot rusty pained blink of your aching eyes, every stream and eruption of puke and piss and shit you can’t control escaping from your clenched, hurt body, every nerve ending going off like a trillion simultaneous electric shocks, every second of begging for sleep and not getting it. Through all of that, you sit there, rolling on the floor, despising yourself and swearing you’ll never, never, never go through this again, no matter what.

What adds to this physical pain and suffering is the emotional damage that goes with it. What he doesn’t say at the end of this passage, but we hear in our head, is the next line: And yet, you do it again. That’s addiction, that’s the power of the monkey that sits on your back screeching in your ear.

Buried beneath the years of addiction, and failure, is the dysfunction that Bud was forced to endure by his abusive father and long-dead mother. There is a history of insanity in the family, physical and mental abuse, and, of course, a wide range of drug addictions. When you stack the angry father on top of the suicide of the mother, the son is mangled and fractured from the beginning. Take this bit of advice from Bud’s father: “I’m going to give you a life lesson, Bud. Everyone who matters to you? You want to know what life boils down to? They bury you or you bury them.”

This is not a healthy relationship. It’s not surprising that much later in the novel, Bud has these thoughts about his life and his actions: “The thought of killing my father sickens me. I would never have imagined my life would come to a moment like this. But then, my life has been filled with moments I never would have guessed were coming. Everyone’s life is, I suppose. None of us are special.”

This is the mind that has been destroyed over the years. This is the voice of a man who has found love and lost it through his inability to control his habits, to remain clean, to keep his word. And that’s a heavy weight that settles over the reader.

But this novel is not one note—it is not just a vicious circle of failure and depression, surrounded by the bliss and enlightenment of the fleeting highs that Bud seeks. We are allowed to feel the excitement of his career as a musician, the core member of a band called the Popular Mechanics. We get to witness his genius as a poker player, the mind behind the math and courage it takes to play this game at the highest levels. And we get to know him as husband, the way he gives himself over to his wife Olivia, and the intimacy and beauty of two people that are engulfed by each other, made whole by each other—the sum greater than its parts. And that’s what makes his failures that much more spectacular. It would be easy to laugh at the lengths he goes to in order to score drugs, the stupid plans, the ridiculous ways that he compromises himself. At times, it is funny, until you realize that this is a real person, not a cartoon, and the black comedy turns back into despair—always with a sprinkling of hope, a dusting of optimism, rooting for him to finally wake up, to get his act together, to understand the pain he is inflicting on those around him, since he obviously doesn’t care about himself.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. It’s also been said that a body pulled in many directions at once doesn’t move at all. Rob Roberge has shown us the tenderness of our humanity and the brutality of our base desires. And with the final words of his novel The Cost of Living, he shows us that even after years of abuse and pain, there is always a chance that we can change and evolve—if only we’ll fight for our miserable lives hard enough:

I dump the vial—the empty ones and the full one—into the garbage can. . . . I feel bad about not knowing some junkie in town because, whether I’m doing the morphine or not, it just feels wrong to throw the full ones out. I walk down the sidewalk and cross on the green light even though I have no idea what direction it’s taking me. No idea where I’m going, but wanting, somehow, to be in motion among strangers in this city where I was born.

Fresh from Alice George’s graduate-level Seminar on Journal Publishing (School of Continuing Studies, NU’s Creative Writing Program), comes these picks from her students. These students have also been pitching in on a variety of tasks for TQ this spring. And we thank them!

Patrick Bernhard's Picks:

The best story involving edgy hospital humor: http://subterrain.ca/fiction/114/the-phantom

Michael Kissinger’s dark comedy in “The Phantom” is very humorous, but more importantly it helps to form a genuinely moving portrait of the narrator and his personal struggles.

As the comfort of nostalgia grows, so too does the weight of memory:

http://www.bu.edu/agni/fiction/africa/matambo.html

“Like God On A Sunday Morning” by Bernard Matambo is a vital read because of how it explores the difficulty of existing in two different worlds without truly feeling a sense of belonging in either.

Caitlin Sellnow's Picks:

Story with best (non-sleazy) use of the phrase, “I was ready to bang”:

http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2012/12/sex-drugs-and-vic-giovanni-by-robert-weinberger/

This nonfiction coming-of-age story delivers sex, drugs and rock and roll in a charmingly un-glamorous way. Each character is lovingly described, but the standout is Vic Giovanni: a piano teacher who knows more than one way to “bang.”

Story that takes the best surprise-appetizing turn after opening with maggoty flour:

http://www.alimentumjournal.com/all-that-she-could-make-with-f/ - .UYK98eg1Yfw

The cuisine of Guyana is the dynamic centerpiece of this essay. The food in the story bridges cultures, muddies the roles of “teacher” and “student,” and will probably make you very hungry.

Tyler Day's Picks:

The best story about Brooklyn before everyone wanted to live in Brooklyn:

http://www.evergreenreview.com/forgotten-brooklyn-kate-oconnor-morris/

Kate O’Connor Morris waxes poetic in “Forgotten Brooklyn.” It is nostalgic and gritty. It remembers what was not as ideal, but perfectly chaotic. It is cool to read this along with Pete Hamill’s more famous “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative” piece from New York Magazine in 1969.

http://nymag.com/news/features/46992/

The best story about an arcade game champion:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9053237/q*bert-video-game-marathoning-trend-aftermath-king-kong

Michael Weinreb crushes this piece for Grantland. He is able to allow the reader to feel something for a character who would otherwise be the butt of the joke.

Tara Scannell's Picks:

Best piece about a girl with a hammer:

http://crr.trevecca.edu/the-carpenters-daughter/: Doris Plantus uses lyrical prose in “The Carpenter’s Daughter” to take you through a beautiful exploration of her father and his influence on her.

Best short prose featuring a 20^th wedding anniversary: http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/my-20th/

Ann Panning’s snapshot scenes in “On the Occasion of My 20^th Wedding Anniversary” will leave you thirsting for more of the stories she hints at.

Troy Parks' Picks:

Best short story involving the building of a blanket fort: (Found in issue 27 of the Brooklyn Review)

In her short story, “Indoor Games,” Christine Rath uses rhymthic, adolescent prose to bring to life a character who, battling a quarter-life crisis, retreats into a private, imaginative world while teetering the line between self-destruction and rejuvenation.

Best short story that uses bodily functions to expose vulnerability: (Found in issue 13 of Fiction Fix)

Eric Barnes briefly illuminates the social vulnerabilities of his characters using the arrival of a porta-potty and an eclectic collection of outsiders who recognize convenience and invade the neighborhood to use it in his short story, “The Porta-Potty.”

Ignatius Aloysius' Picks:

A brief essay that packs a punch on Brevity: http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/an-open-letter/

An Open Letter to the 5th Grader Bullying my 4th Grade Son on the Playground is crafted by writer and teacher, Ted Kluck, and is written as a missive to address a specific recipient (the 5th grade bully) with thoughtfulness and craft in mind—a must read because it is tender, hard, and humorous at the same time.

From Mudlark, an enlightening prose poem about students in Haiti:

http://mudlark.webdelsol.com/flashes/odwyer.html

Written by Irish poet and bio researcher, Laurence O'Dwyer, Education is a prose poem in three brief paragraphs that takes me to a different place altogether, one that reveals the difficulty and persistence of students in Haiti who live without privilege and who are determined to learn near UN compound lights in spite of their deprivations.

James Berg's Picks:

Best video about poetry: http://thecureforyourales.com/?p=196 “Poetry in Action” by Wes Heine is a four-part video that shows performances at the Green Mill poetry slam in Chicago and elsewhere; it includes clips from interviews with various types of poets, fans of poetry and people who absolutely hate poetry.

Must-read interview about extreme art:

http://timeoutboston.com/arts-culture/art/108735/interview-todd-pavlisko

Visual and performance artist Todd Pavlisko works with bullets and nails.

Patrick LeDuc's Picks:

The Best Existential Short Story That Will Scramble Your Brain:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

The Best Short Story Where An Experiment Gone Wrong Is A Pain-ini In The Ass:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ProfPani724.shtml

Mercedes Lucero's Picks:

The Best Prose Piece featuring a Lucky Baby

http://killauthor.com/issuetwenty/bezalelstern/

The Best Short Story with a Title Longer Than Ten Words

http://www.pankmagazine.com/alwayslookingforwaystoforgivemyselfforthethingsicantforgivemyselffor/

The Haymarket Conspiracy
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
University of Illinois Press

Has hagiography transformed a clumsy group of criminal conspirators into secular saints? Are subscription to an ideology and belief in common modes of action by individuals and small groups enough to constitute a network capable of autonomous action?

In The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, Bowling Green State University professor of history Timothy Messer-Kruse attempts to make both cases. The 1886 Haymarket affair was a mass gathering on Chicago’s near west side of workers and activists in support of the eight-hour workday that erupted in violence and left a police officer and several workers dead. It culminated in a trial of labor activists that has generally been condemned as a political show trial at worst, a hysterical overreaction at best. That four men were eventually hanged to death not for hurling the small bomb that sparked the violence but for “fomenting” an atmosphere in which a bomb could be thrown is typically treated by scholars as a miscarriage of justice. But the “martyrs” of the Haymarket, Messer-Kruse argues, were guilty of a criminal conspiracy to murder police officers as a way to spark a worker uprising. What’s worse, he writes, they were doing so as a result of their membership in an international operational conspiracy of anarchists, for whom violence was not only a tolerable but a preferred means of bringing about a stateless workers’ polity. Their advocacy of the eight-hour workday—the cause with which they are most closely associated—was little more than a pretext for propagandistic violence.

Messer-Kruse bemoans the fact that historians have chosen to ignore the Haymarketers’ affirmative support of violence as a means of “active propaganda” to motivate the working class, and that in doing so historians gloss over the legal liability the activists carried as fomenters of disorder. Nothing in the actual Haymarketers’ story, Messer-Kruse argues, makes them admirable symbols of the rights of the exploited classes. To the contrary, they were alienated from the mainstream labor and socialist movements and beholden to an insular “transatlantic anarchist network.”

That last phrase may hit the ears of contemporary readers as ambiguously consonant. There is a reason for that: Messer-Kruse advances an argument demythologizing and imputing legal liability to the Haymarket agitators that vibrates at the resonance of today’s War on Terror.

For Messer-Kruse, the Haymarket “conspiracy,” as he dubs it, was not an isolated incident of fanatics misreading the public’s appetite for mass uprising and acting rashly; it was the necessary effect of an international stateless ideology, preached and practiced by clandestine cells of semiautonomous fanatics. The state was right to react to the Haymarket “attacks” as it did, because it was facing a new type of enemy. The analogy may be discomfiting, but it is not a stretch. While today’s radical Islamists advocate a reactionary theocracy and the Haymarketers an egalitarian and peaceful utopia, under Messer-Kruse’s reading the state’s repression of ideology as a means to action is commensurate with the threat they respectively pose.

Messer-Kruse’s conclusion, that the Haymarketers’ goal was always to engender revolution through violent acts of propaganda and thus their sainthood is undeserved, misses the point in much the same way as the extrajudicial, or tortured judicial, prosecution of the War on Terror has missed the point. In the latter case what is expedient is not necessarily just, and in the former case what is just de jure is not just in any normative sense.

The book begins with a retelling of the events leading up to the bomb-throwing that took place that May evening and the subsequent trial that condemned seven men to death (two would have their sentences commuted to life, and one would kill himself in his cell). “According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial,” the author informs us, “the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb, but the meeting at which this attack was planned.” Thus Messer-Kruse believes that conviction and death by hanging was inappropriate. In turn, he accepts as essentially true the fact that the “conspiracy” to throw a bomb and precipitate attacks on police was hatched in a tavern basement, even though the evidence is sourced to police spies and none of the witnesses who described details of the meeting testified to explicit discussions regarding attacks on the police. In any case, Messer-Kruse’s assertion that the defendants were technically guilty under the conspiracy laws of the time is a cold comfort. Just as assuredly, Eugene Debs’s years-long imprisonment for criticizing the First World War draft was “just” insofar as the operative law at the time—the Espionage Act of 1917—made his speech, rather than any material effect on the war effort, illegal.

It is not disputed that some anarchist labor agitators intended to attack the symbols of the state as an act of “propaganda by deed..” Even so, did four men deserve to be hung to death because a bomb was thrown possibly as a result of that conspiracy? Messer-Kruse offers no new evidence that all four executed men participated in a meaningful way in a conspiracy to murder police officers. Rather, he indulges in an admittedly enlightening and entertaining close reading of the court documents and contemporary sources, and asks rhetorical questions meant to undermine the defendants’ assertions. A close reading, however, cannot turn the transcripts into something more than they are: observable phenomena of an unquestionably deficient, if not outright biased, legal proceeding and system. The author buttresses this close reading with, among other things, anecdotes about individuals referring to letters they no longer possessed years later. This is hardly a damning reappraisal demonstrating actual guilt.

But even if some degree of complicity in a criminal conspiracy could be established by relitigating the trial itself, Messer-Kruse draws a more troubling connection from some of the Haymarket conspirators to a particularly virulent and baneful strain of European anarchism originating in the chaos of preunification Italy and crystallized by Russian anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin. Messer-Kruse, again seemingly missing the point of the subsequent lionization of the Haymarket martyrs, does solid work in tracing the evolution of the idea of violent anarchism as a form of mass propaganda meant to awaken the slumbering illiterate masses. In so doing he ignores the irrelevance of this species-level evolution to the specific concern of how a single violent act during a protest against intolerable working conditions resulted in the state’s hanging four men.

In tracing the phylogeny of violent anarchism, Messer-Kruse does a great job of elucidating a somewhat arcane intellectual history. But when attempting to draw concrete ideological connections to the events in Chicago, he is prone to—or required to, by the lack of firm evidence—resort to abstractions. For example, he characterizes a shift in tactical emphasis among a portion of the international socialist movement as important because, although a small alteration, it entailed “a greater emphasis on one particular aspect of socialist strategy,” and thus “this minor change effected a great transcendence of long-standing and bitter debates.” If that seems obscurantist and opaque, that’s because it is.

This genealogy is intellectually compelling, if unsatisfying as a justification for reversing a century of scholarship on the Haymarket martyrs. After all, is ideological comity enough to draw a more nefarious conclusion or justify state homicide of fellow travelers? Is the holding of a worldview, and even advocating distasteful or illicit tactics associated with that ideology, dispositive of guilt whenever that ideology is instantiated? This is the central thrust of the prosecution of the War on Terror; the Supreme Court’s holding in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project states as much, namely, that even purely political speech becomes opprobrious when targeted at or emanating from a group disfavored by the state.

Messer-Kruse doesn’t fail to take some of the luster off the Haymarketers’ reputation, even if he relies for the most part on unquestioned statements by cooperators and police spies made at trial. Based on the evidence he provides, his characterization of the Haymarket “leaders” as opportunistic revolutionists bent on exploiting sincere moments of workers’ frustrations to blow things up as acts of propaganda is not unreasonable. The author goes to pains to point out that, at least according to the witnesses for the prosecution, the Haymarketers did not really care about the eight-hour workday—the cause for which they were supposedly martyred—but cared only about the opportunity it afforded them.

But even assuming all of this—assuming the meaningfulness of a connection between European and American anarchism, assuming bad intentions, assuming a “but-for” causal link on a long chain between the ideology of the Haymarketers and the events of the Haymarket affairs—four men were killed by the state and several others lost years of their lives for acts of speech, none of which were conclusively connected to the throwing of a single bomb. Nothing in Messer-Kruse’s well-researched work can transform ideological harmony into operational mechanics, acts of speech into acts of violence, or a miscarriage of justice emblematic of state hostility to the rights of the repressed into a dispassionate application of the law against an international axis of evil.

Messer-Kruse undoubtedly adds to the popular and academic scholarship on the Haymarket affair, and a contrary view is always welcome, particularly when expressed in earnest. His book is worth reading for both its concise (if overly credulous) recounting of the Haymarket trial and its excursus through the history of ideologically violent anarchism of the late nineteenth century. That does not mean, however, that his conclusions are fair to the full historical record. And the lurking-under-the-surface analogy to today’s conflict with radical political Islam, though likely unintended, is unsatisfying and unwelcome.

Let the Dark Blossom Flower
by Norah Labiner
Coffee House Press

Norah Labiner is not interested in linear storytelling or books with a traditional beginning, middle and end. You should know this before you read her work. You should know this before you commit to reading her latest novel, Let the Dark Flower Blossom. You should prepare to be challenged if you are not accustomed to books featuring five different story lines in alternating paragraphs. At the same time, you should expect to be enthralled by passages written in vivid and lyrical language that often read like poetry, in form and content, even though this is prose deliberately open to interpretation—or misinterpretation.

Let the Dark Flower Blossom tests readers’ ability to piece together events that zig and zag and digress in no apparent order. Labiner sprinkles the novel with clues, but some don’t register on a first reading. For example, her book opens with a first-person account from a character who periodically appears throughout the book but is not identified until page 153.

This experimental novel is a twisted mystery: Roman Stone, a famous writer, has been murdered and his friends, Sheldon and Eloise Schell—twins—must figure out who stabbed him with a pair of scissors. (Sounds like a game of Clue, doesn’t it?) The book, however, could hardly be classified as hard-boiled genre; if anything, it verges on Gothic.

This is a book of murder mysteries within murder mysteries. Peeling one story opens up another. As teenagers, the Schell twins’ parents are killed, and it’s not clear who is the culprit. Each twin provides a different account of the events that left them orphans. Later, a hitchhiker is murdered, and it’s not apparent who is responsible or why because Sheldon and Roman give differing accounts, each blaming the other. Much later, Sheldon’s wife dies and it’s suggested that the impetus might not have been natural causes. All this before Stone gets pricked with those scissors.

One of the book’s themes is questioning how people tell stories. Labiner includes a character who debunks victims’ memories in court. He’s married to Eloise and a pretty despicable character who frees heinous murderers and rapists by discrediting victims who clearly are telling the truth. This so-called “memory expert” provides a continuous diatribe throughout the novel about perception, how the ability to recall events is flawed, how people tell stories differently each time they give an account— just like the characters who populate Let the Dark Flower Blossom.

This is a novel full of unreliable narrators. Labiner wants the reader to choose which version of the story he or she wants to believe or which account is more credible based on the myriad of details Labiner provides. Much of the book is a labyrinth of evidence set out for readers often before they have the background to understand the significance of what they are reading. It’s a book that might make more sense—and be more pleasurable—on a second reading.

That’s not to suggest that the book is not pleasurable, at times. The scenes are detailed and evocative. Labiner skillfully describes common foods in ways that make them seem exotic. Despite being set in modern times and in the United States, the book has a decidedly Old World feel. There are rare cultural references—no Starbucks or fast food or rock music or current movie stars—and the characters spend most of their time reading or writing literature, telling stories, playing chess or walking in the snow or ferreting in the woods. And the foods they eat evoke a distant era: “The coffee was bitter black boiled through with cardamom and sweetened with honey…This was the last morning, wasn’t it? of coffee and oranges and green birds.” The characters eat licorice, bananas, figs, Goody orange soda pop, orange marmalade, chocolate oranges and Swedish cake with elderberry, espresso, pepper and oranges. Oranges are a motif that appear throughout the book to symbolize the death that ties Roman and Sheldon together.

Labiner could have set the book fifty years earlier and it might have given the novel more veracity. Who uses a typewriter these days, especially if they came of age in the 1980s? Yet Labiner’s characters are so obsessed with typing their stories on typewriters that she includes a maudlin and gimmicky “artist’s statement” with the book’s review copy noting she wrote the manuscript on a portable typewriter: “The violence with which each metal key struck the page is imprinted into the story,” she writes, suggesting that the story is different because each word was the result of a key striking paper. Maybe. And maybe it just made her more averse to revision, especially not deleting repetitive sentences.

Labiner is playing here with structure and story, the results of which are mixed. Her writing is beautiful, and, at times, the book seems more like a work of verse, aided by short, one-line sentences that fill pages and pages. If Labiner has an irritating quirk, it’s repeating the same lines multiple times. We get it. We get it. We get it.

“This is a story about a murder,” Labiner writes in her artist’s statement. “It is a book about violence. Let the Dark Flower Blossom is a book about readers who love mystery….About that moment of realization when you solve the crime just before the detective walks into the library brandishing a candle and a hand mirror to reveal the true identity of the killer.”

So, read the book, maybe more than once. Take notes, tack yellow stickies throughout, use a highlighter, underline, write in the margins, make a timeline, jot down clues, because you’re going to need a few bread crumbs to find your path through this novel. For some readers, that will be fun.

If creative nonfictionists build a persona, can persona-building also become a source of conflict and dynamism in writing? Can building a less-than-reliable persona be a deliberate strategy, much like the use of unreliable narrators in fiction, such as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? Or does any kind of unreliability in the narrator undermine the entire premise of creative nonfiction? In this five part TriQuarterly series, five writers of nonfiction and one writer of fiction brainstorm creative ways for writers to make themselves unreliable narrators—with playful, conflicted, and imaginative results.

***

Unreliable narrators are everywhere: On Fox News or MSNBC, depending on your politics. In film, theater, and of course literature, which was the original focus of a term coined by critic Wayne Booth in 1961 to refer to a fictional narrator “whose credibility has been seriously compromised” (according to the hopefully reliable Wikipedia).

Many of these unreliable narrators are deliberately lying, but others just misread their world with varying degrees of fallibility. Some are too naive, some too full of themselves. Some are going mad, some are in denial, some are jokesters. The list goes on. For the sake of this eight-minute talk, I’m going to eliminate the deliberate liars—be they the Humbert Humbertses of Lolita or the James Frey of A Million Little Pieces—and focus on those whose unreliability is not premeditated. These narrators are reporting on the world as they see it—but the reader doesn’t buy it. Two questions I’d like to raise are how the labels fiction and nonfiction change the ground rules of response, both as readers and as writers, and what makes some of us accept the “I” as reliable while others question and even condemn that same “I” narrator.

For a start, let’s consider the “I” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, brought by her husband in a country house for a rest. She hates it, she says on page 1:

There is something strange about the house—I can feel it!

I even said so to John one moonlight evening but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive; I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control. So I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

She’s agitated, but who wouldn’t be with John for a husband? She’s trying too hard to seem reasonable, so I, as a reader, am getting suspicious, but it’s when she sees in the wallpaper “a strange provoking formless sort of figure that seems to skulk around behind the silly and conspicuous front design” that I can’t ignore how skewered her world is. There is no “The wallpaper reminds me of . . .” or “The wallpaper makes me think of . . .” No, there is a man skulking around back there; she is certain of it.

In The Yellow Wallpaper the “I” is invented, as are her controlling husband and the colonial mansion where she feels imprisoned. All are controlled by the author’s imagination, which, like a puppeteer, is pulling the strings of character, scene, and plot.

But what if this book were called memoir? Suddenly the puppeteer is gone; the people are real, the plot is preordained, and the “I” narrator is also the author. Can we read on equally engaged, or do we pull back from a narrator too unreliable to tell a true story? Not because she is deliberately lying; she is not. Not because her unreliability serves no purpose; it perfectly conveys a larger truth about women’s powerlessness in marriage long before Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

But because in real life, be it at a cocktail party or in a memoir, we need to believe the “I” is credible, seeing life clearly enough to gain our trust. Gilman (who in real life did suffer greatly from depression and a bad marriage) could have written the above excerpt as creative nonfiction, if, early on, she signaled to the reader: “That was the old me, the one who felt that way one summer.” Maybe she’d do it by switching from present to past tense. Or by moving back and forth through time. Or by a series of “I didn’t know then ____” or “Later I will know____.” Or just by changing the font. In some way, I would argue, the nonfictive “I” must, to win a reader’s trust, find a way to process and reflect on her earlier self.

Of course that would ruin The Yellow Wallpaper, which happily is called fiction. The “I” character, who is not the same as the author, can and must be over the top, never yielding one inch of her certainty. At the end of the story she is down on all fours, announcing her victory over the enemy wallpaper that she has ripped from the walls: “Now why should that man have fainted?” she asks and then closes with “But he did and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

What happened to “that man”? Did he faint, die? Or is he still standing there, coaxing her to stand up? Readers can’t really know, not from this narrator. All we know is that the “I” sees herself as finally free—and we see a woman destroyed.

This story, as nonfiction, sends subjective reality off the deep end of credibility. Even the most accepting readers—those who value the good story over fact and those who say “Well, everyone sees the world differently!”—would be hard pressed to defend the reliability of this “I.”

More often, there is less agreement about the quality of insight in the first-person nonfiction narrator. Some readers enjoy memoir told from a child’s perspective; others pull away, wanting more adult reflection. Many like exaggerated humor, content with the author signaling, “OK, I know I am over the top.” Others get annoyed, like Adam Kirsch in his article “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form?” in the New Republic. He singles out David Sedaris, who writes that when taking an IQ test he felt “really stupid, practically an idiot. There are cats that weigh more than my IQ score. Were my numbers translated into dollars, it would buy you about three buckets of fried chicken.” That from Me Talk Pretty One Day, which to date has also sold millions of copies; evidently most readers didn’t share Kirsch’s concern that “[t]he effect is to call the whole story into question. Did Sedaris actually take an IQ test at all, and if so did he really score lower than expected? The answer hardly matters.” The important thing, and what annoys Kirsch, is that “the idea of Sedaris failing an IQ test fits in perfectly with his persona as a “perpetually, amusingly incompetent at school, art, and learning French.”

That argument didn’t resonate for me, because we all have personas that star in our memories of self. Childhood personas, in particular, tend to be long-standing—“I was a hell-raiser” or “I was a goody two-shoes.” Unless some fact or event shakes them loose, we hold on to them. Personas shift more easily, I find, in here-and-now stories. One day I write as a widow; the next as a tennis nut; the next as someone trying to get out of jury duty. Collectively they add up to “me”—or so I hope in “When History Gets Personal,” a work in progress in which I keep changing personas, depending on what role I am playing in my life.

Unlike Kirsch, I’m fine with the humorous nonfiction “I”; what irks me are the very serious “I”s oversimplifying their lives. They seem totally unreliable, I discovered last year while judging the Penn New England Awards in nonfiction. In the mix of biography, researched history, narrative journalism, travel essays, and cookbooks, I read many coming-of-age memoirs, some of them very well written and well received—yet I found myself pulling away, suspicious. Compared to Nabokov’s Speak Memory or Russell Baker’s Growing Up, they lacked complexity, context, and reflection, sharing a shallow through line that something like this: “If it weren’t for my survival instinct, my parents would have destroyed me.” I found myself wondering: Was your father always horrible? Did your mother never protect you—or vice versa? These worldviews were not as skewered as the wife’s in The Yellow Wallpaper—but there was a similar unexamined certainty. I wanted more nuance. I wanted the speculation and struggle that come from what Bret Lott calls “challenging your own first assumptions.” He is referring to our need as writers to question the reliability of our first-draft opinions. One way to do that, I tell my students (and myself), is to find a line you wrote that you are most certain of—and write against it. That is where the true story lies in all its complexity.

A friend in my writing workshop wrote an essay after his father’s death, and on page 2 it says: “My father had never told me before that night in June that he loved me. Not when I won the All Star award or got all A’s at Yale. Not when I married the girl from a ‘good family’ to please him. Not any of those times.”

He told us he had needed to write the piece but now wanted to make it publishable, not just another piece about a dying parent. We homed in on this paragraph about his father never loving him. If it was true, why? What would his father say about those lines? What about the world his father came from? Did people say “I love you” to kids? I just read a second draft of the essay. This paragraph now follows one in a hospital room, when his father says “I love you”—and then the essay expands on his father’s life. I already trust the narrator more. He is looking at all sides, not settling for an easy certainty.

And if, as he writes more, the easiness draws him in, if the real energy comes from the pleasures of fury and neglect without moderation, if what he loves best is an “I” that speaks with absolute, over-the-top certainty and can’t tell it is funny, call it fiction please.

If creative nonfictionists build a persona, can persona-building also become a source of conflict and dynamism in writing? Can building a less-than-reliable persona be a deliberate strategy, much like the use of unreliable narrators in fiction, such as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? Or does any kind of unreliability in the narrator undermine the entire premise of creative nonfiction? In this five part TriQuarterly series, five writers of nonfiction and one writer of fiction brainstorm creative ways for writers to make themselves unreliable narrators—with playful, conflicted, and imaginative results.

