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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:openSearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/" xmlns:blogger="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008" xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" xmlns:gd="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005" xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" version="2.0"><channel><atom:id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708</atom:id><lastBuildDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2024 03:31:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><category>writers friendship</category><category>web del sol</category><category>Lola Haskins</category><category>Poetry</category><category>RAYMOND CARVER</category><category>Barry Spacks</category><category>David Alpaugh</category><category>Jack Foley</category><category>James Houston</category><category>John Berryman</category><category>Laurence Lieberman</category><category>Modern British Poetry</category><category>Mort Marcus</category><category>Robert Dana</category><category>Santa Cruz</category><category>Stephen Spender</category><category>UC Santa Barbara</category><category>University of Florida</category><category>University of Iowa</category><category>Writers' Groups</category><category>eZines</category><category>A Day's Grace</category><category>AWP</category><category>Adele Wiseman</category><category>American Boolk Award</category><category>Andrew Boobier</category><category>Anne Lamott</category><category>Art Bar</category><category>Associated Writing Programs</category><category>BOA</category><category>Blackwaters Press</category><category>Blue Moon Review</category><category>Bookshop Santa Cruz</category><category>C.B. Follett</category><category>CHARLES BUKOWSKI</category><category>Cabrillo College</category><category>Catherine Graham</category><category>Chatoyant</category><category>Chinese Poets</category><category>Coffee House Press</category><category>Dona Stein</category><category>Doug Lawson</category><category>Doug McClellan</category><category>Ego</category><category>Florida</category><category>Friendship Among Women</category><category>Gainesville</category><category>Gale Berkowitz</category><category>Gary Young</category><category>Gloria K. Alford</category><category>Grasslimb</category><category>Grief</category><category>Humanitas Prize</category><category>Illinois</category><category>J.J. Webb</category><category>Jacqueline Kudler</category><category>Jalina Mhyana</category><category>James Wright</category><category>John Hopkins</category><category>Johns Hopkins</category><category>Josephine Dickinson</category><category>KPFA-FM</category><category>KUSP-FM</category><category>Kathleen Spivack</category><category>Lady Pinhall</category><category>League of Canadian Poets</category><category>Libby Scheir</category><category>Linda Rogers</category><category>Lucille Clifton</category><category>Lucille Lang Day</category><category>Lucy Lang Day</category><category>Lynne Knight</category><category>M.I.T.</category><category>MFA program</category><category>MORTON MARCUS</category><category>Macintosh</category><category>Margaret Laurence</category><category>Marion Engel</category><category>Marsh Hawk Press</category><category>McGill University</category><category>Memorial</category><category>Michael McNeilley</category><category>Mike Neff</category><category>Modernbook</category><category>National Book Award</category><category>New Rivers</category><category>Norton Anthology</category><category>Octavo</category><category>Olympia Review</category><category>Paul Engle</category><category>Penny Cagan</category><category>Peter Klappert</category><category>Poetry Santa Cruz</category><category>Poetry Show</category><category>Richard Levine</category><category>Robert Pinsky</category><category>Robert Priest</category><category>Robyn Sarah</category><category>Rochelle Ratner</category><category>Ruth Daigon</category><category>San Francisco</category><category>Santa Cruz Sentinel</category><category>Scarlet Tanager</category><category>Seamus Heaney</category><category>Snow Mountain Passage</category><category>Stegner Fellow</category><category>Stegner Fellow at Stanford</category><category>Suki Wessling</category><category>Susan Terris</category><category>Tang Dynasty</category><category>Ted Hughes</category><category>Toronto</category><category>UCLA Study</category><category>UCSC artist</category><category>UCSC writer</category><category>Urbana</category><category>Valerie Polichar</category><category>Victory Cafe</category><category>Wallace Baine</category><category>Walt Whitman</category><category>Writers Workshop</category><category>Zero City</category><category>black moss press</category><category>competition</category><category>epigrams</category><category>gatekeeper</category><category>guru writer</category><category>honest friends</category><category>james Broughton</category><category>litZines</category><category>oxytocin</category><category>poetry wars</category><category>radio</category><category>random reader</category><category>robert sward</category><category>singer/songwriter Robert Priest</category><category>villanelle</category><title>Writer Friendships</title><description>Stories and Essays About Writer Relations - Friendly or Not So</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/</link><managingEditor>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</managingEditor><generator>Blogger</generator><openSearch:totalResults>37</openSearch:totalResults><openSearch:startIndex>1</openSearch:startIndex><openSearch:itemsPerPage>25</openSearch:itemsPerPage><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-249274088694644736</guid><pubDate>Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:44:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2011-04-24T19:58:13.468-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">John Berryman</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Laurence Lieberman</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">web del sol</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">writers friendship</category><title>John Berryman / University of Illinois/ Laurence Lieberman</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSZvvcyL-Qs/TbTjK2dqJjI/AAAAAAAAAEw/-DLyJV8-l9I/s1600/John%2BBerrman-2.jpeg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 93px; height: 78px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSZvvcyL-Qs/TbTjK2dqJjI/AAAAAAAAAEw/-DLyJV8-l9I/s400/John%2BBerrman-2.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599350012286477874" border="0" /></a> In the middle of the winter of 1969, shortly following the announcement of the awarding of the National Book Award in poetry to John Berryman's volume His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the University of Illinois invited Mr. Berryman to visit the campus for a few days and present a couple of readings from his work. The letter of invitation was sent some months before the suggested date for the readings, but we received no reply from Mr. Berryman. Finally, a couple of weeks before the date scheduled for his arrival, we phoned the poet, and he warmly agreed to be our guest. Apparently, he had misplaced our letter and then had forgotten about the matter, thinking he had already replied in the affirmative. I had for many years been an ardent devotee of the poet's work, and since I was to act as his host at the university, I looked forward to our first meeting with great enthusiasm. I strongly advised Mr. Berryman to plan to arrive a day or two before his first reading, because bad weather in mid- winter between Minnesota and Illinois often interrupts jet traffic. But he arranged to reach Urbana just a few hours before the reading. There was some snowfall on the day of his arrival, not heavy enough to ground the planes but sufficient hazard to delay his shorter flight--the notoriously unreliable Ozark shuttle plane-- between Chicago and Urbana. I drove to the airport to meet the late Ozark plane, and when Mr. Berryman failed to appear among the deboarding passengers, I panicked, since his first scheduled performance was just hours away. I phoned his home in Minneapolis, and his young daughter assured me that he had flown by jet to Chicago. Then began the marathon wait. Mr. Berryman's first performance was scheduled for 8:00 P.M. and by 7:30 P.M., most of the audience of several hundred had already assembled in the lecture hall. I hurriedly composed a speech of apology, but just before I reached the speaker's podium to send the audience home, I was called to the phone. Mr. Berryman was calling from a public phone booth at some point along the highway between Chicago and Urbana--he wasn't sure of the distance--and his first words to me were, "Lieberman, hold the audience!" He sounded in very high gay spirits, saying he had found a cabdriver at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, a lovely, talkative man, who had agreed to taxi him 140 miles to Urbana for a reasonable price. He expected to be about one hour late, and I should kindly ask the audience to wait. Nearly everyone in the crowded auditorium was happy to wait. I delighted to imagine the dialogue between Mr. Berryman and his cabdriver, which I assured the audience jokingly must resemble the wonderful repartee between Henry, the autobiographical persona of Berryman's famous Dream Songs, and his friend and counterpart who refers to Henry in the poems as Mr. Bones. A student carrying a guitar mounted the stage and began to play folk songs; then a number of other students followed the first, and all spontaneously began to sing--so the time passed quickly and happily for all. Shortly after 9:00 P.M., some of the audience became fidgety, and a slow stream of those who had lost patience and were tired of waiting began to trickle out of the lecture hall. At 9:15, the phone rang again. Mr. Berryman, his voice now at fever pitch, repeated "Hold the audience!" In the background, I could make out a jukebox and jangled voices: Clearly, Mr. Berryman was phoning me from a bar, and no doubt he would be treating his chauffeur to "a couple for the road." At 10:00, when the phone rang for the third time, half of the audience had left. Mr. Berryman was calling at last from the registration desk of the Illinois Union, his place of lodging for the night. He had arrived safely, paid his cabdriver, and wished to rest for a short while in his room to get ready for his performance. I elatedly reported the news to the audience, and we all moved from the auditorium to a very spacious private home. We settled in for a late meeting with our poet, in which we anticipated the intimacy of a small, informal--if crowded--gathering would compensate for the long delay. At 11:00 P.M., I met Mr. Berryman at his room, as agreed earlier, and he rose to greet me, while covertly replacing a whiskey flask in his satchel. He was shaking from head to foot, and I distinctly remember him saying as we shook hands, "There's nothing wrong with me that a completely new nervous system wouldn't fix." (I'm reminded of those words by a line in one of the poems in Love and Fame, "When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey." When we arrived at the large home at which the remains of the audience were gathered, Mr. Berryman was quickly accosted by a somewhat deranged young ex-GI poet. I was amazed at Mr. Berryman's extreme kindness toward this ill-mannered fellow; he exercised infinite patience toward a man who was obviously very unbalanced mentally and perhaps dangerous. Mr. Berryman's astonishing compassion for troubled young people was unmistakably demonstrated by this incident. I can hear his words of sympathy for this young man echoed in the many poems in Love and Fame dealing with agonized patients of the psychiatric ward in which Mr. Berryman apparently was a patient for a short while. Another revealing exchange preceding the performance was Mr. Berryman's meeting with John Shahn, the son of the famous artist Ben Shahn, a dear friend of the poet's who produced the superb drawings for the first edition of Mr. Berryman's book Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Ben Shahn had recently died, and his son, John, was the first to give Mr. Berryman the terrible news. Mr. Berryman's instant outpouring of grief for his friend gave me a firsthand glimpse into the poet's great talent for friendship, a major theme of so many of his best poems-laments over the deaths of his friends. In the course of his reading, he interrupted the actual flow of his poems often to comment on friends living or dead, and I particularly remember that he frequently sang the praises of Robert Lowell. He tried to convince the audience that Lowell deserved the Nobel Prize in literature, and evidently he felt there was a good chance that Lowell would win the award later that year. The performance itself was surely one of the most electric and memorable poetry readings I have ever attended. Mr. Berryman felt a great affection for his audience, so many of whom were seated in ardent adulation at his feet in the large front-room parlor, and he easily established a communion with a couple of the prettier girls in the front rows. He often seemed to address the lines of his poems, as well as the wonderful flow of anecdotes and reminiscences between poems, directly to those individual faces. And this quality of personal involvement and exchange gave more life to the experience for us all. In the next few days, during which I was honored to act as Mr. Berryman's host, he often exhibited the same instant surging of warmth and affection for attractive females, including my younger daughter Deborah, who was seven years old at the time and probably reminded him of his own daughter of about the same age. Contrary to the legend of Mr. Berryman as an impetuous seducer of women, his expressions of affection for females of all ages took the form of a spiritual, loving kindness. As I think back to his genuine fondness for every lovely young lady he met while in my company, the memory gives a special ring to my ear as I read the following lines from perhaps the loveliest and most moving of the Eleven Addresses to the Lord. Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me to see them as sisters &amp; daughters. Sustain my grand endeavours: husbandship &amp; crafting. Forsake me not when my wild hours come ... ______ This memoir first appeared in Eigo Seinen [The Rising Generation] (May 1972) from Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets, Laurence Lieberman, University of Missouri Press, 1995 -reprinted with author's permission. return to Writer's Friendships _________________________</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-berryman-university-of-illinois.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSZvvcyL-Qs/TbTjK2dqJjI/AAAAAAAAAEw/-DLyJV8-l9I/s72-c/John%2BBerrman-2.jpeg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7709431822760855730</guid><pubDate>Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:09:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2011-01-30T11:37:41.588-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Jack Foley</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">james Broughton</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">KPFA-FM</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">San Francisco</category><title>Jack Foley on James Broughton</title><description>From The Potted Psalm in 1946 to Erogeny in 1976 I could not have created anything without sharing love with my collaborators. This is a weakness I take delight in. “Relations are real, not substances,” said the Buddha. And the more intense the love, the livelier the work. —James Broughton I would like to profile Joel, Stephen (who is working on a bio) and Jack in relation to your projects and your lives with James and since his death. —Franklin Abbott ----- I was interviewing Michael Lerner, a politically active rabbi, on my [KPFA-FM] radio show. When I asked him about death, he answered, “Death?” His answer made me think of my dear friend James Broughton (1913-1999). James—not easy to write about. Where to begin? There are so many incidents, so many feelings. Scarcely a day passes when I don’t have some kind of thought of him. His image, his poems are on the walls of my house—more are in my memory. Dear James, a lovely, deeply funny, deeply deep man: I am a center of gravity a thermal spring a magnetic field a mercurial planet We met in the mid 80s, probably 1985. I was running a poetry series at Larry Blake’s restaurant on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The series was quite successful and featured a very wide range of poets. One of these was Robert Peters—in full drag as Elizabeth Bathory, his “blood countess.” Peters asked me whether I’d like to be introduced to James Broughton. I said, “Sure,” though I was only vaguely aware of his work. I had heard of his films and had read the excellent early poems published in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry. I also knew that he was a gay man—but I don’t think I knew much more than that. Wonders awaited. James read for my [radio] series many times—including one memorable occasion when the series day fell on November 10, 1987, James’s 74th birthday. My first experience of him was a lunch: he invited me over for one of those incredibly delicious gourmet feasts regularly prepared by his lover, Joel Singer. Though at that time I was a very little-known poet—and straight!—both men made me feel not only at ease but extremely comfortable in their presence. James spoke to me as if I were an old friend. One of the interesting things about him was the fact that, though he was a deep and lifelong believer in “love,” he was never sentimental or treacly. His wit and intellect cut through the false faces of love and went directly to its deep heart. By this time I had read—and adored—his Androgyne Journal. I knew he was in some ways a “Jungian.” I remarked to James, “I like Jung but the problem with Jungians is that they often seem to skip over the body in their zeal to arrive at the archetypal.” James smiled and answered with his ironic drawl, “Tell me about it.” Then James and Joel set me in a little room with a film projector in it. They started Testament (1974) and left me to see it. I emerged starry-eyed. I had seen something stunningly beautiful and incredibly rich. What a movie! At once personal—even self-deprecatory—and magical, alive with transformation. I loved film and had published articles about it, but this was the vita nuova. James wrote of Testament, I spun what I thought would be my final film: a self-portrait bouncing me from my babyhood to my imagined death. To summarize the quest for erotic transcendence that animated all my cinema I mixed film clips, still photos and staged scenes. I was assisted at the camera by an ingratiating redhead named H. Edgar Jenkins… At the film’s beginning I am seen rocking in a chair by the Pacific Ocean, questioning my life: I asked the Sea how deep things are. O, said She, that depends upon how far you want to go. I mentioned to him once that the word “testament” was connected by etymology to the word “testicle.” “Is it!” he said. Over the years I knew James, I wrote many articles about him and interviewed him often. He was a regular guest on my KPFA radio show. I loved his work and was very pleased to discover that he enjoyed mine. One of the features of my poetry readings is the presentation of choral pieces read by my wife Adelle and me. James—unlike some of my other friends—immediately understood the significance of these pieces and dubbed them “androgynous,” a very important word in his cosmos. I introduced James at many of his events. For one I wrote something particularly special. James knew that Adelle and I had been singing a slightly parodic version of the old waltz, “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” Adelle ended the song with a little tap dance—a bit of waltz clog. James asked me to rewrite the words of the song to introduce him on the stage of the Castro Theater in San Francisco. I tried to catch a bit of the feeling of Cole Porter—whom we both admired: SWEET JAMIE O’BROUGHTON Sweet Jamie O’Broughton Our bountiful James It’s he that we’re toutin’ He’s water and flames We’ll go to his movies (We’re taking the bus!) We love sweet Jamie O’Broughton And Jamie O’Broughton loves…(worried) somebody else? (emphatic) No! Jamie O’Broughton loves us! Adelle did her tap dance and James came onto the stage to thunderous applause! On June 28, 1990, Adelle and I read at Cody’s Books in Berkeley with James. We decided to imitate each other’s styles for the reading. James wrote a choral piece—his only one—for him and me to perform together. It begins, THIS WONDER A Hymn to Herm (Duet for Tenor and Baritone) This wonder this wonder this prize this surprise this secret this skyrocket this wonder your wonder my wonder our wonder my steering gear my takeoff my sword my songbird my bird in hand my flying carpet Your wonder O wonder The entire poem is included in ALL: A James Broughton Reader. For my part, I wrote a fanciful prose piece, “Broughton Fountain,” in which I heard his voice clearly. It was full of quotations from James’s work and began: The Master stood on the edge of the cliff. He asked which of his disciples would thrust himself over the side, plunging into the mouth of a horrible and certain death. “I,” said one, eager to get a running start. “Wait,” said the Master. “Do you think I’m some sort of idiot? I was only raising an abstract question. I need all the disciples I can get—and besides, it’s a long way down the side of that cliff.” “True,” said the eager disciple. “But wouldn’t you always honor the name of the disciple who died for you?” “Well, I might,” said the Master, “but really it all depends on whether I’ve written it down. My memory’s a little shaky these days, and I can’t seem to locate my pencil.” “Master,” said the disciple, “I would be the one who died for you!” “Well, go ahead if you must,” said the Master, fumbling in his pockets for a piece of paper. “But I’m not guaranteeing anything. Oh, where is that pencil!” “Thank you, Master. Aieeeee!” said the disciple as he leaped over the edge. “What was his name?” said the Master. “I suppose,” said another disciple, “there isn’t much left of him now.” It ended, —My name is James. There is nothing But the indestructible sweetness Of Everything! Follow your weird. I knew James in the last years of his life, as he began his witty, deep, courageous meditation on the fact of his own mortality (“I am / a moony old vessel, / I have / garbled many a hanker”). The thought of Death began very early in his work, but the notion of it changed as he grew older. In the end, Death became the greatest lover of all—propelling James into whatever eternity might await him. James’s work stands by itself and stands high and tall. (I’m sure that James would remark to that, “Hermes bird!”) To those who were, like me, lucky enough to know him personally, he offered the image of another sort of manhood. He was a gay man, I was a straight man—yet we simply accepted each other and loved each other just as we were. He had his fears and anxieties—explored especially in the early work—but he kept the feeling of child-like wonder alive in his consciousness throughout his long life. He once wrote, “People don’t grow up. They just get taller.” How do you describe the sun? * My life since James’s death is not dissimilar to what it was when he was alive. I continue my writing and my performing—both of which are undoubtedly improved because of my knowing James. I feel very strongly still the sense of his multiple selves: “You are your own twin and your own bride and all your gods.” I put together ALL: A James Broughton Reader because I felt the need of a book in which the various aspects of James’s work could all join together in a chorus and sing to one another. I’m very proud of the result. I am currently writing a long history of poetry in California from 1940 to 2005. It will probably be published next year. James’s work is an immensely important element in that history. I feel his presence as I write this, as I re-read his work, as I turn my mind towards the amazing man he was. Jack Foley</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2011/01/jack-foley-on-james-broughton.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-2114652100222407767</guid><pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:01:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-11-22T17:06:17.744-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Illinois</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">John Berryman</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Laurence Lieberman</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">National Book Award</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Urbana</category><title>Hold the Audience: A Brief Memoir of John Berryman by Laurence Lieberman</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TOsSyNCJHRI/AAAAAAAAAEg/nE71s7gEkIU/s1600/John%2BBerryman.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 60px; height: 78px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TOsSyNCJHRI/AAAAAAAAAEg/nE71s7gEkIU/s400/John%2BBerryman.