At Wednesday’s reading, Jeffrey Eugenides said he was genuinely surprised that he wrote a book that at all contained Jane Austen or George Eliot or the Victorians at all. Eugenides said that at Brown in the ‘80s, he was enamored with the modernists—Joyce, Proust, Faulkner—anyone or anything that was “taking apart consciousness.” But then, he said, he graduated and read Tolstoy (which exemplifies the kind of writing the modernists were reacting to) and discovered the “narrative drive and vividness of characters so compelling that they shouldn’t be left behind in the drive toward something new.” Thus, The Marriage Plot, in which deconstruction and tradition both have their place.

What Eugenides said in the post-reading interview with Alex Parsons really put the book in an articulate perspective for me. He said in writing this book he was interested in the moments in our lives when “our head and our heart are in conflict.” The head, in this case, is the sense-making deconstruction of Barthes and Derrida, the necessary acknowledgement that everything, even love, is a construct. The heart, then, is the passion Madeleine feels for Leonard, the dependence on the purity of feeling for truth. Of course, Leonard, a scientist with manic depression, is constantly negotiating head troubles and heart troubles. And Mitchell, a gifted philosopher in pursuit of religious purpose, is also grappling with head and heart, the known and the unknown.

Though many have criticized this novel for not being as epic in scope as Middlesex or as narratively risky as The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides’s comments on Wednesday gave words to why this book is still successful. In short, because it’s about—as many great novels are—the things that linger over our real selves for years and years after they take seed and ruin our graduation, or our trip across Europe, or our first love.

On Wednesday, Eugenides gave a bit of advice for first-time novelists: give yourself limitations. Don’t try to write the whole world your first time out. Sounds like excellent advice to me, but in a recent post over at The Millions, Eugenides articulates a slightly different lesson. He discussed why and how he sat down to write this novel, and tried to name what he learned from all of it. His lesson is the lesson I want to remember when I sit down to write mine:

But you don’t write a novel from an idea, or at least I don’t. You write a novel out of the emotional and psychological stuff that you can’t shake off, or don’t want to. For me, this had to do with memories with being young, bookish, concupiscent, and confused. Safely in my 40s, married and a father, I could look back on the terrifying ecstasy of college love, and try to re-live it, at a safe distance. It was deep winter in Chicago when all this happened. Every day I looked out my office window at snow swirling over Lake Michigan. After separating the two books, I put one in a drawer and kept the other on my desk. I ran off with The Marriage Plot and didn’t look back. I changed completely, became a different person, a different writer; I started a new life with a new love, and all without ever leaving home.

The other day I was telling a friend that I thought maybe Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot was a kind of feminist novel. As a reminder: Madeleine, a senior at Brown University, is trying to reconcile her adoration of Victorian novels that employ the marriage plot (an antiquated courtship narrative) with the changing landscape of literary criticism. In the midst of her academic consternations, she gets involved in a love triangle of her own with the enigmatic but depressive scientist, Leonard, and the geeky but tender religious studies major, Mitchell. The beautiful heroine, Madeleine, must choose between a man of science and a man of faith (a familiar plot trope we’ve seen as recently as the television show, Lost). I don’t want to give anything away about the ending of the novel, but Madeleine releases herself from that love triangle with a surprising epiphany that feels more third wave feminism than anything else.

How nice, I thought when I read it and closed the book. A novel where the heroine “wins” in spite of the men who love her, though not at their expense.

So I was telling my friend this and she asked if I’d read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom last year. I haven’t, but I know what it’s about—the troubled girlhood and college life of the character of Patty, and the love triangle she’s a part of. My friend thought it was interesting that both Freedom and The Marriage Plot are both recent celebrated novels about young women finding their way through romance and contemporary life, but that both of them were written by men.

We wondered over our brunch if the same praise would be lauded if women had written those novels. In fact, Ann Beattie’s latest new work (the novella, Walks With Men) is a chronicle of the love life of the twentysomething Jane in 1980s Manhattan, and tackles similar issues: how to be young, how to be in love, how to make sense of the world. But Beattie’s novella wasn’t given nearly the same attention. It was, however, given a bright pink and black cover bearing a photograph of a woman’s naked back.

I don’t mean to say I think The Marriage Plot is doing anything wrong. I think it’s doing so many things right. Not only did I enjoy reading it, but I also thought it was smart. Really smart, unashamedly, thrillingly smart. I’m excited that it exists. I’m also excited to see someone like Jean Thompson or Joy Williams or Mary Gaitskill write the same kind of novel and get the same kind of consideration.

See you all at the reading on Wednesday!

I wrote about Madeleine in my last post, and since The Marriage Plot is really about a love triangle, I want to give some time to the two male characters. First we have Mitchell, the Detroit-bred Greek-American Tom Waits-lookalike who is so torn apart when Madeleine rejects him that he has to go on an aimless post-grad backpacking trip to forget her. Where Madeleine’s struggles are with the construction of love, Mitchell’s are in wrestling with faith. One semester, he writes such an impressive paper for a class called “Religion and Aleination in 20th Century Culture” that the professor all but promises him an in at Harvard Divinity School. Mitchell instead flees to holy grounds in Italy and India.

Mitchell’s mostly solitary storyline is treated tenderly, and his crisis is much less dramatic than Madeleine’s. Mitchell quietly realizes that his search is for faith in 1982--in the wake of ‘60s lit crit, the midst of materialism, and the onset of a recession—might not be quite as simple as it once was. At one point, he considers how the all the blither blathering done by the deconstructionists still don’t answer the questions put forth by the Talking Heads: “No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song, ‘And you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’…And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’” Mitchell goes on to write his religious studies paper, “bending his answers toward their practical application,” but finding no real practical application when it comes to his own life.

Leonard, the character to whom many have drawn David Foster Wallace comparisons, is the enigmatic, bandana-wearing, manic depressive semi-genius that Madeleine is hopelessly in love with. He’s a scientist, but his explorations have very little to do with Mitchell’s riddle of existence or Madeleine’s myth of love. Toward the end of the novel, he tries to describe to Madeleine what it feels like to be depressed. He says, “What happens is that the brain sends out a signal that it’s dying. The depressed brain sends out this signal, and the body receives it, and after a while, the body thinks it’s dying, too.” Leonard’s search is less for something to believe in than for just a way to be alive.

In a way, though, Madeleine is looking to be alive through love. Mitchell is looking for a way to be alive through faith. And Leonard is looking for a way out of madness, toward life. So we have the trifecta of love, faith, madness, and who’s to say what the difference is between any of them.