***

Time: Late August
Place: Hudson Valley Writers’ Center
Event: A weeklong workshop in “writing the memoir”
Players: Seven writers and me, the teacher

Act I

A woman writer in her sixties is the last of seven students to share her work. Her title: “The Psychopaths among Us: A Case Study.”

I present her writing here in the style she adopted, a very clipped textbook shorthand, articles dropped from nouns, and minimal development. I can’t imitate her reading voice, but its tone, hectoring and shrill, is somewhere between Donald Trump and The Nanny’s Fran Drescher.

Introduction: Father is put into sanatorium by wife and daughter. Wife and daughter are mother and older sister of author. Author and husband, away in Canada for long weekend, are unaware that mother and sister are institutionalizing father. This is done behind author’s back for author would never have agreed. Father is not sick.

Action: Author and husband hire lawyer to represent father’s interest. To no avail. Before father can be rescued, father dies in sanatorium.

Action. Author and husband tell story to psychiatrist. Psychiatrist confirms mother and sister are psychopaths.

Author inference: Psychopaths are everywhere in contemporary society: CEO, politician, con man, poser, young man with an AR-15 in movie theater.

Action: Write a memoir–slash–case study about prevalence of psychopaths in author’s family and in world at large. Goal of book is to be used in college classes as authoritative guide on psychopaths.

Action: Illustrate twenty-two traits of the psychopath with stories from author’s childhood.

Psychopathic Trait #1 (manipulation): Incident. Author and sister, as young girls, are last two left on school bus, going home. Bus driver receives emergency phone call. He is needed at hospital after wife’s accident. Bus driver stops bus and orders author and sister off. Sister refuses. Sister stares down bus driver and tells him she will kill him if he does not drive her and author home. Bus driver caves in from sister’s manipulation.

Psychopathic Trait #2 (conspiracy): Incident. Mother hears bus tale from author’s sister and believes nothing is wrong with sister’s action. In fact, mother approves and says she would have threatened same way as well. This proves mother and sister are conspirators.

Psychopathic Traits #3–#22. More of same.

Using DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), author will prove that mother and sister are psychopaths. Their actions represent millions of others and author’s work adds to growing wealth of case studies on the psychopaths among us.

“Thank you for listening,” she says, and stops.

Act II

I ask the woman, “Have you shown this material to an agent or editor?”

“Yes,” she says. “It was a memoir, and they all rejected it.”

“So you rewrote it?”

“Yes,” she says. “I hope in this version the book has more authority as a case study.”

I ask the group members for their input. They pull no punches.

To the person, they say, it’s off-putting. Worse, it’s hearsay. You just told this to a doctor who you say confirmed it. How? Without examining them? It’s scurrilous, baseless. You need more than one professional to diagnose them as psychopathic. Psychologists, not laypeople, write case studies.

Another comments, Isn’t it the mark of trust to hear a writer acknowledge or accept conflicting interpretations, to include in a memoir, for example, different perspectives on the same event?

Still another remarks, You can’t be all right and your mother and sister all wrong. You have to be reliable if you want us to believe you—the only thing you’ve convinced me of is that I don’t trust you based on what you’ve written.

I want to stand up and applaud these comments. The problem with the work revolves around the word reliable, the memoirist’s albatross. She can’t present us with this sort of subjective study and expect us to believe her. It’s absurd.

For her part, the woman listens politely to our complaints and disbeliefs for ten minutes, defends herself a bit, then gathers her pages and leaves abruptly. She must catch a train.

Once she’s gone, our collective jaw drops even farther. The first participant to speak says that what just happened is like a scene from a Hitchcock film: “It’s as if a woman,” he says, “who, disguising herself as a writer, tried to manipulate us into believing her accusations against her family members were true because she’s the psychopath.”

I agree, feeling drawn to the mystery. Not only could she be the crazy one, but what if, I wonder, her mother and sister did what she says they did—committed the husband/father to an institution and, like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, pocketbooked the spoils for themselves? Maybe the whole family is nuts.

Suddenly, I get it. I tell the group that since there’s no consciousness in the writing, she is revealing herself to us as unhinged; she has merely confused us, not oriented us to her cause.

For this kind of nonfiction to work, there has to be an “I” who is not “I,” a narrator who is both author and character, a narrator in whom we see the split or, at least, a tear. The author steadies us while the character grows untrustworthy. The nonfictional self—to be reliable—must have an “other.” This “other” can be a persona, for example a case-study author, but somehow we have to know that in order for it to be nonfiction.

And yet I’m haunted by another question (which I feel in the moment and unpack much later): Why does the woman seek our approval? Does she believe we hold the power to legitimize her claim? What is our role in making or breaking her reliability?

Act III

Let me come at this from a bit of my own psychopathology.

Regardless of our arguments over what is and is not fiction or nonfiction, or foundering in that David Shields–like meander between the two, there is a place in the authorial universe where the writing is true because the act of writing it down—forget the audience’s response—makes it true. Indeed, regard for an audience is seldom the first step.

Take these instances of “what’s true is what’s written down”—the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and the number-one best-selling book during the fall/winter 2012–13 season: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience and Journey into the Afterlife.

Sorry to bring bad tidings, but these “sacred” texts are works of fiction. They are written by questionably sane people whose authority is derived from the extreme hallucinatory state in which each writes or speaks and whose testimony is believed largely because the author has transcribed a supposedly divine source.

But there’s more to reliable truth than this shamanic inscription. There is proclamation, saying it over and over and over.

It’s not skillful storytelling that sets these purportedly holy texts apart. It’s the chain of tradition that selects as true those stories that are replayed the most. Why is this important? It’s the way in which fiction, via repetition and modification, becomes believed, believable, and truth gets reshaped, even misshaped.

Here’s a few links in that chain.

Our culture proclaims and replays a billion times the so-called miracles of the New Testament, which, in turn, allows the Texas Board of Education to put into the curriculum guidelines on teaching intelligent design. The US Constitution proclaims and we replay the rights of gun ownership, which, in turn, ensures that Congress cannot ban assault weapons.

It’s called precedent. And this is the key to the alleged “truth” of institutions.

Because our culture so often promulgates myth over evidence-based knowing, precedent over fact, doctrine over reason, the result is such grand prevarications as Too Big to Fail, corporate farming, infallible popes, enhanced interrogation—whatever the metanarratives and their meta-narrators conspire to transmit.

Those who assent to these myths convince or brainwash others of the self-interest of the ruling class, one which decrees that a society be organized, its commandments encoded, its children disciplined, its myths replayed—that in terms of language and literature, the stories we inherit must be the stories we tell.

Take Hammurabi’s Code. No one would have assented to his laws had there been an impartial examination of its pronouncements—especially by doctors, who, if they operate on a patient and the patient dies, so says the code, will have their hands cut off. No one defied the code because it was tantamount to defying Hammurabi himself. He was right because he wrote it down and he enlisted an army to enforce it.

Reliability doesn’t require proof—only enough assent to subordinate those who object.

In sum, there’s truth by inscription; there’s truth by proclamation; and there’s truth by lasting. Centuries of proclamations for a Christian heaven and hell have been shown to be true because they’ve been proclaimed long enough and wide enough and been believed by people from all walks of life. True, such thinking is circumlocutious. But it’s one that works nevertheless.

My point is, the woman writing of psychopaths in her family is following reliability’s proven path. Use the case-study form, sculpt her tale with more passion than fact, hybridize memoir and psychology, and broadcast it to listeners—not once but, she hopes, a hundred times. In this way, reliability is socially determined, and it functions, for better or worse, via its viral potency.

This is why she enlisted us. She realized that the person with the loudest voice and the widest platform from which to proclaim is more likely to be believed than someone with less voice and platform. Call it the Bill O’Reilly factor.

Controversial claims that raise our ire add to her legitimacy.

I can’t stress enough the persuasive power of such disputed testimony and its repetition with our understanding of what it means to be reliable.

In an age consumed with more media talk than written analysis, more instant messaging than reflection, when video is supplanting text, and when mediated reality is more actual than regular reality (whatever that is), being heard enough times legitimizes your claim, your belief, your story.

And once you’ve gone viral, you earn perhaps the biggest prize: the author is relieved of having to prove her claim; she can rest or hide in the approval of her followers. It doesn’t matter if she believes what she’s written or if we question it or if the evidence is sketchy—not as long as her audience believes her. Audiences will believe anything.

Finally, it’s more than a little strange that here I am, as much ridiculing the woman’s claim as I am repeating it—spreading it, so to speak—so that you, this audience, are strung together as listeners, some of you a touch more sympathetic toward, others more rigidly critical of, her cause.

How pithy this irony is, how easily the masses are led, how easily complicit I become.

That’s what she meant when she said, as I do now, Thank you for listening.

If creative nonfictionists build a persona, can persona-building also become a source of conflict and dynamism in writing? Can building a less-than-reliable persona be a deliberate strategy, much like the use of unreliable narrators in fiction, such as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? Or does any kind of unreliability in the narrator undermine the entire premise of creative nonfiction? In this five part TriQuarterly series, five writers of nonfiction and one writer of fiction brainstorm creative ways for writers to make themselves unreliable narrators—with playful, conflicted, and imaginative results.

***

I wanted to approach this subject of an unreliable narrator in creative nonfiction by talking about some very personal memoirs I’ve been writing about my father. My father drives me crazy. Bat-shit crazy. I’ve spent years diagnosing him. He is a remarkable mix of merry narcissist and controlling obsessive compulsive. In other words, he thinks the whole world revolves around him (or as my wife likes to put it, “the day begins when he opens his eyes”), and he wants to control every minute aspect of it, often years in advance. And like most high-functioning narcissists, he would scoff at the idea that there’s the slightest thing wrong with him.

For my entire childhood, my dad came down to dinner—at 6 p.m. every night precisely—with a memo that he took out of his breast pocket and spread open beside his fork on the table. It was a numbered list of topics—the precise outline of our dinner-table conversation. We would work down the list. At some point, my mom and sister and I, in our joking serious way, disallowed his numbered outline. No more notes at the dinner table, we said. A few nights later, I became conscious of the same sudden shifts in our conversation, so the night after that I spied on him before dinner—he was memorizing his list as he performed his intricate predinner toilette in the bathroom. He thought this was hysterical—we couldn’t very well forbid what he had in his head, could we?—and of course, he found my inexplicable fury all the more amusing.

He had a little routine he often did at dinner. For all the other things that drive me crazy about him, my father is mostly not a racist person, but you wouldn’t know it from this routine. It was the story of an immigrant Asian family whose first son had gotten into Princeton, Brown, Yale, Stanford, and MIT, but not Harvard. “Hahvard numbah one,” my dad would say, supposedly imitating the immigrant parents. “Hahvahd numbah one.” It was a routine, and we were meant to laugh at the single-minded determination of the immigrants, at the bad accent, but no one was more single-minded and determined than my father, and the message was clear: Harvard was number one. I remember distinctly knowing in fifth grade that I (also a firstborn son) would go to Harvard . . . Everything I did, beginning then, was done with that goal in mind. High school theater was to be one of the extracurriculars on my college application, but the biggest production in my high school was always the musical. So my father insisted that I take private voice lessons. We had screaming, running-around-the house fights about this. Because not only did I not have any interest, but, as kind Mrs. McAdams, who sat next to me on our piano bench once a week, would surely tell you, I’m very nearly tone deaf. To this day, I can’t carry a tune.

Somehow, having the biggest nonsinging part in the school musical three years in a row was still enough to get me admitted. I suspect, though, that I’m one of the few people in the world who is ashamed of having gone to Harvard.

I could go on and on about my dad. In fact, as you may sense, I want very much to go and on. But I suspect I’ve already lost a fair number of you. You’re looking at me and you’re thinking, OK, Mr. Clay Benjamin, you really need to get over your daddy issues. You’re a grown-ass man, with kids of your own, it’s time now. And anyway, nothing you’ve described is really that bad—he didn’t beat you or lock you in the basement, or worse. He paid for four years of Ivy League college, for crying out loud. And you know, there’s worse things than having ‘Harvard undergrad’ on your CV, no matter what deep psychological issues you may have about it.

You know what? You’re right. To put it now, in the terms of this panel—I’d say that I’ve made myself unreliable. At some very fundamental level, I’m guessing that by this point you don’t trust my portrayal of my father. Now that I’ve gone on about these perceived slights, you may not trust my portrayal of him very much.

If this were fiction—God, if this were only fiction—I’d go with that unreliability. In fact, if it were successful, that would be a significant part of the pleasure of reading the piece. That you got that this narrator was unreliable—you, the reader, and me, Clay, the author, but not this character I’ve created, would end up on the same page. But in nonfiction the author and the character, of course, are the same—or at least, it’s my theory that they need to end up being the same.

If this were fiction, I might continue to rant and rave—I’d make myself into something resembling the self-consumed misanthrope of Notes from the Underground. (I suspect Dostoyevsky had some pretty serious daddy issues himself.)

But we’re talking about nonfiction here, and in the kind I’m trying to write, you would conclude that this writer is too blind about himself to be able to enlighten you, the reader. So what’s the memoirist to do? It seems to me there’s a particular jujitsu of memoir writing whereby the author acknowledges his own unreliability, acknowledges that yes, he’s not to be trusted on some of this stuff, and that admission somehow makes him more trustworthy. Yes, I would like very much at the age of forty-five to be over my daddy issues, and yes, by any objective measures in the catalog of fatherly abuses, his are slight, and anyway, there are plenty of extenuating circumstances. Fifth grade was, perhaps not so coincidentally, not just the year I knew I would go to Harvard; it was also the year my mom began her ten-year, ultimately losing battle with breast cancer. Can you imagine how hard that must have been for my father, the literal chaos of cancer, for someone as controlling and narcissistic as he is?

Have I regained any of your trust by acknowledging the ways in which I’m not really to be trusted?

But, and here’s the thing about my particular father, he really does drive me bat-shit crazy, still, and partly because nothing he’s done is so egregious, and partly because of his particular brand of successful, grinning, controlling narcissism and his endlessly reasonable-sounding tidal wave of lawyer’s logic, it took me a very long time, to, as the therapists say, realize that my feelings are valid. That’s a part of my story, convincing you of my justifiable anger, making you feel that rage, at the same time that I have enough distance on it to say, wow, OK, I can see I’m being kind of ridiculous, and that ridiculousness is a big part of what I’m writing about here, too.

In my book of stories, anger at my father animated several of the stories largely because it was unconscious. People who knew me said, “Oh, that story’s about your father,” and I’d say, “No, this story’s about an obsessive basketball player, and my father never picked up a basketball in his life; in fact he had outright mocking disdain for competitive athletics.” And my friends would say, “Yeah, OK, duh, but that story’s about you and your dad,” and to some shockingly large degree, it caught me off guard. That kind of blind spot would be fatal, I think, to the memoir I’ve been writing. Acknowledging that I’ve had that blind spot, that for much of my life I really was not to be trusted on the subject of my father, and acknowledging that still, tomorrow, by any objective measure, my rage may seem disproportionate—well, I hope and believe that acknowledgement enables you to cut me a little slack. Don’t you trust me, just a little bit more, when I acknowledge my own lack of trustworthiness?

I want to end with one last thought. It seems to me that the demands of the form, or at least this demand, as I interpret it, requires additional rigor as a writer and I want to say as a person. And though I’m wary of the writing-as-therapy way of conceiving of memoir, it seems to hold considerable promise in that regard as well, by forcing us to confront these less evolved versions of ourselves.

If creative nonfictionists build a persona, can persona-building also become a source of conflict and dynamism in writing? Can building a less-than-reliable persona be a deliberate strategy, much like the use of unreliable narrators in fiction, such as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? Or does any kind of unreliability in the narrator undermine the entire premise of creative nonfiction? In this five part TriQuarterly series, five writers of nonfiction and one writer of fiction brainstorm creative ways for writers to make themselves unreliable narrators—with playful, conflicted, and imaginative results.

***

In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, the two main characters are dueling unreliable narrators. Both are narcissists who exaggerate their own strengths and exploit the other’s weaknesses; both are misleading and deceitful; both are unconscionable liars. Classic unreliable narrators, and believable ones at that. A deliberate choice of course by the author And, in my opinion, a big reason why the novel worked.

A lifelong reader of novels and short stories who borrows what he can from good fiction writers, I have no objection to the larger-than-life behavior of Flynn’s incompatible narrators. Their actions, abhorrent as they are, reveal them to be dreadful people, while at the same time that very behavior humanizes them.

I’m a memoirist by trade. And so different rules seem to apply. Because according to certain reviewers, critics, media flaks, and readers, there’s simply no place in the genre for unreliable narrators. Witness the James Frey–Oprah flap, the spate of false Holocaust memoirs, and recent episodes of plagiarized journalism—you know, the usual suspects.

But those aren’t literary works. Besides, it’s not the only way to look at this matter.

I.

We do not write to be understood. We write in order to understand.

-C. S. Lewis

In most forms of literary journalism and news reporting, there’s an unspoken contract/agreement between writer and reader—a promise, an expectation that the research and reportage is reliable, factual, accurate. This is also the case in personal narratives like family histories, reminiscences, and remembrances, some of which include research and interviews.

In both instances (journalism and straightforward personal narrative), we take for granted that the writer is the putative “I.” And though these are consciously constructed texts—and, let’s be honest, somewhat embellished texts—still we assume that the narrator’s intent is to render the story—its people, events, and situations—as clearly and accurately as possible.

However, often many works of creative/literary nonfiction—especially personal essays and memoirs—grow out of an expressive, exploratory impulse—closer in intent, I believe, to the impulse that produces certain types of lyric poetry as well as works of prose.

A good number of memoirists are writing not so much to confess or tell their stories as to discover, hopefully, through the writing, what poets and fiction writers often describe as finding out “what we didn’t know we knew.”

“To state the case briefly,” Vivian Gornick writes, “memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. What the memoirist owes [readers] is [the attempt] . . . to persuade [them] that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.”

Like Gornick and Patricia Hampl, among others, I believe that the making of a literary work, let’s say, a personal essay or a literary memoir, is a different sort of undertaking from journalism. As such, literary nonfiction ought to be judged on a different set of aesthetic and standards from those that govern other forms of nonfiction.

II.

It’s a myth that writers write what they know, we write what it is that we need to know.

-Marcie Hershman

For me, Mike Steinberg—the person—the impulse for writing a memoir grows out of a sense of not knowing. Often it takes the form of an internal wrestling match, a struggle to come to terms with some nagging itch, perplexing question, persistent feeling, sense of confusion or disorientation, or a lingering personal problem. At the same time, the writer-me is aware that the experiences I’m writing about are raw materials, resources to be used selectively in the shaping of a cohesive, compelling narrative—a process that Annie Dillard describes as “fashioning a text.”

Here, then, is an interesting paradox: as a reader of memoir, I initially want to know, who is this “I,“ this narrator, and what does he or she want? That’s because a piece of me wants to believe that the narrator who’s guiding me is reliable, trustworthy, and honest. Yet when I’m writing a memoir, my narrator, the “I,” invariably becomes a persona, a three-dimensional self; a fully imagined character who is part me and part not me. Whoever my personas are, though, they’re the result of my having made a deliberate choice, one that I hope fits the particular narrative at hand.

A persona, I should explain, isn’t to be confused with the writer. And the decision to create a narrative persona, whether conscious or unconscious, is, to a large extent, an aesthetic choice.

Here’s a short illustration from Trading Off, a stand-alone memoir I wrote some years back. It’s a scene that describes a troubled encounter between a fifteen-year-old boy, a younger version of the adult narrator, and a hard-ass high school baseball coach.

On the first day of high school, the coach calls the boy out of homeroom. He’s desperately hoping that the coach is going to invite him to spring baseball tryouts. But when he gets to the tiny, cluttered office, the coach explains that he called him down there because a friend had told him that the boy was a trustworthy, responsible kid. So he offers him the job of assistant football manager, a humiliating duty that boils down to having to be a glorified water boy and stretcher-bearer. The boy wrestles with the decision, but in the end he takes the job, partly because he thinks it might give him an advantage at baseball tryouts.

Some four-plus decades later, I don’t recall whether this incident happened on the first day of school or sometime during the first or second week. It’s even possible that I went to the coach’s office on my own initiative. Yet I maintain that I did not invent or deliberately distort that scene. The coach unquestionably did meet with me. And when he told me I was going to be a water boy, he was standing in the middle of that tiny room wearing only a jock strap, white sweat socks, and a baseball hat.

Who could ever forget that image?

My point is that I choose particular scenes and situations largely because they serve the narrative. And in this instance, I had to rely pretty heavily on memory and imagination.

Well, then, did the young boy see and hear all of this in a single visit on a single afternoon? Or did this happen over a period of days during the first or second week of school? And would that have made a difference to the narrative? The appropriate question here is this: do those discrepancies make the adult narrator a dishonest or dissembling storyteller?

III.

I won’t tell you the story the way it happened, I’ll tell it to you the way I remember it.

-Pam Houston

It's no secret that memory is an unreliable narrator. And we know that imagination transposes memory. But that's part of the territory—part of what makes a literary memoir, well, “literary.”

And so when I’m writing, I don’t think of my narrators as reliable or unreliable. I say that because when I wrote that essay, what interested me most was the narrator’s internal struggles to come to terms with a deeply disturbing predicament, a confusing dilemma that he couldn't, at the time, understand or interpret.

What drives this piece then, is the boy’s pressing need to make the varsity team, whatever the costs might be. More important, what links that young boy’s story with another human being’s experience is the humiliation that he, as a kid, willingly put up with in order to get a chance to play ball.

That kind of tradeoff, we know, happens all the time in real life, in the context, say, of a family dispute, a shaky marriage, a troubling friendship, a bad love affair, even something like a teacher-student disagreement. It's a common occurrence: one person desperately wants something and so is forced to compromise and make what often are unpleasant compromises.

In truth, the adult narrator is no longer that kid. What’s authentic, though, is the numbing humiliation and despair the boy was feeling in that moment. And in order to re-create his disappointment, I, the writer, had to fully imagine and recall what it felt like to be that kid in that particular situation.

Once again, the important story is the internal struggle, the story of the narrator’s thinking—his or her confusions and guilts, questions and fears, reflections and speculations. How then, I ask you, does one measure the reliability of someone’s thought process?

“Memories and memoirs can and do play us false,” writes the novelist Margaret Drabble. “Maybe,” she says, “ there is no truth. Maybe we all make everything up.”

If creative nonfictionists build a persona, can persona-building also become a source of conflict and dynamism in writing? Can building a less-than-reliable persona be a deliberate strategy, much like the use of unreliable narrators in fiction, such as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? Or does any kind of unreliability in the narrator undermine the entire premise of creative nonfiction? In this five part TriQuarterly series, five writers of nonfiction and one writer of fiction brainstorm creative ways for writers to make themselves unreliable narrators—with playful, conflicted, and imaginative results.

***

“My thinking seems something separate from me.” So wrote Italo Svevo in his 1923 novel Confessions of Zeno.

“I can see it”—Svevo wrote of his “thinking”—“it rises and falls . . . but that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and that its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looks up and blots out the past.”

Svevo’s novel, a fake autobiography by a fictional character named Zeno, is as fine a spoof as any of some of memoir’s worst foibles—its whimsy as to the truth or falsity of its content, its notion that one’s own thinking is somehow outside one’s accountability, its fetishistic caressing of the notion of writing one’s thoughts for no reason other than simply to write them down. In the words of Claire Messud, the book is, though fictional, a “liar’s memoir.”

When I first read this passage by Svevo, I was struck by its similarity to a real memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, first published by Thomas de Quincey in London Magazine in 1821. This passage came to mind:

I trust that [this] will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. . . . [T]hat [is] my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. . . . All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before the public eye until after my death.

Both are emblematic examples of unreliable narration, one fictional, one nonfictional. Each, in its own way, reads as a kind of a joke: in the first case, a spoof on bad memoir; in the second, a document of a writer perhaps too close to his “confession” to be aware of its own transparency. The liar in the fictional version seems precisely a parody of the supposedly reliable—and yet deluded— narrator of the autobiography: “How I first came to be a regular opium-eater”—De Quincey also writes—“was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree. [This is how] I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet.”

Reading these passages over one beside the other, I began to wonder about not only their fundamental, generic, differences but the similarities between their narration styles. I began to think about what this suggested about the possibilities for the nonfiction writer, how the fun and play in Confessions of Zeno might be available for the rest of us as well.

DeQuincey’s confessions, of course, work better for the reader—or this reader, anyway—as “found object,” art by accident. As in traditional, fictional, unreliable narration, the de Quincy can be read ironically. It’s as if reader and publisher are having a joke on author/narrator. This mirrors the traditional Author-Narrator-Reader triangle of fiction. In unreliable narration, author and reader are in cahoots against narrator. Everyone—author included—knows the narrator is deluded, except for the narrator himself. As James Wood puts it, speaking of Svevo’s Zeno, its comedy “resid[es] in the incongruity between our concepts and objective reality.”

But perhaps accident is not the only possibility for the nonfiction writer meaning to exploit narrative instability in the ironic style of novelist Svevo. Perhaps nonfiction can also intentionally manipulate that incongruity? Should it, could it? By writing from a persona, the nonfiction writer always plays with the author–narrator divide. How far can that gap be expanded while one is still building a successful text? Can it be taken to the extreme of humor?

In e-mails back and forth with nonfiction writers Mimi Schwartz. Mike Steinberg, Clay Benjamin, and Tom Larson, I discussed whether we as nonfiction writers might attempt a narration style as outrageously unreliable as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, writing a narrator situated at so great a distance from author that it would be if author and reader were having a joke on narrator, one deeply and obviously deluded. While we disagreed on the extent to which the author–narrator divide might be manipulated, we all agreed there is a gap between author and narrator. Whether as large and humorous as in fiction—that, more or less, was the topic of our conversation.

Our project came about after I first read Joseph Epstein’s thoughts on unreliability in nonfiction in his introduction to the Norton Book of Personal Essays. He writes, summarily: “There are no unreliable narrators in personal essays; in a personal essay an unreliable narrator is just another name for a bad writer. We believe—we have to believe—what the writer tells us.”

His statement had always struck me as too narrow, too limiting. And while Epstein is prescriptive, the idea of memoir in particular as the province of unmediated “truth” is often presented descriptively, for instance when Charles Baxter writes: “In a culture afflicted with data-nausea, I thought, everyone begins to hoard and value the autobiographical, a refuge safe from irony.”

Is autobiography really a “refuge safe from irony”? Unpacking this statement, I think what Baxter is getting at is that truth is opposed to irony, which it is, since irony is by definition “the expression of one’s meaning to signify the opposite."

But the lie at the heart of the statement—and Epstein’s—is the assumption that autobiography resides categorically in the province of truth.

If the liar in fiction is a parody of the supposedly reliable narrator of the autobiography, that parody has such power because the autobiographer is in many senses inherently unreliable. I’m interested in the ways that autobiographers might make use of, rather than deny, that inherent unreliability.

I certainly do so in my own current project. This became especially clear to me recently, when my agent asked me to change the prologue to my recently completed memoir from its original, set-in-the-present opening. In the original, this depicted an unraveling of things for my family during the summer of 2011, which I’d set as the “present moment” of the narration for the rest of the book. This 2011 material set up an opening into an exploration of childhood and the past. My agent said this opening was a downer. I decided she was right, and changed the present moment opening to a point two years in the past of “the present” (i.e., 2009). Once I did that, I had to go through the memoir rewriting the present-moment reflections so that they accurately reflected this different starting/vantage point. Then I decided that the present moment needn’t be static but could move: from 2009 to 2011. So now, in my memoir, the unraveling of 2011 is revealed at the end of the book. The present-moment voice develops from beginning to end, from 2009 to 2011.

This reminded me that the present-moment narrator was an unreliable one, one who was ignorant of what would come though I, the author, already knew. It became easier to present the material with this more distant “I”—easier to see her as a character, another “me” of the past just as the child “me” in the sections set in the “deep past” was a character.

Like many memoirists, I write nonfiction from the point of view of knowing that the narrator “I” is different from the author “I.” In the gap between the two resides unreliability—or, in any case, fallibility. As in the Heisenberg principle, what I see shifts, reliably so, when my vantage shifts.

