New Essay by Dominic Smith
A new essay by faculty member Dominic Smith is available online at The Millions. The essay, titled “Letter of the Law: On J.D. Salinger, Unpublished Works and US Copyright,” discusses, among other topics, faculty member David Shields’ new biography of J.D. Salinger:
1.
In the acknowledgments for Salinger, the new biography that accompanies the documentary about the reclusive lion of 20th-century literature, the authors state: “Most biographies include photographs of and letters to and from the biographical subject, but as in the case of someone as secretive as Salinger, photographs of Salinger and letters from him were extremely difficult to come by.”
David Shields and Shane Salerno are not the first Salinger biographers to be hampered by the author’s shadow life. In fact, current U.S. copyright law is bolstered by a former biographer’s clash with Salinger over access to the author’s unpublished letters. In the 1980s, Ian Hamilton excerpted from a slew of Salinger letters that had been donated to the archives of Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Texas at Austin. The letters were quoted extensively in a draft that went out to reviewers and that was planned for publication by Random House. When Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, passed along an uncorrected proof to the author in late 1986, he formally registered his copyright in the letters and told his lawyer to object to the publication of the book until all contents from the unpublished letters had been removed. Hamilton acquiesced and revised many of the letter excerpts into close paraphrases. For example, “like a dead rat…grey and nude…applauding madly” became “resembling a lifeless rodent…ancient and unclothed…claps her hands in appreciation.” The artfulness of such paraphrases aside, they didn’t appease Salinger and he sued Random House for copyright violation, breach of contract (Hamilton had signed copyright forms at the archives in question), and unfair competition (it was sometimes ambiguous as to whether the words were Salinger’s or Hamilton’s; why would consumers buy actual books of Salinger letters?)
“Still to Behold, Still to Be Told:” Heather McHugh’s CAREGIFTED and the Narrative of Caregiving and Disability by Jeneva Stone
A new essay by alumni Jeneva Stone (poetry, ’07), discussing long term caregiving and faculty Heather McHugh’s organization CAREGIFTED, appears online in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
I’M A LONG-TERM CAREGIVER, an identity arrived at with resistance, an identity of displacement that pushes away the small of my former self. My son Robert has multiple severe disabilities, the result of a rare genetic disorder, and a braid of equal parts love, duty, and a mutual receptiveness to adventure links us. Love comes naturally, duty chafes, and adventure is what we invent to pass the time. “Pretend you’re a dragon,” I said before Robert’s most recent surgery. The best kind to be is the benevolence-breathing dragon, whose smoky light blue breath makes right again whatever it touches. So Robert went off for his procedure thinking about flying over the world and fixing car accidents and blown down houses and how everyone would cheer when they saw him coming. That time, he failed extubation, and a ventilator supplied his breath for a week.
New Fiction by Kevin McIlvoy
A new story, “Ladies Room” by faculty Kevin McIlvoy appears online at The Huffington Post:
Len had spent eleven years cleaning the Mens rooms and the Ladies rooms in Mr. Prudowsky’s three Asheville bars. Fine, private places. Marvelous venues for live music. Uncanny acoustics. A lucky job. But time to retire.
As he knew they would, the three ghosts appeared again in the Ladies Room of The Pea Vine at 4:30 AM, the middle of his shift. It was May 7, his ninetieth birthday. Len’s checklist of tasks more or less done, he listened in.
They didn’t know he was there in their afterlife as they rehearsed the same song, the one song. Between takes they talked about their husbands because, after all, they were not done with them.
They did not talk about Len. He knew he did not qualify. He was neither man nor woman to them. He had been a kind of motherfather to the band they had formed that called itself “Lula Town” after Millie’s favorite Charley Patton song “Mind Reader’s Blues.” Millie, Dee, and Felice were musicians then, forty-some years ago, but they were in the nest and not yet flying.
He and his students had been music to each other: that flawed music with sweetness – and love – arriving in its flaws. His best students always outgrew him. Len was surprised how he missed them, missed their jarring phrasing, their improbable leaps to falsetto or gravelly inarticulateness or full-octave skid.
“Let’s find the head,” said Felice to Dee. Felice, who was the lead vocal and on rhythm guitar, had a thing about hating a stumbling start to a song.