I once read an article by an editor of a literary magazine that predicted the death of fiction would be writers who navel-gaze, writers who write stories about writing, or writers, or academia, or domestic affairs, or love. I’ve always had a problem with that argument—the idea that inward-looking content can’t be Important—and luckily it seems like Jeffrey Eugenides has ignored it altogether. His new novel, The Marriage Plot, is about writing, writers, academia, domestic affairs, and love, among other things. Mostly it’s about how to grow up, how to reconcile your way of seeing the world after the thrilling scaffolding of college vanishes. And, by being about all those things, it is anything but navel-gazing.

We met the heroine of the novel, Madeleine, hungover and full of regret on the morning of her graduation from Brown in 1982. But we meet her first via her bookshelf. “To start with, look at all the books,” Eugenides writes in the first line, before cataloging the novels she’s used to write her senior thesis on the marriage plot in the works of Austen, Eliot, and James. The traditional marriage plot, usually a three-way courtship dance between one maiden and two suitors, plays out in interesting ways with Madeleine, her hunky and manic depressive boyfriend Leonard, and her geeky best male friend, Mitchell.

Madeleine is perfectly preppy, from a well-to-do WASPy family in New Jersey, a fangirl of Victorian literature, and completely undone when she takes a class on semiotics and deconstruction. Though it critiques her beloved marriage plot, she becomes obsessed with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. When boyfriend Leonard swings between manic extremes, Madeleine turns to Barthes’s deconstruction of love: “And it was in this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude…It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.”

In The Marriage Plot, books both illuminate and crumble the characters’ worldviews. Books allow them freedom, books give language to their limitations, and books keep them company. In my favorite passage from the book, Madeleine has first read A Lover’s Discourse and is immediately struck:

What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from a jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.

This is my favorite passage because though it’s 1982, and it’s Brown, and it’s a rich girl, and it’s an erudite book, it’s also what happens to a lot of us. It’s what we wish to happen every time we crack open a new book: complete transportation, revelation, communion.

The Marriage Plot isn’t just for English majors or MFA students or academics. It’s for people who have ever felt the slight echo of something they’ve read when they’ve fallen in love, or fallen out of love, or pined for love. This book doesn’t want you to ask yourself what you know about semiotics and the marriage plot in Austen novels. This book wants you to ask yourself how much of what you know about love—how much of the way you love—is affected by what you’ve read. I’ll leave it to Eugenidies’ epigraph from French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld to explain why this book is important: “People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.”

In his reading at the UH Moore's Opera House last night, Michael Ondaatje deftly collaged a variety of scenes and moments from his most recent novel, The Cat's Table, to take us on a voyage across the oceans, through time and space. Before reading, Ondaatje addressed the question of the mix of autobiography and fiction in the book. While both he and the main character (also named Michael) took a journey on a boat called the Oronsay from Ceylon/Sri Lanka to England in the fifties when they were both 11 years old, he mentioned that in fact all he remembered of the voyage was the ping-pong table on the ship. Paradoxically, for him, this lack of memory freed him up to invent a new story, to create something more wild, more meaningful and more thrilling than reality could ever possibly have been. As he said, quoting Ornette Coleman about music, "What you begin with is the territory, what follows is the adventure."

And adventure we did, as he began with the boys' youthful highjinks on board then lead into a description of a proper Sri Lankan man, Dr. Fonseca, on his way to England. Ondaatje described him as "tentative and languid" with "a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live"---this serenity that the narrator had seen "only among those who have the armour of books close by" (and I couldn't help but see a bit of the author himself here). Then Ondaatje skillfully took us to the deck of the ship during a storm, through the Suez Canal and then on to London years later as he attempts to reconnect with Cassius, one of his co-conspirators on the Oronsay. Ondaatje's voice was surprisingly soft and gentle, a soothing monotone with clipped consonants and rapid flow. His tale was ethereal, carefully paced and surprisingly comforting. It turns out that Ondaatje's focus in The Cat's Table is not only crossing from Ceylon/Sri Lanka to London, but also traversing the smaller lines drawn across the ship itself, like the border he mentioned between the First Class and Tourist Class or like the silences between the characters themselves.

In the question and answer section with writer and UH professor Chitra Divakaruni, Ondaatje alternated between serious reflections on writing and quite funny anecdotes. A question from Divakaruni about the melding of non-fiction and fiction yielded the funniest one-liner of the night, as Ondaatje quoted famed Texas gadabout Kinky Friedman saying, "There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and I think I snorted it in 1976."

On a more serious note, he also declared that, beyond jazz, the greatest artistic invention of the twentieth century was the collage. Its impact, he said has been felt across the arts from film to painting, from literature to music, and he spoke insightfully about his own process of writing his first book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid as a collagist approach. First, he wrote fifty poems, then the prose pieces and finally worked to collage them all together, creating connections between the different texts on the page, adding photographs and writing fake interviews with Billy himself. He contrasted that collagist writing with his more recent approach to The Cat's Table, which, despite its chronological ebb and flow, was largely written straight from the beginning to the end.

There's an evocative line in The Cat's Table that seemed to sum up the evening for me: “We came to understand ... our lives could be large with interesting strangers who could pass us without any personal involvement.” Hopefully, you had a chance to witness this particular interesting stranger last night. And if not, the armor of his books are a wonderful substitute.

In Michael Ondaatje's most recent novel The Cat's Table, Ondaatje returns to the space he's perhaps most at home. Several reviewers of the book have said this home is the island of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, where the author grew up. Yet in fact, the novel does not really take place in the island nation, but rather in the space between Ceylon and London on a ship called the Oronsay making its slow three-week journey from East to West. There is an element of autobiography to the story; however, much like Francisco Goldman's insistence on the word novel to describe his work, Ondaatje also steadfastly affirms the book as a novel, not as memoir. And this despite the fact that the main character and the author have a lot in common: both are named Michael, both leave Sri Lanka to go to England at the age of 11 and both eventually wind up as globally recognized authors. While perhaps frustrating for some, this mixing of fiction and non-fiction does not bother this reader in the least; in my case, I've always enjoyed this sort of wild intermingling of fact and fiction (that ultimately ends up questioning the very existence of fact). So in this novel, Ondaatje returns to his home of perpetual transit, writing about the small world that comes to life onboard the Oronsay.

As in many of Ondaatje's novels, his focus is not on the powerful, but rather on those individuals whose lives are affected by larger world battles and happenings, but who have little control over the outcome. In this novel, Ondaatje focuses in on the lives of three young boys---Michael himself (nicknamed "Mynah"), the daredevil Cassius and the pensive, sickly Ramadhin---as they explore the ship and its motley assortment of adult passengers. The boys all sit at the Cat's Table, the least prestigious portion of the ship's dining room, far removed from the Captain's table. But as always, Ondaatje is interested in what happens at the margins; as he says, "What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves."

The fun of the book, its verve and power is derived from the adventures of these three boys as they voyage across the Indian Ocean, through the port of Aden, up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and off to England. None of the boys will be the same after the voyage and the perils and precarious situations they live through will leave them forever altered.