Perhaps these words illuminate the issue of unreliability somewhat, reliably, or unreliably.

Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons
by Fiona Deans Halloran
The University of North Carolina Press

A disclosure: I am a political and satirical cartoonist. I have, for the past twenty years, drawn political caricatures for "The New Yorker." My knowledge of Thomas Nast has, until now, been cursory, even as the spirit of Thomas Nast and his work has made an impression on and affected my work. During my childhood, a Thomas Nast print (coincidentally, his first to feature both the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant) hung in our home, and I frequently mused on it, its biting character, composition, and imagination. I knew Nast for his wonderfully lacerating cartoons that helped bring down Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall (Nast's caricature of Tweed at times seem an antecedent to Charles Addams's ghoul), for his invention of the Republican elephant, and for his many charming portraits of Santa Claus.

In Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Fiona Deans Halloran provides a superb overview of Nast's life, from his family's origin in Germany's Palatinate to his youth in 1850s Lower Manhattan among a dynamic mix of Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant cultures. She tracks his growth as an artist from self-taught youth to student at the Academy of Design, as well as the rise and fall of his career and fortune, with a good deal of detail about his domestic family life included along the way.

There is little record of Nast's early life, but Halloran fills in the blanks with descriptions of the European political upheaval that sent families such as Nast's packing for America. She includes what the young Nast was likely to experience in his neighborhood, a "teeming jungle of crime, commerce, and colorful humanity" bordered by Wall Street to the south, Franklin Square, "the center of newspaper production for the city," to the north, Broadway, with the newly-invented department stores just to the west, and the notorious Five Points slum, one block west and five blocks north.

Halloran provides a vivid outline of the politics of the time—the arrival of thousands of middle class, intellectual victims of the 1848 revolutions. These émigrés brought their liberal political and anti-clerical ideals with them. They quickly became engaged in politics, sometimes pitting them against native-born Americans and the Irish, who were busy practicing their own politics in their newly adopted homeland through patronage and political clubs. The Irish were heavily Democratic, and often in violent conflict with their fellow black New Yorkers, a conflict which culminated in the terrible death toll and destruction of the Draft Riots of 1863. Nast, whose family left the Catholic Church after arriving in the States, held great sympathy toward the black freedmen; the themes of violence, hypocrisy and greed vs. integrity and idealism echoed throughout his life and identified him forever with the Party of Lincoln. Nast's youthful experience also explains the source of much of his anti-Irish drawings and sentiment --- an aspect of his work that can be repellant to present day sensibilities.

Halloran recounts the teenage Nast's arrival at the beginnings of American illustrated journalism, working for "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly" and "Harper's Illustrated Weekly" as these burgeoning enterprises transformed the American publishing landscape. Nast watched first-hand as these publishers took on public issues such as swill milk (from cows fed on wastes from distilleries and breweries), and police corruption, all the while building influence and increasing circulation. According to Halloran, "Illustrated journalism, Nast learned, was a business. Its success rested on the public fascination with journalism that could show the news as well as report it." Eventually, Nast joined the ranks of these "pictorial journalists."

Nast's rise was meteoric. His drawings on behalf of the Union cause during the Civil War struck a mighty chord with Northerners (and conversely, drew the ire of Southerners). His September 1864 drawing "Compromise with the South" in Harper’s Weekly had huge influence and was reprinted by the Republicans as a campaign poster. It showed a battered, one-legged Union soldier shaking hands with a finely-dressed Jefferson Davis, while in the middle Columbia weeps. Besisde her is a tombstone “in Memory Union Heroes in a Useless War.” The illustration led President Lincoln to say of his work, "Nast has been our best recruiting sergeant. His emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism, and have always seemed to come just when these articles were getting scarce." Halloran traces the evolution of Nast's style from the sentimental illustration of the Civil War years to the wickedly funny, political caricature that reached full flower in his Boss Tweed drawings, but there is something slightly mechanical and dutifully academic in her heavily footnoted analysis.

I reread the chapter on “Compromise with the South,” because I recalled it as being particularly ponderous and frustrating. It’s a chapter not without interest, and it is worth noting that the drawing was a hugely popular, highly political sentimental illustration (compared with Nast’s later, barbed, satirical drawings) but Halloran belabors the whys of its connection to the public and to Nast’s other work, and seems to be straining for an argument. This leads her to muddled statements such as the following: “That readers were able to discern Nast’s thoughts and feelings in his illustrations seems a far more likely reason for his appeal than either his technical skill or his emotional connection to the public.” She uses it and others to build a long-winded argument to support her final statement: “’Compromise with the South’… stands not just as the beginning of his cartooning but as the ultimate expression of his view of the war itself.” Fair enough, but she says everything she pretty much needs to say in her final paragraph.

Ultimately, as Halloran focuses on the details of Nast's later life later in the book, the evocation of politics and larger events suffer, as well as the reader's experience of Nast's work itself. For starters, the book is a lousy shape and size (a compact 9.5" x 6.5") for showing off Nast's drawings. For the reader intimately familiar with his work, this may not matter, but for others who wish to enter the realm of Nast's drawings or to follow references between the text and drawings, it is a huge obstacle. Halloran does a good job of explicating much of the imagery in the drawings and their connection to contemporary politics and culture, but the drawings are reproduced at such a tiny scale as to make study impossible.

On the other hand, the freelancing cartoonist in me agonized over every harrowing detail in Halloran's telling of Nast's changing fortunes. We learn of his travels abroad where he journeyed with Garibaldi in the fight for Italian independence; his long and complicated and ultimately destructive relationship with George W. Curtis, the political editor of Harper's Weekly; his growing irrelevance; his shift from prosperous family man to near pauper, through a failed investment in a Ponzi scheme started by Ferdinand Ward, himself the subject of a recent book , http://theamericanscholar.org/con-man/>; his death abroad of yellow fever after a last-ditch effort to provide for his family by being appointed ambassador to Ecuador by President Theodore Roosevelt.

To her credit, Halloran does make a connection between Nast and some of today's artists, such as Drew Friedman, who once modeled a drawing on Nast's famous finger-pointing cartoon about Tammany Hall. She also points us to Harpweek.com, a website that has archived Nast's drawings, highlights a different one every day and allows visitors to explore his drawings at a much more appropriate scale.

Yet despite Halloran's best efforts, Nast's work itself remains curiously inert in her study, out of reach to the reader. She writes,

Among academics, Nast has become a source for useful illustrations and hardly anything more…Teachers love his drawings, understandably. They are a great way to illustrate the issues that were important to nineteenth-century Americans. Yet, again, Nast himself is largely absent. His work must speak for itself, because his personality, politics, and artistic goals are largely ignored.

Ironically, by concentrating on biographical detail and not showcasing Nast's drawings, this biography ends up asking us to accept the greatness and relevance of Nast's work but never actually reveals it.

The two main Nast biographies that Halloran and other sources mention are Morton Keller's "Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (Oxford University Press. 1968. 366pp) and Albert Bigelow Paine's "Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan. 1904. 583pp). Paine was Nast's chosen biographer; Paine interviewed him towards the end of his life, and wrote what is considered to be a laudatory portrait of the artist.

To read through Keller's book is to experience Nast (and book publishing) in an entirely different way, highlighting shortcomings in Halloran's book. Keller's is a 12" x 9" hardbound volume, beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated. It is essentially a series of brief essays that cover American politics during Nast's working career (i.e., "Civil War," "Reconstruction," "Tweed," "The Passing of Political Radicalism," etc.), each one followed by 20 or so related drawings. Even at 2/3 their original size (!), the drawings have an extraordinary richness and impact. Contrary to Halloran's opinion, Keller writes, "The drawings speak for themselves," and indeed, I have to agree.

Keller writes concisely about each political period, and brings them alive in all their drama and vitality in a way that Halloran's concentration on Nast's biographical details does not. This makes it easier to see Nast's drawings as players in that drama. Halloran helps parse the iconography and symbols in Nast's work, but Keller allows the reader to luxuriate in the drawings themselves. And they are astonishing to look at --- the amazing and complex compositions, the humor and vitality of the line. There are elements that call to mind Chris Ware, even Robert Crumb. Although not an art historian, Keller argues very simply and persuasively that while Nast's style was directly influenced by British graphic artists of his time such as John Leech, Sir John Tenniel of "Punch," and John Gilbert, the spirit of Nast's drawings owe most to the French Honoré Daumier and his "passionate commitment to a cause." For Daumier, it was Liberty and the Republic; for Nast, a more perfect Union. While Halloran tallies the huge number of drawings that Nast did weekly for Harper's and describes the ultimately debilitating effect on Nast, it is the drawings themselves in Keller's volume that make one wonder at the sheer physical achievement of it all.

Halloran's portrait makes the professional caricaturist in me think in personal terms about Nast --- do I work as hard? Am I as productive or effective? How do I deal with the constant physical and psychic toll of drawing? Am I as idealistic? Self-regarding? Bourgeois? How well do I work with others (read: my employer)? What prejudices undermine my work? Will I also make stupid investments? Will decline come swiftly and unexpectedly? Certainly not bad questions to ponder.

Keller's portrait better places Nast in the grand arc of political caricature, from his own British and French antecedents to the cynical and absurdist caricaturists of our own time. It begs the question: Are there political cartoonists closer to our own era whose work was similar in approach to Nast? Interestingly enough, Herb Block and Bill Mauldin come to mind, cartoonists who also came of age during a cataclysmic war (WWII), who remained idealistic (Herblock took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as did Walt Kelly), and who eventually were crowded out by cartoonists with a far more ironic and blackly comic take on politics.

Perhaps some advice pertinent to the traveler is pertinent here to the reader. When traveling, take more than one guidebook. When brushing up on your Thomas Nast, take along both Halloran's and Keller's volumes. Together, they will be worth the voyage.

City of the Big Shoulders
Edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave
University of Iowa Press

I grew up in Chicago. For graduate school, I lived in Western New York, Utah, and Alabama. I will always prefer Chicago. We Chicagoans are an unpretentious and modest lot. Perhaps it’s from surviving all those horrible winds. We know that sometimes all you can hold on to is the essentials. Sometimes you’ve got to let everything else get carried by a force of nature.

Ryan G. Van Cleave’s new anthology of Chicago poetry, City of the Big Shoulders, succeeds in displaying the essentials as defined and described by a diverse crowd of Chicagoans. It is appropriately inclusive of people of different cultures and temperaments, though not poetry of all styles. He has privileged straightforward narrative and lyric poems, staying away from anything experimental, yet wholly succeeds in creating a fun and accessible anthology. It could easily be used as a textbook in the high school or college classroom.

I see all anthologies as pedagogical tools. The anthologist essentially says through the organization of his book: “Here are examples of what I found that illustrates this particular theme, aesthetic, or politics. Read it and learn through what I’ve assembled.” Van Cleave introduced me to a lot of poets I was unfamiliar with. My favorite poems include Michael Filimowicz’s “Radar Ghosts.” An excerpt follows:

in the zeppelin’s windows the aquarium city

shows a gold onion dome unspiraling

blossoming for docking atop a new office tower

suspicious and gaudy in 1928

when travelers with visas and faith in their telescopes

sporting new lenses and shiny screws

conspired with mapmakers in the viewing lounge

to designate a continent’s armpit

This poem represents Van Cleave’s main preference: poems that possess a strong discursiveness, a streamlined talkiness. You can see this again in Jarret Keene’s “Chicago Noise (Love Letter to Steve Albini)”:

Steve, there’s something about your band Big Black

in the morning that helps me to more effectively hate birds outside

my window as they chirp ridiculous tunes about nothing to no one . . .

One of the pitfalls of this sort of poems is they can produce an ingratiating slickness. Mostly the poems here avoid that trap.

Van Cleave is a tireless veteran of anthology. There’s no denying he knows what he’s doing. With Virgil Suarez he’s produced several anthologies that include Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement, and Vespers: Contemporary American Poems of Religion and Spirituality. Also, with Chad Prevost, he created Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes.

Perhaps more important, Van Cleave proves himself to be well read. One of the codes of honor of an anthologist is to include not only the most obvious canonized writers but also the emerging or unpublished. The alphabetical order of the contents often results in new poets appearing side by- side with established poets. Who wouldn’t want to include a poem that opens as “Sandburg Variations” does by the well-known Campbell McGrath? Next to it is a poem by the relative newcomer Marty McConnell. Here is the opening of McGrath’s poem:

Money courses through Chicago’s veins like the essence urging the redbuds into bloom, tulips made wiser by the memory of snow, template of April and the daffodils paper-hung, bereft, the white whale of winter rendered unto fat.

Patricia Smith offers another example of the energy in the anthology:

SOUL Butcher for the Country,

Heart Breaker, Stacker of the Deck,

Player with Northbound Trains, the Nation’s Black Beacon;

Frigid, windy, sprawling,

City of Cold Shoulders.

More flat and direct is the opening from John Bradley’s “I Saw You”:

Where: Wilton Ave. The algebra of your nameless blond hair. I think you went offline, which made you flutter, then disappear.

Where: Weiner’s Circle. You favor green or red South American scarves. I wear useless knowledge. Save my village.

Many poets tend to use anaphora in a perfunctory way. Bradley uses it to highlight a diversity of sounds and images.

One thing missing from this vibrant collection is a diversity of form—particularly the way the poem looks on the page. For a tribute to a city known for its architecture—designed by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and others—you would think Van Cleave would want to represent poems that take up space in different ways. Most of the poems are aligned predictably on the left-hand side of the page, either in a huge column or in couplets or quatrains. Perhaps this is why Mary Cross’s “summer news” (written to Joseph Cornell, we’re told) seems to draw attention to itself. It’s aligned on the right, has a lot of fun with spacing between words and phrases, and delights in offbeat choices of capitalization as well as punctuation. These lines appear at the end of the poem:

they’ve hired a crew of border collies to bark

at anything that flies

as they glide along the shoreline in rowboats manned by lifeguards

some say their collars are radioactive isotopes flattening the atmosphere

for sale at a kiosk on the pier

All in all, Van Cleave has done a terrific job here. I bet that John Dewey, one of Chicago’s most important philosophers, who advanced the idea of pragmatism, would be proud. Van Cleave never falls into the trap of tokenism in his inclusion of marginalized people. He has created an accessible anthology that rarely settles for anything less than useful, companionable poems that serve to define the Third City in the early twenty-first century.

The Game of Boxes
by Catherine Barnett
Graywolf Press

“Can we make a game of it,” asks Catherine Barnett in the opening line of The Game of Boxes, “race across the yard / and collect the trash?” It is a question, on one level, about a mother’s attempt to entertain her child, but it is also a question about fitting the lyric to its subject, about whether the play of poetry can transfigure the traditionally isolated self of the lyric poem. What, Barnett asks in this collection, can the lyric do? What are its limits? And what, in turn, are the limits of the self?

In a generation of poets too often contented with a hermetic mimesis of thought—what one recent anthology called “the representation of temperament/subjectivity/thinking in the moment”—Barnett’s poetry engages those liminal points where the self becomes enmeshed in broader questions of philosophy, history, and aesthetics. In place of a ludic opacity, the poems in The Game of Boxes—often spare, many times understated—represent a sincere poetics committed not to “the moment” but to taking seriously an intellectual tradition too often eschewed by the contemporary postmodern lyric.

At the heart of this collection, Barnett’s second, is an engagement with Kant’s idea of the sublime, namely that the self experiences both terror and dread in the face of the infinite—whether death or, as the Romantics understood it, the implacable force of Nature. Barnett develops this idea not in abstract philosophical language but in a series of images drawn from the world, images that together suggest a finite self negotiating what Coleridge called that holy dread at the edge of infinity. “Tell no one where we go at night,” she says in “Chorus,” one of a sequence of poems spoken in the collective voice of a group of children at once naive about and cynically perceptive of the world around them:

            in our sleep, how far we walk,
            toward what, but accompany us
            to the soundings, the quicksands,
            and the rocks.

One of the functions of the chorus in Greek drama was to articulate characters’ hidden fears and secrets, and indeed the collective voice of Barnett’s “Chorus” sequence attests to the way that small moments of isolation, like sleep, are shadowed by the specter of something much more ominous and ultimate. “What’s wrong?” ask the children of their mothers in another “Chorus” poem:

            To keep from answering, they keep reading.
 
            The Book of Illusions,
            The End of Illusion,
 
            and On Not Being Able to Sleep.
            But we know more than they think.

The mother-figure posited by this collective voice exists in a liminal position, a figure of projected stability who nonetheless borders always on despair and panic. In a later “Chorus” poem, the children ask “So who mothers the mothers,” describing

            the lies of mothers scared
            to turn on lights in basements
            filled with mothers called by mothers in the dark

This is the Kantian sublime, that pervasive dread that at any moment the self will be utterly destabilized in the face of the cosmos. And The Game of Boxes, a book in three sections, develops this idea through a tonal unity hovering always at the edge of catastrophe, a voice perpetually aware of imminent danger, perpetually haunted by loss.

The book’s second section, a gorgeous love sequence titled “Of All Faces,” describes the mother-figure of the first section as, now, a lover whose relationships straddle this same divide between self and universe, love and dread. “Still, your pale blue stare—” Barnett writes, “puts this havoc in the air.” The line is entirely Dickinsonian—its end-rhyme, its use of the dash—and, like that of Dickinson, Barnett’s poetry revels in revealing the pervasive presence of mortality behind even something as putatively immortalizing as love. The lover in these poems

            know[s] agape means both dumbly
            open and love not the kind of love
            that climbed the stairs to you.

Yet even knowing this, she remains unsatisfied with the “kind of love” available to her, a limited physical love constantly overshadowed by a purer, inaccessible love:

            He lets me want,
 
            touch, cry:
            he’s a lozenge of smut,
            almost hollow inside.

The speaker-lover in The Game of Boxes longs for what Kant calls the “pure category” of love, unsullied by its embodiment in the endless forms of human existence. This shuttling between ideal and actual, and the omnipresent sense of dread that accompanies it, is rendered beautifully in the poem’s most successful poem, “The Right Hemisphere,” an exploration of the way the ideal beauty of the aesthetic—in this case Mozart—is reduced to and registered by the finite and physical inner matter of the brain. The poem is worth quoting at length:

            Late at night the mind quiets, or
            when listening to Mozart. All the studies
            say so, they show maps of the brain
            when you’re having chills listening
            to something beautiful the way a man’s cry
            is beautiful to me I’m ashamed to say.

Barnett notes the proximity in the brain of the areas for processing music and sex, describing “a few men / in flagrante, or whatever that is.”

            “Present,” I might have said
            though for most of those nights I wasn’t,
            not really. I wanted to be.
            I don’t like to think about the past,
            I was afraid to say “here”
            though there I was listening.

Barnett’s poetry is at its most wounded and wounding when occupying that liminal position between “here” and “there,” situated in the gap between presence and absence, love and dread. The deictics in the last two lines suggest a speaker alienated from both her previous self and the world around her, a self, as she says elsewhere, “left dallying, straddling the extremes.”

In a collection marked by a remarkably effective tonal and thematic unity—nearly every poem explores the ideas discussed above—perhaps the only misstep is Barnett’s hesitance to let the language of the poems itself go to these “extremes.” The speaker here is entirely in control of her language, never given over to the chaotic infinite she describes, an infinite that could have registered itself at the level of form, for example, in greater syntactical discordance or rapid oscillations in tone. In the same way, the book’s thematic unity sometimes falls flat, as Barnett resorts to rhetorical description in place of a more vivid making; when much of the collection meditates on very similar ideas, those ideas threaten to become worn and expected by the end of the book, where one poem, “Vast and Lonesomely,” ends with an unsatisfying description of “a good day for sleeping, / a fascinating day.”

Nonetheless, The Game of Boxes is that rare occurrence in contemporary poetry, a collection at once emotionally devastating and intellectually sharp, turned inward to the working of the self and, more importantly, outward to those points of contact where the self is troubled and destabilized by the dread-inducing universe of which it is a part.

Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released
by Helene Aylon
Feminist Press at City University of New York

I found Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released while browsing in a feminist bookstore in Chicago and have since been unable to put it down. It is a memoir by a visual artist that is a mixture of art, literature, and political manifesto, and it is unlike any book of contemporary nonfiction I have read in recent years.

That’s because the memoir, like the artist herself, swerves between cutting-edge installation art, the ancient passages of the Bible, and centuries-old Jewish law and tradition. In one of Aylon’s major works, The Liberation of God, she highlighted passages of the Bible that bothered her; slowly it evolved until she put God on trial. Religious Jews don’t write in the Bible at all, so that project skirted the line between art and heresy.

Aylon’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Warhol Museum. Her installation commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki appeared on a billboard in Times Square. But her most interesting art and writing seems to stem from her early life at the epicenter of Orthodox Judaism. She describes her family home thus: “The house we rented for eighty years was on the same block where the annual Simchat Torah (Joy of Torah) holiday dancing took place. Our street, Forty-Seventh Street, was the Times Square of Boro Park. The police barriers that were erected during the holiday to block traffic from entering the street were completely unnecessary because the streets were automatically emptied of cars on Shabbos and Jewish holidays. After all, the entire neighborhood was Orthodox.”

At nineteen, Aylon married a rabbi and moved to Montreal. She had two children, but soon, tragedy struck; her husband was diagnosed with cancer. At thirty Aylon became a widow. She enrolled in Brooklyn College and eventually allowed herself to be an art major. She writes:

I secretly enrolled in an acting class, but my major was art. Better late than never.

My degree in art would be a degree in freedom. I used my maiden name when I enrolled; I had yet to start using Aylon, and it was important to me not to “soil” the distinguished name of Rabbi Mandel H. Fisch [her husband] by exposing it to my secular, collegiate world. I cringe even now as I think about this. By the time I graduated Mandel had died, but I had a long way to go before I would truly no longer be Mrs. Mandel Fisch. My feelings were deeply conflicted. I did not take a picture for the yearbook, lest someone from home recognize me and reveal my identity to my professors and classmates. I did not want that old world to be part of my new one. It was only at the age of sixty that I dared to “come out” as a formerly Orthodox Jew.

But there, at Brooklyn College, she was lucky: her teacher was the great modernist Ad Reinhardt. One of the delicious pleasures of this book is that it reproduces two handwritten postcards from Reinhardt, asking how Aylon is doing after graduation and why she did not share the details of her life with him.

This memoir answers Reinhardt’s question as it tells the story, complete with photographs, art, and documents, of how one woman became an artist—and became herself—despite tremendous family and community pressure to do otherwise. It was not easy. Not long after her husband’s untimely death, she volunteered at a center for high school dropouts. There she met a psychologist who promised to cure her of her “religious paralysis.” He declared that it would be a change as momentous as losing her virginity. One afternoon, he took her out for a drive and began speeding—“leering up at the heavens, as the wind hit our faces, ‘You Lordy Lord up there, you fuck-up! Why did you let the babies die?’”

It goes on, getting increasingly lewd, with Aylon begging him to slow down and him yelling at God. Finally, she begins laughing hysterically. “That’s when he finally slowed down and drove to an exit to park the car. Then, with utter calm, he turned to me and declared that my nervous laughter was the release he was waiting for, that I was cured of what he called my ‘religious paralysis,’ and now I could get on with changing my life.”

Changing her life meant creating both her own sense of Judaism and her sense of herself as an artist. Her first professional commission was a mural on the doors of the Jewish chapel at Kennedy Airport in New York. She writes:

I knew that I wanted to paint one word on that chapel: Ruach. . . . It means spirit, breath, wind. It is the one word in the Old Testament that I still venerate. It comes from the second verse in the Book of Genesis that I spoke about with Mark Rothko: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit [wind/breath] of God hovered over the face of the waters.”

Here Aylon quotes a first- or second-century sage. “Rabbi Akiva, the great Jewish scholar, once said that the world is based on wind/breath. ‘Take away just breath . . . there is no life.’ This word would be what I would hold onto as I exited one life and passed through the revolving door to face a new direction.”

Unfortunately, the donor who funded the doors wanted his name on them. Aylon refused. “I said, ‘This is the entrance to God’s temple. The name of the donor can be placed on a plaque somewhere on a wall.’” She writes that she had the courage to do this because she had already been paid for the doors, and photographs of them had been published in Art News. But when Aylon stopped by with her son to see the doors, she saw that they were “lying on the ground like fallen angels.” In their place, “an expensive new wooden entrance with the name of the donor on the new door” was there. “Two more words had been added: ‘push’ and ;pull.’” Aghast, Aylon paid four construction workers to pick up her doors and transport them to her studio in St Mark’s Place.

The doors remained there, in her studio. “The doors were there in the evenings when I went home to Brooklyn to give my daughter dinner and be a mother, and they greeted me upon my return the next morning, bearing witness to my life as an artist.”

This was only the beginning of the story of her career: both a battle with and a deep engagement with Jewish text and the Jewish community. What began with Ruach, those airport doors, culminated with a huge project later in her career. From 1990 to 1996, Aylon worked on a mixed-media project called The Liberation of God that took her interest in Genesis—and the entire Bible—to new levels. This breadth helps explain the intellectual challenge of reading this memoir; it includes plenty of references to centuries-old Jewish thought, and sometimes it gets a little esoteric. As I got deeper into this memoir, I found myself having to stop reading, to take a breath. It is an intense reading experience—at times a little too intense. But mostly, the book moves in interesting and graceful loops between art, theology, and memoir.

I wondered whether anyone who was not an artist from a religious background would appreciate this book. Then I saw the photo of Leah Rabin, wife of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a religious extremist, with Aylon at the Liberation of God exhibit. Leah Rabin, of all people, probably understood the fearsome power of religion and might be able to convince others that this unusual book matters. But as I reread, I realized that there was no need to name-drop. While there is plenty of radical art and opinion in these pages, there is something in Aylon’s brave, lonely, and stubborn struggle to become herself that is, in the end, universal. There is something profoundly human in the idea of what we contain, and what we eventually release to the world.

The Walls Behind the Curtain
Edited by Harold B. Segel
University of Pittsburgh Press

The prison systems of all democracies are alike; every dictatorship has its own way of torturing its prisoners. The Russians, whether in the days of the tsars or in communist times, sent their victims to freezing Siberia, a natural prison by itself, where the underfed prisoners did hard labor until they dropped dead. The Ugandan dictator Idi Amin simply fed his prisoners to the crocodiles, the Taliban organize mutilations and stonings for their victims, and so on.

This fascinating book, edited by Prof. Harold B. Segel of Columbia University, presents a rich sampling of writings by people imprisoned in the jails of the former Eastern European Soviet colonies, or Soviet satellites, to use the time-honored euphemism. Who were these prisoners? You might guess they were people associated with the regimes deposed by the communists, or people who dared to oppose the communist system, or writers whose writings had offended the government. You could even guess that they were people guilty of absolutely nothing. With each of these guesses you would be right in quite a few cases, but the general picture is much weirder than that. It is not as if all Soviet satellites had been nice democracies overrun by the evil commies. Quite a few of these countries were fascist dictatorships, as evil as what came after them. Therefore, to hear, for example, Nichifor Crainic, a poet and also the minister of propaganda in Marshal Ion Antonescu’s wartime Romanian fascist dictatorship, kvetch poetically about how he was hungry in communist prison, calls forth not compassion but rather a paradox. Should one’s natural disgust at the communist methods of torture be trumped by one’s equally natural Schadenfreude, prompting a smile and and a “Serves him right”? Unlike the victims of the atrocities committed by the Antonescu regime, Nichifor Crainic managed to survive the hardships of his communist imprisonment and then managed to find employment as editor of, wouldn’t you know, a communist propaganda magazine.

Segel provides a brief and informative biography for each of the authors included in this collection. For Nichifor Crainic he accurately describes the man’s life story, but he abstains from passing any judgment and lets the reader discover the moral discrepancy between what this man said and what he did. This intensifies the effect of Crainic’s inclusion, which on literary merit alone would hardly be justified.

If I start with Crainic, a Romanian writer, it is because (full disclosure!) I myself was born and grew up in Romania, so not surprisingly, I first took a look at the Romanian writers in this volume. This was easy, as the volume is organized by the writers’ nationality.