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542544420110933266" /></a> John Berryman In the middle of the winter of 1969, shortly following the announcement of the awarding of the National Book Award in poetry to John Berryman's volume His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the University of Illinois invited Mr. Berryman to visit the campus for a few days and present a couple of readings from his work. The letter of invitation was sent some months before the suggested date for the readings, but we received no reply from Mr. Berryman. Finally, a couple of weeks before the date scheduled for his arrival, we phoned the poet, and he warmly agreed to be our guest. Apparently, he had misplaced our letter and then had forgotten about the matter, thinking he had already replied in the affirmative. I had for many years been an ardent devotee of the poet's work, and since I was to act as his host at the university, I looked forward to our first meeting with great enthusiasm. I strongly advised Mr. Berryman to plan to arrive a day or two before his first reading, because bad weather in mid- winter between Minnesota and Illinois often interrupts jet traffic. But he arranged to reach Urbana just a few hours before the reading. There was some snowfall on the day of his arrival, not heavy enough to ground the planes but sufficient hazard to delay his shorter flight--the notoriously unreliable Ozark shuttle plane-- between Chicago and Urbana. I drove to the airport to meet the late Ozark plane, and when Mr. Berryman failed to appear among the deboarding passengers, I panicked, since his first scheduled performance was just hours away. I phoned his home in Minneapolis, and his young daughter assured me that he had flown by jet to Chicago. Then began the marathon wait. Mr. Berryman's first performance was scheduled for 8:00 P.M. and by 7:30 P.M., most of the audience of several hundred had already assembled in the lecture hall. I hurriedly composed a speech of apology, but just before I reached the speaker's podium to send the audience home, I was called to the phone. Mr. Berryman was calling from a public phone booth at some point along the highway between Chicago and Urbana--he wasn't sure of the distance--and his first words to me were, "Lieberman, hold the audience!" He sounded in very high gay spirits, saying he had found a cabdriver at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, a lovely, talkative man, who had agreed to taxi him 140 miles to Urbana for a reasonable price. He expected to be about one hour late, and I should kindly ask the audience to wait. Nearly everyone in the crowded auditorium was happy to wait. I delighted to imagine the dialogue between Mr. Berryman and his cabdriver, which I assured the audience jokingly must resemble the wonderful repartee between Henry, the autobiographical persona of Berryman's famous Dream Songs, and his friend and counterpart who refers to Henry in the poems as Mr. Bones. A student carrying a guitar mounted the stage and began to play folk songs; then a number of other students followed the first, and all spontaneously began to sing--so the time passed quickly and happily for all. Shortly after 9:00 P.M., some of the audience became fidgety, and a slow stream of those who had lost patience and were tired of waiting began to trickle out of the lecture hall. At 9:15, the phone rang again. Mr. Berryman, his voice now at fever pitch, repeated "Hold the audience!" In the background, I could make out a jukebox and jangled voices: Clearly, Mr. Berryman was phoning me from a bar, and no doubt he would be treating his chauffeur to "a couple for the road." At 10:00, when the phone rang for the third time, half of the audience had left. Mr. Berryman was calling at last from the registration desk of the Illinois Union, his place of lodging for the night. He had arrived safely, paid his cabdriver, and wished to rest for a short while in his room to get ready for his performance. I elatedly reported the news to the audience, and we all moved from the auditorium to a very spacious private home. We settled in for a late meeting with our poet, in which we anticipated the intimacy of a small, informal--if crowded--gathering would compensate for the long delay. At 11:00 P.M., I met Mr. Berryman at his room, as agreed earlier, and he rose to greet me, while covertly replacing a whiskey flask in his satchel. He was shaking from head to foot, and I distinctly remember him saying as we shook hands, "There's nothing wrong with me that a completely new nervous system wouldn't fix." (I'm reminded of those words by a line in one of the poems in Love and Fame, "When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey." When we arrived at the large home at which the remains of the audience were gathered, Mr. Berryman was quickly accosted by a somewhat deranged young ex-GI poet. I was amazed at Mr. Berryman's extreme kindness toward this ill-mannered fellow; he exercised infinite patience toward a man who was obviously very unbalanced mentally and perhaps dangerous. Mr. Berryman's astonishing compassion for troubled young people was unmistakably demonstrated by this incident. I can hear his words of sympathy for this young man echoed in the many poems in Love and Fame dealing with agonized patients of the psychiatric ward in which Mr. Berryman apparently was a patient for a short while. Another revealing exchange preceding the performance was Mr. Berryman's meeting with John Shahn, the son of the famous artist Ben Shahn, a dear friend of the poet's who produced the superb drawings for the first edition of Mr. Berryman's book Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Ben Shahn had recently died, and his son, John, was the first to give Mr. Berryman the terrible news. Mr. Berryman's instant outpouring of grief for his friend gave me a firsthand glimpse into the poet's great talent for friendship, a major theme of so many of his best poems-laments over the deaths of his friends. In the course of his reading, he interrupted the actual flow of his poems often to comment on friends living or dead, and I particularly remember that he frequently sang the praises of Robert Lowell. He tried to convince the audience that Lowell deserved the Nobel Prize in literature, and evidently he felt there was a good chance that Lowell would win the award later that year. The performance itself was surely one of the most electric and memorable poetry readings I have ever attended. Mr. Berryman felt a great affection for his audience, so many of whom were seated in ardent adulation at his feet in the large front-room parlor, and he easily established a communion with a couple of the prettier girls in the front rows. He often seemed to address the lines of his poems, as well as the wonderful flow of anecdotes and reminiscences between poems, directly to those individual faces. And this quality of personal involvement and exchange gave more life to the experience for us all. In the next few days, during which I was honored to act as Mr. Berryman's host, he often exhibited the same instant surging of warmth and affection for attractive females, including my younger daughter Deborah, who was seven years old at the time and probably reminded him of his own daughter of about the same age. Contrary to the legend of Mr. Berryman as an impetuous seducer of women, his expressions of affection for females of all ages took the form of a spiritual, loving kindness. As I think back to his genuine fondness for every lovely young lady he met while in my company, the memory gives a special ring to my ear as I read the following lines from perhaps the loveliest and most moving of the Eleven Addresses to the Lord. Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting. Forsake me not when my wild hours come ... ______ This memoir first appeared in Eigo Seinen [The Rising Generation] (May 1972) from Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets, Laurence Lieberman, University of Missouri Press, 1995 -reprinted with author's permission. return to Writer's Friendships</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/11/hold-audience-brief-memoir-of-john.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TOsSyNCJHRI/AAAAAAAAAEg/nE71s7gEkIU/s72-c/John%2BBerryman.jpeg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7235918040667499852</guid><pubDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:13:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-09-16T16:23:14.351-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Bookshop Santa Cruz</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Josephine Dickinson</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Modern British Poetry</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Poetry Santa Cruz</category><title>British Poet Josephine Dickinson</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKlq8WcapI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/K-SlZTmxOlw/s1600/josephinedickinson.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 175px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKlq8WcapI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/K-SlZTmxOlw/s320/josephinedickinson.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517654650655632018" /></a> Haven't met her yet, but am researching and exchanging e-mails with British poet Josephine Dickinson who will be reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 7:30 PM, Tues., Oct. 12, 2010. I'll be doing the Intro and, long distance, getting to know her... Scarberry Hill ISBN 09527444-3-0 £7.95 Josephine Dickinson [in her own words] I grew up in South London but am rooted now in this place Alston, beloved of Auden, who ever kept its map on his wall. I aspire to the qualities of the shepherdpoet, indeed it is my e-mail address. My sense of vocation as a poet emerged after I became profoundly deaf overnight at the age of six and I started reading and imitating poetry. I lost a physical sense but started seeing and hearing the miraculous. I read Classics at Oxford, then became a music teacher and composer after study with Michael Finnissy and Richard Barrett. Life events brought me to Alston. One day Michael Mackmin wrote and asked me if I had enough poems to make a book. I sent him 100 poems. He chose 60. And this is 'Scarberry Hill'. Not all my poems are about sheep. Current interests include mythology and fairy tales, space travel and cosmology. I was stunned by last year's transit of the Sun by Venus and very much look forward to 2012.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/09/british-poet-josephine-dickinson.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKlq8WcapI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/K-SlZTmxOlw/s72-c/josephinedickinson.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-4934115325776198744</guid><pubDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:41:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-09-16T15:50:13.270-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Lucy Lang Day</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Poetry</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">villanelle</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">writers friendship</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Writers' Groups</category><title>Writers Friendship, Lucy, Richard, Dan, Alan…</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKdwu6fbZI/AAAAAAAAAEI/M5Bw8U5xlQE/s1600/Lucy+Lang+Day.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 204px; height: 270px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKdwu6fbZI/AAAAAAAAAEI/M5Bw8U5xlQE/s320/Lucy+Lang+Day.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517645954034920850" /></a> Trip on Sunday to Oakland for brunch with Lucy Day and Richard Levine and their friends, Dan Langton, a poet who teaches at San Francisco State, and his wife Eve, plus poet Alan Goldfarb and his wife Arlene. There are times when things just really click and one can only give thanks… thanks to one’s friends for extending an invitation and taking the time to prepare and put together an event, eight people in all, five of them writers. The event: Middle Eastern food, drink and a memorable sharing of poems, e.g., Richard and Lucy each reading a villanelle.* The poems (Lucy’s “Color of the Universe” and Richard’s “A Blessing in Beige”) so complement one another I found myself imagining each villanelle being asked in turn, “Do you, “Color of the Universe,” take “A Blessing…” to be your lawfully wedded wife/husband, and each responding… “I do.” Turns out these were indeed Richard and Lucy’s wedding poems. [*Note: poems by Dan Langton and Alan Goldfarb to follow.] By way of intro I should say: Lucy Day (aka Lucille Lang Day) is the author of eight poetry collections and chapbooks. Richard Levine is a journalist who is now writing fiction. Their wedding villanelles first appeared in Blue Unicorn and are included in Lucy's latest poetry collection, The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva, 2009). COLOR OF THE UNIVERSE The universe is really beige. Get used to it. John Noble Wilford The New York Times For Richard I can't believe the universe is tan, Not red or green or lavender or blue. I feel carnelian when you take my hand— Not beige like lima beans from a can, But a splendid, electrifying hue. I can't believe the universe is tan. Rose and gold are what I understand When I think of waking up each day with you. I feel carnelian when I take your hand, And like the universe my love expands, Surrounding us with turquoise and chartreuse. Can you believe the universe is tan, A color desolate as lunar sand And homely as a peanut or cashew? I feel carnelian when we're hand in hand, Listening to Perahia play Chopin. The stars all turn cerulean on cue. I don't care if the universe is tan: I feel carnelian as you take my hand. —Lucille Lang Day A BLESSING IN BEIGE The universe is really beige. Get used to it. John Noble Wilford The New York Times For Lucy Some stars burn brighter as they age Like maple leaves and apple trees flaming up from green. Alas, the color of the universe is beige, Not peach or pearl or the palest shade of sage, Not turquoise, as they once thought—so serene. Some stars burn brighter as they age. The love that we have is harder to gauge But it too burns brighter the later it seems. Does it matter so much if the universe is beige? As a poet breathes sound onto a silent page Your love bathes my days in aquamarine. Some stars burn brighter as they age. Let them light up our lives as we leave this stage And fill our hearts with their triumphant sheen. Who cares if the color of the universe is beige? A bird in flight outshines its silver cage. If the sky’s too bright the stars shine unseen. May our stars burn brighter as we age. Hurray, the color of the universe is beige! — Richard Michael Levine [see also: http://www.redroom.com/blog/robert-sward/writers-friendship-lucy-day-and-friends]</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/09/writers-friendship-lucy-richard-dan.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TJKdwu6fbZI/AAAAAAAAAEI/M5Bw8U5xlQE/s72-c/Lucy+Lang+Day.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-6835854107589603675</guid><pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:44:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-09-07T11:57:23.629-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">David Alpaugh</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">gatekeeper</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">writers friendship</category><title>Writers Friendship, David Alpaugh cheers the soul</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TIaKz2Q99mI/AAAAAAAAAEA/doW8nmixgS0/s1600/David_Alpaugh.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 228px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TIaKz2Q99mI/AAAAAAAAAEA/doW8nmixgS0/s320/David_Alpaugh.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5514247417106396770" /></a> My friend <a href="http://www.davidalpaugh.com/">David Alpaugh</a>, author of “Counterpoint,” “Heavy Lifting,” and widely read and discussed essays on "The Professionalization of Poetry" and "New Math of Poetry," responds to my new poem, “Legacy: Muse Neglect,” which opens We’re comin’ up to my birthday./I’m seventy-seven—twenty-three more and I’ll be a hundred!/So what’s it all about, sixty-odd years of writing, scribbling?/ ...Etc. Hello, Robert: My apology for taking so long getting back to you on "Legacy: Muse Neglect." Been tidal-waved by late days of summer, gearing up for fall obligations (Coolbrith, Valona, etc.). "Legacy" is a brave poem. You certainly touch a responsive chord in this poet, as I, too, am starting to wonder if I've lost the muse, have been treading water post-Counterpoint. Didn't old man Wordsworth and young man Byron have similar doubts? ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"). I love the concrete "eye to eye" confrontation with your "first mutt," that "first published poem." The metaphorical sense here is as sure as it is quiet. The paradoxical reversal of the dog becoming master and wagging the man is richly comic, and most poignant in that manly dogly reproach, "Bad poet, bad poet!" Unpretentiousness that comes from truly having the goods rather than just the flash has always been one of your most appealing qualities. Cheer up, Bob. "Legacy" is proof that you're poems have not lost their canine magic. Dogliness was and is the metaphor for what you continue to aim for in your work. Falling a bit short much of the time is inevitable. (When Samuel Beckett was asked if he had a favorite work he shook his head and muttered: "Something wrong with all of them.") The more I look at the history of poetry the more I believe that our mission is (in Frost's words) "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." You've done that with "Uncle Dog," "God is in the Cracks," "Heavenly Sex" and a dozen others, and now "Legacy" will be in the running (or, as you would say, trotting!). The only question is the crucial one for our Po-Busy time: will the gatekeepers get out of the way and allow poetry to live not by status and accreditation but by love? Here, I'm afraid that "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Let's hope we can overshoot their papier-mâché palace and land a few good poems on the other side! With deep respect for your generous, generative humor, David</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/09/writers-friendship-david-alpaugh-cheers.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/TIaKz2Q99mI/AAAAAAAAAEA/doW8nmixgS0/s72-c/David_Alpaugh.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>1</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-2527676821410960751</guid><pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 20:46:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-31T13:58:28.485-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">C.B. Follett</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">David Alpaugh</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Jack Foley</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Jacqueline Kudler</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Lynne Knight</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Ruth Daigon</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Susan Terris</category><title>A Celebration of Ruth Daigon, by Robert Sward</title><description>Remarks from Sun., May 30, 2010, Memorial Poetry Reading, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA on a program with David Alpaugh, Jack & Adelle Foley, C.B. Follett, Lynne Knight, Jacqueline Kudler, and Susan Terris. Ruth has been something of a muse, an inspired spirit for many of us, and in addition, for me, literally a “goddess of memory.” She wrote a description of our first meeting (some 40 or so years ago) and our ongoing friendship in a little essay she titled “The Poet in Bandages.” I’d been run over by a car in Cambridge, MA, shortly before meeting Ruth and Artie at a reading I was giving at the U of Connecticut, where Artie was teaching. I’d spent the night in Massachusetts General Hospital. I’d suffered a mild concussion, some loss of memory and my ability to recall all that happened that night (in the late 1960s) was somewhat impaired. My right ear had had to be sewn back onto my head. So I was wearing a blood-stained bandage over my head and loose and damaged ear to keep it in place. Sometimes one reads to an audience of 4 or 5 people. But for this one, so I believed, Ruth and Artie had conjured up a crowd of a couple hundred people. Goddess of memory? All I know is that when I think of Ruth (and Artie) this image arises… of two inseparable, wonderfully warm, loving, heartful and generous people, but also, for me, “bridge people,” two individuals who helped mark my movement as a writer from late 1960s East Coast (Connecticut…) to late 1980s West Coast USA (San Francisco, Berkeley, San Rafael, Oakland, Santa Cruz...). Ruth saved some letters we exchanged and when I read at the Berkeley "Y" in the 1980s on a program with another East Coast friend and ally, Jack Foley (who I’d met and known at Cornell), Ruth turned up with a copy of a letter I’d written about her poetry. That night in the company of Ruth and Artie Daigon, Jack and Adelle Foley, I felt in a sense I’d come home. Especially when, after our reading at the Berkeley “Y”, Ruth and Artie told me more about the UConn reading, of which I remembered little. In Ruth’s account, I grabbed Artie’s arm and exclaimed, “You were there? Tell me all about it.’ In her “Poet in Bandages” essay, Ruth wrote, “It was like Robert had lost and was reclaiming a part of his life…” which is true. She understood exactly what was happening. I was, indeed, with Ruth and Artie’s help, reclaiming a lost part of my life. So later, recognizing Ruth –in addition to everything else—as “Goddess of Memory,” it seemed only appropriate to show her a poem of mine titled MR. AMNESIA, which opens, “Even an amnesiac remembers some things better than others / …I don’t know about you, but I hardly unpack / and get ready for this lifetime and it’s time / to move on to the next…” which Ruth published in her magazine, POETS: ON. And we’ve been in touch ever since. And it was Ruth and Artie Daigon who introduced Gloria and me to David Alpaugh and Mary Jane… good friends, good friends! Speaking of movement, adventure and memory, I’d like to share Ruth Daigon’s poem FREEWAY which, as Artie agrees, is something of a prayer (Ruth herself used to read it as if it were a prayer), and prayers are nothing if not lyrical, emotional, inspired, musical… Freeway Be my friend Slow down the traffic Re-route the semis and their blind spots Call a halt to the crawlers the weavers The shooters the spreaders Grant me a free space in the slow lane where Traffic flows serenely Like the life I left behind Entering another an immigrant Crossing borders with nothing to declare I come from a wandering race And life with its ten plagues Is too familiar Almost a friend But the freeway invents new disasters Sure as a needle in a vein A waltz between two pits And another pogrom waiting in the wings Freeway Deliver me from interlocking lanes Tangled traffic Hypnotic miles Calm in control Holding hard to the studded lifeline With my motor humming Like a second heart. _ BIO Ruth Daigon made the transition from concert soprano to full time poet, editor, performance artist. She began the publication Poets On: a theme-oriented poetry journal, and was its editor for its twenty year life. She has frequently appeared in Internet publications, hard copy magazines and anthologies. Her most recent book Between One Future And The Next, Papier Mache Press, was published in 1995. Ruth's latest book " The Moon Inside" (Gravity/Newton's Baby) made its appearance in 1999. [Ruth Daigon in her own voice reads Payday at the Triangle, CD available, I believe, from our friend Jack Foley. It's an amazing poem, one that will likely secure her reputation as one of this country's truly gifted poets. You want the real thing? THIS is the real thing.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/celebration-of-ruth-daigon-by-robert.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-1867787562321064725</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 23:24:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-08-05T16:08:47.349-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Barry Spacks</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Johns Hopkins</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">M.I.T.</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">UC Santa Barbara</category><title>Reading an Old Friend's Poems by Barry Sparks</title><description>The wonderings and sweetness of this voice bring to my thought the scent of fine paper, fine linen, shirt with a white collar for the first time worn, long evening with a new book, dwelling over the pages. But in its sayings of loss, this voice tastes blood on its teeth, tart taste of blood that can neither be spit out nor swallowed. In reverence for loveliness my friend's word-music comes upon me like air before rain: remember? ? that freshness, cool, ultimately delicate; though air so offered may lift at times into a wind carrying sand, or into a deluge to follow. "Where will we go," asks the poem's voice, "when they send us away from here?" ? the body gone from all its familiar desirings and gone this mind that was a savoring, while its voice alone continues, a comfort to desire. _________ BIO Barry Spacks earns his keep as a persistently visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara after years of teaching at M.I.T. He's published many poems in various journals, paper and pixel, plus stories, two novels, and seven poetry collections, the most extensive of which is SPACKS STREET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, from Johns Hopkins. A CD of 42 poems, A PRIVATE READING, appeared in October 2000. _________________</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/reading-old-friends-poems-by-barry.