Remember you'll have an opportunity to hear Ondaatje read and answer questions this evening at 7:30pm at the Moores Opera House, University of Houston. Get your tickets now.

Some years ago, I was lent a copy of Michael Ondaatje's book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by a friend who knew of a project I was working on mixing prose, poetry and images. Unfortunately, as we've all experienced, sometimes a friend's book recommendation can be entirely off, but in this case, it was the perfect book to read at that moment in my life. Ondaatje's combination of poetic adventurousness and archive was invigorating.  At first, his investment in this deeply Western story seemed odd for this Sri Lankan-born, Canadian resident.  And yet, it shouldn't have seemed strange at all, as artists are forever exploring, never confined to that which they have experienced or known (for contemporary examples, see Lars Von Trier's American movie epics or Jorge Volpi's Eastern European novels.) Unsurprisingly somehow, Ondaatje's work on Billy the Kid is grounded in the childhood cowboy games he played while living in Sri Lanka.  In fact, Ondaatje says he was obsessed with Westerns ever since he was eight or nine years old. Even in Colombo, the myth of the American West had quietly taken root.

His obsession with the Western as a form and with Billy the Kid (and his raucous, violent twenty-one year long life) continued over the years as he moved from Sri Lanka to Britain and to Canada. Eventually he began to piece together this book, spending more time with Billy the Kid and his own imagination as he invented details of his life. He says in an Afterward to the book that he couldn't afford to visit the West or Texas at  the time, so, ever the fan of writing in situ, Ondaatje drafted much of the book in an abandoned barn, and its locale⎯ "the dry smell of past animals, the cobwebs on my pencils...became important." There were rats, he writes, in the stalls nearby and so that afternoon rats came into the novel. (Ondaatje has spoken in interviews about his predilection for writing in the locales where his novels are set⎯in Italy for The English Patient, in Sri Lanka for Anil's Ghost, etc.) Eventually, in crafting the book's final appearance, Ondaatje worked with a designer to include the fictional photography and images (as well as ample white space) that builds an airtight substructure for the book.

I've gone into all this detail about Billy the Kid for a few reasons.  First, because it shows that Ondaatje's visit to Houston next week is a kind of imaginative home-coming, a chance to visit the Texas he never got to see while writing his book (though 2011 Houston arguably has even less to do with Billy the Kid than that Canadian barn where he wrote much of the book).  It's also a chance to recognize a non-Texan author for what I consider one of the best lines ever written about the state; it's become a kind of mantra for me: "The blood came down like river ride / long as Texas down his side."

Also, I wanted to initially introduce Ondaatje as a poet.  He's written far more books of poetry than of fiction, and yet he'll forever be recognized as the author of the novel The English Patient, later made into the award-winning movie of the same name.  Despite his novelist fame, Ondaatje strikes me as a poet living and writing in a novelist's world.  He has a poet's love of language, forming it and deforming it, attentive to the most minute details of his artistic material.

Don't miss your chance to see this Sri Lankan-born poet cowboy next Monday evening at 7:30pm at the Moores Opera House, University of Houston.

One of the most exciting things about art is the unexpected synergies and conversations that emerge when various works are placed next to each other, often at random.  Whether in the gallery or on a stage, suddenly links are established and connections are made visible.

On Monday night at the Wortham Center, the audience witnessed just such an auspicious pairing.  As Francisco Goldman and then Nicole Krauss took to the stage, the intimate details from each of their novels created a shared discussion about love, grief, longing, death and hope.  Rich Levy began the evening by saying that Goldman's novel (Say Her Name), though it plumbs the depths of loss, actually emerges as a kind of celebration.  Before reading from a surprisingly funny chapter of his novel, Goldman enjoined the audience to giggle whenever they found something humorous; he gave everyone permission to experience a complex range of emotions and not simply a somber melancholy.  The chapter featured robotic rats in subway stations and litter twirling the night air like frozen bats, as he recounted several instances prior to the death of his wife Aura Estrada in which he experienced small moments of loss.  These were often seemingly trivial stories, typical mix-ups like a forgotten phone call provoking worry or misunderstood directions resulting in both of them standing alone on different subway platforms with a few stops between them.  These moments of temporary separation became tiny, absurd rehearsals of the larger absence haunting the narrative.  As Goldman joked, "Death doesn't let you stop for hot chocolate."  There was a sense of fun in the prose, but also a very palpable sense of ruin, of writing from the ruins of the day that was supposed to have been--"the ruins of the future," as Goldman called them.

Both authors mentioned Bruno Schultz's book The Street of Crocodiles as a text they kept close by during their writing process and a book that Aura Estrada also valued deeply.  Nicole Krauss mentioned it as she began her reading as a way of pulling out a thread that united her work with Goldman's. Unexpectedly, Krauss's reading also meditated strongly on the aftermath left behind by death. In the section she read from Great House, she used the first-person voice of a father to think about his relationship with his own son after his wife and the son's mother had passed.

Themes of death and longing and hope reemerged during the discussion section thoughtfully moderated by University of Houston Honors College professor and novelist, Robert Cremins.  Cremins pointed out that all the characters in the book seem to be in a moment of crisis, brutally struggling within themselves.  These crises motivate the characters of both novelists as they attempt to grapple with intensely fraught situations.  Krauss talked about how, for her, empathy is the only reason to write, the opportunity to crawl inside the psyche of another person.  She also spoke about the inheritances that come down to us and "reverberate through the generations."  Goldman spoke about his investigations into what Marcel Proust has referred to as "the mysteries of personality" (thanks to Lydia Davis's recent translations).  At the end, Goldman returned to the Kabbalah and the Jewish mystical tradition as he talked about his mission as a writer as "getting the spark of life into the mud."

In their writing, it seems that both Krauss and Goldman are working towards a similar mystical goal.

I said it in a previous post, but I’ll say it here again: I think Nicole Krauss’s most recent novel, Great House, is one of the top three novels I’ve read in the last year. Probably even the last five years. While writing these posts over the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out exactly why I responded to it so strongly. Yes, the sentences are lovely and yes, the story concept is rich, but there was something else I couldn’t quite pin down.

I returned to the notebook that her first novel helped me begin, and found part of an interview with her that I’d copied out. In response to the question, “Why do you write?” Krauss answers this:

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it’s something to do to pas the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about. http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0502/krauss/interview.html

Back when I was applying to MFA programs, I kept returning to that quote when attempting to write personal statements for the applications. Why do you want to be in an MFA program? Why do you want to, of all things, write? I thought I’d never heard anyone say it better than she had—not just that you can’t help but write, but also because it is a way to live the life you can’t yet live, or the one you never will. It is a way to say the good things that happen and control the bad things that happen. It is a defense, and sometimes the only defense.