At this point I should mention that the texts incorporated in this book are almost all translated by Segel himself from seven languages into English, a real tour de force. But what is the purpose of this collection? On the one hand, there is a historic purpose for using the voices of the victims to expose atrocities committed by communist governments and the way people dealt with the horrors inflicted upon them. The other purpose is literary. After all, prison writing has a spectacular record in European literature. Think of Miguel de Cervantes, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens (who wrote about not his own but his father’s prison experiences), Oscar Wilde, Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Jean Gênet, to name but a few. Wilde summed it up in one of his famous quips: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” By such standards none of the rulers of the Soviet satellite states ever “deserved” to have any prisoners, but with Generalissimo Josef Stalin as their sponsor, they got them anyway, and this book acquaints us with their writings.

Of the great European writers I just listed, only Céline and the two Russians were political prisoners. The practice of imprisoning writers for political reasons can be traced at least as far back as the great Roman poet Ovid, exiled on a whim by the emperor Augustus to Tomis, the current Constanţa in Romania.

Segel’s choice of writers is very interesting. We find well-known dissidents who had played an important historic role, such as the Czech Václav Havel, the Pole Adam Michnik, the Montenegrin Milovan Djilas. Much as one may admire their indisputable courage and political insights, their artistic merit is on a much less solid footing. Consider the excerpt from Adam Michnik’s Letters from Prison and Other Essays. Starting from the outrageously slanderous propaganda injected by the communist authorities into the internationally reported-upon trial of the murderers of Rev. Yerzy Popieluszko, Michnik discusses the role of the Catholic Church in Polish history. His historically and politically well-informed analysis of this interesting issue is constructed as what can best be described as an op-ed article. By all accounts, Michnik was the brilliant idea man of the Polish Solidarity movement, and reading his take on major events of those days is unquestionably of historic interest. But historic interest and literary value are two different things.

In the Romanian section, right after Crainic, we find the poet Radu Gyr, tainted by his very active membership in the ultra-fascist Iron Guard. Similar stains also burden some of the writers mentioned in Segel’s introduction but not included in the collection, such as the Bulgarian novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova. The Romanian section also features Paul Goma, the dissident writer forced by the communist government to emigrate to France, only to be pursued in Paris by an assassin sent by have the Ceauşescu regime. It made worldwide headlines at the time, because the assassin defected to the French counterintelligence. In an excerpt from his novel Gherla, Goma records his memories of his stay at the ferocious Gherla prison.

Like Goma, many of the writers detail, mostly in memoir form, the banal ways in which they were harassed and tortured. As the Macedo-Bulgarian Venko Markovski puts it so well, “Everything is forbidden us at Goli Otok. . . . Even sighing is forbidden us.” Goli Otok is an Adriatic island-prison that makes Alcatraz look like picnic grounds. Officially labeled “a program of reeducation,” this program of torture had in many cases the clear goal of recruiting the prisoner as an informer.

In the Hungarian contingent we find Tibor Déry represented, among some other of his writings, by an excerpt from his novel Liebe Mamuskám!, written in that marvelous German- Hungarian hybrid developed in the days of the Austro-Hungarian kaiserlich und königlich, or k.u.k., empire (the title of the novel means “My dear Mommy” with the word dear in German and the rest in idiomatic Hungarian). It is constructed with letters from Déry to his mother, written in prison and then conveyed through a long chain of friends and mailed to her from the West, so as to hide from the unsuspecting mother the fact that her son is languishing in a communist prison. This caught my attention because the novel Liebe Mamuskám! provides the basis for the magnificent Hungarian film Szerelem (Love), starring the legendary actress Lili Darvas, widow of the famous writer Franz Molnar. Molnar himself had a big political problem: both he and his wife were Jews in fascist Hungary. The way they dealt with this was by emigrating to the United States. Notice the difference from Paul Goma or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who were forced by their countries’ governments to emigrate, though the end result, exile, was the same.

Beyond the hardships of imprisonment, for a writer a maybe even more painful fate is exile to a foreign land in which his or her mother tongue is not spoken. Such exile can affect painters (e.g., Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall) and composers (e.g., Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg) as well, but in exile you can paint just as in your native land, and music sounds just about the same everywhere. By contrast, exile deprives a writer of exposure to the language that is her or his medium. The street signs are in a foreign language, the people on the bus speak that language as well, and so the writer cannot overhear conversations and then use snippets of them in writing. All this notwithstanding, some great poets and writers have managed to write major works in their mother tongue while in exile: Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, Czech novelist Milan Kundera, Irish novelist James Joyce (who wrote in a rich language of his very own, to which continued exposure to the sounds of Dublin streets might have added very little). Other writers “adapt” to exile by changing the language in which they write: Joseph Conrad, Eugène Ionesco. Yet others write in both itheir mother tongue and the language of their land of exile: Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett. An ironic twist on all this is provided by the novelist Herta Müller, whose mother tongue is German even though she was born in Romania, and who, after growing up in Romania and graduating from the West University of Timişoara, was allowed to leave Romania for Germany, where she writes in German. Anyone familiar with the work of these artists cannot fail to notice the superlative quality of their writing in exile. Why are exiled writers able to write so well? Is it because they have a picture of things on a grander scale? Or is it because they are not exposed to physical pain and deprivation or to deep-seated and continuous fear, as they would be in a prison in their homeland? I do not know the answers to these questions. It would be really nice if Segel could follow up this excellent book on cold war East European prison literature by editing a book on cold war East European exile literature.

Love: An Index
by Rebecca Lindenberg
McSweeney's

In 2009 the poet Craig Arnold disappeared on the remote Japanese island Kuchinoerabujima, while hiking near a volcano. Though Japanese authorities searched for days, Arnold was never found. Rebecca Lindenberg, his partner of six years, has now written Love: An Index, a meditation on their love and her loss of him. It is a book that could never be imagined without the tragic circumstances of Arnold’s disappearance and the wrenching unknowable that is left to her. “I wish this book were not here to be read. But it is,” Jane Hirshfield said. “And be read it will, with gratitude, stopped breath, amazement.”

In her book Nox, Anne Carson writes, “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.” And like Carson, Lindenberg is working to reinvent the elegy, to show us, through fragmented thoughts, how to comprehend loss. How to record the history of it. How to tell her own history. In this debut book, Lindenberg proves that while loss can fragment you, it can also make you generous. She gives us a reinvented form, a definite elegy, a compilation of ways to translate love and loss into the most modern terms possible. And though this project may have begun as a way of reconciling her own grief, she has generously given us a reference book for understanding our own impossible losses.

The heart of the book is the second section, where the long title poem “Love: An Index” appears. Here we are given an A–Z dictionary of terms that are singularly understandable and important to the poet and her lost lover. Some of them are universal: ache, comfort, forgive. However, most define their specific relationship, its quirks and nuances, and the individual components that make it unique to them:

APARTMENTS,

Laramie, a basement, a stoveless kitchen, / toaster-roasted eggplant, baseboard / heat and sex in woolen socks.

Rome, 5B, stone floors, kitchen / white as the madness I felt there, a bed made / from twin beds held together with duct tape / always suggesting itself a metaphor.

EYE, in the Middle Ages it was thought impossible to desire anything / you’ve never seen, and so the blind could not love.

LEMON, Meyer, you brined them for tagine. How I love that word, tagine. / soap, when I got out of the shower you grinned, / “You’re a clean little lemon drop. C’mere.”

PERSONISM, I cannot pick up the telephone / and call you, so I write you poems.

SKYPE, you turned your screen / to face the hostel wall and said, “Okay, go” / and I lifted my shirt.

WITTGENSTEIN says, “The world is all / that is the case.” Once I wrote it: “The word / is all that is the case.” (Also: “Pubic parks.” Oh well.)

Some terms are private snapshots, some are grand gestures of knowledge, some are simply records of places where the two had lived. Singularly, they feel like fragments. But the index, as a whole, serves as reference material in understanding the nature of this couple: their education, their anger, their fights, their trips, their understanding of each other, their understanding of the world, what they mean together, what they mean apart.

It is interesting to see this index come after the first section of poems. That is, we, the readers, don’t read the first poems of the book with this knowledge. We are at first simply readers. And it is not until we arrive at the index that we are actively invited into their world. Then we become part of the book. Part of their relationship. Part of Lindenberg’s loss.

In a review of the book in the Rumpus, Spencer Davis says the poet is “trying a bit too hard to be inventive.” But really, it seems that Lindenberg is struggling with the opposite. The forms in this book exist because the loss would have been impossible to write about in a traditional poetic form. She attempts the traditional in her villanelle “Obsessional,” which works with the following repeating couplet:

What makes a man impossible to find?

Could it be worse than what I have in mind?

Though the villanelle is stirring, I find the poem much less interesting than, say, the Status Update prose poems in which the speaker struggles to explain herself in the confines of our own modern social media:

Rebecca Lindenberg is in a relationship and it’s complicated. Rebecca Lindenberg is single and it’s complicated. Rebecca Lindenberg joined the group “It All Seems So Simple Now, In The Aftermath Of This Consciousness-Altering Tragedy.

It’s easy to stay within the traditional bounds of poetry. But like everything, poetry must evolve and adapt for its readers, and modern readers want modern poetry. Lindenberg includes enough history and research here to earn these new forms. She’s read Plato and Sappho, Browning and Catullus, Ovid and Milton, as we see in the poem “Love, N1.” She has studied the history of loss, both historically and personally. And because of this, she earns the right to be modern and tell her story in whatever inventive and new way she deems necessary, or possible.

It seems then, that the whole book is working toward defining the indefinable and naming the unnamable. It’s striking that Lindenberg doesn’t know what to call herself, as she points out in her definition of widow:

widow as: “a woman whose husband has died. / So, not me.

She wants to know what category of the bereaved she belongs to. But we, the readers, can define her. Lindenberg is a brilliant, modern architect of love and loss. Instead of keeping her grief all for herself, she shares it with us, and then translates it for us. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Linderberg says this is how it feels, this is how you talk about grief and sadness and love right now. Love: An Index is a devastating and beautiful and generous book of poems. It is filled with light of all kinds. As Hirshfield said, it must be read.

(Pieter Breugel’s Triumph of Death)

I’ll conclude my account of the second week—though it doesn’t cover everything we talked about in classes—with this post on the other poems we discussed: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Return,” and two poems from William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, which was his response in 1923 to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was published the year before.

My main purpose in reading these two poems by Pound was to look at the rhythms of them. “In a Station of the Metro,” as it was first printed and published a hundred years ago in Poetry, had extra spaces between some of the words, and floated its line-ending punctuation out to the right of the last word. It’s read by most people as a free verse poem, and in Pound’s mind I think it was. But in his mind, to judge from the evidence (his poems), free verse included lines of poetry that were still metrical but were not of a traditional length (especially pentameter).

We’re going to get to iambic pentameter soon, and in fact the students are going to write a sonnet. Pentameter is a core requirement of this course, simply because without being able to read it, we can’t understand what’s going on, at every level, in any poem written in that meter. And that’s most of the tradition of English poetry and a lot of American poetry, too.

Forty years ago I heard Stanley Kunitz tell of a game that he and Theodore Roethke had played against each other. When they saw each other, each would quote (from memory) a stanza from an English poem of the Renaissance (and it had to be fairly obscure for the game to work at all), and the other had to identify poem and author, and also the decade in which it had been written. (This could be done, by ears as great as theirs, and minds as happily filled with poetry as theirs, partly by listening to the rhythms and meter, because the iambic pentameter didn’t get sorted out in a stable way until the end of the 16^thcentury, but more important, by listening for the specifics of stylistic identity, which they had certainly learned to recognize.) So Kunitz told me. He also said that he never managed to beat Roethke; there was no stanza that Roethke couldn’t either remember or figure out.

Teaching students how to hear the rhythms of English in the lines of poems, I start with listening to the rhythms of the natural speech stresses—from loose, quickly moving lines with fewer stressed syllables than unstressed ones, to lines in which the speech stresses are close-packed—two, three, four, and sometimes even more in a row.

Pound’s poem looks like this when we listen for the speech stresses:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .

Here I’ll add the metrical accents to the speech stresses (the difference between these is how meter works; it’s everything):

The áp | parí | tion óf | these fác | es ín | the crówd: |

( ˇ) Pét | als ón | a wét | black bóugh.|

(Really, the accent marks above the words should be over a whole syllable, but I’ve had to put them over vowels, because that’s the limitation of the character set in a word processing program.) I have notmarked the syllables in metrically unaccented positions at all, except for supplying the one that’s missing in front of “Pet-“.

In metrical practice (and terminology), a line like the second line here is often called “headless,” because it’s missing that syllable. But this variation is a perfectly acceptable, and frequent, variation of the iambic line, and then the line both begins and ends with a metrical accent, and is a syllable shorter than it would have been, and varies the sound and the effect of the word-rhythm.

So Pound composed this little free verse poem by writing a line of six iambic feet followed by a “headless” line of four. (They add up to ten… which would be the count of two lines of iambic pentameter; in effect, this is a disguised, syncopated couplet, with a strong “half” or “slant” rhyme.) Pound’s distribution of the speech stresses across the scheme of the meter creates what’s interesting in the rhythm of this famous little poem. The first line runs by quickly, lightly, ending on that heavy word “crowd”—a word with three consonants and a pretty broad, long-lasting vowel. The second line is rhythmically more emphatic, with four speech stresses out of a total of seven syllables. (Which is why he doesn’t happen to want, much less need, an article in front of “petals”—it would only lessen the rhythmic intensity.)

(Yes, “black” is a little less of a speech stress than “bough”—the vowel is short, the final “ck” is sharp and quick. So “black bough” is an iambic foot, even though “black” is given much more stress, has much more physical force in our mouths and ears, than the metrically accented but unstressed “on” in the second foot. (That’s what makes the second foot interesting, rhythmically.) Then “bough,” with its silent—but visually, typographically, charming—final consonant, is just one consonant and one vowel, but the vowel is very long, and of course it chimes with the identical vowel in “crowd”—with a different spelling, which is also visually pleasing to a mind given to liking these kinds of things, poet-mind. The bough is where the crowd is seen for an instant, after its metamorphosis into an image.

Pound’s poem imagining the return of Roman gods, “The Return,” is again rhythmically emphatic on the basis of the iamb, but he uses a metrical figure over and over to vary the iambic meter as much as possible without losing it, and he uses lines of irregular length, so I’m sure he thought, at the time he wrote this, that that too was one of the available kinds of “free verse.”

But William Carlos Williams went further (as did Pound himself, in his Cantos). We looked at Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital” (that’s the first line; originally Williams gave the poem no title) which is especially notable for the skill with which it catalogues a waste land (aha!) beside a road—just weeds and other wild plants, and weedy trees—that’s beginning to come to life as winter yields to spring. As compared to the Dantesque, Shakespearean, Wagnerian, ancient Greek, Baudelairean, Ovidian, Spenserian, Goldsmithian, etc. (all of which, and more, is in The Waste Land) English and European poets, whose words name the plants etc. for which those very words were coined, this, this weedy roadside on the way to a hospital built far from anyone because its patients all have infectious diseases—this is America, this is the humble, ordinary, nameless “stuff” with which we American poets must construct our poems because this is the rough, uncelebrated “new world” (line 16) that we who speak old European languages must describe and imagine in a new way. So Williams thought, or said he thought, and so he wrote, in this extraordinary amazing book. But note that the simple everyday language of this poem is as rhythmic as it can be: the “waste of broad, muddy fields,” “small trees / withdead brown leaves under them,” and so on. There’s no “ghost of the pentameter” (Eliot’s phrase) hovering behind these lines. Williams has noticeably kept it out (it can come right back in if the poet isn’t listening carefully enough). And the free verse rhythms—appearing to be spontaneous, impromptu—are as strongly emphatic as those in Hopkins or Pound.

In another poem from Spring and All, “Pink confused with white” (that’s the first line; originally Williams gave the poem no title), the literal images begin to glow with symbolic meanings, while remaining vivid to the mind’s eye. And here, for whatever reason, Williams does something that Pound does in “The Return”—he takes a metrical figure out of the tradition and uses it in free verse. Pound especially liked two of them. First, the initial trochee-plus-iamb, which is one of the most frequent variations of the first foot in a line: “Seé, they | retúrn!”—in this instance, speech stress completely coincides with metrical accent; Pound puts this into his poem over and over, whether it’s at the beginning of a line or not. The other one Pound loves to use and also to extend into another speech stress looks like this: “and the | slow feet.” It’s two syllables with neither speech stress nor metrical accent, very small and short indeed, followed by two stressed ones, so it’s effectively a two-foot figure; that is, a rhythmical device within the metrical scheme. Recognizing it as a two-foot figure, rather than trying to rationalize how it might be two iambic feet, makes it possible for us to steal it for use in free verse, for it does show us that even metrical verse, supposedly so artificially constrained, follows what English already does on our tongues—using lots of alternations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and sometimes packing them in closely.

Here’s Williams in “Pink confused with white,” using the first of the two metrical figures I described above: “dárting | it báck,” “petals aslant” “red where in whorls,” “gay with rough moss”; these are at the beginnings of lines, so they wouldn’t at all be out of place in a metrical poem. But this poem really is free verse. (It has no extended iambic passages. We can’t produce them by putting sequential lines together.) Other instances of this metrical (in metrical verse) and rhythmical (in both metrical and free verse) device are inside the lines: “flowers | reversed,” “darkened with mauve,” “there, wholly dark.” And the other device is here, too: “into the lamp’s horn,” “from the pot’s rim.”

There are many kinds of free verse, and many ways to try to define free verse, but one simple definition is that it does not have extended passages (five feet and more) of uninterruptedly iambic rhythm.

When what appears to be a free-verse poem does include such a passage here and there, it’s artistically inept, it stops us from hearing the pleasing irregularity of speech stresses and pulls us into hearing instead a metrical ghost; no, I should say zombie, because it takes over the body of the free-verse poem. (This is very different from a loosely iambic poem that tightens with very apparent deliberateness into polished meter in order to achieve an effect, for example at the end of a poem, or in some other moment of emotional intensity.)

We can see that Pound and Williams, in a moment of transition when the extended regularity of iambic verse simply had no more appeal in their minds, did nevertheless use some metrical effects that had been invented within iambic verse. Eliot remained comfortable with loosening the pentameter and continuing to explore its possibilities as a medium of allusion in The Waste Land (he himself tightens it at the end of the scene of the “carbuncular” clerk, with the effect of suggesting that the lovemaking gets steady, maybe mechanical). And in the Four Quartets he extends and contracts the line at different points, loosening or tightening it, mixing it in with free-verse lines in a way that feels (it was easy for him) very carefully calibrated.

Why should that be? Because this is what English does, this is what it sounds like—it is both predominantly iambic, even in everyday language, and it likes (that’s how I would put it) to sound iambic.

Millions of people worldwide died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Here’s Williams, M.D., portraying a visit to the “contagious hospital” (perhaps it was built during the epidemic, or in response to the epidemic, obviously to isolate the sick geographically and thus lessen the transmission of the disease to others). The hospital was built somewhere out from town, where what we see on the roadside is weeds and mud and scrub trees. No doubt many of the patients are, in some peoples’ eyes, “weeds”: the poor, the immigrants. These were Williams’s patients.

I can’t resist adding one more little poem by Williams, in this same vein of responsiveness to what others do not notice (this one’s not in our anthology):

(Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Red and Abstract Painting)

I’ve been mentioning “literal” and “figurative” or “symbolic” images. Just to explain, quickly:

Imagery, it turns out, is enormously difficult to define, because it is so various, because the way the mind works out what words mean is so infinitely complex, and because we use words to mean more than one thing at the same time (red is a color; in a particular context red signifies blood and all the associations of violent bodily harm; in another context red signifies anger or bull fighting or a commercial drink also associated with a bull or a “surreal” effect, such as a red tree in a painting; and more). With students, I am emphasizing a basic distinction between a word that has a literal meaning and appears to have no additional value beyond its descriptive use for the sake of giving the reader something concrete to imagine, and a word (even the same word) that has a figurative function, and also perhaps a symbolic value (red could be used metaphorically, as in “Texas is a red state, but it may become purple”).

These lines from Seamus Heaney’s “Death of Naturalist” illustrate the literal image:

The “figurative image” is easily illustrated by the last line of the Gwendolyn Brooks poem:

In this poem, red has become the color of what is not even mentioned: blood, which in turn stands for the violence of the boy’s death (“red” is a metonym, in this sense, substituting the color of blood for the blood itself, which in turn is a metonym for the violence that produced the blood, that is, the murder). The whole prairie is now red. The murder “colors” everything. The word “prairie” suggests a natural state of the land, before the whole history of Chicago, so it too, while signifying literally a certain kind of geology and weather and vegetation, also symbolizes the “heartland” of the settled United States. (And the rhymes in that poem, culminating in the largest of them, “prairie,” produce their own sequence of thoughts, beyond what the poem says.)

-Reginald Gibbons

South Africa is an afterthought to many Americans nowadays. Its relevance to world affairs receded into the past once apartheid was abolished and Nelson Mandela became the nation’s first democratically elected black president in 1994.

In his book “After Mandela,” Douglas Foster paints a complex picture of the political and cultural forces shaping South Africa since the end of Mandela’s presidency in 1999. Foster, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, spent parts of eight years in South Africa reporting on its ongoing transformation, including a full year living in Johannesburg in 2007. He interviewed hundreds of politicians, journalists, activists, health care professionals, educators, and young people about their hopes for the future of South Africa. What he came away with is a brutally honest account of the painful transition to democracy, the fight against a fearsome AIDS epidemic, and the struggle to catch up with a rapidly evolving world economy.

TriQuarterly sat down with Foster at his apartment in downtown Chicago to talk about what he calls “an urgent book at an urgent time,” not just for South Africa but the rest of the world.

TriQuarterly: As I was reading the book, I was thinking about what I already knew about South Africa, assumptions that I think a lot of people in America share. I had this image that first there was apartheid, then Mandela became president and it was over. But the book describes a very complicated transition phase.

Douglas Foster: I think for a lot of people, even people who pay close attention to global affairs, maybe “cognitive dissonance” is the best way to put it about South Africa. I think people have a couple of images in their minds. One is that amazing transition in the mid-90s. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and for those of us who marched in antiapartheid demonstrations and grew up seeing images of him as a young revolutionary, that was an astonishing moment. And the other is the cataclysm, either the expected cataclysm that didn’t occur or the cataclysms that did occur in the shape of HIV/AIDS, or even up to the current day with the violence in the mines. And of course, the reality of any people is a lot more complicated than that. It’s somewhere between the poles of cataclysm and miracle, and that’s what I’ve tried to capture in the book.

TQ: What do you mean when you say there was an expected cataclysm? People expected that after apartheid fell, everything else would fall apart?

DF: The entire global press corps arrived in 1994 in South Africa to cover the election, fully expecting that there would be a bloodbath, and to a certain extent their expectations were pleasantly defied. Many of those reporters expecting to cover the kind of confrontation that right-wing Afrikaners had threatened if Mandela was elected president went off to Rwanda, where genocide was under way. There’s always a place to go to cover a cataclysm, and to be honest, when I went in 2004, I had no expectation that I would stick around South Africa to tell the story in this book. I thought I would go to the People’s Republic of the Congo or Burundi or someplace else; I’m a magazine writer, and the story of some active conflict would be of most interest to editors.

What I got seduced by was, first, seeing the tremendous change that was under way in the newsrooms, but then, as I was around political and cultural circles and around young people, it was seeing society being stitched back together again in really interesting ways. It was a struggle that I chronicled in a kind of upstairs/downstairs manner, of people trying to achieve this very high-end goal of a nonracial, nonsexist, nonhomophobic, more egalitarian society at the southern tip of Africa. Eighteen years in, that’s still the goal.

TQ: How successful do you think that experiment has been? By the end of the book it seemed like you were cautiously optimistic, but maybe you left feeling there’s a lot of work left to be done. In your final conversation with Jacob Zuma, he said some disconcerting things about limiting the freedom of the press, so where you might have been hopeful that things were moving in the right direction, you still had that bad taste in your mouth as you left.

DF: I think it’s very hard to be there or to see what’s happening in the country without having a sense of disillusionment, disappointment in the ruling party and in the president. Today, in the National Council of Provinces, the “protection of state information bill“ was voted out of that house, and that is an anti-media piece of legislation. The kinds of things that I was arguing about with President Zuma in our very last interview are things that concern people. A crackdown on press freedoms, rising disrespect for judicial independence, and failure to narrow the gap between rich and poor are the key indicators of a society in distress.

At the same time, what the book tries to make clear is that there was a great collision of world historical forces on one day in 1994. The very same day that democracy arrived, HIV tipped into a pandemic. And on that very same day the South African economy was hitched back up to a world economic order that was characterized in the mid-90s and the early part of the next decade by a worsening of income inequality everywhere. That was then layered over the inequalities of apartheid. So you see a system with leaders and citizens both under these tremendous stresses, and trying to move them in the direction of the promise of 1994.

Thus I think whether you should be cautiously optimistic depends on your framing. It may be “They promised peace, jobs, and justice—that’s what Mandela promised in the campaign of 1994, that was the slogan—so wait a minute, where are the jobs? Where is the justice? Maybe they do have peace.” With this framing I think you come out with one answer. If you come at it with a more nuanced framing that incorporates the unexpected challenges that were faced by the incoming leaders, then I think you can have a certain measure of cautious optimism that even these principles, these standards, and these goals still survive eighteen years in.

TQ: It seemed to me that, at least after Mandela’s term was over, the African National Congress (ANC) ossified immediately, that some of the revolutionary zeal fizzled or turned into a different type of energy. Is that fair?

DF: I don’t think so. It’s often presented as if there were these five miraculous years of Mandela, and then came Thabo Mbeki, his successor, and that’s where the revolution went off the rails. That in fact is the case that Jacob Zuma and his supporters made in 2007, 2008, and 2009 about why Zuma was needed. The fact is, there was a lot of continuity between Mandela and Mbeki. Mbeki had served as a kind of prime minister under Mandela from the beginning. So I don’t think you can say there was this stark turning point at which an ossification was visible.

I think there were certain ossified qualities of the party right from the beginning. It had been a party in exile. Its leaders had largely been in prison, in frontier states as guerrillas, or like Mbeki, who was in exile for nearly thirty years in London, disconnected from their own people, used to operating in a Marxist/Leninist kind of top-down manner. There are certain qualities of the party that then continue, and there’s a struggle to adapt to these new conditions, to return to the bottom-up representative shape that it had before the exile years. I think that’s a struggle that’s ongoing. I would say there are backward-looking forces within the party, and there’s a fight at very senior levels, including at the top now, between people whose outlook is primarily shaped by what they did in the struggle years and those who are more oriented to thinking about the future.

TQ: One of the big themes in the book, and one of the most troubling parts to me, was the Mbeki administration’s initial antiscience, denialist position on the AIDS epidemic. Why do you think that happened?

DF: Well, I had to struggle a lot with that, because the entire orientation of the book is to try to understand what the forces were that led people to make decisions, even if they seemed to me crazy in their consequences. What was the logic of Thabo Mbeki’s developed argument that HIV did not necessarily lead to AIDS, that what he was seeing in South Africa was not HIV? I can tell you what the internal logic was of that decision making. First, the conventional wisdom of epidemiology is hard to grasp. It’s difficult to understand why an epidemic that was primarily characterized in other parts of the world as a syndrome that was primarily transmitted through male-to-male sex, through IV needle use, or from sex workers should suddenly appear in a very different form at the southern tip of Africa, primarily transmitted through heterosexual sex and not through sex work avenues. That raised a question mark in his mind: why should it be like this everywhere else and then be characterized this way here? I think that raised hackles and suspicions that the long history of white people trying to control the sexuality of black people was somehow implicated.

My ability to wrap my mind around that was helped by having been in communities like San Francisco during the first two waves of the epidemic in the United States, when very similar arguments were made by leaders in the gay community. The coverage in gay weeklies would raise the question whether this was a CIA-developed microbe, whether this wasn’t a federal effort to demonize sex. So what I saw in South Africa when I went there, not just among leaders but widespread, with people saying, “Oh, AIDS, that’s the American initiative to demonize sex,” had a kind of resonance.