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-3330221287896139389</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 23:20:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-08-05T16:51:26.482-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Dona Stein</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Kathleen Spivack</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Peter Klappert</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Stegner Fellow at Stanford</category><title>Learning Friendship by Dona Stein Luongo</title><description>In college, shyness perhaps caused by difficult family circumstances: I should be at work to help out instead of pursuing an education while my father was in jail, kept me at a distance from professors who might have become literary friends, both book and writing friends. Also they seemed remote teachers or stars to be admired, not chums. Professors (all male) with whom we shared enthusiasm for the works of Austen or Milton or Joyce we talked to after classes, but in those more formal years of the late fifties and early sixties, decorum was observed and meant distance at least for female students, me and those I knew. Our college literary friends (often writers and artists on the literary magazine editorial board and contributors) sometimes became lovers and/or partners, and here another complex story could and has been told, of the female often putting her interests and talents to the service of her literary partner's as she listens to, edits, and types his graduate school papers and/or literary efforts while working to support them or while taking care of a baby (sometimes working as well). In the meantime, her literary friends have gone in different directions to graduate school (which she turned down scholarships for because she was in love) or Europe, or Mexico. Her literary friends are now his, but not really hers, even though she may write a novel on the kitchen table or send poems to literary magazines that are accepted. Sometimes, in the midst of his term papers and the baby's diapers, she feels alone, abandoned, but she doesn't know how or why. That was me; I saw male literary friendships all around me. They were cemented by student teaching, by working with a thesis advisor, by stopping at this mentor's home (male) for drinks after a seminar, or at a bar. Soon these friendships involved advice about where to publish, who knew whom at what journal or press, and these friendships also soon involved first year graduate students, for by now the males were in their third, or fourth year. These friendships carried over to tennis, to the men's Sunday morning basketball games, the Friday or Saturday night poker games, and sometimes fishing and camping trips. I watched the toddler on the sidelines, made sandwiches and ferried them and chips and beer to the poker table, and later packed for the fishing and camping excursions. For most of these years, my literary friend was my partner. We talked about books he read or we both read. Sometimes I felt like one of his students. Soon, his male literary friends spread to universities across the country, extending from coast to coast, in some cases, even to Europe. Of course this was a proverbial men's club. I like to think it has changed, but the reason I describe it from my memory, is that today I see it working as strong as ever, especially where I teach. The Creative Writing Department Assistant invites one of his former undergraduate teachers (a male) to be a featured speaker and reader at the University. All invited readers for the Creative Writing Department so far this academic year have been male. To back-track, upon being challenged by my partner to at least learn what you're doing after a few nice publications, I was accepted in my first Creative Writing class, at Harvard. At the end of this class, Peter Klappert was leaving Harvard, and as a result of his criticism and encouragement, female writing friends from that class talked about other workshop leaders, especially Kathleen Spivack, teaching through the Radcliffe Seminars. A strong, vital, tough teacher, and advocate of poetry, she became a friend for many of us. From this class writing friendships came my way and I cherish some of them still--life friends and true friends in that we visited each other's homes, went to local readings together, read poems in public together (and became involved in politics together), introduced our favorite authors to each other, talked about our families, and talked about our struggles to write and publish; is it a surprise that we were all women, then in our thirties with children and ambitious partners, some of us limited by our economic circumstances, but all fed by our attention, interests, and efforts with poetry? In these friendships, some of my shyness was eroded. That residue of shyness or reserve or formality (perhaps now family illness kept me distant, reticent) made me stand on the fringe, hang back, kept me from claiming as literary friends people I might have gotten to know better after meeting them, sometimes even being in their homes or speaking to them (sometimes in monosyllables) or in some instances even corresponding with them about poetry in two instances with the encouragement and intercession of a partner: J. V. Cunningham, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, John Logan, Anne Sexton and many other writers whose names you might recognize. Today, I have no career in Creative Writing nor do I teach such a course, but I have literary friends without the struggle of conflicting tensions, no jealous partner questioning my choice to spend time talking about writing. Now--I think-- no youthful bashfulness (despite family illness and economic problems) gets in the way of my appreciating our writing strengths and successes. I even like to count a former spouse as a literary friend. So not all my literary friends are female, some are famous, and not all are close by. Yet I cherish our written and in-person visits when we indulge in literary gossip and information about grants and residencies, read each other's latest work, attend each other's readings, and cheer on each other's latest writing and reading enthusiasms. We know our lives are the richer for our literary friendship. BIO D.L. Stein, a former Stegner Fellow in Writing at Stanford, has been writing in Greece and in Schwandorf, Germany while on an International Poetry Exchange Fellowship in Germany. Stein is currently at work on two prose manuscripts, "Gone Wild" and "Aphrodite in the Afternoon," and a poetry manuscript, "Desperado." Recent publications include Athens News, Quarry West, and Rattle.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/learning-friendship-by-dona-stein.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>1</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-386122137133034286</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 22:49:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-10T15:53:26.830-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Libby Scheir</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Robert Priest</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">singer/songwriter Robert Priest</category><title>My friend, Libby Scheier by Robert Priest</title><description>In 1977 at the age of 26 I developed an enlarged pore in my right cheek. I had a vain hope that it could just be my little secret - totally unnoticeable. Libby had recently arrived from New York and, presenting herself as a fan of my poetry, had asked me to have a coffee. I sat there with her, face to face, perhaps a little too cocky, perhaps a little too close and she took her index finger put it right up to the enlarged pore and said ‘What’s that?” That was me crumbling, me blushing. Such pokery from Libby was something I soon learned to accept and admire about her. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and Student University of New York (M.A., 1971) she had solid academic grounding in political theory which was far beyond the naïve idealism I had come to via Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. She had been an activist at Berkeley in the sixties and had more recently been up to some Trotsky deeds in Israel which had resulted in her being expelled. She was always recommending that I read the Marxist essays which had changed her life. I recommended Neruda. Soon I became Libby’s little piece on the side. Her husband was having numerous affairs and I was her sweet revenge. Yes, it was that era when one could be just friends and have mutual, uncommitted wild sex. This, I think, is much underestimated as a good binding force for allies. And of course, after some time, love does begin to grow. Eventually Libby introduced me to her own poetry. She had published two chapbooks in New York but had had to use a pseudonym because her Trotsky sect frowned upon the writing of “bourgeois” poetry. I wasn’t at first wild about these poems. They were totally apolitical. Plus, I’m sure I wanted, to shelter the dynamic which had me as the doted upon poet and her as the generous ‘older’ woman. One day she showed me a book that was not a collection of Marxist essays. It was Andre Breton’s surrealist manifestoes. Probably one of the most important books of my life. My own writing to that time certainly had qualities of surrealism drawn no doubt from the culture of the day. But this book blew it wide open for me. Suddenly I was freed. Gushing reams of imagery. Laughing my head off as I wrote some of the best poetry I have ever written. I don’t know whether it was Libby’s eventual confession to her giant husband or the fact that I became briefly monogamous that ended the sexual part of our friendship. It hardly mattered. There’d been no big falling in love thing and there was no falling out either. The important part was the friendship continued. Soon, perhaps with some influence from me, (or was it Neruda) Libby started to write some very good poetry ? poetry that melded her surrealistic streak with her erudition and her politics. Poetry that couldn’t be denied. Extreme, challenging, tender poems full of wit and wild beauty. When Libby’s first book, The Larger Life (Black Moss Press, Canada) was published to ecstatic reviews how did I react? Like any true friend I tolerated her success. As she tolerated mine. Yes, I could be a little jealous, but so could she. I joyfully expanded the meaning of ‘friend’ to include ‘fan’. And Libby was not an easy one to remain friends with. That Pokey quality was not appreciated by everyone. She had a big mouth and ‘chutzpah plus’. In polite reserved Canada she didn’t hide and back down or couch her opinions in grant-getting veneer. She took risky ideological stands and stuck with them ? often to her own detriment. When her son, Jacob became seriously ill just as grants began to dry up,Libby, now a single mother, reacted with an incredible burst of energy. She started The Toronto School of Writing where she went on to employ not only me but numerous other writers. She became a technical writer for a science magazine. She secured a teaching position at York University. She became a literary columnist for the Toronto Star (where I got a very good review)and somehow, thankfully she continued to write and publish impassioned poetry. Sky, (The Mercury Press) is one of my all-time favourite books of poems. What a great example she was for me and so many others. Libby spent her last year on earth battling a breast cancer which was diagnosed far too late. Her treatment began with a double mastectomy. Afterward she refused chemotherapy. Instead she sought donations from friends to fund an approach using alternative medicine. She expressly asked that no-one contact her personally as she needed all her energy for the battle that was to come. I respected her wishes as much as I could. I did call twice, but was only able to leave messages of support. I was told though by her main caretaker that in her last days the mention of my name was one of the few things that could bring a smile to her face. I am very grateful for that. My friend Libby Scheier passed away in Oct. 2000. I have found this hard to fathom. I still have dreams where it’s all a big mistake and she is happily still alive. But alas, it is not so. She has gone - perhaps to point out holes in the faces of the gods; maybe to aggravate angels or plead the case of the poor and oppressed whom she cared so deeply about. I have not been able to write about her till now. The friend dies but not the friendship. That ship sails on. I am still friends with Libby. I am a friend of her poetry, her stories, and her memory. I am also a friend of her son, Jakob Scheier, who credits his survival entirely to his mother’s research, care and hard work. He now travels the world and has begun to publish very good poems of his own. Books of Libby Scheir’s you should read: The Larger Life. (Black Moss Press, 1983). Second Nature. (Coach House Press, 1986). SKY - A Poem in Four Pieces. (Mercury Press, 1990). Saints and Runners - Stories and a Novella. (Mercury Press, 1993). Kaddish for my Father. (ECW Press, 1999). BIO: Robert Priest has published fourteen books of poetry and prose including The Man Who Broke Out Of the Letter X (l984) and The Mad Hand (1988), recipient of the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award. In l992, Mercury Press released Scream Blue Living. Robert is also the author of three plays including Minibugs & Microchips which was the winner of A 1998 Chalmer’s Award. His children’s works include Daysongs Nightsongs, a book/tape package for children. Finally, in true bardic tradition Robert is also a successful singer/song-writer. ___________________________</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/my-friend-libby-scheier-by-robert.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-6488819798286610695</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 20:25:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-10T13:32:46.108-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Adele Wiseman</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">League of Canadian Poets</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Linda Rogers</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Margaret Laurence</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Marion Engel</category><title>Perhaps by Linda Rogers</title><description>I have been thinking a lot about death lately, because so many of the generation of writers before mine have been getting up from the table and people are no longer calling me and my friends "young writers." What does it mean, living and dying, all of which is witnessing and writing for us? I have noticed that many of my country's finest fiction writers are women, an alarming number of them picked off by cancer before they have written their definitive book of old age. We have lost Adele Wiseman, Margaret Laurence, and Marion Engel before they got a chance to be grandmothers. Laurence's son has just had a daughter, whom he and his wife named Adele. How Wiseman and Laurence, literary friends from childhood, would have loved that. I wonder if our young country is not yet ready for its King (or Queen) Lear? I have been present at the deathbeds of many friends, including Robin Skelton, Wiccan editor of the Malahat Review, Charles Lillard, Amer-Canadian poet and historian, and Al Purdy, Canadian Poet of the Land, and I have noticed a pattern. The curiosity that marked their lives as writers also characterized their adventures with dying. Wiseman got out of bed and crossed the room before she died. I would like to think she was going to choose a favourite book. Purdy, hooked up to oxygen, refused morphine because he wanted to keep his mind clear to read the poems of tribute that were filling his mailbox every day. These people did not fear death like others I have known. Dying with pen and paper on the bedside table, I do believe they were hoping to write about it. Just as they had spent their lives recording every personal and cosmic event that touched them, they were very interested in their dying. I sometimes find myself with a near jealousy. Just as I wanted a bra or a baby to mark my earler passages in life, I am now wondering what it is like to wake up every morning, knowing that it is one of my last. What special pleasure would I have taken in yesterday, Mother's Day, when the sun lit up the flowers in my garden and the children and pregnant daughter in law, had it been my last, like my friend Carol Shields, who is in the final stages of cancer? How would the celebratory lunch have tasted? Is there an elixir of death that makes every smell, taste and sound unbelievably exquisite. I am writing a novel about a woman with a mortal illness and to that end have been interrogating everyone I know about their experience as a dying person. The writers like to share it as others do not. Just as we have spent our lives together rejoicing over titles and metaphor, "You saw it. It's yours!" now they are sharing that sacred voyage beyond the phenomenal world and family as we know it to the place where they bcome part of memory and the stories and poems they have written. Carol says she is in her final chapter. The curiosity that has made her one of the finest fiction writers of the twentieth century sustains her now. She watches the people around her. How are they reacting? How will they react? How is she reacting? Every bad and good thing that happens in our lives, whether it is illness, an accident, a love affair, a windfall of some kind, has been treated the same way. We file our joy and our pain in the memory bank that pays interest when we withdraw them from memory and rearrange them in poems and stories that are always true in their details, even when the sum is fiction. If a piano fell on me while I was walking down the street, I'd be carried away on a stretcher, saying, ""Boy am I lucky. This will make a great poem!" This is what my friends make of death, great poetry. Carol was determined to finish her last novel, Unless, in which she examines the nature of goodness. It comes from the twilight zone, where all of us become transparent as we cross the bridge between our mortal and immortal lives. Carol's transparency is a medium through which we see ourselves more clearly. With her characteristic humour, she pushes the boundaries of femininst thought, examining the principles of unconditional and indifferent love as defined by Simone Weil and getting in her final digs at a world where women novelists are still fluff. Unless is her final gift and she focused the energy that many use to grieve for themselves before dying into showing us that redemption and a state of grace are still possible in a world of conditional values. In footnotes to the book, she has given each of her friends the notion that they are valued and valuable, an act of generosity that transcends concern with herself. Why is it that writers, so many of them cut short, possibly exhausted by their passionate engagement with the world and a sedentary lifestyle that has them attached to machines that translate for them, treat dying as if it were labour, an opportunity as opposed to a tragedy? I think it is because we value the work we do. In telling and retelling the human story, we have a relationship with the world that others might miss in their quest for fame, fortune or just an ordinary living. A writer who writes gets to be fulfilled whether or not he or she reaps the rewards of the very successful. We get to leave something behind. We get to say our piece, unlike others who didn't for one reason or other get to bring their lights out from under the proverbial bushels where they are hidden. You hear about people who hang on and wait to die at a particular time. They want to see the grandchild born, or the daughter's wedding, or the last migration of geese. Shields has waited for the reviews for Unless, even though she feared it would annoy readers who saw a more congenial and complaisant deus ex machina behind her earler books. Maybe she secretly wanted to see the effect. When you fill a balloon with water, it's more fun to watch it splash that run away. Now the reviews that are coming in sound like obituaries and I want to tell their authors, those critics who as often as not don't get it, that they are not getting it. This woman is not dead yet,and, furthermore, she never will be. You cannot kill a tree that flowers like the Pilgrims' staffs in the opera Tannhauser, by an act of God. This year, my husband and I were invited to read poetry and play music in Cardiff. Because it didn't fit our schedule, we had our Welsh experience in paying a visit to the website of our friend, designer Patricia Lester, who happens to live in Wales. Patrica's sister also suffered from cancer. All this long winter, we have been watching someone we love struggle with a fatal illness. Patricia's sister was angry. In the words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, she raged. The day she died, Patricia sent me a letter saying two apple trees had fallen in her orchard. One, bare branched and angry, crushed her roses. The other flowered the ways plants sometimes do at the end of their plant lives. It occurred to her that this was the difference between the two women. She has sent me one of her beautiful silk scarves to give to Carol Shields, who has the gift of a scarf as the moral and philosophical central metaphor of Unless. That scarf comes to my mailbox like the poems that came to my friend Al Purdy, as the gift of love between friends. The transparent form of our friend may slip through our fingers, but the knot that ties our friendship will endure, because her wisdom and love reside in every word she has written. Nothing, not even death, can take that away. Aren't we the lucky ones? BIO Linda Rogers, teacher, broadcaster and past president of The League of Canadian poets and The Federation of British Columbia Writers, writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children's books. Canada's People's Poet for the year 2000, she has been awarded the Leacock, Livesay, Confederation, Acorn, Alcuin and Millenium Awards in Canada, The Voices Israel prize, The Cardiff, Kenney and Bridport prizes in Great Britain, the Acorn-Ruckeyser Award in the U.S., and the Prix anglais in France. With her husband, mandolinist Rick van Krugel, she writes and performs songs for children. Upcoming titles include The Bursting Test, poems, Tango Gallo, a novel, and Honorable Menschen, conversations with men in the arts.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/perhaps-by-linda-rogers.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7803338919259084406</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 20:04:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-10T13:15:56.975-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Lola Haskins</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">University of Florida</category><title>Lola Haskins on Writers Friendships</title><description>When I meet someone on a plane, and they ask what I do for a living, I say, well, I teach Computer Science for a day job, but my profession is poetry. What usually happens next is that their eyes glaze over and I can tell they’re mentally checking their watches to see how much longer the flight is going to take. Then, unless they think to ask me something about computers, usually to do with whether they should scrap their pcs for the latest hot-lick models, they tend to develop a sudden, burning, interest in Sky Mall. If I’d been some other kind of writer, a novelist or a screenwriter for instance, I’ve always thought it would have been better, but maybe not, because to most people watching cars go airborne over the top of Gough Street, heading down towards the bay screenwriters seem as irrelevant as tinsel on last year’s Christmas tree. Be that as it may, I think it’s fair to say that we poets find ourselves at the bottom of the interest scale with most of the non-reading public. One of the consequences of that is that we have fewer chances to connect with audiences than do people who work in other literary genres. So, being in the minority and being relatively poor, even in the literary world, we help each other out whenever we can, right? Well, in my experience, not necessarily. For example, when I meet some poets, I get the feeling that they’re sizing me up to see if I’m any threat. If the verdict is that I’m not, then they relax. If they decide otherwise, they clam up and start looking over my shoulder for someone more useful to talk to. Sometimes, it goes much farther than this, perhaps even to the point of paranoia. For instance, a few years ago, when two poets came to my town to teach in the writing program, I thought, great, more poets, and bought their books. But not only have they not been polite to me--without ever exchanging more than ten words total with me in all the years since they’ve come, they put me down to their students on a regular basis. So why are they doing this? I’ve decided it’s because they’re protecting English, which they see as their territory. It seems such a pity, but I know it’s not an isolated case. I’ve heard other stories like that, where certain writers seem to have peed on their four corners, to make sure interlopers are aware that only they, the purveyors of urine, and their students are welcome within their borders. And if someone tries to cross that line, he or she finds out what that odd odor means and, to mix a metaphor, in spades. Luckily, this isn’t universally the case, maybe not even generally so. Over the years, I’ve met some hugely generous people, to name only a few: Andrea Hollander Budy, Nick Samaras, Jo MacDougall, Frank Gaspar, Maurya Simon and, more recently, Ruth Schwartz, all terrific poets and all genuinely happy when any of us gets lucky. We buy each others’ books and tell people about each others’ work. To be fair, we’ve often become friends in the first place because we did like each others’ work. If you think about it, how much more deeply can you know someone than by living with his/her poetry. And sometimes -- in the ancient tradition-- we talk in poetry. For instance, a few years ago, Andrea and I had a poetry conversation, with the goal being neither of our greater glory but both of our greater growth. During that exchange, Andrea wrote some lovely poems which wended their way into her most recent collection, and I profited too, spinning off her intelligence in directions of my own. Nick Samaras and I are now doing a similar thing- we send each other a poem a month, which we then critique back and forth until it falls to rest. Nick’s a fine critic, and I’ve learned a lot from him. And those are only a couple of examples. I have many wonderful friends and teachers among other poets. In fact, like many of us, I feel friendship, even kinship, to writers I’ve never met, just from their work. But the most important of my own friendships are the warm, live ones. It’s a great feeling not to need to explain why I do what I do, because they already know since they’re the same, and in that mutual knowing I feel the sort of acceptance which I can’t always, in the last analysis, get from those closest to me. In fact, sometimes I think of my friendships with other writers as a kind of home base on the field of my life. I’d like to leave you with an analogy. My husband makes beautiful stained glass. And because he wants to give something back, he donates windows to poor churches. We go to Mexico often, making that part of our trips, and when Gerald’s finished a project, we prospect for another. A few years ago, he built some windows for a church on a bumpy street in a barrio in Patzcuaro. Ger spent an especially long time on those- there were eight, and he designed them beautifully, with an Indian woman in the foreground and colors which seemed just right for the bright plastic streamers which adorned the inside of that church. When the windows were ready, we took them to the sacristans in Patzcuaro, a couple named Adolfo and Josefina, to explain how install them and help them do it. It wasn’t an easy job because the windows weren’t set up to receive glass, so there was a fair amount of improvisational engineering- a sort of engineering skat- to be done before we could start the actual installation. The three of us, Adolfo, Ger, and I had been working for several days, and neither Adolfo not Josefina had said a word about the windows. Now, I knew how hard Ger had worked on them– months and months in the barn. So, though I felt guilty about it, I was also beginning to feel let down and a little annoyed. More and more, I wanted someone besides me to admire those windows. Or at least thank Ger for his trouble. But then one day Josefina and I were sitting at the table in her tiny house with its glass-less windows and its dog on the roof, where they lived with their eight children, and she said: You know, we don’t have much, but everything we have, each person gets a little bit.” And then I understood why they hadn’t thanked us. Because, of course we’d shared what we had. And that felt right to me, and I think it’s how we poets should be to each other too, how my dear friends are already and how I’d like to be too: we don’t have much, but everything we do have, each of us gets a little bit. BIO Lola Haskins' most recent collection is The Rim Benders (Anhinga). Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from BOA in 2004. She teaches Computer Science at the University of Florida and is a 2003 NEA fellow in poetry.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/lola-haskins-on-writers-friendships.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-3022679699570074353</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 19:37:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-10T12:43:03.118-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">A Day's Grace</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">McGill University</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Norton Anthology</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Robyn Sarah</category><title>A CONVERSATION WITH ROBYN SARAH - An Excerpt</title><description>"Some of My Best Friends Are Writers." ROBERT SWARD: Robyn, how did you start, how old were you when you first began writing? ROBYN SARAH: I started at such an early age, I almost can't remember a time when writing wasn't part of my identity. I was six, in first grade, just beginning to read, when my mother put an unexpected gift into my hands, a "Huge 10-cent Scribbler"--bright orange covers, ruled newsprint inside. "Here," she said, "it's a book for writing in. You can write a story in it." A novel idea!(no pun intended.) I sat right down and wrote one, and I haven't looked back. Oddly enough, given the subject of this interview, the title of that first story was "Nancy Finds a Friend." ROBT: Did you ever have a "writing friend" or were you one of those solitary figures... ROBYN: Both. I've always tended to be solitary, even reclusive. But I've almost always had "writing friends" with whom I occasionally shared my work. (Different friends at different times--some of the relationships short lived, some ongoing for decades.) This one-to-one exchange replaced the "workshop" experience for me--writing workshops hadn't really caught on in Canada at the time I began my adult writing life, and later I felt no need for them. (I mean, I've led workshops, but have never participated in one.) I had my model from the beginning: in second grade, my best friend was one who shared my favorite school subject, "Composition" --and, like me, she also wrote stories at home. We used to read our stories out loud to each other on the telephone. She thought mine were wonderful, and I thought hers were wonderful. We inspired each other and imitated each other, but it was entirely good-spirited, collaborative, celebratory--not competitive. In high school, I had a writing friend who was a fellow student at the Conservatoire de Musique... she was three years older than I, already in university. It turned out she too wrote poetry and stories, and it was natural for us to show our writing to each other. This, again, was purely in the spirit of sharing an interest: neither of us had thought as far as trying to get published. ROBT: How have "writing relationships" contributed to your development as a writer? Were they always positive... or did you, at times, feel you needed to be on guard in a certain way? Essentially, what led you to develop a friendship with "writing friend A" as opposed to "writing friend B"? What qualities did you look for in (potential) "writing friends"? ROBYN: Initially,I was just glad if I found someone who shared my secret passion, someone else who scribbled. In the early years of university, it got harder--ego is on the rampage in those years, and most of the scribblers around me (poets, mainly) were male and much more sure of themselves than I. They gave readings, they took themselves seriously as poets, some had already published poems here and there... and they seemed to move in packs... and I as a woman who wrote poetry didn't feel taken seriously. It was hard for me to get up my courage to show them anything of my own. So there was this uneasy period when I hardly shared my work at all--which changed slowly once I began publishing in magazines. Since then it's been maybe two or three trusted writing friends, consulted one-on-one, when I've felt the need to show someone unpublished work or to talk about writing ....What do I look for in a writing friend? Well, for starters it has to be someone whose own writing I genuinely respect (though not necessarily a professional writer or one who is currently publishing.) It has to e someone who has responded to my own writing in a way that suggests some recognition of what I'm up to. And it has to be someone whose focus is on writing itself, in a very pure way--not on "writing biz." ROBT: Robyn, how do you balance the need for solitude with the need for contact with other writers? Indeed, some writers find it very difficult to sustain friendship with other writers. There's jealousy, rivalry and one's need to be alone for long hours in order to produce and that sometimes means neglecting one's most valued friends. It's hard. The pie is small. The rewards are few. The competition brutal. So there's a degree of paranoia... (you and I being the exceptions, of course). ROBYN: Well, you know, some of my best friends are writers. But, quite seriously, a lot aren't. Of my "soul-friends", the deepest friendships of my life, I think if I took a tally, more have NOT been writers. And the writers tend to be friends I don't see or communicate with very regularly--rather in intense, extended "bouts" with long lacunae. (I do have lots of writer-friends/colleagues with whom I grouse, as we all do, about the ups and downs of literary life, the vagaries of literary politics--and whose advice I occasionally solicit--and with whom I have ongoing exchanges about books and literature. But they aren't usually the same ones who see my manuscript drafts and/or show me theirs--and they aren't necessarily close friends in other ways.) Still, I'd have to say I feel a communality with other writers that's important to me, and special--a shared calling. A lot of my contact with other writers is by correspondence--often (but not always) initiated by me. Sometimes it's ONLY by correspondence. It's my way of having that important exchange, but preserving my solitude at the same time. But when it's time for a break from my desk, time to meet someone for lunch--often I prefer to see friends from other walks of life. It's good to get away from the claustrophobia of writing, thinking about writing, talking about writing -- and good to hear about other lives. As for that competition, paranoia... generally I don't cultivate friendships with writers who are career-driven--and I avoid or flee the kind of event where writers gossip about their agents, book deals, advances, foreign sales. That kind of talk brings on needless anxiety and self-doubt, and distracts me from what really matters, which is the work itself. BIO: Robyn Sarah was born in New York City to Canadian parents, and grew up in Montreal. A graduate of the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec and of McGill University, she began publishing poems in Canadian periodicals in the early 1970s. In 1976, with Fred Louder, she co-founded Villeneuve Publications and co-edited its poetry chapbook series which included first titles by August Kleinzahler, A. F. Moritz, and others. The author of several poetry collections, most recently A Day's Grace (2003), she has also published two collections of short stories, and her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in the U.S. in such publications as The Threepenny Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Hudson Review and New England Review. Her poems have been anthologized in the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, in Bedford's Poetry: An Introduction and The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and in The Norton Anthology of Poetry.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/conversation-with-robyn-sarah-excerpt.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7957448510482731374</guid><pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 19:26:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2010-05-10T12:43:59.171-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Modern British Poetry</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Paul Engle</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Robert Dana</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Stephen Spender</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">University of Florida</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">University of Iowa</category><title>Stephen Spender Once More by Robert Dana</title><description>Until 1976 when he became my distinguished colleague in the writing program at the University of Florida, Stephen Spender was just a biographical essay and a handful of brilliant lyrics I first encountered in Louis Untermeyer’s anthology of Modern American and Modern British Poetry. Oh, I’d met him at close range back in the 1950’s when he came to give a reading at the University of Iowa and to talk to a bunch of fledgling poets at the Writers’ Workshop. After Spender’s reading that evening in the senate chambers of Old Capitol, Paul Engle had arranged a rump session so that the students could talk with Spender one on one over beer in the basement of a local bar, perhaps Irene Kenney’s. It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I recall the subject of our conversation, in which I had the presumptuousness and dim wit to chide him for certain Britishisms in his Lorca translations. Of course, Stephen’s world was so large and his history so long and rich that, when we really did meet in Florida and share several months of our lives, he retained no memory at all of our having met twenty years earlier, and, thank god, no memory of my youthful stupidities. * Stephen was part of the bait dangled before me by the late Richard Green, then chairman of the English department at the University of Florida. He also offered me a much lighter teaching load and the chance to teach graduate students, and more money than I was presently making at Cornell College in Iowa. I had just returned from a sabbatical in England where I’d gone to recover from some serious surgery and to try to finish the book which later became In A Fugitive Season, so I didn’t think my dean would give his permission for another leave of absence. Encouraged, however, by my new wife, Peg, and by Dick Green, I explored the possibility with my colleagues and the dean, and was granted permission to accept Florida’s offer. It would be a full year visiting writer appointment, and I would be Stephen Spender’s colleague when he arrived for the third quarter. It turned out to be a seminal year, needless to say. * Our friendship began in a very personal way. Shortly before Stephen’s arrival in the spring, I casually asked someone, at my wife’s prompting, perhaps Dick Green, where Stephen would be living. He was, at the time, nearly seventy. I was shocked to find that neither the department nor the university had made arrangements for their distinguished guest. In addition to getting on in years, he would be arriving in Florida from wintry England. Peg and I reasoned that someone needed to make a move on his behalf. So we contacted the supervisor of our building to find out what furnished apartments might be available. There were several. We got the department’s approval, and then canvassed department members via their mailboxes, to round up dishes, pots and pans, silverware, blankets and linens, so that when Stephen arrived he’d have decent digs awaiting him. When he did arrive, he needed phone service, of course. And it was here that Peg stepped in, and the episode provided one of our favorite stories. Stephen had trouble understanding the operator at Bell Southern, and she had trouble understanding his English accent, so he asked Peg to do his talking for him. At one point, she said, “Stephen, they want an idea of how much of a bill you might average a month.” “Oh tell them a hundred dollars,” he said, grinning, and then sotto voce, “It’s probably more like five hundred.” The bill was probably “more like five hundred” given the family calls—to his wife, Natasha and his daughter Lizzie in London and to his son Matthew in Italy; and the business calls—to his old friend Christopher Isherwood in L.A, and to International PEN on Taiwan (No, he wouldn’t be coming), and to his editor Jason Epstein at Random House in New York. Perhaps it was at that moment that it began to be clear that Stephen dealt with people straight on, by and large. He didn’t see himself as either a “great man” or a “great writer.” In fact, he saw himself as sometimes a comic “figger” as he would have said. * So began a friendship I could never have imagined having, and one that would last nearly twenty years until Spender’s death in 1995. A friendship from which I learned at least as much about human decency and perspective as I did about literature and what it means to live a life of letters. One of the first things I learned from Stephen was what real achievement and fame were. His record spoke for itself. I was forty-six, had published two books, and was still getting rejection slips from various magazines. I was certainly not getting phone calls from PEN International. So there was no question of competition between us, as there always is to a certain degree, between contemporaries. Stephen wasn’t my mentor, nor was I his student. It was a case of two poets from different generations and different cultures sharing what was there to be shared. He shared his wisdom, his stories—of himself and Auden at Oxford (“I printed his first little book on my card press in my room.”), of his experiences in Spain during the civil war and in Britain as an air-raid warden during the blitz, and his attitudes toward poetry. For my part, I drove him to the university when needed, explained him to his undergraduate class, which didn’t know what to make of him and treated him, at first, like a fragile family heirloom; and plied him with questions about his life and work. In May of 1976, in my role as a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review Review, I actually conducted a formal interview with him. It took place, as I recall, in the living room of our Gainesville apartment. Here are a few clips from that afternoon: “…If one thinks of one’s own contemporaries who had talent or even genius. I think that, really, three qualities are necessary. First of all, to have a little genius; then to have quite a lot of talent, and then, thirdly, to want to do it...You have to want, in some crazy way, to write poetry. I think quite a lot of people want to be a poet, but that’s rather different from actually wanting to write poetry poetry.” .” “Eliot in ‘The Four Quartets’, for instance, is always really a thinking poet. And also a poet with a mystical vision. And when the thinking is intense and the mystical vision is intense, he discovers a language which is very strange, and which is what we think of as the best of Eliot. But when the thinking is sententious—about, you know, growing old, and all that kind of thing,--the form can become sententious. He hasn’t got the talent which can invent an interest in the language which is beyond what is actually being said… “…I think that American poets believe that, as Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too...And I think the American poet does feel that deeply, and he feels it’s something of a tragedy if he doesn’t get a great audience…I think that’s a tragic point of view, that you need vast audiences.” Once, during one of our evening conversations, I asked him how he’d felt when Auden died. “I felt the way I did when my brother died—“ he said, “that now I could go out and drive the car. At the end of this life, dealing with Auden was like dealing with a corporation—Auden, Auden, Auden, & Auden. It wasn’t very pleasant.” And so I learned that fame, if it comes to one, is something best carried lightly. I learned that when Spender spoke of walking the shore of Lake Geneva with Merleau- Ponty, or of spending an afternoon with his friend Henry Moore, or told some anecdote about Louis Mac Neice, he wasn’t trying to impress you. He was merely recounting an interesting or pleasant moment in his life or a personal opinion. Stephen had no need of boasting or name-dropping because he was sure of who he was, even if he tended to underplay his achievements. His autobiography World Within A World makes it clear that early on he had ceased to lie to himself or anyone else about who he was, or why he did what he did. (“Oh, it wasn’t politics that caused us to go to Berlin. We went there to chase boys,” he said to me once, with a laugh.) He had learned young to rely on his intelligence and his sense of humor. His dignity, generally, was as sure and casual as his rumpled clothes. * After Florida, we met almost once a year between 1976 and 1978, and sporadically thereafter, both in England and the U.S. When I left the University, they offered me a position. But upon returning to Iowa, I learned that the poet I’d replaced, and whom I’d thought of as a friend, was circulating a document damning both me and another member of the writing faculty. I was stunned and couldn’t believe it. When Stephen heard what happened he was furious and came to my defense. Even after the poet had been let go, Stephen telephoned him and demanded that he apologize to me and withdraw his remarks. The man refused, of course, but it was a surprising measure of our friendship. I was instrumental during these years in bringing Spender to Detroit where I was the visiting poet at Wayne State. He gave a reading and a lecture on Modern Poetry and Modern Art. It so happened that the original paper wall-sized cartoons of Diego Rivera’s mural in the Detroit Institute of Art had just been discovered in some dusty old archive of the museum. We were invited to view them from a mezzanine where they were rolled out below us. He also came to Cornell College where I taught and spent a month there. He taught a seminar on Modern Poetry to a group of handpicked students, and gave three lectures and a farewell reading to packed houses. Writers and literary people came from all over Iowa came to hear him. Mount Vernon, Iowa, is of course, a very small stage for such a large player, so one weekend, Peg and I arranged a visit to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Since Stephen had known Tyrone Guthrie, the theater people set us up with fine seats and a backstage tour. One of the plays was Waiting For Godot. It was a compelling and polished performance, so when it was over Peg and I inquired what Stephen thought of it. “It was quite good, you know. I saw the play in London and didn’t like it at all and walked out after the first act,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. * I saw Stephen several times after that, once at his house one evening in St. John’s wood where we had a wonderful supper of “scraps” that Natasha had prepared, and another time with Peg at Westminster Abbey when he delivered the eulogy for Henry Moore, after which he took us to The Groucho Club, a spot whose patrons' books were displayed behind the bar. * My world’s a smaller place without Stephen. But the sense of perspective I gained from being in his presence from time to time, my sense of what’s really important, my sense of decency and compassion and craft is a legacy that’s still with me. “I think continually of those who were truly great/Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history,” Stephen wrote in an early poem. Oh, yes. And so should we all. BIO NOTE: Robert Dana was born in Boston in 1929. In the mid-1950's he studied at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop under Robert Lowell and John Berryman. He received National Endowment Fellowships for Poetry in 1985 and 1993, and The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize in 1989. He was recently appointed Poet Laureate of Iowa. His books include The Morning Of The Red Admirals (Anhinga Press, 2004), Summer (Anhinga Press, 2000) and A Community of Writers: Paul Engle And The Iowa Writers' Workshop (University of Iowa Press, 1999).</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2010/05/stephen-spender-once-more-by-robert.