It strikes me now that Great House is really about writing. Yes, there are the four characters narrating their separate stories, but the fifth (and perhaps most important) character is the mysterious writing desk linking those narratives, which has served as witness to both low tragedies and exalted loves across generations and continents. The writing that happens at that desk is the way the characters withstand life’s pain. It is their defense. I think I responded to this novel so strongly because it is, in many ways, a love letter to the act of writing, of recording, of sitting down at a desk—made of veined wood, worn, sturdy, many-drawered—and rephrasing the world.

I think I’ve figured it out. This is a fine novel, a great novel. It is a novel for anyone interested in writing, and by that I mean anyone who tells themselves stories in order to survive.

Time spirals around continually in Francisco Goldman's novel Say Her Name.  Aura dies on the first page and then she is alive and then she is gone and always time is defined by where we are in relation to the date of her passing: July 25, 2007.  This narrative structure gives a sense of motion and movement and instability, all of which allow the reader to breathe a bit.  I was asking myself repeatedly: is this scene before Aura's death?  Or after?  At the end we are suddenly in the moment on the beach in Mazunte, that fateful moment when a wave hit Aura at just the wrong angle and took her life.

As I read the book, I wondered how a person can focus in on this kind of awful, random horror for so long and with the diligent intensity that writing a novel demands. Slowly I began to see why Goldman kept on writing this book and why he labored to pull it out of his deepest depths.  I also understood what an intense experience reading the book is.  It becomes a communion of reader and writer and character.  We all participate in bringing Aura into the world of the living again and allowing her to think and write and breathe once more.

It is crucial to remember though that this book is still a novel, not a memoir.  There are parts that are highly fictionalized and even fanciful.  Perhaps unexpectedly, there's also a good deal of humor in the book, both Aura's humor and Frank's.  I'm glad Goldman decided to write a novel and not a more traditional memoir, because the imagined elements of the novel move it to another level, to a place where pain and horror are transcended by humor, joy and even happiness.

It's been a bit challenging for me to write these blog posts.  Writing through this mixture of the personal and the literary means dealing with a number of conflicting emotions and thinking about deeply difficult topics.  But then when I turn to the novel and think about the intense challenge its writing must have entailed, I'm left with even more respect (and awe) for Goldman as a writer.  And Frank as a person.

Don't miss Francisco Goldman this Monday, September 19 at the Wortham Center at 7:30pm.

In a 2005 New York Magazine interview with Nicole Krauss (click here to read), the interviewer asks to see some of Krauss’s poems, and Krauss declines, “having set aside what she describes as an impossible quest for poetic precision.” Of course, you can still listen to some of her poems here, at the Paris Review. And even these days--after the critically acclaimed Great House was a finalist for the National Book Award –she is often described in reviews and magazines as a “former poet” or someone who has abandoned poetry for the more suitable genre of prose. This might make sense considering that while her most recent novels are gorgeous tragedies, sprawling across time, with textured characters in vibrant settings, something of the poet in search of precision remains in her language.

In Great House, a novel weaving four separate narrative threads into a complex tapestry of sorrow, each voice carefully bears its specific tragedy in small, beautiful sentences. In the thread narrated by Arthur Bender, who is losing his wife to a slow dementia, he thinks this about the nature of their love at the end of their life togethe

The act of love is always a confession, Camus wrote. But so is the quiet closing of a door. A cry in the night. A fall down the stairs. A cough in the hall. All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin. Imagine myself into her loss. Trying and failing. Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I wanted to fail. Because it kept me going. My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

I thought Great House was one of the best books of last year, not only because the construction of it is a brave, multi-voiced beast of a story, but because inside that big structure are precise images and poetic confessions. The whole of Great House is made up of sentences like those above, and while you will be impressed by the structural feat, what will stay with you is the way the lyrical prose glimmered, making you feel as though each confession was only for you.

Toward the end of Great House, Arthur discusses his sadness by way of remembering the small things that represent the bigger, unspeakable loss:

We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door.

In much the same way, what I remember most and appreciate most from Great House are the precise details and images that speak to something larger, but reverberate on the page all on their own. Perhaps Krauss’s inner poet has not been abandoned after all, but rather finally satisfied by the intricate assembly of poetic details into a grandly orchestrated novel.

When I first purchased Say Her Name some months back it was with a mix of anticipation and fear.  I was happy to have another one of Francisco Goldman's novels, excited to be sucked into his always entrancing prose.  I knew the narrative would pull me in and not let me go, but, this time around, I wasn't sure if I was ready.

The difficult thing is that Say Her Name is the story of how Goldman lost his wife Aura Estrada and his horrific personal journey away from the brink of real madness and through the process of writing about her life and their relationship.  But unlike my experience of other books that deal with grief in this personal, physical way, I knew the main actors in the drama.  This meant that reading this act of remembrance was also a trip through my own memories of this amazing person, Aura.  While I only spent time with her on a few occasions, those times were incredibly intense and, in the case of their wedding in San Miguel de Allende, overwhelmingly joyful.

Goldman has talked about writing this novel as a way of bringing Aura back to life, resuscitating her and living with her again through the writing process.  Aura does come back to life in the book, she becomes the same witty, smart, hilarious, vibrant person that she was in daily life.  And this is both a rush of joy and a bittersweet encounter.

Please make time to come see Francisco Goldman on September 19, 2011 at the Wortham Center downtown.

In the summer of 2004 I was 22, poor, recently graduated, and bored at my Washington, D.C desk job. I was frantically checking books out of the Capitol Hill library, hoping something would make my life feel meaningful or tell me where to go next. Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks Into a Room was featured on a display table in the library, and I read it in my too-expensive, too-hot sublet off Constitution Avenue.

Man Walks Into a Room is – like much of Krauss’s work – about the nature of memory. Samson Greene, an English professor, develops a brain tumor and suddenly cannot remember anything past his childhood, and then deserts his wife to undergo memory replacement experiments with a Nevada doctor. It is a rich concept with unexpected turns, exceptionally well-written, and I ate it up. But when I got to the end, it became something more.

The short epilogue suddenly switches point of view to that of Anna, the long-suffering wife of Samson. I read it, and was so astonished by it that I sat down and copied it out, word-for-word, in the first page of a brand new notebook. Here is a passage from that epilogue:

We took a drive and stopped by a path on the side of the road. There was a No Trespassing sign, but we ignored it. The sound of a hunter’s gunshots broke the distance. We ducked into a silo—you could see the sky through the gaps in the tin roof, and there were birds up there. Everything, parts I couldn’t have imagined would care, ached for some physical remark of his love. His mouth was cold and tasted metallic, like the season itself, if that’s possible. To me he always seemed like that, autumnal. Painfully earnest, with an awkward swiftness to the way he moved, a physical remoteness like he was already receding. I don’t remember who kissed whom. It was one of those lucid days in which you can see your whole life like a promise before you.