Then there was a practical pressure that heightened the sense of being horn swaggled into doing something, which was a quite accurate totting up in the late 90s of what it would cost South Africa, given antiretroviral medication costs at the time, to treat the country’s way out of the epidemic. If you just priced it out it would’ve been much of the national budget to do it. That’s before prices came down as a result of pressure from organizations like the Treatment Action Campaign. There was a kind of background suspicion heightened by things in popular culture, such as John Le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener and the film, raising questions about the way the international pharmaceutical companies treat Africans as guinea pigs. In a way it was two plus two plus two equals eleventy-eleventy, or some remarkable number. It’s a hard exercise to do if you’re somebody like me who has lost lovers and friends to AIDS, but there is a logic train that led to this really unfortunate conclusion on Mbeki’s part that he was being pressured by the CIA and international pharmaceutical companies to do something that would derail the capacity of the government to do anything else.

TQ: What was the tipping point for his administration? Because suddenly there was this very widespread program where the drugs were available in all the clinics. Is it because they couldn’t withstand the international pressure anymore?

DF: I think international pressure cut both ways. Some of it helped, and some of it was very damaging and made Mbeki dig in more. He figured that if there was such a loud clamor from the US and Western European governments, maybe his analysis was correct. The change was largely due to the bottom-up efforts of doctors, nurses, health promoters, the Treatment Action Campaign (one of the most successful cases of civic organizing in the history of the world), and Médecins Sans Frontières. It was individuals and networks of doctors, nurses, and health promoters, who after all had worked on a plan as far back as 1992 to take on the disease before it tipped into epidemic proportions. Many of those people just doggedly kept at it and raised money to do what the government wasn’t doing until 2004, the same year I arrived. The other thing was that there was a concerted move within the party. Nelson Mandela wasn’t president any longer, but he certainly made an effort both publicly and within the party. Lots of other members, including people on the national executive committee, kept insisting, “This is crazy. We’re losing support, we’re losing people, our people are dying.” There was a rising sense of urgency as people’s families were affected.

TQ: Where does the effort stand now under the Zuma administration? Have they continued to make strides, or has it stalled?

DF: Since 2009 there have been big strides. There’s a visionary minister of health, Aaron Motsoaledi, who, despite tremendous constraints in terms of resources and public health system infrastructure, has been able to ramp up the proportion of treatment. There’s still tens of thousands of people in desperate need of being on medication who aren’t on it, but when I arrived in 2004 there were zero being treated from public funds and public health clinics. There’s some indication in the surveys of young people now that the rate of new infections has leveled off, so finally there may be a point where people can begin to develop a strategy of treatment plus prevention and have some sense that those prevention efforts will start to have an effect.

The scale of the epidemic there and in the United States really can’t be compared. We’re talking about 15–16 percent infection rate in the population in South Africa. That means walking down the street and counting every sixth person to begin to imagine the scale and scope of the challenge on that front. Being there is a little bit like seeing scaled up to a national level what we experienced in places like Chelsea and San Francisco and neighborhoods that were heavily populated by gay men. For people who lived through that period and were in the central nodes of the epidemic, I think there is a sense of what it would be like. It was always people’s greatest fear that it would tip into a generalized epidemic, that we would see that kind of scale and scope to it. And I think that’s another place where we need to have some humility in judging the ways in which the South African government and the people reacted, because after all, we didn’t look so good in the early years and the scale of the challenge was significantly less.

TQ: One of the other major sections of the book dealt with the struggle between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. What was behind the conflict between those two and their leadership styles, and what did they represent to the country?

DF: There’s a couple different ways of slicing it. One is to think of Mandela as having represented the group of leaders who had been in prison. Mbeki represented the group of leaders who had been in exile, and Zuma represented the group of leaders who had been on the front lines in the guerrilla forces, who had been actively promoting an armed overthrow and had been in military organizations. In addition to that there are some differences between Mandela and Mbeki on the one side and Zuma on the other. They were highly educated, professional Xhosa-speaking people. He was an uneducated goatherd as a child, who came from very poor conditions and didn’t have much schooling. Zuma learned to read and write on Robben Island, in prison. So I think there’s a class difference. There’s certainly an ethnic difference in the sense that he’s the first Zulu-speaking leader to rise to the level of president of the party and the country since liberation, and that has some implications for how they’re seen. What played to his benefit was that Mbeki was seen as a quite clever, smart, intellectually oriented leader who quoted Yeats and Shakespeare, while Zuma knew how to dance, knew how to sing. He was a leader that looked more like me if I’m out there in a village or a township.

TQ: It seemed like there was a level of fear of what would happen if Zuma became president, that he would mismanage the country or take out retribution on the people who opposed him. Do you think those fears have come to pass? Has he done things to justify it?

DF: No, the fear that people were going to be frozen out was largely eliminated with the selection of a very broad-based cabinet. I think the big fears about Zuma that have relevance still are the ones that were always there: the corruption allegations were never adjudicated. He’s continued to make decisions that seem to favor direct relatives. There’s a huge controversy over new construction at his homestead that I describe in the book, of substantial amounts of money supposedly to increase the security there. There’s the construction that will cost, I think, two billion rand, of a village right outside of his home village. That is the kind of decision making that you generally haven’t seen from the top in the ANC before, and it makes people think of the ways in which liberation movements have gone off the rails in other parts of Africa, and other parts of the world too. People sometimes talk about it as an African phenomenon, or they’ll say, “I’m afraid South Africa will go the way of Italy.” The model in some ways is more Berlusconi than anybody in Africa: the mixing of personal interests and public resources, that kind of corruption.

TQ: One of the other conflicts that was very apparent throughout the book was generational. This is definitely not unique to South Africa, it’s happening everywhere, but young people there have very few opportunities for better education and better jobs. You interviewed a lot of young people and made a point to seek them out. Do they have any prospects? Is it getting better for them, or do you think it will?

DF: There’s no question that things have gotten better. Two million blacks have moved into middle-income status in eighteen years. It’s not enough, but it’s not nothing: the emergence of what President Mbeki’s adviser used to call the “patriotic bourgeoisie,” meaning a new emerging black middle class. The problem is that the South African economy operates in a global system that is unsustainable. China produces most of the textiles. Brazil produces most of the agricultural products. India is doing most of the service, including call centers, and the United States is consuming almost everything, based on debt. Obviously unsustainable, every piece of what I said, but what it leaves is 70 percent of the population in the world, in the developing countries, with a dilemma: where is their place in that economy?

You asked, are there enough opportunities? No. Seventy-five percent of black college graduates don’t find a job in their first year. That’s a sign of a huge potential explosion, that people follow the rules, do what they’re told, get a good education, get prepared for the new economy and the rest, and then there’s no payoff. So there are structural constraints that are creating tremendous pressure for this new generation. Half the population is twenty-four and under. Forty percent of the population is eighteen and under, and for that generation coming of age right now, it’s right there in their faces.

TQ: Given that situation, I would think that would be, if not the most urgent problem that they’re facing, one of the most urgent.

DF: It is absolutely the most urgent.

TQ: But what is the outlook for South Africa now? I asked before, has this project been successful? Maybe the answer is “we don’t know yet, they’re still in the middle of it.” Given that situation with young people and the world economy, what kind of path is South Africa on right now?

DF: I think the hopeful part is that the goals of the revolution are still widely embraced. In the last five years the number of young South Africans giving “South African” as their first identity, as opposed to “Zulu speaking” or “white,” are up. The level of optimism that their life will be better than their parents’ lives is up. So in spite of the structural constraints that create a very narrow funnel to success, there is this hope, expectation, and determination among the young to achieve their goals. It’s not as if large numbers of young South Africans have said, “We’ve heard about these goals for eighteen years, we’re not getting close enough, and therefore I’m going to embrace a different kind of goal.” There hasn’t been a push for a black nationalist state in which whites are pushed into the sea and finally pay a price for apartheid. You’re not hearing those kinds of things except from a very small number of people.

I wouldn’t want to pretend that the crushing constraints aren’t there. There’s an international need to look at not just this place but the kind of pressure that people in all developing countries are being put under, if we want the shape of the globe to be better five years from now than it is right now. That’s part of the reason for feeling that this is an urgent book at an urgent time. We’re quite rightfully concerned by the level of unemployment in the United States and the ways people were devastated by the financial crisis of 2008, but in the circumstances people face in a place like South Africa, 10 percent unemployment would be heaven. We have to think about how to foster a certain kind of growth that allows for social mobility and expanding opportunity around the world, not just expanded opportunity for ourselves.

In the last post I was describing some of the discussion in our classes during the first two weeks—ending with poems by Lorine Niedecker. Now I’ll add a few words about Denise Levertov and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the next poets we discussed.

In contrast to the way the language in Neidecker’s poems is often very concrete and only concrete, even while there’s a fascinating play of thought, or the way Seamus Heaney mastered from the very beginning of his work the use of words with Old English roots to create the most vivid mental images of the natural and human worlds, in Denise Levertov’s poem, “Stepping Westward,” the use of image-words is more like that of Gwendolyn Brooks in “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” That is, the literal images have another meaning, and this second level gives the poem a thoroughgoing symbolic texture. (Not that any of these poets produce no symbolic meaning: they do, of course. The differences in the way they sound—and thus in the way they think and feel—has to do with proportions.)

In “Stepping Westward” Levertov uses lots of literal images: green, ebb, flow, north star, black sky, blue, quilts of cloud, sweet, salt, and so on. But nearly all of them turn into symbols—as we absorb them, they grow from words that point to the physical reality outside language to words that point to ideas in our culture(s), our era, and our heads.

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Inversnaid,” the language is very sensuous in terms of how much our mouths do when we say it aloud. The consonants and vowels, like Heaney’s, really work our powers of articulation, and this—the way the English language works—makes the sense impressions, whether of sight or of other senses—especially vivid in our imaginations. That vividness is one of the great pleasures of the English language, and naturally enough it has been one of the primary poetic resources of our language, through all the life of poetry in English.

In Hopkins’s poem, we looked at the rhythms and the sounds, first. The emphatic rhythms of the close-packed speech stresses of lines like “His rollrock highroad roaring down” give more vividness to Hopkins’s description of the small, fast, fast-falling stream in Scotland. The neologisms and very particular existing words, like the tree that is called a “beadbonny ash,” also give the diction of the poem more concreteness, even when we don’t know what physical characteristics the beadbonny ash has. And then after all that hyponymic description (I’m coming to that in a moment), there’s the rhetorical shift to discursive language at the end—as if the fast stream, the “burn,” has now reached the level of the calm lake into which it drains, and the poem, like the lake, has time to think in a more familiar way: with general ideas.

In these lines nature has become an abstraction, a very valuable one in Hopkins’s mind: “wildness.” And “wet” has become an abstraction too. And even the literal image “weeds,” that generic term, becomes symbolic of all of life that grows up on its own. (Presumably in such a place in Scotland, that long ago, there might not have been the annoyance and danger of invasive species of weeds.) The poem was probably written in 1881 or soon thereafter; in America, Henry David Thoreau, who was born in 1817—almost thirty years before Hopkins—had begun to prize wild places by the 1840s, but I don’t imagine that Hopkins could have known of Thoreau. (I’d welcome a correction of my conjecture.) When Thoreau lectured and wrote, his rhetoric was discursive—a plea, a defense, a hope urged on his listeners and his readers. But he was a naturalist with a great appetite for specificity of detail. (Unlike Emerson, who was a general thinker; Thoreau said that taking a walk in the woods with Emerson was very unrewarding, because Emerson’s vision was poor, he didn’t notice things, and he talked all the time.) At the end of his poem, Hopkins comes to something like Thoreau’s rhetoric, but his utterance is first prepared for, through three intensely descriptive stanzas, by his presentation of what we might think of as a nature of words—the word-world that stands in relation to what it names in nature. The thing first (sort of), then the sentiment.

All of it intensified by the eccentric and fine-tuned ear of the poet.

Finally in this post: hyponym. A very useful word and concept. (Etymologically, it is formed from ancient Greek words.) As in hypodermic or hypothermia, the “hypo-” suggests something like “under,” “below.” And a hyponym is in fact an “under-name.” It is a name for something that is more specific, that has less conceptual breadth, than the word above it. So we can make a scale from most general to most specific by going down a list of hyponyms. For example:

(Wikipedia says of the rose: “’American Beauty’ is a hybrid perpetual rose, bred in France in 1875, and originally named ‘Madame Ferdinand Jamin’.”

The English language loves hyponymy. We relish the specificity, the taxonomic clarity, of words in everyday life. It’s well known that in French poetry, for instance, the reader is not likely to be told by the poet what sort of tree, for example, she is supposed to imagine. The tree, its foliage, its leaf, its red autumn leaf, its red maple leaf in autumn, its red Norway Maple leaf in autumn, is, in French, already idealized and thus simplified to “leaf” (la feuille) and it’s not likely to matter (to most French poets of all eras and to most French readers) which tree the leaf came from. What it looks like isn’t the focus; the focus is what it suggests, stands for, symbolizes. But the story of English, a Germanic language, is very different from that of French, a Latinate language. Which is why Shakespeare’s language—most famously—finds no analogous sort of diction in French. And because the languages differ, so too do the overall effects of the play that has been translated from English into French. Or the poem.

-Reginald Gibbons

We spent the second week of class looking at poems that added some variety to our sense of how language, feeling, perception, and more are linked by sensuous qualities of language: the sounds of words, the rhythms of phrases and sentences and lines. We also made conscious note of the mental images evoked in us by words that point to things outside language, and the effect on us of words that do other things (see the two lists of language functions in post #6).

Our poets the first week were Auden, Brooks, Dickinson, Heaney, Komunyakaa, Larkin, Millay, Montale, Rich, Rukeyser, Sandburg and Sophocles in the anthology. (See post #4 for the table of contents.) Just to recap, so I can emphasize the ground work I want to do in this course: in that first week we focused our discussion—for which we have too little time!—on Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist,” for the sounds and rhythms and the pleasures of the tremendous specificity of his language. We focused on Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” in order to take full note of the tremendous compression and symbolic power of that short poem in which so many of the words have more than one meaning or resonance. I didn’t get us to the discussion of Sophocles’s so-called “ode to man,” which is one of the choral odes of Antigone; I scheduled this for the sake of encountering the first poem in western culture that celebrates the accomplishments of human beings (true, it’s “man” in the poem, but that’s another topic) and measures life by these accomplishments, not by a divine standard or law. (I would have also talked about the monumental structure of this poem.) And we focused on Emily Dickinson’s poem #359 in order to look at how her particular sort of narrating—which in this poem encompasses the straightforward and simple actions of the robin and then the turbulence of consciousness as her metaphoric impulse proliferates quickly and wildly. (I see that turbulence as a very subtle instance of the same—but much more explicit—attention that she gives, in many other poems, to the mysteries of consciousness and to her skepticism about how mind—given by god to man—can be so all-encompassing and yet be baffled by the divine. (In many poems she’s skeptical about the divine, too, as is well known.)

The students turned in their first poems—they were asked to describe in only 8 lines a natural place. They turned out (“in” … “out”: a syntactical figure for the sheer pleasure of it) to have been held back (dead metaphor—sorry) by the temptation to abstract, to idealize, to allegorize. A number of the students described a real place as an illustration of a meaning, so they generalized that place out of the range of the mind’s eye. Instead it would have been better to have described a real or even an imagined place so that it is vividly evoked in language. (And that’s what they’re doing in their re-writes.) This is one of the expected difficulties of beginning to write poetry, though, and no cause for anyone’s alarm. In fact, there’s a lot to be learned from talking about it.

This second week our poets were Hopkins, Levertov, Niedecker, Pound, Ritsos, Roberson, Snyder, Tsvetaeva, Turcotte, Williams and Yeats. (How will I ever make it up to poetry itself that there is not enough time in the span of a college course to spend an adequate amount of time on even one poem each by these poets?!) Our focus in class—necessarily much narrower—was on Lorine Niedecker, in whose work we listened to the lovely changes of pace of the speech stresses, the subtle surprises of her line-breaks and her movement of thought, the double meanings of words and combinations of words, the way she so quietly yet effectively, pleasurably, breaks an idiom or surprises our expectation of idiomatic word order (“my brown little stove” and “she gives heat”—in “Swept snow, Li Po”). We looked at she makes one word flower from inside a previous one in these lines (from Fog-thick morning”):

(This is something that Marina Tsvetaeva does exuberantly in Russian, but which few poets do at all often in English. In Joseph Brodsky’s essay on Tsvetaeva, in which he tries to show all of us who have no Russian what makes Tsvetaeva’s work so remarkable, he calls this “root-word dialectics”—which is not an easy idea to take in—but in the little example above there is no common root, only a shared group of sounds: c-a-r-y.)

And we talked about the lovely A-B-B-A (chiasmus) of the simple but reverberating conclusion to “My mother saw the green tree toad,” which suddenly turns the poetic self and her mother, observers of the apparently endangered species of toad, a very “other” sort of living being, into vulnerable creatures just like it:

(A-B-B-A: changed-brown-town-changed) In the next post I’ll continue this one.

-Reginald Gibbons

Time out! But I’m not abandoning poetry—I’m only moving for a moment to another aspect of the life of poetry. Two important poetry events in Chicago are coming up in May and June.

On May 14 the Guild Literary Complex is presenting a tribute to Sterling Plumpp (it’s Guild’s annual benefit event). Plumpp was born in Mississippi, left that state for college, served in the army, eventually came to Chicago, and taught for many years at the University of Illinois - Chicago, before retiring not too long ago. He is one of the most original of American poets, and has developed the unique style of his poems through a deep, lifelong interrelationship between language and music—namely, both the blues and bebop. (In fact, he wrote several blues lyrics for the late Willie Kent.)

The author of numerous volumes, Plumpp has a recent poem in TriQuarterly:

http://triquarterly.org/poetry/mississippi-suite

Also at TriQuarterly is a very full interview: http://triquarterly.org/interviews/interview-sterling-plumpp

Then on June 7 the American Writers Museum Foundation, Third World Press and the Guild Literary Complex will present the first annual Brooksday—a celebration of the work of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) on her birthday. It will be a continuous reading of her work from 9 a.m. till 7:30 p.m. at the Cultural Center in downtown Chicago (at the corner of Michigan Ave. and Randolph St. (Enter from Randolph St.) If you live in or near Chicago, I hope you’ll want to come to one or both. For information about both, go to http://guildcomplex.org/

You’ll see buttons on the left for both these events.

Also, check out http://www.americanwritersmuseum.org/

(Back to poetry writing, in the next post.)

-Reginald Gibbons

One useful very general critical source on literature in general, is the online edition of M. H. Abrams’s venerable Glossary of Literary Terms. In order to have a bigger frame in which to see the poetry that we ourselves write, we need to understand what we’re doing in the context of all other poetry, or at least in the smaller context of the poetry that lies behind our own efforts, even if we are not yet aware of it all. And in literary criticism and what used to be called (but no longer) “philosophy of art” or even “philosophy of literature,” a number of different aesthetic stances or theories have been conceived by those who have thought generally about literature, from classical antiquity to the present.

For example, the four types of criticism that M. H. Abrams has discerned in the whole history of (western) thinking about literature: mimetic theories of poetry, which look at the relationship between the poem and the world; pragmatic theories, regarding the relationship between the poem and the audience; expressive theories, on the relationship between the poem and the poet; and objective theories, which consider the poem mostly as an object to be studied closely for its intrinsic qualities. Read more.

And browse or search the whole glossary at:
http://archive.org/details/AGlossaryOfLiteraryTerms

Within these four categories, or related to them, there are different ways of reading poetry—linguistically, formally, historically, sociologically, philosophically, etc. The value of learning about these four types of criticism is that it can make us more aware of artistic opportunities in our own poems, and it reveals to us that what people read poems for, what they are in search of in poems, can be very different.

-Reginald Gibbons

Language Functions

I like to think that poets have an intuitive and practiced sense of how many functions language has in daily life. Intellectually we tend to notice only the “representational” function—the way each word has a meaning (or several) and what that meaning is. But we use language not merely to communicate the meaning that the dictionary confirms for us. There’s a lot more going on in the simplest of human communication than that. Perhaps most of all in the simplest.

But the academic study of literary language tends to be confined mostly to the representational function, and almost never do I see a critical description or analysis of poetry that goes into the language functions that affect us at deeper, more intuitive levels. For a while, peaking in the 1980s and only slowly trailing off after that, it was hard to find a scholar in the field of literary studies who believed that language had any other function than the representational. Hence the strong attitudes of that time in many academics against what they call “the aesthetic,” meaning almost any formal aspect of poetry at all, from tiny phonetic figures to big structures.

The acquisition of language by children has been studied deeply, though, and here we can find a refreshing breadth of responsiveness to the different things we do with language—which means the different ways we make and communicate our meaning, and that in turn means: all the possibilities of meaning making that can be found in poetry.

Here’s my favorite example, although it is probably rather dated by now:

“The linguist Michael Halliday observed his young son during the period when his vocalizations were assuming consistent phonological form and when he began to exhibit clearly an intention to communicate by means of these forms. Halliday was able to distinguish seven different functions, or uses, of his son’s talk, which he took to be models of the child’s conception of what talk is for. The first notion to emerge is that of talk as [1] instrumental, a means of satisfying wants or needs. Another function is [2] regulatory: the child discovers that others seek to control him by talking and that he can also control the behavior of others. The child also senses that one can establish and maintain contact with others by talking; he recognizes [3] the interactional function. The child also expresses his individuality in talking; he asserts himself and his own sense of agency, for talking is a field of action in which he can make choices and take some responsibility. Thus talking has [4] a personal function, as well. [5] The heuristic, or learning, function, is exemplified in the perennial questions ‘why?’ and ‘what’s that?’; the child finds that he can use talk to learn about and describe his world. And talking serves [6] the imaginative function of pretend, which may overlap with an aesthetic function (although Halliday does not dwell on this possibility) as the child realizes that he can create images and pleasurable effects by talking. Finally, the perhaps the latest use of talk to appear, is[7] the representational function, or talking to inform. Adults, when they think about language, regard it as a means of expressing propositions or as a means of conveying information. They view this as the primary function of talk, but it is hardly the dominant use for the child.” (Catherine Garvey, Children’s Talk, 1984, emphasis added)

The linguist David Crystal has analyzed the functions of language in a different, emphasizing communicative effect, whatever the intention may be.

(1) expressing emotion

(2) expressing rapport

(3) expressing sound

(4) playing

(5) controlling reality

(6) recording [and preserving, I would add] facts

(7) expressing thought processes

(8) expressing identity

…he also situates the use of language in the context of technology. Crystal is emphatic that one must keep oneself aware—when studying language itself, or even when thinking about it informally, as a lay person not a linguistic—of the diversity of language functions. (This list is from his book How Language Works.)

The first time I ever really thought about Roger Ebert it was because I knew he was warm, dry, and celebrating and I was cold, wet and furious. It was January 2005 in Chicago, and unsurprisingly it was snowing on me and members of Not Dead Yet as we staged a protest outside the Union League Club, surrounded by a row of news trucks. Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day, my boyfriend and I had sat, horrified, at a screening of Million Dollar Baby. We’d been stuck right in the middle of a long row of people, unable to escape, watching Hilary Swank go from a strong and fearless heroine to fully balls-out suicidal the moment she became a crip. A quadriplegic crip, in fact, like many of my friends, including the people now huddled beside me. Behind the club’s ornate facade, Roger Ebert was awarding Million Dollar Baby the Chicago Film Critics Award for Best Movie of 2004.

Ebert had defended MDB on grounds of artistic integrity and its connection with great human dramas of the past. His opinion upset my boss, Marca Bristo, who was a founder of Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago, a politically active organization that provides services by and for people with disabilities, and, more to the point, a longtime friend of Ebert’s. Marca had expected him to see the movie for what it was, influenced perhaps by their friendship, and since he was known as a boldly liberal progressive. Marca was a hero to me. She’d told me about trying to explain to Ebert why the disability community was so very upset about this film. After I talked to a bunch of pals who were just as dismayed, we decided that Roger needed to hear the message a wee bit louder. The signs we clutched outside the Union League, accordingly, were magic-markered in all caps:

MILLION DOLLAR BIGOT

EBERT SAYS: THUMBS WAY UP FOR KILLING THE DISABLED.

CRITICS SAY: WE LOVE DISABILITY BIGOTRY

At the time, I was the visiting artist in the Gross Anatomy cadaver lab at UIC, and we happened to be studying the area beneath the mandible when I’d seen the film. I knew exactly how delicate and closely packed that area was, how much like a Swiss watch, with its tightly coiled vessels, tiny bones of the ear, and spongy pad of salivary glands. Watching Swank’s face being pummeled by boxing gloves made me nauseated. I had to look away from her bruises and swellings, though I knew they were mostly special effects.

The hinge of the jaw was the exact spot where a very real cancer would emerge in Ebert’s face one year later.

I had never protested a movie before—and haven’t since—but Swank’s character’s descent from pride into self-loathing mattered to me. MDB was right in line with every horrible picture I’d ever seen—moving and still—that had taught me to hate my own body. I am an artist and a disabled woman. I’d been drawing and painting portraits of people with disabilities for about ten years, in part to lift the smothering weight of shame from my own life, and from those of my collaborators. People like us mostly turned up in films like Freaks, Tod Browning’s roundup of the morphologically variant. Freaks had become a sort of mascot to the disability community. It wasn’t hard to identify with the violent sideshow performers as they closed in on their able-bodied torturers. And I’d come to MDB all excited after seeing Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, which had meant a lot to me as a queer woman—even though she’d died at the end of that one, too. At least she hadn’t asked for it.

Ebert’s defense of the movie was infuriating but hardly surprising, given that I couldn’t recall a single other mainstream critic ever questioning the frequent deaths of disabled characters in films. Dying nobly seemed to be the main reason to include a cripple in a script, unless said cripple was Monster of the Month. I did not know that Ebert already had had to contemplate his own mortality after multiple treatments for thyroid cancer. I saw him on television defending Eastwood’s movie, and he looked to me like an imposing and powerful presence.

On top of this, I’d found out about and was in contact with the very not-suicidal artist Katie Dallam, whose amazing life was the basis for F.X. O’Toole’s original story. Dallam’s life had a much more hopeful and interesting arc than the one traced in the movie, and yes, I understand what art is, thank you very much. As a narrative artist, I would not want someone to tell me that a story must hew to the facts or that what I want to explore in human experience is invalid. Come to think of it, I’ve been told the latter many, many times, over the course of a career that was slow to take on disability after being discouraged, to say the least, by professors, gallerists, collectors and critics. However, our culture has continually told the disabled that their very lives have no value. It has seldom supported art that tells a different story. Art that continues the damage of centuries should, at the very least, be shown as a failure of human potential. And as I learned about Katie Dallam, a boxer who had been severely brain-injured after a title fight, had gone through a long, slow recovery after a months-long coma, and had become a tough and ferocious artist, I couldn’t help but think about what a movie that followed her story would have meant to me. She too was enraged with the depiction of impairment in the film, so it felt like we were in each other’s corner.

Anyway, all of this had combined in anger and disappointment with Mr. Ebert, until I found myself standing in the falling snow, clutching a wet cardboard sign and trying to explain myself to the reporters who were shoving big fuzzy microphones in my face. They just kept asking, Don’t people have the right to die, but mainly, Why are you here? Why are you here? which at times felt to me like Why haven’t YOU died yet? Why do you want to go on as a cripple?

We never even saw Ebert that day. I’m sure he had come in much earlier, or through the bat-cave entrance for VIPs. The group of us watched for his big familiar body—it would’ve been hard to miss—but finally we gave up, never having made any contact with anyone at the dinner, and cold and hungry ourselves. My boyfriend and I saw ourselves that night on the evening news, the Officially Angry Disabled, flickering between snippets of Ebert and Eastwood talking about the Rights of the Artist. I thought, protest makes you look stupid and simpleminded and humorless, but at least there were actual scenes of people in wheelchairs on television. I wished I could just have hung a row of Dallam’s blazing paintings outside the club and gotten the message through via—well—art.

Then, in 2006, cancer came back, this time in Roger Ebert’s mouth. His doctors removed it, but immediately a blood vessel ruptured and caused irrevocable damage to the tissues of his face. In order to save his life they were forced to remove his entire mandible— the bones of the jaw.