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-1461711402897801434</guid><pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:02:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-11-29T17:05:53.758-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Andrew Boobier</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Octavo</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Seamus Heaney</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Ted Hughes</category><title>Casting and Gathering, Friendship - on the contrary</title><description>by Andrew Boobier -- In his poem, Casting and Gathering, dedicated to his friend Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney writes: I love hushed air. I trust contrariness. Years and years go past and I do not move For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers And then vice versa, without changing sides. Heaney evokes here the push-pull effect of friendship, the fact that two people can have different natures, contrary impulses yet be united in the common bond of mutuality and respect for each other as fishermen and poets. The poem is also about growing up and learning to respect these differences, 'I have grown older and can see them both...' he says. There is a dialectical movement in which the two opposing forces of Heaney's and Hughes' language (the 'hush' and 'lush') are not only synthesised into their bonds of friendship but also as a resolution within the poem and Heaney's own contrary. The strong resolutions within Heaney's poetic output in general are indicative of his allegiance to his Romantic forbears and his own particular need for balance and redress (e.g. see his lecture, The Redress of Poetry - essentially a post-romantic rebuttal of post-modernism). I have a great [*word missing?] of sympathy with Heaney's trust of contrariness, though I have a harder time coming up with cosy resolutions. I once wrote a poem combining suicidal American poets with the need for public displays of mourning after national tragedy, it ended: Human beings, as Eliot says, cannot bear too much reality. History is a register of fancy. War is a matter of personal taste. Poetry is the language of saints. If only everything were so black and white. That last line is an ironic, wistful sigh mimicking the romantic-capitalist desire to categorise discourse and ideology into neat manageable parts which can be subsumed or appropriated into a neat manageable whole. I certainly do not blame people for seeking these kinds of resolutions; we're all looking for something to hold on to when reality gets too heavy [*to] bear. But having been schooled these last twenty years in existentialism, surrealism, and the works of Georges Bataille, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, I tend to have a more sceptical eye on such matters. I, too, trust contrariness. But it is one that is intuitive, left open to its own raw and rough edges, dark and often unresolved. This kind of operation is not always easy to undertake when you have also been influenced by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Heaney, Hughes, and others who have trod the well-worn path of Romantic academic poetry fed to the young on undergraduate courses. Like Whitman, I say: Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself. This attitude is undoubtedly rooted in the fact that I am a working class kid educated to highfalutin middle class intellectual values. So, on the one hand I am a poet - the ne plus ultra of post-romantic narcissistic navel-gazing. On the other, I hate that kind of widely accepted and highly-acceptable form of egocentricism. Poor Andrew, torn between the ego-impulse to express himself and desire to lose the 'self' in a more communal project! Anyway, a few years ago this came to a head. I've always been too much of a misanthrope to be enthused by 'community arts' and so instead I was drawn into the more cerebral collective adventure of surrealism. One day I was browsing through one of the larger chain-store bookshops when I came across a strange 'calling card' which had been left in a book of surrealist short stories. I can't recall what it said exactly but it intrigued me enough to contact the authors. I thought it was a flyer for a magazine and I had just starting writing 'surreal' poetry and so I sent them a letter with a couple of poems and told them I was familiar with surrealist history and had even translated a novel by Georges Bataille at university. They wrote back immediately and set up a meeting in a nearby pub. So I then met up with four people calling themselves The Leeds Surrealist Group. They were four friends who'd originally met at university, united by a passion for black attire and exploring the darker side of the imagination first begun in the 1920's by Breton and his band of collective adventurers. For some time the Leeds Group had been adhering to strict Bretonian principles: collectively drawing[s] and writing, and devising games in the single-minded pursuit to wrench the imagination back from the all-devouring profit-motive and market forces. It was all very idealistic, historically informed and seemingly exactly what I was looking for. Inevitably we hit it off and I passed the 'interview' - my wife and I were invited to one of their creative evenings. In the candlelight and semi-gothic darkness we'd sit drinking red wine discussing the politics of surrealism, the activities of other groups in Prague, Paris and Stockholm, the mutual respect for Artaud and the equally mutual hatred of 'Avida Dollars'. We'd play exquisite corps and initiate new games. Once every week we'd sit in a pub, seething into our beers with hatred for the 'system', all the while plotting a 'revolution of the mind' by collectively drawing on a beer mat. The real glue that held everyone together was a deep, though often fraught, friendship. Being newcomers, it took some time for the others to let their guard down and let us into their inner sanctum of trust and bonhomie. And yet, group dynamics being what they are, a certain strained tension was never far away. There was a definite leader of the group. He was the one who would organise sessions, the intellectual force behind the whole project, be the overall spokesman etc. Coming into the group from my own intellectual position (my 'Bataille' to his 'Breton') shifted the weight in the boat a little. Not that this would come out in any overt way - we never argued - it was more subtle in the way I would question given assumptions or undermine some of the pomposity of what we did with humour. The group could be very serious, sometimes to a point of blind self-righteousness. I find it difficult to be totally serious about anything that doesn't appreciate the absurdity of one's own human, all too human, situation. There is no text without a context, and I wanted to understand more the context of what made the group and its friendships tick. I therefore devised a collective game called The Misfortunes of Memory which would explore the limits of surrealistic discourse and what held us all together. The game itself was quite complex, involving players choosing objects from their past, writing them down and distributing them secretly among the others where they would undergo various 'transformations' (visual representations, narrative reconstructions, etc). One controlling individual called 'The Puppet Master' would have little to do with the game except at the end when he would create a small 4 act play based on material given by the others. The players would then have to act out this play. The fifth act would be an act of revenge whereby the actors view the puppet master's objects and devise an ending to the play (including the Puppet Master's inevitable 'death') based on this new material. The idea of the game would be for people to give up some aspect of their past, like a gift (in more anthropological terms, an act of 'potlatch') and allow this to be manipulated and changed by others to create something new. It would be an act of artistic trust and faith in the Other. What it ultimately meant was that no act of self-reflection would fall into a single 'fetishised' discursive form; it would be open to a series of manipulations and interpretations outside any individual's controlling ego. All-in-all I thought it quite an exciting (and difficult) challenge and felt it would take the group's activity to a new level. My wife was equally enthusiastic about it though the rest of the group were highly suspicious of my motives. They didn't seem to take in the spirit it was presented: as a game. They wanted to analyse it and discuss it further, reformulate it so it conformed to a mutually agreed format with a more defined outcome. The fact that the game was dictatorial was intentional; imposed by an Other like so much that goes on in society. That's why I included the role of the Puppet Master (i.e. the role of Authority) who has an unequal amount of power yet gets his comeuppance. What I hoped the game would produce was a microcosm of the power structures both within the group's own dynamics and in society 'out there', as well as how collective engagement (i.e. artistic friendship) could transform and corrupt power's own corruption through the work of the imagination. It was everything we'd talked about, enacted. OK, it might not work as a piece of art - it was the taking part that was most important - lessons would be learned; the armour (amour) of our friendship would have been tempered in the white-hot forge of collective and imaginative engagement. Blimey, it would have at least been a laugh! It was not to be. I felt by this time the group had moved on and fallen foul of the need to justify its existence through the production of more bone fide 'works'. Endless discussions, overt lack of enthusiasm, needless suspicion... it was the beginning of the end, at least for us. And my wife and I began to see less of the group. In the end we re-enacted one of the more sordid episodes in the history of surrealism - the ideological split. Breton vs Bataille all over again. You cannot blame the group or any individual for this outcome. It was an experiment after all. It's just disappointing that we couldn't take the risk and that, in the end, the ego's defences were set too strong for this particular collective adventure. People confuse my contrariness with being just plain awkward or difficult. Perhaps I am. But being contrary, for me, means exploring given assumptions about the world, seeing how far you can push things before they fall off the edge or transform into something new. For me it's nothing aggressive or nasty; it should be fun, playful. It's just a tool of the imagination that many poets and artists employ. How far should it go though? Should this imaginative prodding extend to the bonds and boundaries of friendship too? As I found out there's a risk involved. Is it worth taking? That depends. One man casts the other gathers... CODA All this happened six or seven years ago now and I haven't heard from the group since. Despite our differences, I still think about them and wonder what they are up to. As for myself, I still live a contrary life - relatively alone - between writing acceptably narcissistic poetry (which has found a modicum of success) and devising more 'weird' stuff with a new writer, Anton Brassiere (which has also had a slight drizzle of public approval). My wife and I have also resurrected the Misfortunes of Memory game which we are currently playing: less as husband and wife but, more comfortably, as friends. Where it's going, we're not sure yet, but we are enjoying the ride! ---- BIO: Andrew Boobier was born in Haworth, West Yorkshire in 1963. He has published poetry and translations in the UK & US. In 2003 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Andrew is also the editor of the Alsop Review's prestigious online quarterly magazine, Octavo (http://alsopreview.com/octavo). Andrew has just launched his own web site at http://www.boobier.com; He'd be pleased to hear from you. ----</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/11/casting-and-gathering-friendship-on.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-5494331274496120777</guid><pubDate>Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:20:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-11-26T16:30:54.820-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Chatoyant</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Penny Cagan</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Suki Wessling</category><title>Beyond Cats and Chocolate: Two Writers Learn Through Friendship and Work</title><description> <style>  </style>   “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”<o:p></o:p> --Anais Nin<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p><o:p></o:p> --<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> by Suki Wessling <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I met Penny Cagan at the Vermont College Post-Graduate Writers Conference. It was the first conference---or workshop, for that matter---that had attracted me for years. My last writing group had descended into psychotherapy on the cheap---"What does this story say about Suki's relationship with her mother?"---rather than real critique. But I hoped that this conference would be different. At least, I assumed, there would be no beginning writers there who would ask what point of view was. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I was a fiction writer at the time. I was suspicious of poetry and poets. The former because I'd been taught very badly in high school that poetry was "serious," and I'd taken refuge in fiction, which could be "fun" as well as meaningful. The latter because MFA programs seem to foster this mutual suspicion, in spite of the many cross-over writers who are among our greats. There was a poet in my fiction workshop at Michigan, and without fail she was critiqued with a sort of patronizing pity---"her images are beautiful, but the plot doesn't hold together."<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> So there I was in Vermont, in the middle of a room where everyone seemed to know each other. For the most part, they did. Most of the students were former MFA grads of the college. There were chairs set up for a reading. Sitting alone in a sea of empty chairs was a striking woman in black. "I have always felt like a head without a body," was one of the first things she said to me. Then we found out that we both had beloved cats, and loved chocolate. Not much more is needed for a friendship. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> What grew from my friendship with Penny, however, has been much more than girlish chats (we've had many of those), support through hard times (I think we rate well there, too), and loyal enthusiasm for what the other is doing. Penny introduced me---again---to poetry. This time, the right way. Penny's love of poetry is deep and instinctive. She can keep up with the best of them in literary analysis, but when you ask her what she likes in a poem, she tells it from the soul. She's introduced me to some of my favorite poets, suggested I read others I didn't care for. In every case, I've learned from her long love affair with poetry. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Early on in our friendship, when I had a small graphic design business, I confided in Penny that I'd always had the dream of starting a publishing company. "Then you'll publish my first book," she said matter-of-factly. It seemed silly to me---she'd been published in many fine journals and had a growing reputation. Why have a novice publisher put out her book? But I thought it would be fun, so we put together a chapbook of what I called her "city poems"---her work that reflected her great love of New York City. It was a great thrill and also instructive---never again will I hand-bind 250 copies of a book with a rivet gun! <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I assumed that Penny would go on to publish with a larger publisher, as I made plans to go forward with my small company. She did, in fact, start working with a very well-known publisher on her book, but she felt that her work was just getting lost in a large bureaucracy. Once again, she came to me to publish her work. I was honored but also wary of the responsibility. I warned her that I wouldn't be able to get the distribution that the large company would have, that the Chatoyant name on a book would mean nothing to people who didn't know her work. But she had loved the intimate process of her first book so much, that she convinced me it was the way she wanted to go.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Penny's book And Today I Am Happy is now on Chatoyant's list, and doing well. Penny is still working and living in New York City. I am now a mother of a small child (with another on the way) and going on with my publishing. Our friendship thrives. I know that my relationship with other authors will probably not be one founded first on friendship, but I hold my relationship with Penny as an example of how writers can work together, teach each other, and also be friends. Penny has never let any professional disagreement we might have get in the way of our friendship, and I continue to learn from her and enjoy her company---whether we're talking about writing and publishing or cuddling with our cats and a good cup of hot cocoa! <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> BIO NOTE: <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Suki Wessling is a writer and publisher of Chatoyant, a small poetry press. Her work has been published in a variety of literary journals, and she has a great stash of rejected novels on her hard drive.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/11/beyond-cats-and-chocolate-two-writers.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-2161881238158758550</guid><pubDate>Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:51:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-11-26T15:06:21.517-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Cabrillo College</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Memorial</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Mort Marcus</category><title>Mort Marcus, 1936 - 2009</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sw8JMqKPLgI/AAAAAAAAADI/p4nhCSwdK3k/s1600/DSCN0129.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sw8JMqKPLgI/AAAAAAAAADI/p4nhCSwdK3k/s400/DSCN0129.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408551790575562242" border="0" /></a> <div class="image-attach-body" style=""> </div>In a piece, a prose poem titled "The Library," my friend Morton Marcus wrote, "When I die I will be a book on a shelf in the library, and this notion doesn't bother me. I look forward to leaning against Melville and Montagine, and I can't wait to stand in the ranks..." Attended Mort's Memorial at Cabrillo College, Aptos, CA, where he taught for 30 years... profound sense of loss, outpouring of emotion... An extraordinary event and extraordinary, too, was that sense of Mort as impressario, poet as magician... Mort with a magic flute... overseeing it all... it was as if the man was hosting his own funeral and, following that, the wake. In the last weeks of his life, dying of renal cancer, dealing with the pain and the one or two good hours a day left to him he managed to function, he put together the program, invited the various speakers and performers (businessman and long-time friend George Ow, Jr.; historian Sandy Lydon; poet Joe Stroud; novelist Kirby Wilkins... musician John Walther, artist James Aschbacher and writer Lisa Jensen, poets Gary Young and Stephen Kessler, Leonard Gardner and Jack Marshall, California Poet Laureate Al Young and Mark Ong, San Francisco author and book designer...). The word _gravitas_ comes to mind, that, and bravery, facing one's death and preparing at the same time to mount a celebration. Yeah, Mort had more than the usual amount of vitality and appetite for life... an impressario, he knew how to make an entrance, and he knew how to make a departure. </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/11/mort-marcus-1936-2009.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sw8JMqKPLgI/AAAAAAAAADI/p4nhCSwdK3k/s72-c/DSCN0129.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7769758008744998154</guid><pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:37:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-10-01T23:52:36.628-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Gary Young</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">KUSP-FM</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Mort Marcus</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Poetry Show</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">radio</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Santa Cruz Sentinel</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Wallace Baine</category><title>Mort Marcus - Last Poetry Reading</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SsWgAg4VcmI/AAAAAAAAADA/XPBcLp9duD8/s1600-h/R-Sward,+Mort,+Gary.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SsWgAg4VcmI/AAAAAAAAADA/XPBcLp9duD8/s400/R-Sward,+Mort,+Gary.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387888459905331810" border="0" /></a> Left to Right - Robert Sward, Mort Marcus, Gary Young It seemed an utterly natural thing to do, to be dying of cancer, to have suffered a year or two of agony, and yet to agree to give one last poetry reading. Still, with <a target="_blank" class="ext" href="http://www.mortonmarcus.com/" title="Mort Marcus">Mort Marcus</a> you can never be too sure. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the line he managed to do another. And of course he has two new books coming out and, once he has actual copies in hand, they'll need to be properly launched, though he did a decent enough job of reading poems from both and alerting his audience at last night's reading (Tues., Sept. 1, 41st Street Book Cafe, Capitola, CA). Mort is an impressive storyteller, a teacher and a performer... an actor... and he knows how to make an dramatic entrance and, as he proved at last night's reading , he knows how to make an exit. Yeah, I'm thinking "exit," as in "exit dying..." And he looked good doing it. "Mort looks like he's already gone to heaven," said my wife, a woman not given to exaggeration. I don't know many people who could carry it off, attracting an overflow audience, and delivering, 'bringing it on home,' reaching deep and giving an all-out reading, a reading answered by a standing ovation... 30 years of teaching in a really good community college, years of hosting what is said to be this country's longest running <a target="_blank" class="ext" href="http://www.kusp.org/" title="KUSP-FM">Poetry Show (KUSP-FM radio)</a>, and serving as a film reviewer for radio and TV... My friend, poet Gary Young said afterward, "Robert, we're lucky to be here, even to have bad luck..." If you're gonna have bad luck, well, it's better to have bad luck in some places than in others. I somehow left the reading feeling grateful as much as anything else. Grateful for a place that values its writers and artists. . Wallace Baine in a moving front page tribute to Mort Marcus in the <a target="_blank" class="ext" href="http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/" title="Santa Cruz Sentinel">Santa Cruz Sentinel </a>(Aug. 30, 2009), concludes by saying, "Yet the struggle to maintain his lifestyle in the face of painful treatments has taught him a few things about the emotional strength it takes to face the stiff headwinds of mortal illness. Reflecting on his life-long love of film, Marcus turns to the memorable climactic scene of the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront. "There's the scene on the waterfront when Lee J. Cobb and his goons get Marlon Brando down in the meeting house there and just beat the hell out of him and leave him there. Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint jump down in there and say, 'You all right? We got to get you an ambulance.' And Brando says, 'No, no. Just stand me up.' And they lift him up into a standing position, and he says, 'Am I standing?' "Marcus added, his voice thick with emotion, 'Yeah, I know what that's like.'" </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/10/mort-marcus-last-poetry-reading.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SsWgAg4VcmI/AAAAAAAAADA/XPBcLp9duD8/s72-c/R-Sward,+Mort,+Gary.JPG" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-8939343406000877012</guid><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2009 20:22:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-05-30T13:27:05.345-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">competition</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Ego</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Gloria K. Alford</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Poetry</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">poetry wars</category><title>Misery loves company</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SiGV7rGAYaI/AAAAAAAAAC4/AWn8d14Sbjo/s1600-h/bizarreballoon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 360px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SiGV7rGAYaI/AAAAAAAAAC4/AWn8d14Sbjo/s400/bizarreballoon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341715485450854818" border="0" /></a> He calls it "the poetry wars." The little world of poetry. The pie, i.e., the poetry pie... there's never enough to go around. Awards, publications, readings, honors, "A" and "B" list parties... a slice of this, a slice of that. My distinguished friend tells me of a fellow poet (also a friend) who won a major award (much deserved!) following which he hosted a party to celebrate the event, neglecting to invite my friend or myself. The truth is, I'd rather not have known of the "A" list party and puzzled as to why my distinguished friend would think I needed to know or could in any way benefit from knowing? It's a human thing to do, says my wife. It's a way--his way--of bonding with you, this "big" literary event neither of you were invited to. I think of <a href="http://www.gloriaalford.com">Gloria Alford's print, "The Ego Like A Bizarre Balloon Rises Ever Upward."</a> It's a variation on the title of Redon's print "The Eye..." A man on a horse--an Eighteenth Century symbol of pride--is taking an "ego trip." The horse is suspended from a puffed-up and protruding balloon, which is the only soft and vulnerable part of the print. The rest is encased in clear, flat plastic covering a blue sky full of clouds. Two Seventeenth Century angels with bows and arrows are poised ready to shoot down the balloon. The blue border, also of plastic, is a continuation of the sky. As for myself, I grab a towel and head for the swimming pool. Even swimming, even swimming, it gets to me! As for Buddhist practice and Mindfulness, well, I'd give myself a C-.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/05/misery-loves-company.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SiGV7rGAYaI/AAAAAAAAAC4/AWn8d14Sbjo/s72-c/bizarreballoon.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-4853848852671935061</guid><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2009 05:06:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-05-04T22:15:43.504-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Friendship Among Women</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Gale Berkowitz</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">oxytocin</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">UCLA Study</category><title>UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sf_KTgtrPHI/AAAAAAAAACw/R0GPiSF1CAE/s1600-h/friendship-2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 92px; height: 129px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sf_KTgtrPHI/AAAAAAAAACw/R0GPiSF1CAE/s400/friendship-2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5332202920377793650" border="0" /></a> I dunno, this may not be specifically on "Writers' Friendship," but I can't imagine _not_ including it. Feedback welcome! By Gale Berkowitz A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women.. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research most of it on men upside down. "Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible," explains Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. "It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just "fight or flight." "In fact," says Dr. Klein, "it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the "fight or flight" response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men", says Dr. Klein, "because testosterone" which men produce in high levels when they're under stress seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it. The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha!" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. "There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded", says Dr. Klein." When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something." The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. "There's no doubt," says Dr. Klein, "that friends are helping us live." In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidantes was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight! And that's not all! When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). "Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women," explains Dr. Josselson. "We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women It's a very healing experience." Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., &amp; Updegraff, J. A. Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/05/ucla-study-on-friendship-among-women.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Sf_KTgtrPHI/AAAAAAAAACw/R0GPiSF1CAE/s72-c/friendship-2.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-7849898198754033527</guid><pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:06:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-04-21T14:20:58.742-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">RAYMOND CARVER</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Stegner Fellow</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">UCSC writer</category><title>James Houston, 1933 - 2009 - #2</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4nifivZYI/AAAAAAAAACo/GsgKmk-4j7U/s1600-h/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 80px; height: 100px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4nifivZYI/AAAAAAAAACo/GsgKmk-4j7U/s400/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5327238882762122626" border="0" /></a>By James D. Houston (cont.) ... "[Raymond Carver] also had a brotherly demon in him, and this was appealing in another kind of way. Ray [Carver] could talk you into things, cajole you or seduce you into things you were not perhaps ready for: a pied piper on the prose and poetry circuit. One afternoon stands out in my memory. This must have been six years later. I was upstairs working on something, I can’t remember what, when I heard footsteps down below. We have an old Victorian-style place with an attic that has been converted into a writing space. It’s private yet still not entirely cut off because the building is old and poorly insulated. Rising toward me came the sound of large and deliberate footsteps, too heavy to be those of my wife or one of our kids. I listened until the footsteps stopped, in the room directly below me. A voice called my name. I didn’t answer. I didn’t care who it was. I didn’t want to see anybody just then or get into a conversation. It was about three in the afternoon. Whoever this was had now moved to the doorway at the bottom of the attic stairs. "Houston, you sonofabitch, I know you’re up there." Again I didn’t speak. "Answer me!" he shouted. I knew this voice, but I said, "Who is it?" "It’s Carver." "What do you want?" "Goddamn it, come down here and say hello to some people." "I’m busy. I’m working." "Of course you’re working. We’re all working. We’re busy as bees. Do you want to come down or shall we come up?" "I’ll be there in a minute." He was traveling with Bill Kittredge and a big, red-bearded fellow named John, recently arrived from Alaska—all large men, large and thick. The four of us completely filled my living room. Ray was carrying two bottles, a gallon of vodka and a half gallon of grapefruit juice, which he carefully set upon the rug. From a plastic bag he withdrew a plastic cup and began to fill it. With his rascal grin he said, "You tell me when," though he paid no attention to my reply. They had been at it since lunch, or earlier. Ray was living in Palo Alto at the time. On and off he’d been teaching here at U.C. Santa Cruz. He had them on a kind of sightseeing tour with no clear agenda, making it up as they went along. I surrendered to the inevitable and began to quench my thirst with the drink he had prepared, which ran forty-sixty in favor of the vodka. I don’t remember all that we talked about. Kittredge was down from Montana as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, so we must have talked about that. Ray’s first book of stories, Will You Please be Quiet Please, had been put together, so we must have talked about that. It was a rambling conversation about books and writers and schemes and plans, that grew noisier as I caught up with them, as we sat and sipped and argued and laughed, and while Ray, self-appointed host, refilled and refilled the plastic glasses. I guess an hour had passed when someone mentioned starting back. "What do you mean?" said Ray. "Who can drive?" said Kittredge. "My God, you’re right," said Ray. It was his car. "Who’s going to do it?" This led to a long debate over who was most qualified to navigate Highway 17, the curving mountain speedway that connects Santa Cruz to Santa Clara Valley and the Peninsula. "Maybe Houston should," said Ray, at one point, "while he can still see." "Gladly," I said, "though there is a problem with that. Once we got to your place, I would need a ride over the hill." He leaned toward me with a raspy and infectious giggle. "Well, it goes without saying. One good turn deserves another. We’d just have to give you a lift back home." The next thing I knew they were lunging through the house, down the hallway, out the back door and into the yard. While they piled into the car we shouted our good-byes. It was a big, unkempt American car, a car from a Ray Carver story, with low tires and a rumbling exhaust. It lurched a couple of times, kicking up dust. Ray took the corner without braking. The rear end swung wide, he gunned it, and they were gone. There was no wind. The sky was clear, ordinarily a great time to be outdoors. But my head was throbbing. I was alone in a sudden stillness. In those days my driveway wasn’t paved. It had not rained in a month or so. Dust hung in the slanting light of late afternoon and slowly settled around me, and I stood there wondering what I was now supposed to do, stunned with drink at quarter to five and abandoned in my own driveway. Later on we would talk about that trip and others like it, and Ray would always laugh the hardest, hearing his escapades repeated. But it doesn’t seem so funny now. It fills me with sadness, thinking back on the turmoil of those mid-1970s days, when he was always on the run. I prefer to remember him as he was in the years after the running ended, after the drinking stopped. The last time I saw him was in February 1987, maybe six months before he learned about the cancer in his lungs. By that time he had gone back home to Washington. He and Tess Gallagher were living in Port Angeles. He had come down to the Bay Area to spend a few days as the Lane Lecturer at Stanford, which included a public reading at Kresge Auditorium. It was a triumphant return to the campus and to the region where he had honed his writing style. To a packed house he read "Elephant," which had recently appeared in The New Yorker, and got a standing ovation. Ray had a hulking, self-effacing way of receiving praise. At the podium he looked a bit surprised. He also looked genuinely prosperous. He was wearing an elegant suit, light beige, almost cream colored. It had an Italian look, single breasted, with narrow lapels. As I stood there applauding with all the others I was thinking about a time I had flown to Tucson, fall of 1979, on my way home from a trip to Albuquerque. Tess had a one-year appointment at the University of Arizona, and Ray was on a Guggenheim. He’d been moving around so much I hadn’t seen him for a while. I’d heard about the big changes in his life, from him, and from others, but I wasn’t sure quite what this meant, until we went out that night for Mexican food. "You have whatever you want," Ray said, when it came time to order the beverages, "I’m sticking with the iced tea." As we began to talk I saw that the crazy restlessness had gone out of his body. he had lost some weight. He was calmer, clearer, his laugh was softer. He had spiraled all the way down, he told me, drunk himself into the final coma, which he described as being at the dark bottom of a very deep well. "I was almost a goner, I see that now. I was ready to go out. I could have. I was ready to. But I saw this pinpoint of light, so far up there it seemed an impossible distance. It seemed completely beyond my reach, and yet something told me I had to try and reach it. Somehow I had to climb up toward that last tiny glimmer. And by God, I managed to do that. What do you call it? The survival instinct? I climbed out of that hole and I realized how close I had come, and that was it. I haven’t had a drop from that day to this, and I’ve never felt better in my life." He had always had the will to write, no matter what. Now he had joined that with the will to live. It made a powerful combination. You can see the effects in his later stories, and you could see it in his face the night he read at Stanford. After the reception that followed the reading we found some time to chat, catch up on things, old times, new times—a chat which turned out to be our last, face to face. I had never seen him so happy. There was a lot of light around him, the kind of light given off by a man who feels good about himself and his work, a light enhanced by the ivory-tinted cloth of his tailored suit. Ray had quite a bit of money tied up in that suit, and he liked it. That is, he liked the idea of it, though my guess is he was not entirely comfortable wearing it. He had a way of leaning in and lowering his voice, even when no one else was around, as if what he was about to say should not be overheard or repeated. "I have to tell you something," he said. "Every day I feel blessed. Every day I give thanks. Every day I am simply amazed at the way things have turned out. All you have to do is look at what I’m wearing. Look at this suit . . ." He laughed his high, light, conspiratorial laugh. "Can you imagine me wearing anything like this? It’s just astounding!" ---THE DAYS WITH RAY, copyright ©1999, by James D. Houston appeared earlier with Jim Houston's permission in my Writers’ Friendship series, courtesy and with thanks also to Web Del Sol / Perihelion. ************************ </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/04/james-houston-1933-2009-2.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4nifivZYI/AAAAAAAAACo/GsgKmk-4j7U/s72-c/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-6424397568071711607</guid><pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:58:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-04-21T14:22:25.063-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">American Boolk Award</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Humanitas Prize</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">James Houston</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">RAYMOND CARVER</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Snow Mountain Passage</category><title>James Houston, 1933 - 2009 - #1</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4lzTfGwuI/AAAAAAAAACg/bkbvZXe_yh0/s1600-h/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 80px; height: 100px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4lzTfGwuI/AAAAAAAAACg/bkbvZXe_yh0/s400/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5327236972560171746" border="0" /></a> Stunned, still reeling… just learned of Jim Houston’s death via email from a mutual friend… turned to San Jose Mercury News to read the headline, Famed author James Houston dead at 75. We’re the same age and Jim was one of the first writers I met when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1985. We’ve been friends ever since… witty, sharp, heartful and an astonishingly fine writer. As an example of his warmth and wonderfully natural style, I think of his book The Men in My Life. And Gloria and I were privileged to be asked to read and comment on Jim’s “Snow Mountain Passage” when it was still in manuscript form. Hard to write this… newspaper account lifted from Mercury News:“<a href="http://www.jamesdhouston.com/about_author.html" mce_href="http://www.jamesdhouston.com/about_author.html" title="jim houston website">SANTA CRUZ — James D. Houston,</a> one of California's richest literary voices who made Santa Cruz his home for 47 years, died Thursday of complications from cancer. He was 75. Houston, past winner of the American Book Award and the Humanitas Prize, wrote vividly and warmly about California in his long career, from insightful essays on the state's magnetic sense of place to the fictional chronicle of the famous Donner Party journey in his celebrated novel "Snow Mountain Passage." He lived with his wife Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston in a historic redwood home in the Twin Lakes area of Santa Cruz, a home he had written about glowingly, most recently in his anthology "Where Light Takes Its Color From the Sea..." ----- It seems appropriate to reprint Jim’s essay on Raymond Carver who, years ago, lived in Santa Cruz and taught at UCSC… THE DAYS WITH RAY appeared with Jim’s permission in my Writers’ Friendship series, courtesy and with thanks to Mike Neff, Web Del Sol / Perihelion. Material that follows copyright ©1999, by <a href="http://www.jamesdhouston.com/about_author.html" mce_href="http://www.jamesdhouston.com/about_author.html" title="jim houston">James D. Houston.</a>James Houston on Raymond Carver I first met him at a collating party in San Francisco back in 1969. This was when George Hitchcock was editing and publishing Kayak magazine out of his house on Laguna Street. I had just come back from two months in Mexico and had to think twice about climbing into a car again to drive the eighty miles from Santa Cruz into the city. But it was considered something of an honor to be invited to one of these gatherings, a little nod of recognition from George, the small-press impresario. And I had been told that Ray Carver would be there. George was about to bring out Winter Insomnia, Ray’s second book of poems. I had been seeing his stories and wanting to meet him for a couple of years. Among other things, I was struck by his clothing, a plain white long-sleeve shirt and dark slacks. I liked him for that. 1969 was the height of the counter-culture, which had its world headquarters right there in San Francisco. The streets were teeming with headbands and broad-brim hats, turquoise pendants, amulets, moccasins, Roman sandals, shirts covered with hand-sewn embroidery and leather fringe hanging from every vest and jacket. But the Bay Area scene did not interest Ray much at all. He was not affecting the look of a hippie or a cowboy or a Buddhist or trail guide or a lumberjack. Oblivious to the costumery of the times, he was a man of the west who dressed in a sort of Midwestern way, conservative, though not entirely respectable, since the white shirt was wrinkled and the slacks were rumpled as if he might have spent the night in these clothes. After an hour or so of snacks and drinks, George put everyone to work on his literary assembly line, someone to collate the pages, someone to add the cover, someone to trim the edges, to staple, to fold, to stack, and so on. I was assigned to the stapling gun. Ray ended up next to me, working the trimmer with its guillotine blade. Neither of us was mechanically inclined. We had already talked about various forms of car trouble that had bewildered and defeated us. We wondered if our participation that afternoon would have any effect upon sales. That is, we wondered if readers would buy a poetry magazine spotted with the drops of blood that would inevitably fall upon its pages once we touched the machines we’d been asked to operate. We wondered if Hitchcock might get sued, the way angry consumers will sue a food processor when a loose fingernail turns up inside the can of stewed tomatoes. Then the joking subsided. We bent to our tasks. What I remember most about that day is standing next to him for the next hour or so, not talking much, standing shoulder to shoulder, stapling, trimming, stapling, trimming, as we worked along with George and the others to put this issue of the magazine together. Ray was an easy and comfortable man to be with, to stand next to, or to sit with for long periods of time. He had a ready wit, and an infectious laugh, and no pretensions about him, no attitude. In every way he was unassuming. From the first meeting I felt a strong kinship, and I realize now that it was due, at least in part, to our similar origins. Years later we would finally talk about how both our fathers had come west during the early 1930s looking for any kind of work, his from Arkansas into the state of Washington, mine from east Texas to the California coast. There was something else about Ray that I found enormously appealing. I think of it as a priestly quality. I never imagined I would be making such a statement about him, but as I look back I believe it’s true. He could be very brotherly. He often seemed filled with wonder. And you knew he would never judge you for your sins, whatever they might be. That was my experience, at any rate. In later years he had the capacity for genuine forgiveness. [this is part 1... see next entry for part 2] ******************** </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2009/04/james-houston-1933-2009-1.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se4lzTfGwuI/AAAAAAAAACg/bkbvZXe_yh0/s72-c/James+Houston.thumbnail-1.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-2673843097908641729</guid><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:51:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2009-04-20T22:21:45.648-07:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">CHARLES BUKOWSKI</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">MORTON MARCUS</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">RAYMOND CARVER</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Santa Cruz</category><title>MORTON MARCUS - REMEMBERING RAYMOND CARVER</title><description><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se1XsWwH1oI/AAAAAAAAACY/47SExf7lrbY/s1600-h/carver2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5327010353782445698" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 156px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 205px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se1XsWwH1oI/AAAAAAAAACY/47SExf7lrbY/s400/carver2.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div>One of the most often used later publicity photos of Ray Carver shows him seated, leaning forward, hands crossed in front of him, wearing a soft leather flying jacket, eyes peering intently, almost challengingly at the viewer. His hair is mussed but recently razored to fashionably fit his face. He looks like he's just come from a polo match or his fortieth bombing mission over Schweinfurt. He's cool, in control, almost aggressively, intimidatingly self-confident. There are several variations of this photograph, most taken by Marion Ettlinger, but they all insist on the intensity of those eyes, on that self-confidence, and on the hair razored fashionably short and mussed. The Ray Carver I knew looked nothing like that. He wore ties and rumpled sport jackets and never appeared quite right in them. Not that the jackets didn't fit, but that he seemed awkward, even uncomfortable wearing them: he held his shoulders too high, away from his body, like adolescent weights, giving the impression that there was an iron bar lashed across his upper back and that his body hung slackly from it. Sometimes it seemed as if that bar was the only thing holding him up. As for his hair, it grew over his ears and sat in uncombed chunks around his head. A nervous, raspy laugh punctuated his sentences and he had trouble looking people in the eye. The word youthful comes to mind, and shy, bashful, ingenuous. Or boyish. Eternally boyish. A boy who woke in a nightmare to find himself in an adult's body hemmed in on all sides by sport jackets and snatches of menacing conversation. As for props, he usually had a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Like the imagined bar across his back, they held him up in their own way, although now I can't help seeing that cigarette as a piece of chalk he used to chart his lifeline on the cosmic blackboard, or as a baton with which he was learning to conduct his own requiem. * At the outset, I want to say that my relationship with Ray never reached the boozy intimacy he had with others. I knew him from 1967 - 1977, his most notoriously alcoholic period, and even though I can still sit and talk in bars for hours on end, I don't drink now and I didn't drink then. For that reason alone it may seem impossible that we were friends at all. Another impediment to our friendship was our personae: Ray internalized everything -- the pains, the uncertainties, the humiliations, the fears -- whereas I gushed them in a torrent of emotions and operatic gestures. Add to this that Ray was a small-town boy, and a small-town boy from the Northwest at that, while I was a city boy from the East Coast and you've got what seems an almost insurmountable barrier to friendship. Running counter to the differences, however, were the similarities. Ray and I didn't put on airs; that's what we had most in common. Although I was from New York City, I never pretended to be cool or hip. Ray -- and Maryann, too -- were open and generous-spirited from the start. I knew they had no rocks in their hands and they knew I had none in mine. We never analyzed our friendship or even once questioned why we liked one another because whenever we saw each other we talked, laughed, shared our work, and generally enjoyed one another's company. No matter how many months would go by between meetings we resumed our friendship where we had left off. In 1981 Ray sent me a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In it he had inscribed this dedication: "For Mort, with nothing but love, and admiration." That about says it, although the word "admiration" needs to be explained. I'd like to think it refers to the writing, which truly cemented the friendship, the recognition on both our parts that under the sport coats we were two kids trying to figure out what this life meant, no matter how horrendous the revelations, and that we were both pursuing that goal through a mutually ferocious dedication to words. That commitment was out inseparable bond. Besides this I was a poet whose work Ray liked, and poets were something special to him. He said toward the end of his life that he would like to be remembered as a poet and I wish now I had told him more often how good I thought his poetry was. There is a lack of pretentiousness in his poems -- in tone and diction -- which is unique in contemporary American poetry, and we can all learn from it. It is disarming and therefore makes the implications, ironies and juxtapositions of images that much more powerful. Ray wrote poetry as if it were written with a small, not a capital, "p", conveying an impression of almost artless naturalness that no other American poet of his generation -- and maybe any other generation -- has been able to evoke. In his last volume, A New Path To The Waterfall (1989), this naturalness reaches its apex, spilling with an appearance of artlessness that resembles nothing so much as water, which assumes the shapes of every channel it enters yet remains itself, and appears as swirls, slurs, elongations and a variety of textures and colors under the shifts of light and sediments it travels over yet remains as transparent and ephemeral as breath when you attempt to lift it in your hands. * Ray always insisted that we knew each other in Iowa, and so did Maryann, but I can't recall it. And our dates of tenure there don't correspond. Sometimes I think that he meant that he knew of me from Iowa. Maybe that was it. As far as I'm concerned we met at George Hitchcock's house on Laguna Street in San Francisco at one of those parties Hitchcock gave four times a year to put Kayak magazine together. There were always about twenty of us, an interchangeable group of contributors, friends, actors, and writers or painters passing through, all turned into happy workers by Hitchcock, a commanding presence with a voice like a wave booming in a sea cave, who directed us to collate and staple pages, stuff and address envelopes, and encouraged us to meet each other, while he kept bread, cold cuts, beer and pies stacked on the kitchen table. At that time Kayak was one of the important literary magazines in the country and fostered a sort of deep image or "near surrealist" approach to poetry. But as a kayak is a one-man vessel, so the magazine was a product of one man's taste, a man who abhorred categories, George Hitchcock. The magazine displayed his many talents as poet, editor, printer, visual