And just like that, at the very end, Man Walks Into a Room becomes a novel also about the nature of love.

The two fantastic novels Krauss has written since, 2005’s History of Love and last year’s Great House, also deal with the themes of memory and half-known love, and they bloom out big and fragrant. That the otherwise modest Man Walks into a Room ends where it does, with a mysterious suggestion towards the aching welt at the center of the story, makes sense considering what she would go on to write.

I spent two aimless years in D.C, volunteering for losing presidential campaigns and running out of happy hour money, but after returning to that notebook page where I had copied out the epilogue, I decided what I really I wanted to do was write sentences like those, which articulated what it was to want something inexplicable. It’s safe to say that the epilogue was what made me start something new, a writing program.

On the early autumn day I drove a UHaul away from D.C, it was beautiful: a clear sky trip through the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge, horse farms and vineyards in the distance, green everywhere, and I was alone. It was the only time I didn’t feel sad while moving. It was one of those days, just like I’d read about.

Francisco Goldman was the first writer I realized was a human being. In the real world. Off the page. It's odd it took so many years for me to recognize this very obvious fact. I was living in Tampico, Mexico, in 2004 and reading his latest book (at the time), The Divine Husband. The novel revolves around a brief period that the original pan-Americanist literary and political powerhouse, José Martí, spent in Guatemala. Goldman's novel invents the story of a young woman, María de las Nieves Morán, with whom he's said to have fallen in love, but the novel also delves into the stories of a panoply of characters around her, as she travels back and forth to New York and around other parts of the Americas. I'd read (and loved) all of Goldman's previous novels before that: The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman.

I spent two long days on the couch in our hot, sticky living room, enthralled by the novel. I slowly became more and more obsessive about the man who wrote these books, snooping around on-line and searching for any information about Goldman or Martí. I even got a copy of the complete works of José Martí in Spanish to deepen my quest. But suddenly, one day as I was cyber-stalking Goldman, I found out he'd be in Austin that following weekend. I talked it out with friends and decided in the end to take the risk. I got on a bus from Tampico and rode the sixteen hours or so north, all the while furiously writing out questions for the "author."  I went to Goldman's event and sat near the back, finally building up the nerve to ask one overly thought-out, frighteningly complex question. Afterwards, I struck up a conversation with the man himself and, surprise surprise, he was a human being.  And a friendly one at that.

Long story short, Francisco Goldman became Frank. He was smart (I already knew that), but he was also a raucously good time: funny, kind and incredibly open and welcoming. That weekend, I also met and fell for Aura, his girlfriend then, and a slew of his literary and not-so-literary friends. I did an awkward interview with Frank in a hotel lobby based on all the questions I'd pulled together on the bus. Rather than being scared (probably the more rational response), he was flattered and charmed. We ended up hanging out all weekend, drinking well into the morning, partying like literary rock stars, even swimming in a sparkling pool well after the bars had closed. On the bus back to the dusty, industrial neighborhood where I was living in Tampico, I was literally bouncing with joy. Who knew the people with their names on books were actual people?

Recently, Inprint asked me to blog about Frank's most recent book, Say Her Name, and specifically about its mix of memoir and fiction. So each week for the next three weeks, I'll be putting a new blog post up here. As I thought about what I would write, I realized that my experience of Francisco Goldman, the author, is impossible for me to separate from my experience of Frank, the friend. So these posts will also be a mixture of memoir and book review. And of course promotion for his upcoming event in Houston on September 19 at the Wortham Center downtown. Don't miss it!  Get your tickets now!

By Andrew Kozma

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Kay Ryan’s reading last night. I’ve been immersing myself in her poetry for over a month, so I felt that I had a good handle on the way her poetic mind works, but that’s a far cry from the way a person presents herself onstage. And that’s not even to approach the dire fact that great poets can be horrible, utterly disastrous readers of their own poetry.

Poets are not actors, after all.

But, if you’re lucky, a poet can be personable and completely charming, and so on the ball that each poem is surrounded by laughter even though – as you know, if you’ve been reading these blogs – the poems themselves are darkling meditations on life and thought and the pitfalls of human interaction.

One of the points that Kay Ryan stressed throughout the reading is that poems that other people have responded to as depressing – such as “Crustacean Island” and its depiction of a human-less land – Ryan actually finds hopeful, or peaceful, or beautiful. And on stage she may say that she’s somewhat misanthropic, but her personality belies her statement. She delights in play and willful misinterpretation, and those qualities can only be fully expressed in the presence of others.

It’s that sense of play mixed with her utter seriousness with regards to the art of poetry that allows Ryan to take chances with her reading that would derail another poet. How else does she get away with interrupting her own poems repeatedly without harming the integrity of the poem?

There are two things I’ll take away from that night.

The first is Ryan’s quip about the importance of the art vs. the importance of the artist. That if she and her book were on a life raft and another Kay Ryan was helming the rescue craft (admittedly, we’re clearly into the world of Ryan’s own poetry here) that was only big enough to save either Ryan or her book, she’d save her book.

The second thing is just this quote about poetry, what it does and what it is. “It is a roomier place that words create. It is another kingdom.”

Luckily, you have the key to that kingdom before you. All you have to do is open the cover and read.

Readers of poets like to find arspoeticas, poems that tell you the poet’s philosophy and, as a side bonus, how to read that poet’s work. In the poem “Flamingo Watching”, Kay Ryan says, ostensibly about the flamingo, that “she’s/too exact and sinuous/to convince an audience/she’s serious.” Of course, the poem talks about the poet, spotlighting how Ryan’s poetry is a kernel of darkness popped into popcorn, how the poems distract from the seriousness of her topics through wit, beauty, and sound.

This attention to sound in Ryan’s poems is why I’m especially looking forward to hearing her read (on Monday, April 11th, at 7:30 pm in the Alley Theatre, dontchaknow). I tend to read poems silently, the implicit assonance and rhyme echoing in my mind rather than in my ear. I write poems the same way, mostly in silence, reading aloud only when I need to get myself back into the mindset of the poem. I read some of Ryan’s poems aloud simply because the mix of sounds is so joyous on the tongue, a pleasure that’s only apparent when my muscles are dancing around the tongue twister.

How does Ryan read her poems? Does she stop at the end of the line, emphasizing the structure of the poem on the page? Does she stop at the end of the sentence, prioritizing the sense of the poem over the construction of it? Or does she highlight the sound, stressing the internal rhymes? I read Ryan’s poems silently at first because if I read them aloud, my tongue and my ears and my eyes all get twisted up together, trying to make sense of what does, indeed, make sense, but only to the practiced mouth.