I did not know about what had happened to him until after it became clear that the doctors could not restore Ebert’s original face. All of a sudden, I was seeing the most astonishing pictures. Roger Ebert did something virtually unprecedented in the history of media: he invited the cameras, the reporters, the great electric eye of the world to come see his new and permanent self. In pictures he often posed in a black turtleneck that made his face slightly more puzzling: was part of his jaw tucked into the fabric? There was one article in particular, in Esquire, with a photograph that I looked at over and over. I’d put my finger over the strange shape of his chin, and there was startling presence of fame, that plinth of forehead and observer’s gaze we all knew so well. How many times had I watched him and Siskel argue before I headed out for a Saturday night at the movies? Now Siskel was gone, and Ebert’s face was bisected by ravenous cells and the surgeon’s knife. There have been a handful of famous people who did not hide away after a transformative injury. But many, like Christopher Reeve, used their bodies to beg for a cure, or others, like Richard Pryor, were seen as saying good-bye to their professional lives. Ebert’s brazen presence was as new as the altered geometry of his bones.

Marca began telling Roger that he should sit for a portrait by me. She told me I had to convince him to be painted. So I sent Roger a proposal, and was thrilled when he said yes. That June, Roger Ebert was the “Lead On” Honoree at the 2011 Access Living Gala. I put on my best velvet frock and went to meet the man.

Ebert gave a funny and moving talk, using his voice board, and holding onto his wife Chaz’s arm as he moved slowly on and off the Navy Pier stage. He was no longer a rock but a reed. I went to sit down at his table. He was curled into a huge leather recliner that was docked like an ocean liner next to his wife’s chair. Chaz watched me closely, ready to chase me off if I drained his limited energy. As I settled in across from him, I looked at this face I wanted to paint.

His upper face was still sturdy and certain, a firm scaffold for the loose, soft flesh that draped down from his cheekbones. Because there was no mandible left, I could see his shirt through the open aperture of his mouth. There was no tongue I could see, no lower teeth, just black cloth shifting weirdly behind the V-shaped gap of his lips. I wasn’t entirely prepared for the effect. This was what I had tried to understand in all those photos, and as an anatomist and a portrait artist, I wasn’t immune to a disturbed fascination with what the doctors had done. Yet, undeniably, Roger’s smile was sweet and welcoming. Maybe the shape of his mouth had been created in the operating room, but it was echoed by the expression in his eyes. It was as if he could channel his entire being through the tiny, delicate muscles that rim the lids, like a dancer using the smallest inflection of fingertips and toes to bewitch the audience.

We spoke for a little while, physically and electrically, and made a plan to make a plan. He said, Call Chaz, she’ll set it up. But when I did, it was only to hear that Roger was back in the hospital, or was traveling in the last months he could do so, or was too fragile to work just now.

Last week, I made a note on my desk that said Contact Chaz. The next day Ebert announced his Leave of Presence. And the next day he was gone.

I’ll never know what we would have done together. The images I make are narratives, born of long, intensive conversations about my subject’s life and work. Ebert was going to send me his autobiography, but that did not come to pass either. A part of me was afraid to do his portrait. Two people I worked with have died, and each time I went into it knowing it was possible, in one case definite, making me feel a heightened responsibility to do them justice. There is a specific grief I felt after losing the kind of intense and intimate relationship that came as I looked at them and they looked back at me. People have told me that I should do Ebert’s portrait anyway, but when I work with someone, able-bodied or disabled, I do it in part to be changed myself, to be made different and bigger by entering the universe inside their skin. The portrait is meant to allow my collaborator to exist in a way he or she cannot do alone. Copying photos of the dead would have no point at all.

Yet I have been changed by Roger Ebert. When he let us see the fact of his face, he made us all bigger, he made a space free of shame but full of intention and intelligence. I’m not capable of believing in beauty that is not twinned with pain and survival. The body as history is, for me, the deepest and truest form of beauty. Each such body strips away the concrete veils that have covered and imprisoned me in my life.

And yes, I know that you’ve read a zillion tributes and I-Met-Roger-Ebert-Once blog posts this past week. I’ve met a lot of amazing people in my life. But no one else who has done quite this specific, invaluable thing.

I found this quote, from Life Itself, Ebert’s autobiography. It seems to say that he kept his own body out of the fray of the world: “I used journalism to stay at one remove from my convictions: I wouldn’t risk arrest but would bravely report about those who did. My life has followed that pattern. I observe and describe at a prudent reserve.”

It isn’t true. Because Roger Ebert was so fierce, so smart, so skilled, and so much in the world, he brought his face to us as a gift, a vast map to free and unfamiliar lands.

When discussing the poems that we’ll be studying in this course and the poems that the students will write, I emphasize how poetic effects and poetic meaning are created. Poetic effects communicate and enact thought and feeling, harmony and dissonance, emphasis and rhythm, movement and stasis, narrative and meditation, tones of voice, and more. In general, they also mark the language of a poem as belonging to poetry rather than to some other kind of utterance. The qualities of language that mark a poem as poetry are in a way a proof of the poet’s skill and artistic deliberateness; they used to be proof, long long ago, of the peculiar effectiveness of language when it is used in a particular, highly compressed way with notable rhythm, sound and tropes. But these qualities of language are also a trace of what I believe is an instinctual impulse in all of us to use language to do more than it usually does. And also the result of the fact that we get pleasure from language used in this way. (See Dylan Thomas’s account of his childhood sense of language, in his “Poetic Manifesto” —it’s reprinted in the book I edited, The Poet’s Work; this is only one of many essays in which poets speak of this.)

"You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick… You’re back with the mystery ofhaving been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God." - Dylan Thomas from A Poetic Manifesto

We all feel to some degree an uncanny power in language to say more, to mean more, than words mean, and to do more than merely represent our world and our lives in it. We have all felt the power of language turned against us, and we have all used language against others. Language is not just something we use but also something we do. (I’ll post soon a quick summary of language functions.)

(In recent decades some of the arts have gravitated toward de-skilled creation, and so has poetry. But our focus is on work of manifest and impressive artistic skill.)

As I see our main work together in a poetry writing workshop, whether beginning or advanced, it’s more a studying of how poems say what they mean, rather than a discussion of what they mean. (That latter leads into what the poet believes and who the poet is, and everyone has to right, I must think, to believe and be who they are; but no one has an obligation to like what everyone else believes and who everyone else is. Poets rise and fall based partly on what sorts of human values and courage of being they give to the reader; that takes place on its own.)

That is, I try to teach how to describe how poems make meaning rather than how to interpret the meanings they make. We may have different (good) reasons, as individuals, for cherishing one poem over another, about which we may agree or disagree; but we’re pretty likely to agree on how a poem creates its effects in the listener and reader.

Among the elements of poetry that we’ll study are: the relationship between the poetic line and the shape of a sentence (i.e. syntax); the sounds and rhythms of the English language; imagery and figures of speech; word choice (diction); some of the traditional resources of poetry (such as particular devices and patterns), and particular purposes of poetry—like declaring, perceiving, mourning, acknowledging, playing, praising, narrating, meditating, and witnessing; and also the flexibility of poetic thinking.

Depending on the purpose of our looking, we look at the elements of poetry in different ways. Regarding poetic and linguistic resources, we study image, line, sentence, rhythm and meter, diction (word choice) stanza, structure, tropes (especially metaphor and metonymy), traditional forms and rhythmic patterns, and in general simply how poems (as opposed to other kinds of human discourse) move from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, image to image, and so on. Regarding the poet’s stance toward reality and use of imagination, we speak of landscape, history, social functions of poetry (which are related to genres), and the kinds of objects (in a psychoanalytical sense—that is: people, places, things, events, etc.) that hold the poet’s attention.

-Reginald Gibbons

Here’s the Table of Contents of the little anthology I have created for this course. I chose each poem for its usefulness in showing (various) elements of poetic technique. And some of them speak to each other. Homer, Pound and Gunn; Pound and Duncan; Auden and Yeats; Baudelaire and Donne’s “Negative Love” and Greville and Voznesensky (regarding thinking by negatives); Williams and Niedecker and Levertov and others; all the sonnets; Hadas a sonnet, by the way—look at the line-endings for rhyme words, and then you’ll see how the poem is put together with a combination of expanded lines and “composition by field”; and other connections.

Essays about many of these poets, additional poems, and recordings of them reading their poems can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.

More poems and resources are at the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

There are also some recordings of the poets themselves or of others reading some of these poems on YouTube.

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Anonymous, “Sir Patrick Spens”

W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

Charles Baudelaire, “Obsession”

William Blake, “London,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (2 poems), “The Sick Rose”

Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”

Louise Bogan, “Women,” “The Crows,” “Dark Summer,” “Several Voices

Out of a Cloud”

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “New World A’Comin’” (excerpt)

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,”

“The Mother”

Shawn Carter/Jay-Z, “History” (excerpt)

Charles Causley, “The Great Sun”

John Clare, “The Mouse’s NeHart Crane, “Voyages” (V), “At Melville’s Tomb”

Robert Creeley, “The Language”

Emily Dickinson, poems 359, 612, 647, 1000, 1004, 1611

John Donne, “Negative Love,” “Holy Sonnets” (X)

Robert Duncan, “At the Loom,” “Poetry, A Natural Thing”

Robert Frost, “Home Burial”

Allen Ginsberg, “Sunflower Sutra,” “Howl” (I—excerpt)

Fulke Greville, “In night, when colors…”

Thom Gunn, “Moly”

Pamela White Hadas, “Eurydice”

Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” “Homage to the

Empress of the Blues”

Seamus Heaney, “Death of a Naturalist,” “Casualty”

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, “Sonnet of Black Beauty”

Homer, Odyssey X (excerpt)

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”

John Keats, “To Autumn,” “Ode on Melancholy”

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Yellowjackets,” “Memory Cave”

Philip Larkin, “The Explosion”

D.H. Lawrence, “Snake,” “Bavarian Gentians”

Denise Levertov, “Stepping Westward,” “Living”

Linda McCarriston, “With the Horse in the Winter Pasture”

Thomas McGrath, “Letter to an Imaginary Friend” (I—excerpt), “Love in a Bus,”

“Used Up,” “Epitaph”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I, being born a woman…”

John Milton, “Methought I saw…,” Paradise Lost IV (excerpt)

Eugenio Montale, “Lemon Trees”

Lorine Niedecker, “Swept snow, Li Po,” “Fog—thick morning—,”

“You are my friend—,”“Effort lay in us,” “

My mother saw…,” “Grandfather”

Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them,” “The Day Lady Died”

Boris Pasternak, “Mirror”

Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°”

Sterling Plumpp, Ornate with Smoke (excerpt)

Ezra Pound, “The Return,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “Canto II” (excerpt),

“Canto XXXIX” (excerpt)

Adrienne Rich, “The Fact of a Doorframe,” “Power”

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther”

Yannis Ritsos, “The Meaning of Simplicity,” “Attack,” “A Wreath”

Ed Roberson, “”Beauty’s Standing” (excerpt), “Bend,” “Locus in Black Folktale”

Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Dead Man’s Dump”

Muriel Rukeyser, “Boy with his Hair Cut Short,” “”Letter to the Front”

(VII—excerpt)

Carl Sandburg, “Onion Days”

Sappho, fragment 31 (2 translations—by Anne Carson and Jim Powell)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”),

Sonnet 55 (“Not marble nor the gilded monuments“), Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes

are nothing like the sun”)

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella sonnet 1 (“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my

love to show”

Gary Snyder, “Point Reyes,” “Milton by Firelight,” “Axe Handles”

Sophocles, Antigone, lines 332-375 [“Ode to Man”—translation by RG and Charles Segal]

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” “This Solitude of Cataracts”

Marina Tsvetaeva, “Poets” (excerpt) [translation by RG and Ilya Kutik]

Mark Turcotte, “Continue,” “Reflection”

César Vallejo, “A man goes by…” [translation by RG]

Andrei Voznesensky, “A Graveyard Within: To the Memory of Robert Lowell” [translation by RG and Ilya Kutik]

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” (excerpt)

Walt Whitman, “Whoever You Are…,” “A March in the Ranks…”

William Carlos Williams, “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” “Pink Confused with

White,” “Nantucket”

Anne Winters, “The Mill Race”

William Wordsworth, “The Winander Boy,” “Composed Upon

Westminster Bridge”

Sir Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt…”

William Butler Yeats, “The Fisherman,” “Meru”

It’s National Poetry Month and TriQuarterly is proud to introduce a new web series by Reginald Gibbons, the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Professor Gibbons will report on his class discussion—what can be talked about with clarity and what is elusive, too. And also what his students find most interesting and how they develop through the course.

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It’s always a pleasure for me to begin talking about poetry with this little bit of folk poetry, first attested only in the 19th century, but it must be much older. We spent a fair amount of time simply noticing everything that’s going on in these few words:

oats, peas, beans and barley grow

Beyond using that simple poetic line to notice sounds, rhythms, and ideas, these first few days of class I’ve spent reading just three poems with the students.

My idea is to get everything we can out of those three poems—they represent a wide range of poetic styles and effects—and start, just start, to map all the sorts of things that language-in-poems, or human-beings-doing-poetry, does, everything it and we make happen in terms of thought and feeling and in terms of using more of language than we do in most of everyday life. Which doesn’t mean that the language in a poem can’t be everyday, casual, intimate, personal. It can and often is, in our day. But because we encounter that language in and as a poem, we know that there’s more meaning in it—if we listen for it—than we’re used to hearing or reading.

We talked about Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist”: we looked at the kinds of words he uses (so many with Old English roots—earthen words, used originally in a culture and time where technology was limited to crops and animals and weapons and ships), and at how these words create so many visual images, and how these remain “literal images” for the most part, without creating symbolic resonances in us. He sets a scene very vividly, in order to narrate (another thing the poem does) a moment of awakening (at least, that’s how it’s narrated, whatever experience he may have had, or not, and may still have remembered, at the time he was writing the poem). He invites us into what seems an autobiographical episode. We also looked at where the poem takes a step beyond where it has been hovering. It’s especially obvious where Heaney breaks that line two thirds of the way in, into two parts. That’s when the poem gets darker. And we listened to the speech stresses, and began, just began, to put them in relation to his “loose” iambic pentameter. (But notice that the first line and the last are very neatly done as impeccable pentameter lines) (including that extra unstressed syllable at the very end of the poem—almost as if he had barely gotten his fingers out in time—from where he didn’t, in the poem, actually put them).

Then we talked about Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.”

I asked students to read on their own the story of this hate-crime murder, and of how Till’s mother kept the coffin open for the funeral in Chicago. When we looked at the imagery, the word choice, in this poem, we saw the superficial resemblance to the imagery in Heaney’s poem (the words for things: taffy, coffee, mother, room, boy, prairie, and for their qualities: pretty-faced, red, black, and so on). And we also saw the great difference—in Brooks’s poem, we are witnesses to something real, historical, that has enormous symbolic meaning. That is, the words are both literal in their creating our mental images, and many of them also have a symbolic value (three kinds of “black,” for instance, each of them pouring meaning into these simple lines).

We ended with Emily Dickinson’s famous poem number 359, “A Bird came down the Walk.” There’s so much for us to notice, think, and feel, in this poem. It’s far beyond the cute poem it’s thought to be. At the beginning, there are those visual images that create the scene of the poem. Simple, direct, amusing—and a little odd. ”A dew,” “a grass.” The little narrative has begun impersonally, then there’s an unsettling moment when the narrator shows up, and we see that by implication either the bird or the narrator, or both, feels anxiety, caution. There’s something dangerous for the bird in the presence of the human being—and there’s something dangerous for the human being in the *ideas* that will now bubble up with an almost joyous rapidity of metaphorical invention. And there’s all the ambiguity of that metaphorical profusion and overlap—things that can’t entirely be figured out, syntax that works in two different ways, words left out…

So in the first few days, we’ve got a fair amount to be placed on each student’s map of poetic technique: the rhythms created by the speech stresses; phonetic figures (repeated sounds); the movement from idea to idea or feeling to feeling or image to image, etc., families of words (from Old English roots, from Latin ones—the two biggest ones in English); the way these aspects of craft and others “mark” the language of a poem as poetic, and set us up to pay attention to that language much more closely, and how the poetic devices also vouch for the poet’s artistic skill. And more. We’ll see such things (and more yet to be named and pondered) over and over, as we go, and we’ll see how the individuality of each poet’s voice is created. And we’ll get a sense of the artistic range of the possibilities of poetry, and a little of a sense of the historical evolution of poetry—from Homer (we’ll look at one brief episode) to Jay-Z.

-Reginald Gibbons

Ramblers: Loyola Chicago 1963-The Team that Changed the Color of College Basketball
by Michael Lenehan
Agate Midway

When the Loyola University Ramblers beat the Mississippi State Bulldogs 59-51 in an NCAA Division I men’s basketball game in December 2012, it was mostly ignored, even among rabid college basketball fans.

The game had been set up to commemorate a much more dramatic meeting of the two schools, who had last played in the 1963 NCAA tournament. At that time, the tournament hadn’t yet become March Madness, with the hoopla and betting frenzy marking today’s college basketball championships. That 1963 face-off is now known in basketball history as the Game of Change, a milestone in the movement for civil rights as well as in the evolution of the game of basketball.

In those days, even as the battle for civil rights raged and the integration of public schools moved rapidly forward, white players still dominated the college game, with African Americans mostly playing against one another on the teams of all-black colleges and universities. But that would change, as anyone who turns on their television during a college basketball game today can easily confirm. In 1962, according to the Journal of Sport Behavior, 45.2 percent of college teams had at least one black player, and virtually none of those schools were in the South. By 1975 the percentage had climbed to 92.4. What’s more, the average number of black players per team increased to 4.5 from 2.2.

The Ramblers, with an unprecedented four black players among the starting five, won that 1963 game against MSU, then went on to beat all comers, including number-two-ranked Duke in the semifinal game and, in the championship game, college hoops’ reigning powerhouse, the Cincinnati Bearcats, a team that also started three black players.

In his first book, Ramblers: Loyola Chicago 1963—The Team that Changed the Color of College Basketball, Michael Lenehan tells the story of how, in the process of becoming NCAA national champions, Loyola broke the mold not only of who played college basketball, but also of how the game was played.

Lenehan, known mostly for his many years as editor and executive editor of the Chicago Reader, builds his narrative around the final game, weaving together the myriad threads that made that year’s tournament a groundbreaking event. Using dozens of interviews with players, coaches, journalists, and others who helped build the modern-day game, and doing the kind of exhaustive research he has pushed writers towards in his role as editor, Lenehan has assembled a powerful account of what he calls a “milestone in a long, involved history” of “basketball’s integration and evolution.”

The success of Loyola’s team was a benchmark—the beginning of the end for segregation in college basketball. Finally, African American players would begin to gain full access, including scholarships, to the most prestigious universities. And along with that came the kind of exposure that would facilitate their entry into the ranks of the professional game, another place where white players had an unwarranted edge.

Loyola had opened the door. In 1966, all five starters from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas, El Paso) were black. The Miners became NCAA champions by beating the all-white Kentucky team in the final game.

One blogger went so far as to claim that the Texas Western coach, Don Haskins, “did more in this one game to further the cause of integration than Martin Luther King. This game was the defining Game of the Century for college basketball.” An exaggeration, to be sure, but there’s little question that the civil rights movement and the game of basketball have shared a symbiotic relationship.

Back to the Loyola Ramblers: They played a fast-paced game, honed on the playgrounds of the nation’s largest cities. It was a game unfamiliar to the most successful college coaches, who taught tight defense and a highly structured, patterned offense. In those days, Lenehan reminds us, the game was mostly played on the floor, while today’s game is played in the air.

Morris “Bucky” Buckwalter, a former NBA scout and coach who author David Halberstam credited with opening doors for black players, was one of Lenehan’s interviewees. “With the shot blocking and the rebounding and the high-flying dunks, it was no longer a horizontal game,” Buckwalter explains. “It had become vertical.”

“The game’s axis had just been tilted 90 degrees,” Lenehan marvels.

But the style of play wasn’t the only thing that was changing in college basketball. Lenehan tells of a 1960 Ramblers game played against Loyola University of New Orleans at a time when the Ramblers’ star player was 6ʹ5ʺ Clarence Red, a black player from Algiers, Louisiana: “Where Mississippi had an unwritten rule against integrated sporting events, Louisiana had it in writing—a state law enacted in 1956...That law had been successfully challenged in 1958, but no integrated sporting event took place in Louisiana until the two Jesuit schools contrived this battle of the Loyolas.” Loyola of New Orleans won.

And racial barriers in college basketball were beginning to break down elsewhere across the nation. In 1961 James Meredith decided he would become the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Governor Ross Barnett, whom Lenehan describes as an “unabashed racist,” promised the residents of the state, “No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor.” Eventually thirty thousand federal troops made Barnett eat his words. Lenehan maintains that Meredith’s struggle was crucial. “Because of what happened [at Ole Miss] . . . Mississippi State would finally get its chance to go to the NCAA tournament,” he writes, and go on to play Loyola in that 1963 Game of Change.

Despite Lenehan’s lack of experience in writing about basketball, Ramblers is an easy, fascinating, and at times illuminating read for the avid fan. The less knowledgeable, who will find it valuable as a crucial chapter in the history of the struggle for civil rights, can also gain a beginner's appreciation of the game’s finer points. It tugs at the reader’s heartstrings while providing a clear-eyed look at the sometimes shameful, sometimes constructive role of sports in our society.

It’s National Poetry Month and TriQuarterly is proud to introduce a new web series by Reginald Gibbons, the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Professor Gibbons will report on his class discussion—what can be talked about with clarity and what is elusive, too. And also what his students find most interesting and how they develop through the course.

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Poetry is one of the capacities inherent in language. It uses qualities of language as a medium, beyond what words mean. (That is, it’s more than most narrative, for example, which always depends on what words mean.) Poetry is a particular way of using language, and it’s a kind of thinking that can be very different from our everyday thinking. It’s also very likely the earliest human art, in the form of song and prayer, blessing and curse, story-telling, memory aid and a way of expressing praise and lament.

A few traces of all the lost ancient oral poetry—that is, from the time before the invention of writing—are still preserved in some of the oldest poems that have survived to our day in written texts, and these traces suggest that some of the elements of poetic technique that we still use are amazingly old. It’s interesting to think about why that should be so, since the functions of poetry in human society have changed so much.

In all later historical epochs, including our own, poetry has continued to flourish, expanding into new forms and media, while at the same time it has narrowed: from having been the principal genre of verbal art in ancient societies it became only one verbal genre among many. In modern times, techniques of poetry and rhetoric were also incorporated into mass commercial and political utterance (these two having become closely linked).

Also, in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, in Renaissance and some later drama, and in other places and times, poetry (not just song) has been associated with spectacle. Now its association with spectacle is in popular music performance and also in music videos (a huge audience) and an even more recent genre, video poems (a tiny audience). Just as the medium of transmission of poetry has drawn poetry toward its own purposes and possibilities throughout the past, so the medium of the spectacle also partly reshapes poetry to its own ends.

-Reginald Gibbons

It’s National Poetry Month and TriQuarterly is proud to introduce a new web series. Reginald Gibbons, the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, will follow his undergraduate poetry writing course with mini-essays that lay out the framework of poetry as he sees it. Professor Gibbons will report on his class discussion—and what he failed to get to, or what was too elusive, and how his students develop throughout the course.

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First day of classes of the spring quarter at Northwestern: my beginning poetry writing course for undergraduates. Over the last month I’ve spent at least 40 hours creating a small anthology and working out the syllabus—which in my case is a complicated interweaving of class days with assignments (even more complicated than usual because for the first—and probably last—time I have two sections of this course, one meeting three days a week and the other two). Why so much time? I’ve been reading and reading poems looking for just the right ones. Working and reworking the schedule, which has made the calendar look to me like chronological cole slaw: it’s all chopped up according to the sequence of assignments. Several different types alternate: poems, exercises, responses to some of the prose we’re reading (by the poets in my collection, The Poet’s Work), some tiny studies of individual words (using the Oxford English Dictionary—the remarkable on-line version that students and professors can access through the university library) and a couple of very brief prose pieces about poetic technique, and write-ups of readings the students attend.

I didn’t want to teach this course again from a big anthology or a set of smaller ones. Students typically pay $70 for a 6-pound book that they haul to and from class, and in our quarter system (rather than semesters) at Northwestern, there’s no time to talk deeply about more than what’s on about 60 pages of it. So I created my own anthology (120 pages, typed: I’ll post the table of contents on this blog soon), after rummaging through many books of poems (and many anthologies, too) to remind myself of poems—beyond some of my favorites that I knew I would use—that will help show not so much which poets have written what, over time (history of poetry—but we will get some of that) but rather to teach how those poets have written. What they have done with language in order to make a poem.

And instead of handing out a syllabus that goes week by week through elements of poetry (structure, sound, rhythm, metaphor and metonym, imagery, forms, etc.), I am going to help everyone see as much in every single poem as possible—and let the students collect the craft elements as we go. Over the quarter, I’ll require them to create their own maps or outlines of poetry instead of handing them mine—they can reorganize when they need to, putting together the elements as they wish. At the end of the course, they’ll turn in some revised poems, a final very short paper (after writing others during the quarter), and their individual maps. I’m eager to learn from seeing how everyone takes in the range of the devices and strategies and tricks and structures of this craft—and my favorite subject of all: how poems move.

-Reginald Gibbons

Stephen Elliott has seven books under his belt, he's directed a feature film, published dozens of essays and magazine articles, and founded a highly regarded literary website. Yet at age forty, he still lives—and quite happily, he says—like a poor college student, staying in a rented room in a San Francisco artists’ co-op with a shared bathroom down the hall. Though many of his novels and nonfiction books have been critically acclaimed, they haven’t made Elliott much money. And he’s okay with that.

Elliott says he’s never been driven to write for money. If he can make a few bucks creating art, that’s great. If not, so what? He’s not just saying that, either. Elliott once turned down an advance from a major publisher that would have put ten thousand dollars more in his pocket than an offer from a smaller press. People thought he was crazy. But Elliott didn’t like the prospect of his book being lost among the hundreds of titles churned out by the bigger house. It’s attention and connection that he craves more than money.

“I think a lot of people forget why they become writers,” says Elliott, who began writing when he was about ten. “We all change; the things you want from writing, at a certain age, become different from the things you want later. I’ve avoided any obligations, and I still live like a child. I don’t have a wife and kids. I’m on my own. It’s a choice.”

His choices have taken him from writing literary fiction to filmmaking. By exploring a new form of expression, he hopes to avoid becoming creatively stagnant. Filmmaking is, of course, much more costly than writing a novel, and even if he can fund his bare-budget films, Elliott is hardly guaranteed a paycheck for himself. Despite his indifference about making money, Elliott needs money to fund his latest creative pursuit as a filmmaker, and recently found himself in the sometimes uncomfortable position of asking for cash to fund an adaptation of his novel Happy Baby. He wants to direct and produce the film on his own terms rather than have big outside investors call the shots. So he started a Kickstarter campaign in November seeking $85,000 through small investors, and wound up getting $93,775 from 1,013 backers. Since then others have pledged to invest, bringing his budget to around $150,000. Shooting is scheduled to begin in New York in May.

The screen version of Happy Baby will be Elliott’s second film. He co-wrote and directed About Cherry, financed by private investors and released last year with an impressive cast including James Franco, Lili Taylor, Dev Patel, and Heather Graham. Elliott got friendly with Franco after the actor optioned Elliott’s 2009 memoir, The Adderall Diaries, which remains unproduced.

Elliott recently took some time to speak with TriQuarterly about his vision as a writer and filmmaker, how the two creative forms intersect, and what he’s learned by doing both. Following is an edited transcript of that interview.

TriQuarterly: How did you move from writing novels to screenplays?

Stephen Elliott: After James Franco optioned The Adderall Diaries, I asked him if I could do the adaptation and he said 'yes'. I thought that meant I was getting paid, but it didn’t. I hadn’t written a book in a really, really long time, and this was a different format. I had read screenplays, but I don’t read a lot of them. I approached it not thinking I had to write the three-act structure. My assumption was that a good screenplay would read like a novel. Philosophically, I just thought a screenplay should read well. What I found was that the rules of writing a screenplay are all action and dialogue. There is no fluff. I found that a challenge similar to when you’re going from writing poetry or novels to writing a memoir—the rules actually bring out a lot of creativity. I found it extremely invigorating. I wanted to keep going and write another one, so I wrote About Cherry with my friend Lorelei Lee right away and launched right into it. I was waiting for Team Franco to get back to me on The Adderall Diaries. But then I thought, "This is not going to work, I don’t want to be waiting around for other people. I can do something." I thought I would get the actors and directors and try to raise some money.