artist and organizer. He was the sun from which all things grew and ideas radiated, the center we looked toward for direction. Well over six feet, a recognized playwright, and an actor in the grand manner -- on those Sundays he directed the closest thing to an American-style Parisian salon I have ever attended. It was at one of those collating parties in the spring of 1967, I think, that Hitchcock introduced me to Ray and Maryann, an indulgence to which George's laissez-fair attitude towards social etiquette usually didn't succumb. Ray said he remembered me from Iowa and was an admirer of my poetry, but even then I wondered if he had asked George to introduce us. As I have said, I still don't remember Ray from Iowa and it wouldn't be until many years later that I learned that he had been the student of two special and talented friends of mine, the fiction writer Richard Day at Humboldt State University and the poet Dennis Schmidt at Sacramento State University, both of whom could have exposed Ray to my work. When I learned that, I suspected even more that Ray had asked Hitchcock to introduce us and that he hadn't said he knew me from Iowa but rather had heard about me there. Whatever the reason, Ray and I were soon chatting like old friends. There was an openness about Ray and Maryann that could win over anyone. There was nothing morbid or precious about them. They weren't ego-centered or self-absorbed as are so many of the literati I've met. We talked about everything -- from literature to sports to politics, and kept talking from one collating party to the next. Within a year or two Hitchcock and his wife broke up and Maryann's sister, Amy, a vivacious, talented actress, began coming to the collating parties. She and George were entranced with each other immediately, and I remember staying late a number of times to watch them perform some hilarious, ingenious, spontaneous bit of nonsense after which the five of us would go off to dinner somewhere, joined by any odd member of the collating squad who wanted to come with us. At about this time (1969) Hitchcock put out my first book of poems, Origins, and a year later he brought out Ray's first major book of poems, Winter Insomnia. During this period, I knew Ray as a poet. That is what we talked about mostly and I'd seen some of him poems in Kayak and other magazines. He never lost this focus on poetry and I think the extreme concentration he exercised in his prose at times can be traced to his poetic practices. Gradually he showed me one or two stories, then added others, many in manuscript or in pages stripped from magazines. I was astonished by them, to say the least. As I remember, the first one I saw was "The Student's Wife," and soon after that "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please," and within the next year or two, in the early seventies, "Fat" and "Neighbors." What was astonishing, even unique about Ray's stories at that time was not that they engaged everyday American life and went behind the doors of suburban middle-class and blue-collar homes, but that they were scenarios of our worst dreams about the reality of our neighbors' existences, scenarios about the spiritual barrenness at the heart of American life which on the surface the majority of us were living, whether we admitted it or not. Ray had the courage to face this barrenness and the genius to make it come alive. I sensed that a lot of Ray's writing was autobiographical, things that had happened to him and Maryann or, more, things which he feared might. That's why I call them scenarios. He was writing his worst dreams, readying himself for whatever might happen to him and his family, innocent small-town American kids moving through the world like victims in search of an oppressor. That's why Ray's vaunted realism is so strange, or rather "unrealistic" in the end, and seems to be steeped not in bleakness but in nightmare and approaches the surreal. His poetry, especially. It is a poetry of the threatened. Winter Insomnia is propelled by a kind of paranoia, a fear that everyone the speaker encounters means him and his family harm or poses the possibility of it. Menace is everywhere, especially in the poems that deal with the Middle East. It is the paranoia one finds in a Hitchcock film or an Eric Ambler thriller: Everyone out there is a threat. This is not "realism" or "super-realism," it is, if anything, expressionism, a reality shaped and shadowed by the mind of the artist. That is why I think Ray's poems and stories were so admired by the Kayak crowd and why Winter Insomnia came out under the Kayak imprint. One more word about the work. Not so much those of us around Kayak, but later, in Santa Cruz from 1970 to 1976, just before What We Talk About When We Talk About Love hurled Ray to the heights of the literary world, a number of writers I knew thought Ray's stories too depressing. I wonder if they would think that now, not because Ray has become a legend, but because in the last few years what he imagined about America has become the truth of our lives -- the unemployment, the fear of homelessness and the lack of medical security; I mean the terror of being poor or disenfranchised in this land of milk and acid. Intuitively Ray knew what that part of America was all about and the terror of that knowledge drove him to the bottle and cigarettes, or so I thought then and think to this day. Now it might seem too simple to assign the fear of the small town boy with the weak father, who didn't even provide him with a location of good places to fish, as the reason for Ray's drinking and smoking, but I did, as many of us do with our friends. The bottle lip and cigarette tip were nipples on a milk bottle that gave Ray security, pacifiers that let him relax -- pacifiers he didn't need any more when he met Tess and that he had needed with Maryann because he and Maryann were both young and he had to grow through his fears and out of them when he was with her. Which means Tess was the lucky one and Maryann was not. Or Tess had that certain trait that could wean him away from the bottle where Maryann couldn't. Maybe those notions are too easy. And, again, maybe they're not. * By late summer of 1968 I'd moved seventy miles south of San Francisco to the small coastal town of Santa Cruz, where I had gotten a job teaching English at a community college. I still journeyed to San Francisco for the Kayak collating parties, but within a year Hitchcock followed me to Santa Cruz and was teaching poetry and acting at the local University of California campus. He continued printing Kayak magazine and books from his Santa Cruz address. Ray and Maryann were living in Cupertino, a suburban town thirty miles south of San Francisco and ten miles north of San Jose, the center of a middle-class residential area which in the late sixties and early seventies served the families of the burgeoning computer micro-chip industry called Silicon Valley. Ray and Maryann were living the TV version of the American good life. As I remember, their house was a one-story, upper middle-class showpiece complete with swimming pool, field-stone walls, and huge bay windows set in angles like transparent guillotines -- although I suspect my hyperbolic imagination has galloped off here with the frail damsel of memory. I do recall that at night you could see all the way to the bay, several miles away, street lights and house windows along the way glittering like an overturned jewel box. I remember at least several memorable parties there, each with dozens of people -- a lot of writers and businessmen and engineers, the last two groups obviously neighbors and fellow workers. I'm not sure but I think Ray was still employed as a text-book editor at Science Research Associates and Maryann was teaching high school in Los Altos. What is certain is that they were living beyond their means and soon it was difficult to reach them by phone. The creditors were descending and any friendly "Hi!" chirping from the receiver could be followed by demands for payment of overdue bills. Was it that year, 1970, or five years later, that Ray's mother or Maryann would answer the phone explaining that the Carvers no longer resided at that address? When I came to visit once, Ray's mother, who didn't know me, insisted I had the wrong house, until Ray, who was standing behind an inner door, rescued me. At about this time Ray showed me the manuscript of a new story called "What Is It?" (later renamed "Are These Actual Miles?"), one of the most terrifying pieces he ever wrote. It was about the day in the life of a man burdened with bills whose wife goes off to sell the family car. At different points during the afternoon and evening the man receives calls from his wife who says she is on the verge of making a "great deal" on the car. Finally, in the early hours of the next morning, drunk, she is covertly dropped at home by the car salesman, and the husband stoically puts her to bed. But the salesman returns to place the wife's handbag, which she had left in his car, on the porch. Observing the salesman through the window, the husband wrenches the door open to confront him, but he is unable to say anything to the man, who retreats and drives off behind a nervous spattering of excuses. The story is filled with a sense of humiliation for both husband and wife, a sense of hopelessness for anyone caught in our socioeconomic treadmill. Few writers anywhere have portrayed economic degradation this nakedly. At the time I was overwhelmed by the story and wondered if it was yet another scenario of Ray's terrors, but I never asked him. Now I assign the story to the category of those chilling pieces of literature which depict the end of an age, such as Ray's beloved Chekhov continually wrote so relentlessly about in plays and stories. The cultures and times are different, but the vision and subject are the same, although Chekhov's vision is not as raw as Ray's. * During this period I was teaching a course I had designed for the University of California Extension called "Writers Off the Page." the class met all day Saturday. In the morning we discussed a novel or book of poems by a contemporary author, and in the afternoon the author met with the class to read aloud, answer questions, and discuss his work. I asked Ray to be one of the participants and select several stories. He chose "What Is It?" ("Are These Actual Miles?"), "Neighbors," "Fat," and an initiation story he had just finished called "Steelhead Summer" (which appeared renamed and revised, not for the better, as "Nobody Said Anything" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and later as the first piece in Ray's selected stories, Where I'm Calling From). The story is about a boy who does combat with a giant fish in the river on the other side of his home town. What makes the story unique is its frame, which comments ironically on the boy's coming of age ritual: at the beginning and the end of the story, the boy is witness to his parents arguing. This intrusion of the mundane, drearily unhappy adult world of 1950's America destroys the boy's heroic undertaking which had charged his imagination by making the everyday world marvelous, all of which was suggested in the original story by medieval quest imagery that paralleling the contemporary images, but was cut by the time the story reached What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as "Nobody Said Anything." (Ray puts the frame to similar use in another story that would have been ordinary without it. The piece, called "Distance," first appeared in the Furious Seasons and in severely truncated form under the title "Everything Stuck to Him" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The story line deals with the first serious argument between a young married couple with a sick child. The husband wants to go hunting, as he has done for years, but his wife wants him to stay home because of the child's condition. He goes but returns early and the couple make up, dancing in their small house and vowing eternal love. However, the frame occurs twenty years later when the child, now a young woman, visits her father, divorced from her mother and living in Rome, and begs him to tell her a story about when he and her mother were married. The sense of loss and pathos is conveyed by the use of the frame. Even the poignancy in the story is created by the frame. It is a brilliant choice here. So is the original title, which Ray later restored. Distance, in time and place, colors the central meaning of the story, reminding the reader of how transitory human relationships are. I should also mention that Chekhov, Ray's favorite writer, put the frame to similar use in a number of stories -- "Gooseberries" and "In Exile" come immediately to mind -- and the bittersweet nostalgia in "Distance" comes closest to echoing the Russian master's in tone and coloring. As does "Errand," of course. Generally, however, Ray's stories are much more brutal than Chekhov's.) The class was composed mostly of teachers taking the course for graduate units. Ray's stories excited and horrified them because of their freshness and the way he had directly faced the dark side of American life. The group was filled with admiration and generated the kind of energy one feels when a group discovers someone in their midst who is going to be a celebrity. This was the third time I had given the class, and the powers that be had decided to move its location to Palo Alto, fifty miles northeast of Santa Cruz, as an experiment to draw new students. Weather permitting, we would meet for the afternoon session under a shady clump of trees in a rolling, open park. When I met Ray to guide him to our glade, I was surprised by how nervous he was. He was more jumpy than I had ever seen him. I pretended not to notice at first, but as he tremblingly lit one cigarette after another I finally asked what was wrong. "This is the first time," he said. "For what?" I replied. "This is the first time I ever taught a class." "On your own work?" "On anything." It had never occurred to me that Ray hadn't taught before. I tried to calm him down, give him confidence and a few basic pointers -- a coach's pep talk. I tried to make him see that he had already introduced himself through his stories, that everyone in the class thought they knew him to the quick because of who they imagined the writer of those stories to be. I don't think that set him at ease at all. He was dry-mouthed and twitching as he began the class. But many of the women, seeing his nervousness, gave him maternal encouragement; and the outright admiration of the entire group was so apparent that within fifteen minutes my rhetorical questions and other verbal aides were no longer necessary. Ray's shy, humble manner won everyone over, and he warmed to the serious conversation about his work. I like to think he developed his unassuming, open classroom style because of what happened that day, but the truth is he was just being Ray and sooner or later he would have realized that simple secret of teaching. As I remember, I invited him to talk to the class for several successive semesters; those who took the course repeatedly insisted on it. One more thing. Neither the class nor I could convince Ray that "Steelhead Summer" ("Nobody Said Anything") was a first-rate story. I nagged him about it endlessly over the next several years and he did finally send it out and get it published in Sou'Wester, but he always felt unsure about it. Maybe he thought it was too much like Hemingway's The Old Man In The Sea. Maybe he was piqued at himself for writing an initiation story, the kind of tale he had been raised on and knew had become cliched by the late fifties. I don't know. But I was happy to see it as the lead off story in Where I'm Calling From, even in its severely revised form. * By 1972 Hitchcock had gotten Ray a teaching assignment at the University of California Santa Cruz. That had to have been accomplished through the man who had hired Hitchcock, the well-known short-story writer, James B. Hall, who had been made the Provost of the new Creative Arts College on campus, which was called, for lack of a financial donor, College Five. George worked there and now so did Ray. While he was at the University, Ray influenced a lot of students, including a number of my former pupils who would tell me how much they loved him as both a teacher and a human being. I, of course, would tell those of my students heading up to the University to be sure and take a class with him. Although he was only working at the University part-time and would soon begin a dizzying travel week teaching at both Santa Cruz and the University of Iowa, a schedule reminiscent of the feverish peregrinations across Siberia of Vasily Sergeich in Chekhov's "In Exile," Ray had the energy to convert UC Santa Cruz's literary magazine, Quarry, into a publication of national stature, under the name Quarry West, by lobbying many of the poets and fiction writers he knew to submit work to it. It was during his tenure at Santa Cruz that one of the more revealing episodes in my relationship with him took place. As I recall, it was in 1973. Ray had been chosen to host Charles Bukowski, who was to give a reading at the University. When he met Bukowski at the airport he discovered that the irascible poet had been on a binge for more than a week. I wonder if Ray saw a future image of himself in the creased, pockmarked face of his older contemporary. I know something early on made him decide not to drink glass for glass with Bukowski, and when we met before the reading Ray was completely sober -- and worried. He didn't have any idea of how Bukowski was going to behave, and had quickly realized that the Los Angeles poet operated on both insult and shock. "Stick close," Ray said to me, "and be sure to come to the party after -- please." Bukowski, on his part, must have taken one look at Ray in his corduroy trousers and rumpled sports jacket and decided to dismiss him as an insipid academic. The reading drew a full audience and was a wild affair. Bukowski punctuated each poem by sucking from a large bottle of gin and tossing raspy insults at the audience -- at all the spoiled middle-class students and prissy professors, as far as he was concerned. The professors grinned condescendingly or left. Or grinned and then left. But by and large the students were titillated and warmed to this old drunk telling them what little shits they were. I got the impression that Bukowski was delighted in parading his image and that the students were experiencing the taboo excitement of slumming, or being in touch with "real life" -- at least for the evening. Ray wasn't amused by any of it. His worried expression was a mask stuck to his face throughout the reading. As host, he said later, he felt responsible for whatever happened and I translated this into meaning that he saw his credibility slipping with his superiors at the University with every insult Bukowski growled. At the party, held in the house of two former students of mine who were currently students of Ray, things got wilder. Only students were present after the first ten minutes. Rock music and pot smoke engulfed the shabby room. Bukowski, drinking everything in sight, muttered, bragged, cursed, and getting drunker by the minute, grabbed the girls and mashed his whiskery face against theirs, or shot his hand to the crotch of their jeans or down their shirts. Several of the girls screamed and ran from the house. A number of the more cerebral students sat back and stared straight ahead, probably stoned. A group of rough town poets watched Bukowski's every move adoringly, as if they were learning how to be real poets with every belch or snort. Ray started drinking. Bukowski blinked when he saw me coming up the stairs. "Allen," he said, "I didn't know you were here. Why doncha recite some lines from 'Howl'." I shot back some stupid remark to the effect that "My name isn't Allen. It's Kenneth, Kenneth Pachen." A malevolent smile lit Bukowski's face, making him look like a sinister pumpkin, as he turned toward Ray. "Hey, Professor, why didntcha tell me that Allen was going to be here?" Then he turned back to me and said, "Come on Allen give us some 'Howl'." My former students were so poor they didn't own a couch and Bukowski was seated like a malicious Buddha on a mattress set on the living room floor, stubbing out his cigarettes on the floorboards until one of the students who lived in the apartment stopped him. Bukowski kept turning to Ray between drinks and grabs, derisively calling him "professor" and treating him like the most menial servant, every once in a while turning to me with that sinister pumpkin face and saying, "Come on, Allen, let's hear it." I smiled back as malevolently as I could. Bukowski continued drinking. More students ran squealing from the house. Soon Ray, fed up, and by now drunk himself, stalked out. There was no one left but my two former students, Bukowski and two or three others. Bukowski had not risen from the mattress in several hours. Now, obviously exhausted, he subsided into a stupor, his chin on his chest. "So, Allen," he muttered one more time, "what do you think of this shit?" At this point Ray clumped up the stairs. Bukowski spied him and raised his head for a moment. "Professor," he said with the last bit of derision he could muster, "Professor..." Ray looked down at him, swaying, but said nothing, his expression caught midway between disgust and pity. But maybe it was neither: Ray was drunker than I'd ever seen him. Something about Bukowski's behavior struck deep inside him, like a pickaxe sinking into the wall of a mine, something he never spoke to me about. My sense of the extremity of Ray's reaction, however, suggests that there was something more to it than just disgust or pity. I'm convinced he saw in Bukowski's drinking and behavior intimations of his own future, a sort of Mr. Hyde who would be released by his incessant boozing. On the other hand, this is said with a good deal of hindsight and may be just literary balderdash. It was a revelatory evening, an historic non-meeting of two major American writers. For the first time I saw Ray act uncomfortably, feeling responsible for someone else and not knowing how to handle the situation. Bukowski was too much for him: Ray couldn't deal with his continual insults and venomous behavior. But Bukowski was more revealing to me. He showed that the self image he chose to establish in his poems, an image which limited the poems in both reach and meaning, had taken him over. He had become the mask he chose to face the world wearing. More than this he was so overwhelmed by this image, and the easy assumptions of others that went with it, that he stereotyped Ray and never realized that he was in the presence of the one artist whose work, on the same subjects and themes, had achieved what he rarely, if ever, could for the very reasons he failed to recognize who Ray was -- lack of real interest in others and compassion. The upshot of the incident was a nasty poem by Bukowski about the uptight academic host who took care of him in Santa Cruz and a reply from Ray, the collage-barrage of lines he heard or thought he heard Bukowski speak throughout the evening incorporated into the poem "You Don't Know What Love Is," a poem that can be found in Fires. I've often wondered if Bukowski ever read any of Ray's work and realized that that Ray Carver, that "uptight academic" host was was no prissy professor but the author of stories of more depth, passion, and authenticity than he allowed himself to write. * During the winter of 1972, Noel Young of Capra Press asked to bring out two of my books. That request grew into a friendship and, for the next several years, my sending along a dozen writers or so to Capra for Noel's burgeoning chapbook series, a dozen or so west coast writers, I should add, for there was a feeling among us of neglect and downright hostility from the publishers and editors of the good green east. The first author I introduced Noel to was James D. Houston, a novelist whose subject matter and themes are the mores and lifestyles of the California central coast, a thinker who in book after book has insightfully defined what California means to the psyches of those who live here. Jim, also a friend of Ray, was completing a group of stories at that time concerning a character named Charlie Bates whose very existence, often depicted in Kafkaesque comic situations, was bound up with cars and freeways, certainly a most California subject. Noel immediately took one of the stories for the chapbook series and a year later brought out all the Charlie Bates stories in one volume. Now both Jim and I were feeding Noel authors, and I'm sure that both of us urged him to get in touch with Ray, while urging Ray to get in touch with Noel. Nothing happened until the spring of 1972 or '73, and Jim and I were both involved in it. It was at the annual Swanton Corn Roast, a spring ritual in those years when all the local craftspersons -- potters, weavers, jewelry makers and leather workers -- showed their wares in makeshift stalls set up in the wilds of a rural road north of the coastal hamlet of Davenport. The scenery was the epitome of old California, open farmlands surrounded by woods. The corn roast was held in a meadow hemmed in by redwoods, madrone trees with their sweet potato-colored bark, lime-colored lichen-splotched coast live oaks, and spicy-smelling California bay trees, all tangled together by vines and jumbles of weeds and poison oak still green and succulent from the winter rains. The corn roast drew people from as far away as San Jose and San Francisco. Hundreds of cars lined the narrow road. The roast was an event, a reason to get into the country for city-dwellers and come away with a pitcher or belt or beaded necklace made by local artisans, not mass-produced by anonymous third world workers. The roast was a result of the return to the earth movement that gripped the nation in the early seventies. As Noel remembers it, I was strolling with him, both of us looking at the displays. Jim Houston was playing bass with a blue grass band called The Red Mountain Boys, a traditional part of the day's entertainment, and as the banjos caplunketed and the fiddles whined and the guitars thwanged, and Jim plucked baritone sounds of gastric disorder from his phlegmatic bass, Noel and I came upon a tall galoot lying on his side in the grass with his head propped in one hand, listening to the music. Noel remembers that he had a purple wine mustache. I remember that there was several paper cups on the ground near by. I turned to Noel and said something like "Remember I told you about a terrific short story and writer you should get a hold of? Well, here he is." Then I spoke to the reclining figure. "How you doing, Ray? Remember that publisher from down south I've been urging you to send stuff to, Noel Young? Well, here he is. Noel, Ray. Ray, Noel." Now that may sound like one of the great shaggy dog stories of all time, an anti-anecdote, the report of one of the great non-events in any memoir. But truth to tell, it was an historic meeting. Out of it Noel would eventually publish Ray's short story collection, The Furious Seasons, in 1977 and the potpourri of short stories, poems and essays, Fires, in 1983. Capra would become the publishing house where the original and restored versions of some of Ray's best stories would be permanently maintained. That Ray returned to Capra to publish Fires after he had become one of the nation's most publicized writers was a symbolic return to the west from the frenetic east, a move he would make physically within two years after the book came out. Fires contains the definitive versions of those stories that first appeared in The Furious Seasons and that, in two instances, appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the book that made him famous but which also contained drastically revised versions -- to my taste, far too drastically -- of many previously published stories. In Fires Ray re-revised (actually restored) two of the stories which I consider among his best, "Distance" and "So Much Water So Close To Home." For that reason, and its plenteous helping of poems, Fires is an important source for understanding Ray's work. We can thank Noel Young for that as well as for the original versions of the stories in The Furious Seasons. * In a letter to an editor inquiring about Ray, I wrote that "I knew him before the fame, before he became a legend, I knew him as he groped his way through the thicket of his problems and I can tell you that even then he was a lovable man who, despite the debt and drinking, I would trust with my life, and for me that is the test of a human being's mettle." A friend, who is a therapist, told me that such values are typical of people abandoned in childhood, which I was. Who knows. But loyalty and a good heart go a long way to winning my affections, and Ray had both. Do those words smack of sentimentality? So be it. There was a man here I loved who is a hole in the air now, a doorway the wind shuttles through. This man left us gifts at great personal expense, a suitcase full of small trick mirrors in which we can see our distorted inner selves. I remember this person as someone who shaped and polished those mirrors day after day through cigarette smoke, alcohol fumes, unpaid bills and domestic dog fights. He came and is gone, but the gifts he made for us remain, each one a kiss on our lives. ____________ ______</div></description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2008/12/morton-marcus-remembering-raymond.