As I wait to see what Ryan does on Monday, and then report what she did in this blog on Tuesday, I’ll leave you with a fragment of a poem to give you a sense of what I want to see illuminated. Here’s the beginning of “The Test We Set Ourself”:

If we could be less human,
if we could stand out of the range
of the cataracts of the given,
and not find our pockets swollen
with change we haven’t—but must have—
stolen, who wouldn’t?

By Andrew Kozma

If you play in the dark, you might get hurt. You stumble over an unnoticed footstool or slip on a stray bit of clothing. But you play in the dark anyway because the experience is so fascinating. In the dark, your imagination populates the world. You could be exploring a previously undiscovered system of caves or trapped in the dungeons of an evil ogre or in an observatory waiting for the ceiling to open up and reveal the naked night sky.

The dark holds both nightmare and dream, both the horrific and the laughable, the serious and the silly. This is perhaps the aspect of Kay Ryan’s work that I like best, and you get to see it clearly on display in The Best of It, her latest collection of new and selected poems.

Over the years, over the books, over the dozens upon dozens of dozens of poems on display, Ryan will again and again take a subject that is a joke, a cliché, or simply plain inane, and she will treat it with the utmost seriousness. What we consider play, she’ll reevaluate in the dark. She’ll take a comforting phrase such as It’s always darkest before the dawn and reveal how uncomforting that platitude really is. How do you know when it is darkest? When can you be sure that the world will begin to lighten around you instead of deepening into an even more unintelligible shade of black?

It’s the humor and grace of Ryan’s line that keeps these existential meditations from fully undercutting life’s joys. The humor in poems like “Don’t Look Back” reveal that it’s not our limitations that should depress us, but our all-too-willingness to ignore them. Compare the fish (“Fish cannot/recklessly/swivel their heads/to check/on their fry”) who are “torpedoes of disinterest” with the goose and her goslings,

who if she
looks back
acknowledges losses
and if she does not
also loses.

The goose loses because she’s able to see what she has lost, but chooses ignorance instead. It’s the acknowledgment of our faults and failures, Ryan says, that make us human and that, perversely, convince us to enjoy the beautiful in life all the more.

By Andrew Kozma

Here we have the detritus of everyday life: a discarded soda can; loose change along the curb of the road; a chipped and weathered gravestone.

If the purpose of poetry is to transform these every day remnants into beauty, then that is exactly what Kay Ryan does, except she does it with the remnants of language. Sure, there are poems in The Niagara River that take the object and make it into beauty: a shoe, old lamps & doorknobs, and the items in a still life: “the bowl, the/goblet, the vase/from Delft—each/the reliquary/of itself.”

But more often Ryan’s poems take the bits of language we take for granted and transform them. Poems digress into letting the other shoe drop and defining exactly an ideal audience, discovering chickens coming home to roost and elephants in rooms, and if all of these subjects sound banal, that’s because they are. But the poems are the philosopher’s stone that change these subjects into the gold of poetry which, in Ryan’s case, means turning her subjects around philosophically.

We say these phrases without understanding. What, in fact, do they mean? Or, more importantly, what could they mean? For more than any other kind of writer, language is the subject of a poet’s work, the play of words against words, the expected meaning against the implied meaning, and how language is a faulty mechanism for communication. What we say to each other is easily misunderstood, even with the most succinct and common of phrases.

Of course, that’s what makes language itself such a ripe subject for poetry. It is in those misunderstandings that beauty is born, and when Ryan writes about those remnants of language we take for granted – clichés, sayings, platitudes – she is intentionally misunderstanding, searching out the cracks in language. She exposes what we don’t know in what we think we know, you know?

You can feel the truth of what Ryan’s writing about. As she says in “The Other Shoe”:

[…] nothing can
stop the midair
collusion of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.

By Andrew Kozma

A few months ago I was reading Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook and learned about the denaturing of alcohol, a process that involves mixing additives to ethanol make it unpalatable and/or poisonous to drink. Originally, this was so industries could use alcohol without having to worry about exorbitant taxes, and the government wouldn’t have to worry about the ultra-cheap industrial alcohol being sold on the side as a cheap drink.

During Prohibition, the government used the denaturing process on all alcohol to dissuade drinking, because even though alcohol production was outlawed, bootleggers would take denatured alcohol and try to strip the additives from it. They failed, mostly, but people were willing to risk a drink anyway, and the bootleggers got around the bad taste through their own additives: fruit juices, soda water, anything to cover up the flavor.

I’m in love with the idea of denaturing – taking something and making it fundamentally different than what it was in both its substance and its purpose. With alcohol, the substance became toxic and the purpose was turned to industrial uses rather than those of pleasure. In The Niagara River, I find Kay Ryan continuing her denaturing of nature itself, turning the substance of the natural world into a dressed set. And the purpose…

Well, the traditional use of nature imagery in poetry is that of beauty. Sure, that beauty can mean: it can be evidence of the glory of God, or it can be used to reflect the poet’s state of mind as a pathetic fallacy, or it can provide a surface off of which to bounce the poem’s ideas. But in Kay Ryan’s poems, nature has been denatured down to words. The beauty, when there’s beauty, is also in the words. Ryan is not a poet of scenes or of description, but of elegant construction.

If her poems were movies, they would be filmed on a soundstage with beautiful, but obviously painted, backdrops. Nature is revealed through the artifice of the poem as artifice itself, as something that gives meaning only because we give it meaning. And this, of course, as Ryan well knows, leaves us in a world of doubt. As she says in “Post-Construction”,

Who knows better
than the builder
not to trust
a structure

One thing that beginning writers fail to do is to see the real for the abstraction. They talk about “love” and “despair” but all they can conjure up to illustrate what they feel are red roses and blue violets. The first thing a writer learns is that detail is everything. Who smells the roses? Who looks up at the sky and sees loneliness in the distance between the stars?

Of course, the second thing that a writer learns is that detail is the writer’s entranceway into the general. If you want to talk about love, you talk about a specific love, and that specific love brings the reader back around to thinking about love in general. You have to take the back way in to revelation.

This is a lesson that Kay Ryan knows by heart. All of her poems dance between the abstract and the real, the general and the specific, and most of the time her poems travel in a direct – if unexpected – line between those two points. True, she varies the direction she’s traveling, but the end result is always the same: a re-visioning of our world.

Take “The Old Cosmologist” from Say Uncle, for example. The poem is a masterful display of misdirection. The short poem uses the dense nature of Ryan’s style – each line only a few words long – to focus the reader’s attention upon the old cosmologists, and their desperate reasoning that if only they’d tried harder, theorized better, then their ideas about the universe would not have been outdated.

And from that, we understand the poem is about the lack of their ability – and so ours as well – to prevent change. But read these last lines, and how our understanding of the poem is revised by that deadpan and final, in all senses of the word, three-word line:

as if change were not
something that just happens
at certain stages
but a private test failed
moment by moment
as age is.