TQ: Writing a novel is a solitary act; directing a film isn’t. How do you adapt to that?

SE: With a book you have total control, and with a movie it’s like you’re pushing water. You’re just trying to guide it, because you can’t control it. I think writing is very lonely, and it’s really invigorating to work on stuff with other people. You find out that with collaborators you can do more than you can do on your own. When the actor shows up, they know a role and they know it better than you do. They literally know more about this character.

TQ: Why did you decide to adapt Happy Baby for the screen, and how did you go about it?

SE: I’ve tried writing screenplays a dozen times over the years, and they’re no good, they’re horrendous. And the craziest thing happened. I was out one night with Dave Eggers having a drink—we’re friends but we don’t go out that often—and I was complaining that it had been a year since I made About Cherry and I wanted to write another screenplay, but I didn’t know what it would be about. And he said, “Happy Baby.” I said, “No, no, I’ve tried it, it can’t be done.” He said, “Do it like this: start the story backward like you do in the book, and do this, this and this.” And I said, “It will never work.” I woke up the next morning and did exactly what he said, and it just opened up. It was ridiculous. I wrote it in three days, and it was good. I knew it was. Dave had edited the book, so he knew all about it. The script came in at a hundred pages, a little longer than he wanted it to be. I’m pretty concise. You have to remove a lot of stuff. There’s no way to put a whole novel into a movie.

TQ: Artistically, does it feel different? Is it literary enough?

SE: To me it doesn’t feel a whole lot different from what I was doing before. I want to create something artistic. I want to do a movie that hasn’t been done before, as opposed to just telling another story. To tell a good tale, I would like to do something a little different.

TQ: What do you take away from screenwriting that you can bring to novel writing?

SE: I think writing screenplays is really good practice for writing novels because you have to be concise, to move faster. Screenwriting requires me to work in the present tense with very short sentences. On the other hand, anyone who can write a novel can write a screenplay. I mean, writing a screenplay is much easier, twenty times easier. It’s not even in the same league. If you’re good enough to write a published novel, you’re good enough to write a screenplay.

TQ: A lot of people make money writing screenplays for movies or television. Had you ever considered doing that?

SE: Someone said, “Why don’t you just do it? You can make a million dollars and don’t have to worry about this shit.” I couldn’t quite explain to him why that wasn’t possible. Yeah, writing for TV is relatively easy, but the sacrifice for me would be massive. Even if it was only a year or two, I might never come back. Why go make a lot of money at something you are mediocre at? A mediocre TV writer will make a lot more money than a truly great novelist.

I don’t have any interest in the things that could make me any money. I want to create new things. Like when I created the Rumpus, I said I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if I would make any money at it. I like to start things, see what happens, and let them become something else. Because it can always become something else.

TQ: So do you subscribe to the old adage to do what you love and the money will follow?

SE: It’s not true, because the money doesn’t always follow. Do what you love, tighten your belt, and learn to live on less. I’m not complaining at all. I’ve taken my resources, and what I’ve been trying to build, to make this movie, make something that’s really different. I want to try to do a movie that’s structurally different, maybe even distributed in different ways. Because of that I may have a very small audience. I published The Adderall Diaries with Graywolf Press, a small publisher. Norton and HarperCollins had offered ten thousand dollars more. They are bigger publishers than Graywolf, but I went with the smaller publisher. I’m a little crazy like that.

TQ: Your website, The Rumpus, has evolved over the years into a very popular place with top-notch writers. How has that fit into your plans?

SE: We’ve been really lucky. I don’t know. I didn’t know what The Rumpus was going to become. I’m really excited that it’s become this thing—a jumping-off place for ideas that has grown. Now the Rumpus is a place that is producing my movie. I didn’t have any plans for it when it started. We’ve got really great writers. It’s been super weird in that I’m more well-known for The Rumpus, and it’s hard to get used to that. What about my books?

The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford
by Beth Tompkins Bates
University of North Carolina Press

Detroit: A Biography
by Scott Martelle
Chicago Review Press

When I told my aunt—a lifelong Detroiter—that my novel about her city had found a publisher, she said, “Just don’t use its name in the title. People don’t like to think about Detroit.”

It’s true that some don’t—in the same way some of us avoid thinking about the chronically ill. It’s painful to have no solutions, discomforting to realize that such afflictions could befall me as well, easier to look away and assume the sufferer feels shame about having a condition that never improves and never goes away.

However, rather than shame, many current and former Detroiters feel an intricate mix of machismo and heartbreak about Detroit—the kind in Eminem’s ad for Chrysler shown during the 2011 Super Bowl. “A town that’s been to hell and back,” the narrator says as Eminem tours the city in a slick black Chrysler 200, showing us its sights, from grittiest to most refined. “This isn’t New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City,” the narrator says. “And we’re certainly not anyone’s Emerald City,” he continues as Eminem enters Detroit’s gloriously restored Fox Theatre to a rising chorus of gospel music. “This is the Motor City,” the rapper concludes, sounding positively pugilistic. “And this is what we do.”

Like the chronically ill, Detroiters don’t want to be forgotten or ignored. But they don’t want pity either, and they’ve grown weary of the world’s fascination with what they call “ruin porn.” They have been to hell and (maybe) back. After all, Detroit went from Arsenal of Democracy to Automotive Capital of the World to America’s First Third-World City in a handful of decades. New Orleans, post-Katrina, was also anointed a Third-World City, but it already seems to have shrugged that label off its funky shoulders via some gumbo of cultural vibe and strategic locale at the commercial mouth of the mighty Mississippi. And true, Katrina was a swift and brutal blow, more an acute illness than a long-term chronic one. But still, why Detroit? By which I mean, why has this sad fate visited Detroit of all great cities? Why does it seem so unable to recover?

For some time, I’d been thinking that the answer lay in a combination of unresolved racial issues and the curse of being a one-industry town, but I wondered what others thought. Now, two new books—both bold enough to put Detroit in their titles—offer answers to the “Why Detroit?” question, even though that is not the primary objective of either one. They are Detroit: A Biography, by Scott Martelle (Chicago Review Press, 2012) and The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, by Beth Tompkins Bates (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

As the titles reveal, Martelle’s book has the broader reach. His begins on a hot July day in 1701, when Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, beached his canoe on the bank of a narrow stretch of river between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, with the goal of establishing a settlement that would provide security for French fur traders in America. Here’s what he saw: “a meadow rimmed by fruit trees leading into a dense forest of walnut, white and red oak, ash, and cottonwoods, all entwined with thick vines that provided cover for turkey, pheasant, and quail. Deer grazed at the edges and nibbled on fallen apples, plums, and other fruits, the streams and the river itself teemed with fish, and the reeds along the bank hid flocks of swans, geese, and ducks.”

From those Eden-like images, it is a long, complex path to the place Martelle describes today:

Massive iconic factories stand silent and cold. Blocks of commercial districts are vacant and open to the elements, many burned by fires that seemed to spread like a virus. Housing prices have fallen so far that it is cheaper to buy a home in Detroit than a new car. Once-vital neighborhoods have been bulldozed and reverted to urban meadows; in places, wild pheasants [note these on Cadillac’s list as well] and the occasional fox roam freely. Even Detroit’s murder rate, which for years was the worst among the nation’s big cities, has dropped considerably, prompting 2009 mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas to say, “I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn’t anyone left to kill.”

How Detroit got to this juncture is the subject of Martelle’s book. What’s key, he writes, “to finding any sort of plan for fixing Detroit, and, perhaps, to prevent what has happened here from afflicting other cities, is to fully understand what Detroit once was, and how it came to be what it is.”

The shared focus with Bates’s book comes early in Martelle’s: “one cannot write about Detroit without exploring the roots of its black population, which now accounts for more than four of every five Detroiters.” Many of those roots were set down in the early twentieth century, when “Detroit’s black population increased 611.3 percent—from 5,741 in 1910 to 40,838 in 1920—the most rapid growth for any large city and three times faster than the average for other metropolitan areas,” Bates writes. This was the period when the Ford Motor Company “dazzled the world with its innovative mass production system.” Mass production needed workers—hundreds of thousands of them—and Ford offered good wages, so Detroit made its way onto the short list of places to live for southerners who were part of the Great Migration.

Two words are especially important to Bates’s view of how Black Detroit was made: expectations and allegiance, and the tension between them. Let’s begin with the expectations. “Ford challenged the stereotype of the black man as servant when he put out the welcome mat for African Americans,” she writes. “By rejecting the notion that better jobs were for white men only, Ford raised expectations and hope about what was possible, suggesting a corner had been turned in the ongoing black struggle for inclusion as full-blooded Americans.”

Further, Bates argues, those raised expectations point us to the ripple effects of black labor activism and the larger civil rights movement. Black families felt an allegiance to Ford because of the opportunities he had offered, but in the period between the two world wars, the black workers’ allegiance—often portrayed as dependence by other historians—collided with their emerging pro-union position and accompanying sense of political empowerment. And, Bates says, although few have regarded Black Detroit as a leader in the freedom struggle of that era, the labor-oriented civil rights agenda challenged “racism within the union movement as well as in the larger community.”

Offering a detailed and highly readable history of Ford’s industrial goals, his controlling social vision for his workers, and his brutal response to unionization, Bates ends her story in 1941, when the UAW-CIO’s organizing campaign culminated in a strike that shut down the Ford Rouge plant. In that strike, black workers threw in their lot with white Ford workers and the UAW, thus ending their allegiance to Henry Ford. Bates overturns a popular notion that blacks held only the most dangerous or menial positions. Instead, she writes, blacks at the Rouge plant were employed in all phases of manufacturing, including drafting and purchasing. Further, wages for blacks and whites were virtually identical during this period.

Still, racial relations in the plant and in the city were far from harmonious. In the early 1940s, writes Martelle, “City officials and visiting journalists had been talking about the growing tensions . . . , with overcrowding leading to racial frictions on the streets and in factories.” Bates points out that the “struggle for housing was front and center.” We know now that together, bankers, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, neighborhood associations, and Realtors helped set up and enforce racial covenants that kept blacks out of white neighborhoods. Black families faced threats and violence if they tried to “break a block,” and some school district officials attempted to change boundaries to keep black children out of white-majority schools.

But many (perhaps all) northern industrial cities had crises related to race and labor and housing. What made Detroit so vulnerable was its almost-total commitment to the auto industry—an industry that is particularly subject to fluctuations in the economy. As Martelle writes, “When things were going well, people tended to buy cars. When things were going poorly, they tended to milk another year or two out of the car they already had.”

For further insight into the “why Detroit?” question, Martelle contrasts it with Pittsburgh, noting that Pittsburgh’s leaders eventually gave up on the struggling industry that defined that city—steel—and looked to new industries, such as health care, finance, and higher education. Second, Martelle writes, Pittsburgh benefited from a host of sustaining institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, created partly by the fortune of Andrew Carnegie, while neither Ford nor his auto-making peers made contributions to such institutions of higher learning in Detroit. However, “the biggest differences . . . are history and demography. While Pittsburgh saw an influx of southern blacks during the Great Migration years, it was nothing like the scale that swept into Detroit. . . . Though there have been racial frictions, Pittsburgh has never suffered the kind of neighborhood-shifting violence that has marked Detroit’s racial history, or the mass white flight that drained Detroit beginning in the 1950s.”

Here, to make the case, Martelle compares 1960–2010 statistics for Detroit’s and Pittsburgh’s median household incomes, unemployment rates, and percentages of families living in poverty, with Detroit coming out worse in every case, all factors in the perfect storm of its unraveling. In the long hot summers of the 1960s, when so many American cities were in flames, Detroit came out not just worse but the worst. It was the city where the most lives were lost and the most square miles were destroyed. The city never fully recovered, and the ongoing white flight followed by black flight to northern suburbs has left Detroit “largely composed of fractured families led by young, uneducated single mothers lucky to find minimum-wage jobs in a political environment in which aid programs have been slashed. These are not the seeds of a stable community,” Martelle notes.

The most radical plan for stabilization, formulated by current mayor Dave Bing, is to concentrate the population so that the city can provide basic services more efficiently. This means closing off underpopulated areas and, in turn, forcing people to leave the homes and neighborhoods they have lived in for generations. This concept hardly comes without controversy, suspicion, and despair.

Still, like those who suffer from chronic disease but still occasionally find reasons for hope, Martelle enumerates several less radical “small counter tides”: General Motors and others announcing moves to downtown Detroit and bringing jobs with them; Quicken and Blue Cross offering incentives to employees to buy or rent downtown; plans for a light-rail system. And there are other hopeful signs: Large communal urban gardens in those many empty fields. Artists moving in. Three new documentaries—Searching for Sugar Man (nominated for an Oscar), Detropia, and Brothers on the Line—bringing attention and interest to the city. The people of Detroit and surrounding suburbs endorsing a tax initiative to fund their beloved Detroit Institute of Arts, which incidentally houses the magnificent Diego Rivera frescoes portraying the early days of the River Rouge plant.

So many things can be said about Detroit—how the threads of history and geography and human aspiration came together to dazzle the world; how racial and ethnic fear combined with lack of foresight and understanding to incite an extraordinary unraveling. As Martelle writes, “Powerful forces built Detroit into one of the nation’s, and the world’s, great industrial centers and cities. Similarly powerful forces have led to its collapse. The result is a national problem, not a local one, both from a moral and a financial standpoint.” But is it a national problem? And if so, what’s to be done?

A Detroit friend of mine told me that after the ’67 riot/rebellion, women, both black and white, in neighborhoods that had become somewhat integrated, began to meet in each other’s homes to discuss racial issues, with the hope that conversation might lead to understanding and healing. After a short while, the meetings became too difficult. People were too busy, or too afraid, and so they stopped. If it’s true that race played a particularly powerful role in the story of Detroit—and both Martell and Bates think it did—then here’s one dream for its chronic condition: perhaps it might become a laboratory, a model for the world, an industrial-strength Davos of the Midwest, for deep exploration of the chronic racial and ethnic disease that plagues our world. “This is Reconciliation City,” Eminem might declare one day, “and this is what we do.”

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature
by Philip Nel
University Press of Mississippi

It seems that Harold, beetle-browed toddler intellectual of Purple Crayon fame, was scribbling about much more than we thought. Author Philip Nel, director of Kansas State University’s program in children’s literature and author or coeditor of five books, including an anthology of radical children’s literature, finds it “tempting to read Harold and the Purple Crayon and its sequels as radical political commentary,” and with this book, opens our eyes to why. Harold’s stories, and the mind and pen of David Johnson Leisk, have a message: “imagination with a sense of moral responsibility.” The bald philosophical explorer in a onesie and his lookalike cousin, a cartoon hero of the radical Left named Barnaby, were both created by a man who insisted he couldn’t draw but instead, made “diagrams.”

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi) is a title with a tall order. Crayon-wielding Harold plays only a partial role in Nel’s enthusiastic, informed, and sometimes disorganized history of Johnson and Krauss’s “love story of complementary opposites” who together created more than seventy-five books. Packed with research that yields the sublime—like a pre–Andy Griffith Show Ronny Howard and post­–Wizard of Oz Bert Lahr filming a television pilot for a Barnaby series and an FBI memo with the now-familiar redaction marks noting surveillance of the Johnson/Krauss residence—the book makes unexpected connections that can lead to the overwhelming feeling of rummaging through a child’s well-stocked toy box.

Ruth Krauss, granddaughter of a wealthy Baltimore furrier, became a self-proclaimed “artiste” in her twenties, after a bumpy career in high school, art school, and music conservatory. Intense and passionate, she once mixed “three hundred different tones of rose trying to get a background color combining ‘a sense of brightness and doom.’” She had an affair with sculptor Isamu Noguchi before marrying journalist Lionel White, trying her hand at writing pulp novels, and declining to clue her mother in on their dire financial circumstances. In the winter of 1935, Ruth’s mother sent the couple oriental rugs, which they hung on their walls to keep out the cold. Lionel cheated; Ruth divorced him and hit the road for Europe carrying a rucksack and befriending artists. In the spring of 1939, with war looming, she sailed home at her mother’s insistence.

While Ruth was a child riding her bike in the hallway of her parents’ Baltimore home, David Leisk, far away in Queens, took the nickname Crockett from the comic-strip frontier hero to distinguish himself from other kids named David in his neighborhood. He drew for the high school paper, wrote ad copy for Macy’s (quitting before he could be fired for wearing the wrong style of collar), worked briefly in magazine layout, and after the stock market crash of 1929, “like many members of his generation,” turned left. Johnson read Communist publications like the Daily Worker, and for a short time was married to “free thinking” Charlotte Rosswaag.

Nel’s voluminous research into the lives and work of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss doesn’t stop here. Post-crash unemployment data, the birth of FDR’s New Deal, and captions from editorial cartoons of the era establish an assiduously detailed picture of what may soon be the forgotten American political and artistic culture surrounding World War II. This was the milieu in which Johnson and Krauss met. At a party in “Greenwich Village or on Fire Island,” Johnson, who had divorced his first wife, and Krauss, recently returned from an anthropological expedition to the Blackfeet Indian nation in Montana, met.

Nel doesn’t identify Johnson as a party member—a “Communist (with a capital C)”—but notes that “he was surely a communist (with a lowercase c).” Now with the byline Crockett Johnson, he was drawing for the left-wing periodical New Masses, including a cover image of a proto-Harold carrying a sign reading “I Am a Real Red!” Ruth had become interested in language and “the ways in which social structures push people around.”

Johnson’s cartoon character Barnaby first appeared in 1942 in PM, the anti-fascist, pro­–New Deal newspaper read by, among others, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, bandleader Duke Ellington, and writer Dorothy Parker. Contributors included future speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Margaret Bourke-White, Weegee, and Theodor Geisel, later known as Dr. Seuss. (Another reader of PM and fan of Barnaby was my liberal-leaning grandfather, born in a Siberian prison, who immigrated to the United States and worked as a ship’s draftsman for Bethlehem Steel.) What was Barnaby’s appeal? The strip’s “subtle political humor” that to today’s readers may sometimes feel arcane, as in a storyline about Dewey and Truman, and other times timeless, like a storyline about being misled by an investor and a few about national health care. Barnaby is a “precocious five-year-old boy living in a proper suburban home” with a fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley. Nel often lets the strip’s appeal explain itself in reproduced panels, but he makes his point by quoting a reader after the strip ended its ten-year run: “There have been deaths in my family that have hurt me much less.” When publisher Henry Holt brought out a Barnaby book, thereby presenting “the darling of the smart set to a wider audience,” Dorothy Parker wrote a review that she called a “valentine for Mr. Johnson.”

The FBI found less to like about Johnson, suspecting he was a “concealed communist.” The bureau’s New York division began a file on Johnson, noting his work in New Masses and his “supporting civil rights for African Americans and the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.” Johnson, in turn, penned Barnaby strips in which O’Malley investigates “that notorious Red, Santa Claus.”

Meanwhile, Krauss’s anthropological studies led her to believe that “effecting change would require reaching children early in life.” At the suggestion of a friend, she wrote a children’s book and walked the manuscript into Harper and Brothers. Legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom and Krauss had a fractious relationship for years, but from that union came, among a wave of children’s books authored by Krauss, the unforgettable A Hole Is to Dig illustrated by a “twenty-three-year-old FAO Schwarz window display artist” named Maurice Sendak. Later in her life Krauss received praise for her avant-garde poetry, including the collection This Breast Gothic. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights declined to publish her poems, telling her that “after your big success digging That Hole, I’m afraid you’re kind of typed as a ‘children’s writer.’”

A roll call of Krauss and Johnson’s social circle reads like a who’s who of the artistic American Left, and here’s where Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson stumbles under the weight of its own scholarship. Nel clearly admires his subjects and presents them warts and all; Johnson considered John F. Kennedy a “thug,” and Krauss is described at one point as eating “spoonfuls of grape jelly, no toast, just good old gooey globs of grape.” Research this exhaustive can exhaust a reader: the text sometimes yields plums (the Captain Kangaroo show broadcast readings of Johnson’s and Krauss’s books without paying royalties to the authors) but just as often dissolves into name-soup. The notes, acknowledgments, and bibliography are nearly a book in themselves; they’re crucial to a cultural history, but less so for a love story.

Still, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss hits baby boomers in the heart. Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig became “a cultural phenomenon,” and the quirky declamatory language of both the title and the text—“rugs are so dogs have napkins”—sometimes still shows up in my own happiest speech, patterned as I am by my own early-reading years.

Johnson died in 1975 (a date either obscured by or missing from the book’s dense research, as I had to look it up elsewhere). Krauss survived him by seventeen years. Sendak memorialized Krauss’s work in his cover illustration for the September 27, 1993, New Yorker, in which a homeless boy uses Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig as a pillow. And Johnson? His Barnaby ranks “among the twentieth century’s classic comic strips,” along with Walt Kelly’s Pogo and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, with fans including Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, and, one can assume, Chris Ware, who created the cover art for Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. The less overtly political Harold and the Purple Crayon has sold more than two million copies, and has stayed in print for more than fifty years.

It’s Harold—and Barnaby before him—as well as the power of language and imagination that is the real legacy. “Whenever children and grown-ups seek books that invite them to think and to imagine, they need look no further than Johnson and Krauss,” Nel writes. And as children and grown-ups watch and wonder about America’s political life in our time, they can look back to Johnson, Krauss, and the progressive movement in which they created their art and their love.

As an editor of two hybrid anthologies that engage the boundaries of nonfiction, I am enthralled by works that distill the genre to a compelling concentration, such as Dinty W. Moore’s The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal, 2012), David Lazar’s Truth in Nonfiction: Essays (University of Iowa, 2008), and Margot Singer and Nicole Walker’s Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury, 2013). My current fascination is Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska, 2013), edited by B.J. Hollars, who writes in his introduction:

“I should warn you: no two essays are the same here . . . . the writers’ unique stylistic approaches provide vastly different reading experiences. Despite the varied approaches exhibited in the work, each writer undertook the boundary-stretching challenge with a shared purpose—to take nonfiction to new and innovative places.”

Hollars has not only collected what he calls “unboundable” essays, each essay is also “accompanied by a behind-the-scenes look at the writer’s reflections on his or her piece,” something I like to call metawriting. Yet there’s more: the end of the book includes a series of writing exercises, each one “specifically designed to correspond with each essay.”

The result is a smart, engaging, inspiring collection that not only offers new perspectives on the essay but insists that we must, according to contributor Ryan Van Meter, “push against convention in the pursuit of our hardest questions.”

B.J. Hollars is the author of two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America—the 2012 recipient of the Society of Midland Authors Adult Nonfiction Award—and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, forthcoming in 2013. His short story collection Sightings is newly released from Indiana University Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. You can read one of his latest essays in the January issue of Brevity.

JT: Who or what inspired this anthology and its three-part format?

BJH: Blurring the Boundaries was inspired by my own frustration with facts. I’d recently completed my first book of long-form journalism and after years of research and dozens of interviews and countless hours hunched over microfilm, I still questioned whether the story I told was the right one. Or, to put it another way: if the version of the story I told was the most accurate version.

After a while, I decided to turn my frustration into something useful and as a result, Blurring the Boundaries was born. This project was an opportunity for me to ask twenty writers I greatly admired to help me come to terms with the limits of facts, and by extension, help me redefine the limits of the nonfiction form as well. It was thrilling to see the way these writers fiddled with form, fragmentation, structure, sequence, and a wide variety of other techniques in order to put pressure on the genre. My frustration with “facts” soon gave way to my excitement about these new forms. Simply put, I’m thrilled to do my part to shatter all the preconceived notions of what an essay “should” be.

As to the three-part structure, I chose to dovetail the essays alongside the craft essays (and later, the pedagogically practical writing exercises) in order to give readers a one-stop shop for all matters pertaining to this subgenre. This combination of essay+craft essay+writing exercise is actually something I tried in a previous anthology, You Must Be This Tall to Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside the Story. This anthology—which focuses on the literary coming-of-age story—allowed teachers, students, and writers, generally, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the author’s choices. Given the boundary blurring taking place with these essays, I felt it was doubly important for readers to have some sense of the logic behind the craft. I thought to myself, “Writing is such a mysterious process, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a conversation with the author whose work you’ve just read?” And so, I asked the writers to indulge me, and they did. The writing exercises take readers one step further by encouraging them to engage with these newly learned techniques in their own work.

JT: Shattering all the preconceived notions of what an essay “should” be reminds me of a line from Marcia Aldrich’s essay, “The Structure of Trouble” (an essay of structural play): “I, too, am susceptible to the gap between promise and outcome, between how things should be and how things are,” which speaks to what each of the writers in this anthology is doing—exploring those gaps, those spaces in order to open up genre expectations. You write in your introduction, “The boundaries of genre remain unique for each writer.” And Ashley Butler, in her craft essay, insists, “Those who demand static and unchanging parameters are, perhaps, doing a disservice to the genre.” Finally, Steven Church, in his craft essay, notes, “There are [no boundaries] but those the writer creates for himself or that the essay chooses for itself.” So to me, this anthology not only blurs the boundaries of nonfiction, it gives writers permission to obliterate them. (It’s as if nonfiction is in its abstract expressionist phase.) Do you agree—not necessarily about abstract expressionism—but about the obliteration of boundaries?

BJH: You know, it’s a great question. I must’ve line-edited the book half a dozen times, but I was never able to fully see the resonance among all of the aforementioned lines until you situated them before me. So thanks! It’s nice to see the forest from the trees every once in a while.

While I’d never be so bold as to take credit for giving nonfiction writers “permission” to obliterate these boundaries (no one needs my permission for anything), I certainly hope this anthology serves as further proof that any and all genre-related boundaries are in need of an updated cartography. Of course, this isn’t to imply that all of this boundary blurring hasn’t long been at work. I think it has been. For instance, I was recently perusing the library book sale when I came across an anthology entitled Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser and published in 1987. “How interesting,” I thought as I read the title and plopped the book atop my stack, “apparently we’ve been inventing truth for a couple of decades at least.” Now, this fact on its own probably isn’t earth-shattering for most people, but it was nice to take a step back and see how nonfiction writers of the late eighties came down on these types of boundary-related subjects.

Yet perhaps most interesting of all was the book’s back copy, in which the writer noted the “hazards” inherent in writing truthfully about the past, mainly because memory, while powerful, is also “unreliable.” Considering these words a quarter century later, I’d argue that the so-called “hazards” of writing about the past are hardly as hazardous as they once seemed. Likewise, while memory continues to be “unreliable” there seems to be a greater willingness on the part of writers to take advantage of this unreliability. Ultimately, I think the nonfiction writer’s willingness to transform these so-called weaknesses of the genre into strengths has done wonders for the modern essay. We’ve embraced rather than repelled. I’m not arguing that the modern essayist is any less truthful; rather, we’re simply reaching toward a different kind of truth, one that is less sure of itself but powerful in its own recognition of these “hazards.”

Which, of course, is the long way of saying: I’m not sure there were ever fixed boundary lines for nonfiction, but if there were (or are), I hope we can continue to expand the genre by wandering deeper into the unexplored terrain.

JT: Ah, 1987. I was seventeen, inventing truths for every missed curfew or kissed boy or every beer I was “just holding for a friend.” Hazards indeed.

This concept of embracing memory’s fallibility can be found in Kim Dana Kupperman’s essay when she writes: “So much depends on the fallacy of memory, the wreckage of truth we conceal, the lies we do not tell.” And later, Dinty W. Moore refers to “honest memories,” and I really dig that idea because the grids and coordinates of memory are invariably charted by our psychological geographies (picking up your cartography thread here).

“The wreckage . . . we conceal” is something I see many of the writers in this anthology (and beyond) doing in their essays via fragmentation, segmentation, omission; in fact, what writers do is blur the wreckage with structural devices that allow for gaps, white spaces, to emerge (on the page and in the prose). Example: Ander Monson, in his essay that’s in the form of a Harvard outline, wonders, “i. so maybe the outline is a kind of architecture I am trying to erect ii. to protect myself.” Joining him in alternative structures: Aldrich, Biss, Kimbell, Kupperman, Maliszewski, and Moore, who each employ non-literary structures (Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s “hermit crab” concept) in order to write “around” a difficult memory. In that way, the memory is not fallible, but side-swiped like the cars in Moore’s essay: “skimming metal against metal.”