Half an hour earlier, Millie had been the first to wind the spring of the talk about their husbands’ crying. “He would blubber over some lake or river he remembered,” she said.
And now she added, “Raisins. Raisins a special way in his oatmeal would make him cry. Or an untied shoe.
“Or steam on the window. You know: over the sink or in a store front.”
Millie had no grip on the dobrojo’s neck, so it simply hung, too high, on its strap. She should lower that. Len had told her many times.
Millie said, “You hear that?”
“Yep,” said Dee.
Felice tightened the seat of the microphone. She asked, “Rain?”
There was no mike on Millie or on Dee. Millie’s wooden stool was under the metal frame of a john door, and she had strung a wooden cowbell up. She liked to make a calucking sound with it for no good reason. Whenever she did, Dee hit the start button on the DryHands
machine behind them. Millie said, “If he saw somebody tear up. Well. It’s like somebody wet
and gooey would make him — you know: wet and gooey.”
Dee said, “Yep. It’s like a crybabyman doesn’t see it coming — and next thing happens is his noseholes are wet and he’s dribbling like mine –
” – mine mightcould fight the bawling – and not too good — or he might hide himself and lose it on the stairs or somewhere in the house, and you could hear him –
“–he’d make that garbage-disposal sound in his throat and try to turn it off, really try – and mine said, ‘Shit Dee, shit, I’m sorry’ if he was crying –
” – and he’d go right on with it and make a leaky, gummy mess of himself and not pull it together and -”
“They keep things,” Millie said.
“–and – yes they do. Mine did.”
Continue reading at The Huffington Post.
“At the Fairmont” by Peter Orner
Faculty member Peter Orner’s story, “At the Fairmont,” appears on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading:
After the war they met in San Francisco. She waited for him at a hotel on Nob Hill for five days before she got word that his ship had arrived. It is those five days she thinks of now, not the reunion itself. She thinks of the park across the street from a cathedral and the hours she spent sitting with her hands in her lap. It was April and cool and she sat there coatless, not waiting, her mind drained, enjoying it, the days away from the children who’d remained in Chicago with her mother. Men, older men, spoke to her and she didn’t discourage them. They talked about the weather. It was nice to talk about something and not care a lick about it. She can’t remember another time in her life, even during blizzards, when she ever had much to say about the weather, and yet there she was on a bench, in the chill wind, goosebumps on her bare arms, cheerfully saying things like, “Who would have imagined it would be so cold in California and here I am with no coat. My girlfriend Gloria warned me, but I didn’t believe her!” Words flung out her mouth like tiny birds in every direction, that’s how good it felt just to say whatever nonsense came into her head. Because the words themselves meant nothing. It was only the thrill of talking to strangers, men, old men in tweed and scarves, in an unfamiliar place.
Continue reading online at Electric Literature.
New Book by Adria Bernardi
A new book of essays by faculty member Adria Bernardi, Dead Meander, is forthcoming from Kore Press.
An excerpt from the essay, “Alba: Fragments for an Elegy:”
“To split ourselves further. I turn so readily to say this in another tongue. Strappare. Spaccare. Staccare.
Which is to say, To tear, To split, To detach, in the original, common tongue, although both sides now need a dictionary to say it.
I have told myself, First, before I write an elegy, the research. There is the question of your name.
Already one year has passed.
Alba means white. Also bright, light. Dawn. A type of flower. A type of song or a poem.
This morning, on waking, I move like a sleepwalker, going through the morning motions. The water boils and the whistle cries. I walk over to the stove, turn off the heat.
Then, as I reach to the canister for a teabag to put into the cup, I hear your voice, sing-song, say, Du thé?
I look for another word, a single word, that means rejoining, reunion, reassembly.
I look for this word, even though I was never separated by the sea. Still, it seems someone is always missing.
There is a black and white photograph. It is eighteen inches long, ten inches high.
There are three separate groupings.
A husband, a wife, and a girl with straight bangs and an enormous bow that is tilted just off to the side of her head.
A husband, a wife, and a baby boy with tremendous cheeks.
A husband, a wife.