By Andrew Kozma 

I’ve been reading Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle as a complete newbie to her work. I’m sure that’s not exactly true: I know I’ve heard her name before, and I’m sure that I’ve read a poem or three of hers over the years in journals or on-line or recommended by friends. But the truth is that this is my first extended experience with the poet Kay Ryan, and I’m delving into her books now before her appearance here in Houston on April 11th.

My current plan is to spend a few weeks on her three latest full-length books: Say Uncle, The Niagara River, and The Best of It. The past week I’ve been entrenched in the terse, intricately-woven poems of Say Uncle and my first thought was that Ryan is a spiritual successor to Marianne Moore. Similar to Moore, she tends to focus on the crafting of the poem almost as much as the subject, and the subjects are passing gems which have caught her interest – turns of phrase, like “Say Uncle”, or evocative images, such as half a ticket scoured from a pocket – now encrusted in a jewel-like setting.

But I’m not the first to find Moore in Ryan. The Library Journal claimed the kinship in print, and their similarities are praised throughout the internet. The comparison seems a little strange because Ryan’s poems are so different in appearance and are not ruled by the laws of syllabics. Instead, each line of her poems is the cut-off breath of a voice who wants your complete attention to each and every word, who is a master of revelation and so each pause promises a reinterpretation of what has come before.

For Ryan, as for Moore, her poems are as much about the dance as who you are dancing with. The subject may be seeming slight, but so are the everyday events of our lives. And like those events – perhaps meaningless to anyone else – they can affect us deeply.

By Miah Arnold

In volunteering among the refugees Hurricane Katrina sent to Houston from the Louisiana coast, Chitra Divakaruni was struck by the range of stories the survivors told. What made some people remain calm in the face of the disaster, she wondered, while others panicked? Before she’d pondered the question too long, Hurricane Rita hit Houston and sent Divakaruni herself into the kind chaos she had thought so much about already – and One Amazing Thing was born.

The novel, Divakaruni’s latest, is about a diverse group of strangers trapped in the basement of an Indian Consulate in the United States after an earthquake. An asthmatic Gulf War veteran trained in emergency management leads the stranded group to care for themselves physically, but he cannot quell the volatile emotions building up among them as the water level on the floor begins to rise, threatening to drown everybody before rescuers arrive. An Indian graduate student of English literature takes a cue from the copy of Canterbury Tales she’s reading for class, though, and suggests her companions each tell one amazing story from their lives to help pass the time.

One after another of the earthquake’s prisoners tells a story from his or her life – and they are truly amazing, transformative stories as diverse as the people telling them: an Indian graduate student, an African American veteran, a wealthy elderly white couple , a Chinese-Indian grandmother with her Chinese-American granddaughter, a Muslim fundamentalist teenager, and two Indian employees of the Consulate. Through the course of storytelling not only do strangers have to revise the stereotypes they had created for each other, but so do people who have known each other their entire lives.

Some of Divakaruni’s greatest successes in the literary world have been with the short story – and so this form of stories within stories is very fitting for her. I keep thinking about what I should write about, which was my favorite of the stories, and it proves impossible: I loved the story of the Chinese grandmother forced to flee India, the story of her granddaughter’s playing the violin, of both the consulate employees strangely paired stories, and of the older white man’s sad upbringing. Many of these stories were so unlike any I’ve heard before, that I will think about them for a long time to come.

Which brings me to reflect on how, though the plot line dubs the novel the child of the Canterbury Tales, the idea of using story to save one’s life reminds me more of The Arabian Nights. But not only this: One Amazing Thing will always hold a special place in my heart for its allegiance to the folktale about the grasshopper pursuing a PhD in English -- er -- I mean the grasshopper playing violin all summer and taking flack from the ant skilled in emergency management. I mean: hear, hear to a story in 2011 that dares gives the power of the tale – and the keepers of that power – their proper due.

Though Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom has been crowned this year’s Great American Novel in many circles, I nominate Gish Jen’s World and Town for the honor. It is a work that gamely rolls up its sleeves and unravels discomforting and contradictory ideas Americans have about religion and superstition, about new and old American ethnicities, about metropolis, rurality, hope, terrorism, family, failure, success, death, luck, and regeneration. The tone eschews irony and bitterness for a straightforward, very funny humanism. It starts a little slow, but hey: so did Moby Dick. The momentary wait for the story to fly pays off ten-fold.

The story itself is simple enough at the outset: sixty-seven-year-old Hattie Kong returns to the small New England town she spent part of her youth in after consecutively losing her husband and her best friend to cancer. The novel is not concerned with glancing over the shoulder of nostalgia to tell the story of her ‘life’: in World and Town, life is now. It is an electrified thing buzzing with the tensions of the present and gambits for the future.

Among the plot lines that bear out these tensions, the first and most immediate is the tumultuous relationship she begins with a family of Cambodian refugees flailing violently within the broader American culture. Simultaneously Carter Hatch, whose family of ambitious scientists had taken Hattie herself in when she was a teenager escaping the Cultural Revolution, returns to town. In the past Carter has betrayed Hattie in their love and professional lives both, but their deep knowledge of each other brings them together again. As Hattie tangles with these additions to her life, relatives from China send her plaintive missives begging her to restore the bones of her parents from an Iowa graveyard to their homeland.

The novel is told primarily from Hattie’s point of view, however her unswerving humanistic outlook is often intruded on by abrasive and irreverent observations she hears in the voices of her dead husband and friend. Furthermore, while the novel is Hattie’s, it is enriched by two chapters told by some of the novels most important side-characters: Sophie, the Cambodian teenager on the lam from a West Coast foster home; and Evereett, a white farmer (second generation Hungarian) whose wife turns to fundamentalism after they lose their farm to organic growing hippies.

The picture of America the intersections of these storylines present is both hopeful and dire. It is an important, satisfying read full of characters who will stick to your heart and storylines that update what it means to be American in important, dead-on, and yet, somehow, unassuming ways.

By Miah Arnold

Chitra Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions is a breathless and lively retelling of the Mahabarata - an approximately 2,500-year-old Hindu epic said to be twelve times longer than the Bible, and which includes many of the classic stories from ancient India. Divakaruni's version is written from the point of view of the queen Draupadi, whose life is central to the eighteen-day civil war between cousins that is the climax of the original text.

Before reading Divakaruni's book, I asked my husband, Raj, who is from a Hindu background, to point me towards a good translation of the Mahabarata so that I could gauge the texture of Divakaruni's revisioning of it, but he balked: “Nobody reads it. I've never read it. We just... tell it to each other. It's supposed to be this layering of changing stories, and that's part of what makes it the Mahabarata.”

“Come on,” I said, “There has to be a text.”