BJH: Yes! Exactly. I’m always rambling about the power of the “side-swiping” essay (just ask my students). One of my favorite examples of the side-swipe (which is perhaps less of a side-swipe than a well-angled curvature) is Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome.” The essay begins by discussing the history of telephone poles, yet somehow—almost without the reader’s knowledge—we’re suddenly talking about lynchings. When I reread the essay, I always ask myself, “How did we get here? Weren’t we just talking about telephone poles?” The subject matter side-swipes us (or at least sneaks up on us) and the result, I think, is that that the reader is left vulnerable to a pretty powerful emotional wallop. When reading this type of essay, we’re often left feeling as if we’ve just been given wrong directions for our destination, but of course, it was never our destination to begin with. The writer was always the one in control of the car. We were just the lowly backseat drivers.

I, too, appreciate these non-linear experiments with structure. I once wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Sasquatch” in which I sort of cheekily try to “prove” the existence of Bigfoot by structuring the essay as a faux-scientific report. Naomi Kimbell employs a similar structure in her essay “Whistling in the Dark”—an essay that explores mental illness. And ultimately, I think we [both] stumbled upon the structures that allowed us to frame our arguments in the most constructive manner. Kimbell notes that her essay’s subject matter was ripe for structural experimentation, and thus, she employed a “tone and structure easily found in scientific journals…” in order to provide a commentary about mental illness. She managed to co-opt the mental health profession’s own medium to tell her story. Brilliant.

Though the subject matter is wildly different, my own case to “prove” Bigfoot’s existence within the confines of a faux-science report attempted a similar co-opting of form. The structure allowed my argument to “appear” credible on the surface, even if the argument itself was a bit … iffy. By essay’s end, I too try a side-swipe. On the final page, I try to make clear that we’re no longer talking about Bigfoot, but rather the ramifications of a world that refuses to believe in the possibility of Bigfoot. I’m trying to spur a discussion on the death of the imagination. However, whether or not I accomplished this aim is about as unclear as Bigfoot’s existence. (That is, very unclear).

But enough about me. What I mean to say is this: Just as there is no wrong way to eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup, there’s no wrong way to recount a narrative. Sure, there may be better ways, but probably no wrong way. While Ralph Waldo may not embody innovative non-linear structures, nonetheless, he seems to encourage thinking outside the box. For the past few mornings, I’ve woken early to read Emerson’s essays, and this morning, while reading “The American Scholar,” I came across this: “The human mind shall not be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire.” Now, the great thing about Emerson, of course, is that readers can lift pretty much any line and find resonance in their own lives. In the aforementioned quotation, I don’t think Emerson is speaking about the essay form, but I love imagining that he is. I love to imagine Emerson telling us to “unbound the unboundable empire” that is the essay. “No problem, Ralph Waldo,” I want to say to him. “Let the unbounding begin … ”

JT: I have a postcard on my refrigerator—a photo of a man on the back of a train with a sign that reads, “I Don’t Know Where I’m Goin' But I'm On My Way.” That postcard has been on refrigerators in several cities I’ve lived in over past years, so it’s apropos of my penchant for wandering, but it’s also a reminder to me every time I sit down to write (I write in my kitchen) to allow myself to wander on the page and follow the essay where it might lead. It’s one of the elements I most enjoy about what I call the “pure” essay, or perhaps the Montaignean essay—one that follows what Lopate describes as “an intuitive, groping path.”

What I found most compelling about these “unbounding” essays were the imaginings, and how these writers take imagining to complex and significant levels in the essay. Ryan Van Meter “[tries] on different ways of looking and being looked at, [takes] on different identities.” Steven Church “[re-creates] the reality of the experience” by “inventing, adding, and embellishing.” And Ryan Boudinot offers a two-parter entitled “An Essay and a Story about Motley Crüe.” These writers are, as Van Meter describes, “pushing against convention in the pursuit of our hardest questions.”

And then, and then. Wendy Rawlings’ essay about the world of General Hospital and the world of Facebook “explores . . . [how online communities making invented worlds seem more real and real worlds seem more abstract]” might affect “how we make and consume art.” Do you see the blurring of genre boundaries—particularly the conflation of “real” and “imagined” in essays—as a reaction to what David Shields calls “our cultural moment,” or something else entirely?

BJH: Now that’s a brain buster. My first instinct is to try to dodge it completely rather than sound like a fool. But since I’ve already given away my turn-tail-and-run strategy, I suppose I’ll have to try to confront it directly and embrace my inner fool.

First, as to the postcard: what a wonderful reminder of your task. I wonder how many other writers surround themselves with similar talismans. I know I do. My desk is littered with all kinds of unnecessary memorabilia (though, of course, each seems necessary to me, from my Joe Namath bobblehead to my monster-faced mug to my beloved brick that only sometimes doubles as a paperweight). While their messages aren’t nearly as clear as the message on your postcard, these objects remind me of the nebulousness of my pursuit, that none of us (writer, bobblehead, mug, or brick) possesses the right answers. (Though I’ll admit that on more than one occasion, I’ve left a writerly decision to the bobble of my all-knowing Bobblehead Joe). I kid. (Sort of …)

As to the question of “imaginings,” and more specifically, how the nonfiction writer’s imaginings may affect our cultural moment … well … I just don’t know. Nor do I know the long-term effect of nonfiction works that continues to stretch beyond the conventional limits of the form. Generally, I’m an optimist when it comes to innovation, and in the classroom, I regularly encourage my students to try something new. They’ve all heard my speech before: how on the day I saw an advertisement for the children’s movie The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars I knew, with certainty, that all the stories had been written. “If we’ve reached the point where we’re now sending kitchen appliances into outer space,” I reasoned, “then the writer’s well must really have run dry.” As I was coming to terms with my kitchen-appliance-induced existential crisis, it occurred to me that even if all the stories had been told, they hadn’t all been told uniquely. I took some comfort in that. But how do we tell them uniquely?

While I still love and admire and relish the traditional essay form, I also love the experiments often inspired as a result of these traditional forms. While I’m no chemist (why do I feel like I’m always qualifying things with this statement?), I often wonder if we might compare the wide range of essay forms to the periodic table of elements. That is, while each element is unique and valuable on its own, sometimes, when mixed in the proper portions, something equally wondrous can emerge. Like water! Like table salt! Like … geez, I don’t know, but I can feel my high school chemistry teacher slapping an open palm to his forehead as we speak. Suffice it to say, individual elements are great, but so are the compounds created when introducing these elements to one another. Or to put it another way, the essay form thrives when we combine the old with the new, when we nurture the symbiotic relationships between the time-tested forms and those that may be considered more innovative. Imagination is simply one pathway toward this innovation. I’m the first to admit that we need not reinvent any wheels here, but what’s the harm in readjusting, realigning, and recalibrating?

JT: The act of introducing elements to one another to create a compound is a process both of us seem drawn to as editors of anthologies. The act of readjusting, realigning, and recalibrating the form via the combination of selected essays and stories (as well as commentary, interview, and exercises) offers a re-imagining of individual elements as we place them on our own periodic table in order to yield an entirely new element. You’ve edited two other anthologies, Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings and You Must Be This Tall to Ride. You also have a project, the Creative Writer’s Collaborative. Will you describe that a bit and discuss why you are compelled to invest in discussions of genre (fiction and nonfiction) beyond your own writing and teaching?

BJH: Initially, I think my desire to pair stories/essays alongside these “behind-the-scenes” commentary pieces was an attempt to add something new to the anthology market. (Of course, this isn’t altogether new—your anthology, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, includes incredible interviews, as you know). But you’re right—it is interesting that we’ve both sought out ways to publish information beyond the work itself. Purist writers generally hate this sort of thing, and I can understand why. After all, what good is a magic trick if one knows how the trick is performed? But since anthologies (at least ours) are aimed toward readers with an interest in writing, it seems as if these “behind-the-scenes” viewpoints might serve pedagogically practical purposes.

In the classroom, we can analyze a published piece of creative writing until the cows come home (I’m in Wisconsin, which means sometimes you can literally see the cows coming home) but ultimately, all our conversations will yield few confirmable conclusions about authorial intent. When an anthology provides the reader the published work alongside the author’s own commentary on the work, then the work itself seems a little less mysterious. Now, this lack of mystery can be a good thing or a bad thing, but for young writers, I think it’s generally good. In science class (here we go again with the science metaphors), students are often asked to dissect all kinds of critters to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of the critter in question. Why shouldn’t we give young writers the same opportunity to understand something from the inside out?

In many ways, the Creative Writers Collaborative is quite similar to these “behind-the-scenes” viewpoints. In short, it’s a budding project of mine that aims to serve as an interactive resource for teachers, writers, and students of writing. Upon talking with students and colleagues, it occurred to me that there was so much great work taking place inside the creative writing classroom, but we didn’t have an infrastructure to share our ideas. And so, I’ve set up a website to try to encourage a bit more pedagogical sharing. This can be a place where teachers can offer their finest lessons, but also where students can go for a little independent study as well.

Let me give you a little background: Last fall, upon teaching poetry for the first time, I found myself stricken with an acute bout of “how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-teach-poetry?” I posted a cry for help on Facebook—“How do I do this?”—and within minutes [it had] generated dozens of responses. I wanted to keep these ideas, but I also wanted to open the conversation up to others as well. In short, I wanted to create a virtual space where teachers such as myself could continue revising our own pedagogy. So that’s my plug, folks! Sure, buy Blurring the Boundaries if you like, but definitely, definitely send me your finest craft lessons! We’ll all thank you.

Read "Goodbye, Tuscaloosa," an essay that B.J. Hollars published in TQ.

Photo of Hollars courtesy of his website.

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht
Edited by Jonathan F.S. Post
Johns Hopkins University Press

Reading a writer’s correspondence over the course of a lifetime is like watching home movies filmed over many years. We see the person in the present moment without the benefit of hindsight or the reframing that often accompanies knowing how things turn out. Here’s an excerpt from a playful letter a twenty-three-year-old Anthony Hecht sent to his parents while stationed in Japan during World War II.

As I recall, Milton wrote a sonnet upon becoming twenty-three years old. Not only did he write a sonnet, but the damned thing has become immortal. Besides this, he’d written plenty of immortal stuff before he ever became twenty-three. . . . Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, . . . can write nothing.

Along with his frustration at having writer’s block, we see the seeds of Hecht’s ambition, in comparing himself to Milton, and an intellectual interest that would later define the man who became one of the preeminent poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

With the release of The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, Johns Hopkins University Press provides a glimpse into the development of this major poet. The book offers letters written over a span of almost seventy years, from 1935 to 2004. Beginning with twelve-year-old Hecht’s exuberant letters from summer camp, the collection continues through his years in the army and encompasses his long, accomplished career as an academic, poet, and critic. The book concludes with some deeply introspective letters written near the end of his life.

Early in the book is a collection of letters written during World War II, while Hecht was stationed on the front lines. He took part in the final campaign by the Allied powers against German forces on the European front. From there he was shipped to Japan for the end of the war and the chaotic and difficult postwar period. The letters are personal and filled with details of the places and people from his frequently changing locations. They also express the extreme boredom and depression that come from living in conditions over which one has little control. The references to the war are only hints: “The exigencies of combat have made writing impossible for the last few days.” Still we know from his poetry that the war left a deep, lasting impression.

The letters after the war trace Hecht’s significant growth as poet and critic. We see a man thoroughly immersed in the subject and world of poetry. The letters demonstrate the richness of his thinking, much of it delivered with a great amount of grace and wit. An example is this delightful response to poet Sherod Santos, in which he reflects on the relationship poets have with criticism of their work:

The attitudes of most poets, I would imagine, must oscillate between feeling that a number of their best effects have gone unnoticed, and feeling that they have been too generously dealt with. Usually far more of the former than the latter. It is a common hope that posterity, which Emerson called bribeless, beyond entreaty, and not to be over-awed, will come to see what once was missed. I have known some particularly bad poets who have survived on the thin gruel of this hope.

Students of Hecht’s poems will enjoy the frequent insights into his work. For example, he cleared up a question I had about his poem “More Light! More Light!” Although the title is an obvious reference to what are purported to be Goethe’s last words, the poem provides no clue to why that reference was made. In a letter to editor William Read, Hecht explains that Goethe is seen as a primary representative of the German Enlightenment. The use of Goethe’s words in the title was an ironic response to the Nazi soldiers for their cruel and barbaric act of having prisoners bury other prisoners alive.

Reading a collection of letters like this allows one to experience the social world and the network of connections that locate the author. Hecht’s letters follow his developing friendships with many of the most prominent writers of the time: James Merrill, Harold Bloom, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Tate, Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, Edward Hirsch, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, and Donald Hall, among others.

The letters also uncover his significant personal struggles outside the literary world, slowly revealing details of the difficult marriage to his first wife and the emotionally wrenching divorce that ultimately led to a three-month stay in Gracie Square, a psychiatric hospital in New York. The letters from this time include some surprisingly intimate and flirtatious missives to the poet Anne Sexton after Hecht’s divorce.

Most letters have been excerpted by editor Jonathan F. S. Post—at times frustratingly so. Occasionally a letter breaks before it seems that Hecht’s train of thought is complete. However, given how tedious some collections of unedited correspondence can be, we have to assume that Post made cuts in the service of keeping the collection engaging. He does leave in some of the controversial remarks that Hecht referred to as “just the sort of thing that, judiciously edited, could make for a scandalously successful book.” Among them are these tidbits:

[Ezra Pound] I find myself becoming increasingly impatient with anti-semites, and my impatience increases if, at the same time, they regard themselves as infallible prophets.

[Anne Sexton] I was never very comfortable about the way Anne Sexton exploited her hospitalizations and periods of dementia.

[Carolyn Forché] I do not much care for the engagé poems of Carolyn Forché. Poetry should not put itself in the position of trying to compete with headlines.

[Robert Bly] When a Bly review turns up I normally read it since I can count upon a number of splendid imbecilities that keep me humming contentedly to myself for days on end. . . . In his own odd way he was very nearly a reliable critic; which is to say, I could be almost certain of liking any book with which he found vigorous fault.

[Maxine Kumin] Kumin’s essay, rank with self-pity, allows her to pretend she knows something about prosody.

[Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath] A book that is nearly repellent in its narcissistic self-absorption . . .

Along with his considerable intelligence and wit, the letters unveil some unflattering aspects of Hecht’s personality. In one letter he harshly criticizes the contributors to an anthology and realizes that they are almost exclusively women. He says, “I began to think I was, as I have long been accused of being, a misogynist, male-chauvinist pig.” In another letter he disparagingly refers to those who might disagree with him as belonging to a group of “embattled feminists” and others as part of “a lesbian splinter-group.” One can understand the reason he has been so accused. Post is to be applauded for keeping these comments in. Their inclusion makes for a truer portrait of the man who wrote these letters.

The last section of the book covers the period from 1993, when Hecht retired from teaching, to two months before his death in 2004. The letters continue to exhibit a man vigorously involved in the world of literature and ideas. They are also tinged with a sense of his mortality, as when he wrote to writer and critic Francine du Plessix Gray:

It seems to me as I approach my seventh-eighth year that I have been acquainted with death from very early in my life; and by acquainted I mean intimately acquainted. I no longer have much fear as regards my own death, though I dread the possibility of preliminary pains that may precede it. I am much more distressed by the thought of the misery my death will give to family. . . . No doubt after a certain age, the ambitions that sustain us in youth cease to play any role in our lives, and we have to fall back upon love. And when that is gone, we are truly bereft.

In the penultimate letter, in which he responds to scholar and friend William Prichard, Hecht makes a blunt revelation: “I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.” He briefly mentions his chemotherapy treatments but then, always in the service of literature, brings the discussion back to his poetry: “I mention this partly to explain something about a poem of mine I enclose.”

Aside from the literary light it sheds on his work and the work of others, Hecht’s correspondence is engaging and fun to read. Written to a wide range of people in a variety of situations, the letters are consistently warm, thoughtful, and witty. The attraction of a collection like this is the insight it provides into a major writer’s life and work, values and beliefs. To these purposes, The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht delivers quite admirably. While they reveal his flaws, they also show a man who was strongly connected to his family, generous to colleagues and young writers, and deeply involved in the literary discussions of the day. This extensive collection of letters offers satisfying insights into the life and times of one of the major literary figures of the last century.

Hold It 'Til It Hurts
by T. Geronimo Johnson
Coffee House Press

With a name drawn from the cornerstone of Greek mythology comes a modern-day soldier named Achilles Holden Conroy, the young and encumbered protagonist of T. Geronimo Johnson’s first novel, Hold It ’Til It Hurts. The narrative begins in rural Maryland, travels to New Orleans and Atlanta, returns to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and concludes back where it started. We see Achilles as a cautious man, an imperiled US soldier who is lucky to be alive after two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Achilles is fiercely protective of his younger brother Troy, and joined the army reluctantly after Troy rushed to enlist after 9/11. He is guided by his own moral sense and burdened by a lifetime of wrestling with his identity as a black male. The boys are not related and were adopted separately, first Achilles, then Troy, by the same white couple. They grew up together in the family’s small home in a wooded section of Maryland. Achilles is unwilling to discuss his adoptive family with anyone. He identifies as black and is ashamed when reminded that he once talked like a white person.

Hold It ’Til It Hurts demands deep engagement and is a worthy addition to recent fiction about our twenty-first-century wars. Told in a close third person, the narrative begins after Achilles and Troy return from Afghanistan and come to Maryland for their adoptive father’s funeral. In an early tense scene, Achilles and his mother sit across the kitchen table from each other. Earlier she gave Troy a blue envelope marked in her husband’s handwriting, and now she hands Achilles his:

He handed it back. She pursed her lips and drew her shoulders out as she often did before a big announcement, but said nothing, for which he was grateful because he didn’t want to have this conversation again. He’d always insisted that he had no use for his adoption paperwork. She’d always insisted that he would regret never meeting his black blood relatives.

Troy is eager to find his birth parents, but Achilles is unwilling to open his envelope and learn the truth about his biological mother and father. He is adamant: “Even if tracking them down wasn’t treasonous, what good could come of crisscrossing the country to confirm that his biological mother was a junkie whore and his sperm-donor dad an ex-con?” His folks didn’t want him, Achilles believes, so why should he seek them out now? That would involve paperwork, which he feels is more like “pulling the pin out of a grenade.” Then the next day, Troy disappears mysteriously.

Troy’s disappearance feels too sudden, before the reader gets to know him well. The few words shared (flung?) between him and Achilles the day before in their compact bedroom offer a mere glimpse of Troy. This reader wanted to learn more about his relationship with Achilles, but Johnson reveals this later in the backstory, which he skillfully weaves into the novel’s main narrative.

Gradually, Achilles tells us more about Troy: his adoption on Achilles’s eighth birthday (Achilles wanted a puppy), the siblings’ childhood and teenage years, their army service together, and Troy’s heroic acts in the war, which earned him a bronze star. After Troy’s disappearance, Achilles describes Troy’s face to a police officer. The officer gives him a sketch, and Achilles wants to tell him, “You don’t need this. You’ll know him if you see him. You’ll feel his intensity, like a dog that fights to the death. You’ll know my brother by his heart, fearless and light, like a rock that floats.” Achilles remembers the men who served with his brother and him the same way, through instinctive bonds that persist far beyond active service. These soldiers have come home from war altered and abraded, hardened and haunted. Achilles recalls exchanges with his fellow soldiers in their own coded language (gritty, street-smart, biased) and the actions that kept his team together (grittier still). Johnson’s research on an active soldier’s life and the mindset of their shared experience is thorough. In one telling scene he writes, “No one had to explain what it meant when Humvees crawled back with black bags tied on the roof like kayaks. [Achilles] couldn’t imagine riding back to camp with his brother strapped overhead like excess baggage.”

Yet despite these bonds, Achilles remains aloof from his former comrades as he struggles to reconcile his wartime experience with his postwar life stateside. He seems incapable of living up to the heroic expectations of his name, doubt hovering at the periphery of his thoughts. If Troy is the besieged one, the embodiment of crises and daring, then Achilles flounders between courage and decisiveness: the older brother who happens to follow his younger brother.

Achilles’s first stop in search of Troy is New Orleans, after receiving a call from his former comrade Wages, who has settled there with his pregnant girlfriend. Wages insists that he has spotted Troy at St. Augustine Church in the Tremé District, before Troy slipped out of view. At Wages’s house, Achilles witnesses his former comrade beating his girlfriend and pulling her by the hair. Achilles is shocked that Wages can be so violent with her, yet still admires him for his valor in war:

This was Wages the starfish. . . . [Achilles] was . . . proud and as full of admiration as he had been when Wages scurried out to the middle of Bi’hah Road to drag Merriweather back to safety, ignoring the sharp, hot whistles in the air and the small craters trailing him. He was equally afraid that, once again, he could not have seen fit to do the same thing, that if it had been up to him, Merriweather would have lost more than a foot. Achilles was not valiant.

The search for Troy opens up even more old wounds over troubled identity. Achilles becomes romantically involved with Ines Delesseppes, a woman he meets at a storefront shelter in New Orleans. She is light-skinned enough to pass as white but identifies as a black woman. Her family has thrived for generations in a stately home a good distance from the Seventh Ward, and her mother addresses Achilles with polite contempt. This dismissal leaves Achilles speechless—it’s his first stinging encounter with old money and the upper class.

Throughout the novel, he is always on guard, pensive and searching, with a heart that wants to trust others easily but cannot. He calls himself a coward and is ashamed of having been raised by white parents. He believes he is an honest man but doesn’t know why he lies to Ines and omits facts, plagued as always by the devastation of war.

Johnson dredges these dark corners of Achilles’s paranoid, troubled mind and also shows us that Achilles understands right from wrong. When he discovers that Troy is caught up in the Atlanta drug scene, he knows he has to rescue him. When Wages beats his girlfriend, Achilles tries to stop him. He volunteers to help the needy and homeless (if only to seek out Troy) and joins a waterborne rescue team that tries to assist stranded residents during Katrina’s great flood. As Achilles searches for his lost brother in that lost city, Johnson gives us a stirring notion of water’s power to make people disappear: “The river would give nothing back; it would eat them all, inch by inch, winding around the city like a boa constrictor and pushing and pushing until everywhere it met only itself.”

And yet Achilles keeps searching for Troy, a brother besieged and seemingly in peril like that ancient city. As Achilles moves from city to city, his constant source of comfort is that he can return home to their mother in Maryland. Much as Thetis, the mother of his namesake from Greek mythology, tried to make her son immortal, Achilles Conroy’s own mother gave him the good sense and prudence to survive war and remain his brother’s keeper. And just as Thetis unwittingly left her Achilles with a fatal weakness by holding her infant son by the heels as she dipped him into the River Styx, so too our protagonist’s mother has left him with vulnerabilities that define him and keep him searching for an identity as elusive as his lost brother.

I share Achilles’s sorrow for Troy, the heroic soldier we meet only through the memories of his brother. Achilles is caught between black and white cultures, truth and lies, fellowship and revenge. His apprehension about his place in the world holds him back. This is a vivid and provocative novel. As it drew to a close, I understood why Achilles needs Ines and his adoptive mother to anchor him, why he fails to put together the puzzle of Troy’s disappearance, and why he never seeks the truth of his biological parents on his own. The character of Achilles is complex and fully developed, but he feels like a ghost. He’s unable to move on from his past but manages, with effort, to keep himself alive for the present.

The Round Barn: A Biography of an American Farm
by Jacqueline Dougan Jackson
Beloit College Press

Reading The Round Barn: A Biography of an American Farm is like sitting on the porch of an early twentieth-century dairy farm and watching an era in American history pass right before your eyes. In a book that is part history, part elegy, and part memoir, Jacqueline Dougan Jackson—Jackie—tells the story of her family’s dairy farm with the unusual round barn that was famous in the Beloit, Wisconsin, countryside.

Her paternal grandfather, Wesson “Daddy” Dougan, built it in 1911 because he believed a barn braced on a central concrete pillar was cheaper to build and wouldn’t blow over in a tornado. And the circular construction allowed workers to move the cows through feeding, milking, and cleaning stations more efficiently.

But the round barn is more for Jackie. It’s a metaphor for her mission—an omniscient narrator, a real character, for “the round barn is in the middle of us all, and it sees everything. It is the center.” Jackie Dougan sees a lot, too. She’s a first-class noticer. Some readers may feel she notices too much. This sprawling 539-page book is the first of a projected three volumes. (The second has been published, and the third is due out later this year.) But she embraces what she sees with enthusiasm, a keen eye for detail and drama, and a big heart. When someone tells her not to get too involved, she thinks to herself: “Inside, Jackie knows she will always let herself get too attached.” (The book is written in the third person.)

Her attachments pay off for the reader. The rhythms of farm life pulse through the dozens of vignettes that make up the story of the round barn: the care and feeding of the animals; the production, delivery, and marketing of the milk; the sheer hard, and sometimes dangerous, work that keeps a farm going. We see how advances in science, the evolution of popular tastes, the vicissitudes of the economy, and world-changing events like the Great Depression and two world wars affect the farm for good and ill. But Jackie’s transcendent gift is her empathy for the family she loves and the people she meets growing up. The spirit of her grandfather, Daddy Dougan, pervades the book. His story exemplifies the intelligence, pluck, grace, and steadfastness that she sees in so many of the people around her.

Daddy Dougan is a self-made man, dedicated to God, family, and his dairy farm. He endures early life with an austere, withholding mother, struggles for years to put himself through college, then pursues the vocation of a Methodist minister despite his mother’s belief that he’s not good enough. He suffers the loss of his first child due to a doctor’s incompetence, and encroaching deafness finally forces him to give up the religious life he loves. Still, he persists, buying a dairy farm and marketing himself as “the Babies Milkman.” And he succeeds through hard work, devotion to cutting-edge agricultural science, and dedication to his customers and community. His philosophy turns on a principle he posts on the round barn for all to see. A mission statement for the farm ends with the declaration that farming is “Life as well as a Living.”

Jackie thinks being a dairy farmer is not so different from being a minister. “It’s a move from the giving of spiritual sustenance to the giving of physical sustenance, and the physical is of that most spiritual of foods, milk,” she writes. “Milk is used in this sense in the phrase, ‘milk of human kindness,’ and in the Bible, the Promised Land flows with milk and honey.’” She concludes that “it fits, that milk is described as spiritual, that spiritual is described as milk. Grampa knows it. And doesn’t that make the milkhouse, and the round barn, too, holy places?”

It’s a standard that isn’t always easy to live up to. One of the most powerful stories in the book is a gripping account of a moral crisis her father, Ron Dougan, grapples with as he struggles to keep the farm solvent during the Great Depression. He discovers contamination in a lot ready for shipment. He wrestles with the question of what he should do, for he desperately needs the money it will bring. “His stomach is knotted,” she writes. “He knows what he should do. It is still not too late. He knows what his father would do. He lies staring at the dark ceiling.”

Jackie writes affectionately about the men and women who work on the farm and those who buy her family’s milk. They’re a varied collection of quirky characters whose adventures range from the comic to the heartbreaking. But the most beautiful story of the book involves Jackie herself. She’s just thirteen and Billy Beadle is already in college. She idealizes him and cherishes every moment she’s near him during the summer he works on the farm. Billy goes off to World War II and never comes home. Many years later, Jackie returns to the church of her youth and alone, and in silence, offers a remarkable remembrance of Billy and the summer she fell in love for the first time.

The Dougan Guernsey Dairy Farm began in 1906 and lasted more than half a century until Ron Dougan closed it in 1967. Jackie grew up to become a writer and teacher of creative writing at the University of Illinois–Springfield. It’s a vocation she first glimpses in this book as a fifteen-year-old girl. She tells her beloved grandfather that one day she’ll write about him, the farm, and the round barn. “He crinkles all over his face and laughs silently,” she remembers. “He is pleased, she can tell.”

The round barn on Colley Road east of Beloit was torn down this past spring, a safety hazard. But it will never disappear, thanks to the promise that Jacqueline Dougan Jackson keeps with the publication of this and her other books that detail the history of a family as well as of American farming life. (Northwestern University Press published Jackson’s Stories from the Round Barn and More Stories from the Round Barn in 2000 and 2002, respectively.)