At first glance, the elements seem unified. But why the distance between the groups? Why the separate sittings? Why the mist between them? I look again. The sizes of the heads vary too greatly. The bodies are in different scale, three photographs have been pieced together.”
More information about the book can be found on the Kore Press website.
New Interview With Maurice Manning
A new interview with faculty member Maurice Manning, titled “The Kentucky Stage,” appears online at the Poetry Foundation:
The Kentucky Stage
Maurice Manning on the South, Spoon River, and why he’s not a fan of Facebook.
By John McIntyre
Maurice Manning speaks slowly. He’s intent on clarity. If it’s possible to be searching and precise at the same time, he is. Manning lives on 20 acres of farmland in Kentucky. He keeps a picture of the great bluegrass musician Roscoe Holcomb on his refrigerator, and often finds himself working through poems while doing farm chores or walking in the woods near his house. None of that will seem a surprise to readers familiar with his work.
Since Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, for which he earned a Yale Younger Poets nod in 2001, Manning has homed in on the lives of men and women in rural Kentucky. His next effort was A Companion for Owls, a collection that imagined a commonplace book by the legendary Daniel Boone, in verse. Bucolics was a series of takes on the pastoral poem: 78 untitled, unpunctuated poems, all addressed to “Boss.” He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize on the strength of 2010’s The Common Man, a collection that reached back to his childhood. His new collection, The Gone and the Going Away, faces a Kentucky in flux with a brave face and a healthy dose of humor. The Poetry Foundation recently spoke with Manning by telephone, after one of his standard days of teaching and farm chores. A condensed version of that conversation follows.
You were on a panel of writers recently discussing the question “What is Southern?” What’s your perspective?
That was an interesting conversation. People on the panel had widely different perspectives. My thought was, we still have people who have a long time living in the same place, and who live in a region that they have real roots in, family history, and they know that their grandparents lived here, and their great-grandparents lived over here, and that sort of thing. At least that’s my experience of Kentucky. And a sense that the past matters, I would say, is still detectable around here.
Charles Baxter’s Graduation Remarks
Faculty member Charles Baxter’s July 2013 MFA Graduation Address:
To this year’s graduates, and their beloved spouses, and partners, and children, and parents, and to my colleagues, and guests of the college—welcome. It’s my great pleasure and honor to offer a few words today, with emphasis on the word “few,” to the graduates. After all the sacrifices you’ve made—the writing, the revisions, the readings and lectures, the packets, the tuition, the hours alone struggling with words, and the sacrifices your families and loved one also have made—after all this, I know you’re just dreading the valedictory wisdom speech that goes with any graduation. I certainly would be dreading it. Fortunately for you, I have no wisdom. But I do have a story. I’ll give you that.
I’ve been teaching off-and-on in this program for a very long time. I’ve seen students come and go. But two of the most remarkable students stay in my memory. They were friends, two guys from Spain. You could hardly tell where they were from; they spoke without accents. One of them was tall and thin and went around with a sad face and a distracted expression. He had read all the books in all the libraries. He was always quoting from what he had read. The books had made him a little crazy. He said he was from La Mancha, although I have no idea if he was telling the truth about that. He was a poet, of course. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him “Don.”
His friend was this short fat guy. This guy watched the world carefully, figuring everybody out. He had a crafty shrewd look. At lunch he always went back to the salad bar two or three times, and he spilled food on his clothes, and he belched, and there were always weird stains on his manuscripts. Of course he was a fiction writer. He had the somewhat unusual name of “Sancho.”
I worked with both of them.
I first worked with this Don guy. I remember our conferences in Jensen. I’d be talking about poetry, the semester’s reading list, and suddenly he would say, in a loud voice, “Blue is the color of distance!” And to calm him down, I’d agree: “Yeah, right, distance is blue.” I’d go on advising him about his poems, and suddenly he’d interrupt and say, “Blue is also the color of nobility.” And to placate him, I’d say, “Uh huh, nobility is blue.” It went on like that. After the residency, his packets started to arrive. They were thin, containing a few eloquent, sometimes incomprehensible poems, along with an enthusiastic cover letter, filled with ravings about his girlfriend, Dulcie.