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/Se1XsWwH1oI/AAAAAAAAACY/47SExf7lrbY/s72-c/carver2.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-1638710329897157400</guid><pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:56:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2008-12-18T11:21:45.884-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Associated Writing Programs</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">AWP</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Blue Moon Review</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Doug Lawson</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Mike Neff</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Santa Cruz</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">web del sol</category><title>Ferris Wheel in the Sky - Web Del Sol</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUqdkIcN6EI/AAAAAAAAACI/JwELU4daXJE/s1600-h/MikeNeffRobt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUqdkIcN6EI/AAAAAAAAACI/JwELU4daXJE/s320/MikeNeffRobt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281206757112014914" border="0" /></a> Mike Neff and Robert Sward, iPhone photo courtesy Doug Lawson. Last night (12.16.08) for the first time since the 2001 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Palm Springs, I connect with two East Coast friends, Mike Neff of Web Del Sol and Doug Lawson of Blue Moon Review. Both, it turns out, are newly settled in Northern California and we get together at Aqua Blue Restaurant in Santa Cruz. Dear friends who I had long associated with the East, Mike from Washington, D.C. and Doug Lawson from Virginia, where, like Mike, in 1994, he founded and began editing one of the few consistently high quality literary eZines. I was privileged to serve as contributing editor to both Mike's Web Del Sol and to Doug's Blue Moon Review. It was Doug Lawson who published, among other things, my 25 page Earthquake Collage, and did so with imaginative tweakings of photos I took following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which destroyed 70 percent of Santa Cruz' downtown. Earthquake Collage, BTW, will be published soon by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH). Aqua Blue, a seafood restaurant, coincidentally decorated with several blue moons, i.e., large spherical blue lamps… the word spherical, it turns out, can refer to astronomical objects and spheres of ancient astronomy. By chance… what follows seems to have some connection with these two old friends. Ferris Wheel in the Sky, A Dream. Mountain. Then a still higher mountain behind the first. Then, at end of dream, a giant ferris wheel fully lit and filled with people as at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, only this one is rotating, it seems, in the sky above the second of the two mountains. At first I simply see it, then I see it rotating. What's that about? Begins: I'm inside some bland community room at a yoga meditation retreat. Then called out to join the others and am amazed to see first one mountain, then another, higher, taller, steeper just beyond the first. First thought is, This is the Sermon on the Mount, it is that kind of mountain. It seems a combination of the Old Testament and the contemporary Santa Cruz Boardwalk as when, for example, the ferris wheel begins rotating. It seems nothing out of the ordinary and yet totally extraordinary. At first I am facing outward toward an open field where yoga classes might be held and I see people, Esalen like scene, everyone relaxed, picnic like atmosphere, quiet, peaceful… a partially clouded yet sunny afternoon. That's the setting and, asked to join the group, I choose an unoccupied reclining chair, old worn wooden lawn chair with a folded meditation mat or blanket. Nothing special. Then aware of someone to my left, a male figure dressed in a loose, khaki-colored robe. I put out my arm to touch him and he withdraws… the gesture is unwelcome. At once I realize the seat I chose belongs to this man, the leader. I never actually see his face, but imagine him to be a man in his mid 40s or 50s. And I am embarrassed and want to vacate and want to do so quickly, quietly and without notice. Suddenly self-conscious… I am about to move elsewhere… I turn 180 degrees and see this amazing mountain, only this time animated… complete with a giant ferris wheel and it is rotating and there are people on it. And it turns out, in dream, that the upper mountain, the one above and beyond the first, the one I understand to be the Sermon on the Mount mountain, is where people on this Zen Meditation Retreat sleep, where they are housed and it is from there they come down for classes or whatever goes on down below, in the area where I am sitting, the one with the large open field. That is a long way to come, I think, but somehow realize at the same time that it is only walking distance, from mountain top to the main yoga or instruction area. Tassajara. Big Sur. Esalen. I wake thinking the ferris wheel is Web Del Sol, my friend Mike Neffs website extraordinaire. Web Del Sol. Web of the sun. It is a ferris wheel, spinning, with 60,000 visitors a day or a week or something… Dream connected somehow with Mike and Doug, and our friendship, virtual, virtual friendship that goes back 14 years, to early Internet, early eZines, when WDS and Blue Moon first began publishing. Following the dinner, I worked on Robert Dana Writers Friendship essay on British poet Stephen Spender… and the awe and warmth Robert Dana expresses for his friend. Chicago born, transplanted to Santa Cruz. Here since 1985, I wake asking myself, What am I doing having such a West Coast Esalen-like dream? I am just a transplanted mid Westerner.</description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2008/12/ferris-wheel-in-sky-web-del-sol.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUqdkIcN6EI/AAAAAAAAACI/JwELU4daXJE/s72-c/MikeNeffRobt.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>1</thr:total></item><item><guid isPermaLink="false">tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5776178214858007708.post-986160671874276032</guid><pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:33:00 +0000</pubDate><atom:updated>2008-12-17T22:37:54.503-08:00</atom:updated><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Robert Dana</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Stephen Spender</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">University of Iowa</category><category domain="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#">Writers Workshop</category><title>Robert Dana - Spender Once More</title><description><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUitXEAZ4eI/AAAAAAAAABw/IW0zFSyvDSA/s1600-h/StevenSpender.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 229px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUitXEAZ4eI/AAAAAAAAABw/IW0zFSyvDSA/s320/StevenSpender.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280661174815941090" border="0" /></a> Until 1976 when he became my distinguished colleague in the writing program at the University of Florida, Stephen Spender was just biographical essay and a handful of brilliant lyrics I first encountered in Louis Untermeyer’s anthology of Modern American and Modern British Poetry. Oh, I’d met him at close range back in the 1950’s when he came to give a reading at the University of Iowa and to talk to a bunch of fledgling poets at the Writers’ Workshop. After Spender’s reading that evening in the senate chambers of Old Capitol, Paul Engle had arranged a rump session so that the students could talk with Spender one on one over beer in the basement of a local bar, perhaps Irene Kenney’s. It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I recall the subject of our conversation, in which I had the presumptuousness and dim wit to chide him for certain Britishisms in his Lorca translations. Of course, Stephen’s world was so large and his history so long and rich that, when we really did meet in Florida and share several months of our lives, he retained no memory at all of our having met twenty years earlier, and, thank god, no memory of my youthful stupidities. Stephen was part of the bait dangled before me by the late Richard Green, then chairman of the English Department at the University of Florida. He also offered me a much lighter teaching load and the chance to teach graduate students, and more money than I was presently making at Cornell College in Iowa. I had just returned from a sabbatical in England where I’d gone to recover from some serious surgery and to try to finish the book which later became In A Fugitive Season, so I didn’t think my dean would give his permission for another leave of absence. Encouraged, however, by my new wife, Peg, and by Dick Green, I explored the possibility with my colleagues and the dean, and was granted permission to accept Florida’s offer. It would be a full year visiting writer appointment, and I would be Stephen Spender’s colleague when he arrived for the third quarter. It turned out to be a seminal year, needless to say. Our friendship began in a very personal way. Shortly before Stephen’s arrival in the spring, I casually asked someone, at my wife’s prompting, perhaps Dick Green, where Stephen would be living. He was, at the time, nearly seventy. I was shocked to find that neither the department nor the university had made arrangements for their distinguished guest. In addition to getting on in years, he would be arriving in Florida from wintry England. Peg and I reasoned that someone needed to make a move on his behalf. So we contacted the supervisor of our building to find out what furnished apartments might be available. There were several. We got the department’s approval, and then canvassed department members via their mailboxes, to round up dishes, pots and pans, silverware, blankets and linens, so that when Stephen arrived he’d have decent digs awaiting him. When he did arrive, he needed phone service, of course. And it was here that Peg stepped in, and the episode provided one of our favorite stories. Stephen had trouble understanding the operator at Bell Southern, and she had trouble understanding his English accent, so he asked Peg to do his talking for him. At one point, she said, “Stephen, they want an idea of how much of a bill you might average a month.” “Oh tell them a hundred dollars,” he said, grinning, and then sotto voce, “It’s probably more like five hundred.” The bill was probably “more like five hundred” given the family calls—to his wife, Natasha and his daughter Lizzie in London and to his son Matthew in Italy; and the business calls—to his old friend Christopher Isherwood in L.A, and to International PEN on Taiwan (No, he wouldn’t be coming), and to his editor Jason Epstein at Random House in New York. Perhaps it was at that moment that it began to be clear that Stephen dealt with people straight on, by and large. He didn’t see himself as either a “great man” or a “great writer.” In fact, he saw himself as sometimes a comic “figger” as he would have said. * So began a friendship I could never have imagined having, and one that would last nearly twenty years until Spender’s death in 1995. A friendship from which I learned at least as much about human decency and perspective as I did about literature and what it means to live a life of letters. One of the first things I learned from Stephen was what real achievement and fame were. His record spoke for itself. I was forty-six, had published two books, and was still getting rejection slips from various magazines. I was certainly not getting phone calls from PEN International. So there was no question of competition between us, as there always is to a certain degree, between contemporaries. Stephen wasn’t my mentor, nor was I his student. It was a case of two poets from different generations and different cultures sharing what was there to be shared. He shared his wisdom, his stories—of himself and Auden at Oxford (“I printed his first little book on my card press in my room.”), of his experiences in Spain during the civil war and in Britain as an air-raid warden during the blitz, and his attitudes toward poetry. For my part, I drove him to the university when needed, explained him to his undergraduate class, which didn’t know what to make of him and treated him, at first, like a fragile family heirloom; and plied him with questions about his life and work. In May of 1976, in my role as a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, I actually conducted a formal interview with him. It took place, as I recall, in the living room of our Gainesville apartment. Here are a few clips from that afternoon: “…If one thinks of one’s own contemporaries who had talent or even genius. I think that, really, three qualities are necessary. First of all, to have a little genius; then to have quite a lot of talent, and then, thirdly, to want to do it... You have to want, in some crazy way, to write poetry. I think quite a lot of people want to be a poet, but that’s rather different from actually wanting to write poetry.” “Eliot in ‘The Four Quartets’, for instance, is always really a thinking poet. And also a poet with a mystical vision. And when the thinking is intense and the mystical vision is intense, he discovers a language which is very strange, and which is what we think of as the best of Eliot. But when the thinking is sententious—about, you know, growing old, and all that kind of thing,--the form can become sententious. He hasn’t got the talent which can invent an interest in the language which is beyond what is actually being said… * “…I think that American poets believe that, as Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too... And I think the American poet does feel that deeply, and he feels it’s something of a tragedy if he doesn’t get a great audience… I think that’s a tragic point of view, that you need vast audiences.” Once, during one of our evening conversations, I asked him how he’d felt when Auden died. “I felt the way I did when my brother died—“ he said, “that now I could go out and drive the car. “At the end of this life, dealing with Auden was like dealing with a corporation—Auden, Auden, Auden, &amp; Auden. It wasn’t very pleasant.” And so I learned that fame, if it comes to one, is something best carried lightly. I learned that when Spender spoke of walking the shore of Lake Geneva with Merleau-Ponty, or of spending an afternoon with his friend Henry Moore, or told some anecdote about Louis Mac Neice, he wasn’t trying to impress you. He was merely recounting an interesting or pleasant moment in his life or a personal opinion. Stephen had no need of boasting or name-dropping because he was sure of who he was, even if he tended to underplay his achievements. His autobiography World Within A World makes it clear that early on he had ceased to lie to himself or anyone else aboutwho he was, or why he did what he did. (“Oh, it wasn’t politics that caused us to go to Berlin. We went there to chase boys,” he said to me once, with a laugh.) He had learned young to rely on his intelligence and his sense of humor. His dignity, generally, was as sure and casual as his rumpled clothes. * After Florida, we met almost once a year between 1976 and 1978, and sporadically thereafter, both in England and the U.S. When I left the University, they offered me a position. But upon returning to Iowa, I learned that the poet I’d replaced, and whom I’d thought of as a friend, was circulating a document damning both me and another member of the writing faculty. I was stunned and couldn’t believe it. When Stephen heard what happened he was furious and came to my defense. Even after the poet had been let go, Stephen telephoned him and demanded that he apologize to me and withdraw his remarks. The man refused, of course, but it was a surprising measure of our friendship. I was instrumental during these years in bringing Spender to Detroit where I was the visiting poet at Wayne State. He gave a reading and a lecture on Modern Poetry and Modern Art. It so happened that the original paper wall-sized cartoons of Diego Rivera’s mural in the Detroit Institute of Art had just been discovered in some dusty old archive of the museum. We were invited to view them from a mezzanine where they were rolled out below us. He also came to Cornell College where I taught and spent a month there. He taught a seminar on Modern Poetry to a group of handpicked students, and gave three lectures and a farewell reading to packed houses. Writers and literary people came from all over Iowa came to hear him. Mount Vernon, Iowa, is of course, a very small stage for such a large player, so one weekend, Peg and I arranged a visit to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Since Stephen had known Tyrone Guthrie, the theater people set us up with fine seats and a backstage tour. One of the plays was “Waiting For Godot.” It was a compelling and polished performance, so when it was over Peg and I inquired what Stephen thought of it. “It was quite good, you know. I saw the play in London and didn’t like it at all and walked out after the first act,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. * I saw Stephen several times after that, once at his house one evening in St. John’s Wood where we had a wonderful supper of “scraps” that Natasha had prepared, and another time with Peg at Westminster Abbey when he delivered the eulogy for Henry Moore, after which he took us to The Groucho Club, a spot whose patrons' books were displayed behind the bar. * My world’s a smaller place without Stephen. But the sense of perspective I gained from being in his presence from time to time, my sense of what’s really important, my sense of decency and compassion and craft is a legacy that’s still with me. “I think continually of those who were truly great/Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history,” Stephen wrote in an early poem. Oh, yes. And so should we all. ---- Robert Dana was born in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston" title="Boston">Boston</a>, Massachusetts in 1929. He served in the South Pacific in World War II as a U.S. Navy radio operator. After the War, he moved from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, where he attended <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_University" title="Drake University">Drake University</a> and worked as a sportswriter for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Des_Moines_Register" title="Des Moines Register" class="mw-redirect">Des Moines Register</a>. Later he studied at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa" title="University of Iowa">University of Iowa</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Writers%27_Workshop" title="Iowa Writers' Workshop">Iowa Writers' Workshop</a>, and received a Masters Degree in 1954. From 1954-1994 he served as Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_College" title="Cornell College">Cornell College</a>, Mount Vernon, Iowa.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Dana#cite_note-cornell-0" title=""></a> In 1964, Dana was responsible for the resumption of the publication of The North American Review, and served as its editor for a number of years. He also taught at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Florida" title="University of Florida">University of Florida</a>. Dana has published over a dozen collections of his poetry. In addition, Dana's work has appeared in publications such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation" title="The Nation">The Nation</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker" title="The New Yorker">The New Yorker</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times">The New York Times</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Science_Monitor" title="The Christian Science Monitor">The Christian Science Monitor</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_%28magazine%29" title="Poetry (magazine)">Poetry (magazine)</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Poetry_Review" title="The American Poetry Review">The American Poetry Review</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iowa_Review" title="The Iowa Review">The Iowa Review</a>, and The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewanee_Review" title="Sewanee Review">Sewanee Review</a>. Dana's poetry has won a number of awards. His poetry collection "Starting Out for the Difficult World" was nominated for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize" title="Pulitzer Prize">Pulitzer Prize</a> in 1988. In 1989 he was the recipient of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmore_Schwartz" title="Delmore Schwartz">Delmore Schwartz</a> Memorial Award for Poetry, given by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_University" title="New York University">New York University</a>. He received a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushcart_Prize" title="Pushcart Prize">Pushcart Prize</a> in 1996, and has been awarded the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke" title="Rainer Maria Rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a> Prize for Poetry. He has also been the recipient of two <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Arts" title="National Endowment for the Arts">National Endowment for the Arts</a> Fellowships (1985 and 1993). In September 2004, Robert Dana was named poet laureate for the State of Iowa. He has also served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_University" title="Stockholm University">Stockholm University</a> and at several American colleges and universities. ________________________ </description><link>http://writerfriendships.blogspot.com/2008/12/spender-once-more-until-1976-when-he.html</link><author>noreply@blogger.com (Robert Sward)</author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tu-djPDRyWE/SUitXEAZ4eI/AAAAAAAAABw/IW0zFSyvDSA/s72-c/StevenSpender.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></item></channel></rss>

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