How can I describe his poems? They were visionary and beautiful, but sometimes they made no sense. They also had some sort of moral agenda, but I could never figure it out. Evil, he thought, should be defeated; giants must be subdued. The poems represented the speech of the angels. I was in awe of these poems, I loved them, but what could I say about them? They created some utterly new world on the page, in which trees were giants and the giants were forces of nature and distance was blue and the forces of nature were colorful and rapt and aromatic, and the words he employed somehow seemed free of the things they referred to, and they hypnotized the reader. He used phrases like “the bubbling aquarium of eternity.”
Well, he eventually graduated, and he started his own press, Blue Distance Press. He never seemed to care about how many copies of his books he sold or what reviews he got or whether anybody read his work. I once sent him an order for several of his books, along with a check, and he never deposited the check. It’s still out there somewhere. He was impractical, oblivious, and his head stayed in the clouds. If people laughed at him, he never noticed. He didn’t believe in success and failure. He didn’t believe that the literary world had winners or losers. Literature is not a sack race, he once said to me. If he had never sold a single book, he still would have been a happy man.
I loved him. Everybody loved him.
I also worked with his fat friend, Sancho. The fat friend wrote fat novels, clear-eyed studies of how people actually live. You always knew what was going on in them. They told the truth, and this truth was precious. The sentences were lucid, sometimes witty. His packets were so fat that they occasionally exploded when the letter carrier dropped them on my front stoop. (This was before we had length limits for the exchanges.) Once the fat guy graduated, his first novel turned out to be an Oprah pick, a best-seller, and he sold thousands of copies and became quite rich. He still shows up at the Warren Wilson receptions at the AWP. If you go there, you’ll know him: he’s the fat guy standing near the hors d’oeuvre table, with the barbeque stains on his Brooks Brothers shirt. I never loved him the way I loved his tall impractical friend, but I admired him, and the program still asks him for charitable donations.
My dear friends, beloved graduates: I lied. I never actually taught Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They were never actually students here. But I contain both of them. So do you, men and women both. When you are looking carefully at something, practicing the religion of attention, trying to remember how people talked and thought and how they acted and what they did, when you are watching and watchful and shrewd, you are Sancho; and when you are having visions, and when only the right words in the right order will do, and when you don’t know or care how successful you are in the world’s eyes, and when you forget to cash the checks because only the work is important, you are Don Quixote. You have to be Don Quixote to have the visions, and you have to be Sancho to pay the bills. But you don’t have to be either one; most of us are both.
What is it like to be both of these people? I promised you no wisdom of my own, but I have some borrowed wisdom, from the great modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. Cavafy thought long and hard throughout his life about what it was to acknowledge oneself (as a gay man, as a poet) in public, and he thought endlessly about what we say to ourselves about our own successes and failures. He wrote one of the greatest poems ever about graduating into the life of writing. If there is a better poem about this subject, I don’t know it. The poem is called “The First Step” and Cavafy wrote it in1899. Here it is in a translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. The poem contains the word “idyll”, meaning a poem about country life.
The young poet Eumenis
Complained one day to Theocritos:
“I’ve been writing for two years now
and I’ve composed only one idyll.
It’s my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
Of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
And from this first step I’m standing on now
I’ll never climb any higher.”
Theocritos retorted: “Words like that
Are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
Should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
What you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
Is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
You must be in your own right
A member of the city of ideas.
And it’s a hard, unusual thing
To be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
No charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
What you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”
Graduates of the summer class of 2013, what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing. To quote Cavafy, it is a hard, unusual thing to be enrolled as a citizen of this city. Well, now you are enrolled in that city, and now you are citizens there. Congratulations and blessings and all good fortune to you all, in your writerly lives as spiritual Spaniards, as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Faculty and Alumni in Blackbird
New poems by faculty members Ellen Bryant Voigt and Dana Levin, and alumni Victoria Chang and Sean Patrick Hill, appear online at Blackbird.
“Lost Boy” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Two Poems by Dana Levin (also, A Conversation with Dana Levin and Matthew Zapruder)
Four Poems by Victoria Chang
“Gauguin Among the Tahitians” by Sean Patrick Hill
FRIENDS OF WRITERS 