“But didn't you say the story's about Draupadi?” he asked, and I nodded. “Well then: you already know the story of Draupadi. It's your favorite.”

This is one of the problems with being a white girl from rural Utah married to an Indian: I learn a lot of stories but am still working on nailing the myriad of classical names that go with them. Raj reminded me, though, of the part of Draupadi's story that I know.

It begins several chapters into the Mahabarata, when the great warrior Arjun Pandava wins princess Draupadi's hand in marriage by a feat of archery so exquisite that it would have left Robin Hood's head spinning. When Arjun brings his bride to the small shack his clan is living in - though royal, the Pandavas are in an exile because of the subterfuge of a cousin set on killing them - one of his four brothers calls into his mother to come see what surprise Arjun has found in the forest.

“Share it among yourselves,” she calls back out to the boys without looking, “That's the rule of the house.”

“But mother,” they cry, to no avail: it's already too late. In an American sitcom, they'd all have a big belly laugh over the guffaw, at this point: but in the Mahabarata, when your mother accidentally demands you share your brother's new wife, that's what has to happen. The uttered words are law. Draupadi has to marry all five brothers.

In our house, we like giggling over the imagined disasters that might occur if our own words were always taken so literally, and so this story comes up a lot. But I never knew the rest of Draupadi's story, which is consistently surprising and compelling - at least as it is as told in The Palace of Illusions.

From Draupadi's fiery birth to her love of Krishna, from the night she's insulted so profoundly it becomes the kernel of a bloody war, to her observation of the war itself, The Palace of Illusions explores the complexities of fate and womanhood, of duty and desire. Divakaruni endows Draupadi with a humanity so profound her problems feel as current to the modern reader as their own.

I’m not a big sports fan, but one of the things I like about going to watch a game is the rise and fall of the crowd. In baseball, I like when the star first basemen comes up to bat, and the stadium P.A. starts playing “Eye of the Tiger” or some other theme song. I have no idea what this guy can do, but I can see the fans stand up, and the whole stadium starts to feel like anything could happen, and we’re all hoping it does so we have a chance to cheer even louder. As a poet going to a poetry reading outside the university setting, I feel this same voyeuristic impulse. I don’t know what people like in poetry, because poetry doesn’t come up in normal conversations. And so, when Alicia Ostriker stood up last Monday night to read from The Book of Seventy, I didn’t know how people would react.

I’m not saying that I go to a poetry reading only to spectate the spectators. I am always fascinated by how a poet reads, what his voice sounds like, whether it resembles the voice I assumed he or she would have when I was reading the poems. I will say I was surprised by the way Major Jackson read. He voice was subdued, which aptly matches the impressionistic, lyrical poems from Holding Company, but the personal reading of “Letter to Brooks” had a different style to it. Is this how the poems sound to him? That might be my greatest curiosity. As an avid poetry reader, I’m always curious about whether the voice people use in reading their own poems is the voice they hear while they’re writing it, or whether this is the way they want other people to experience it.

I’m not really sure what I would say about the audience’s response. It didn’t have that same immediate kind of applause as Ostriker received during her reading. But then, I’m not really sure that Jackson’s poems are meant to have an impact like that. Or it didn’t seem that Jackson was looking for that kind of response from the audience. Where Jackson came across as subdued, Ostriker was effusive, speaking about Willem de Kooning as an inspiration for these new poems. In particular, she looked to the “pure” and “austere” lines in his later paintings.

About a third of the way through her reading, Ostriker read “The Plateau,” a poem about the placid bliss one can experience in a relationship, that deep serenity I spoke of in an earlier blog posting, what you might call the plateau of a relationship. It’s a beautiful poem, especially for its ending. For, no matter how satisfied these two people might be, one of them will have to die first, and at that point, passion will again take over. The wording of the poem is “pure” and “austere,” and the audience was absolutely wild for it. After that poem, Ostriker had won an undying loyalty from the Houston audience.

When you see members of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program out and about, that knowledge exists among us. If we’ve had a workshop class together, then we’ve shared three months’ worth of our poems or stories together, which means we have fairly intimate bonds binding us.

What do I think I know, then, of Alicia Ostriker? She had a very complicated relationship with her mother. Yeah, who doesn’t, right? But if you’re going to read Ostriker (or hear her read this coming Monday night), then you should understand how much this complicated relationship means to her poems. Open her book, The Imaginary Lover,The Volcano Sequence, published in 2002, and watch how she ties the anger toward her mother with the image of a volcano. It is a rage she always felt, that she was only able to reconcile as her mother came close to death. Read Ostriker’s essay about the Old Testament Book of Ruth. And even though Ruth and Naomi are related through marriage, and no matter how academic or incisive Ostriker’s analysis, the mother-daughter dynamic sits in the background. That’s what I mean when I say a poet’s life is defined by the poems she writes. Even in thorough theological writing, I can’t help but hear Ostriker’s poetic subjects come through. published in 1986, read the poem, “Surviving,” and you’ll find a lyric narrative describing the overwhelming guilt when a mother blames her daughter for keeping her from her artwork. Open Ostriker’sbook,

In 2004, Ostriker wrote, “I have written about my mother all my life.” It came out mingled as disgust, fear, gratitude, and guilt. But, as she goes on to write, “In one of our last conversations before she died, she asked me who I would choose to be my mother, if I could. In tears, I said that I would choose her.” I can’t help but think that this relief she refers to here appears in her newest book The Book of Seventy. If I could be so bold to say, that serenity I wrote of in my first post about Ostriker comes from her letting go of the anger she held for so long. They are poems of gratitude and thanksgiving.

Primarily, Jackson has taken a real turn with the work. And while I could again offer some homework to help give context to this newest book (Among the Monarchs, by Christine Garren; The Usable Field, by Jane Mead; and, most interestingly, Wind in a Box, by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Terrance Hayes), I think .reading these other poets might lead us too far away from Major Jackson. And it wouldn’t give me room to explain why I’m so fascinated by the transition from Hoops to Holding Company.

Fascinated, really, to the point that I find it hard to put words to what I’m thinking. This isn’t a romp into those old poetry forms, like Hoops was. These are contemporary lyric poems. The kind you find in those books I listed above. And I don’t have a great way of describing these poems. Imagine if you were swimming in one of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings, and you were deep in that water. But, of course, it’s not really water, it’s more like this impressionistic, gauzed soup of oranges and greens and blues and yellows. Now imagine Major Jackson sees you there, and he dunks your head under the water so you’re actually breathing those colors. And when you breathe the colors, all you can think are words, not necessarily complete sentences, maybe just phrases, but they all seem to add up to some feeling you’re familiar with, but you can’t really name. That feeling, along with that vague sensation when you can’t put the exact words to what you’re feeling, is the heart of the lyric poem.

And Jackson’s Holding Company keeps a steady clip of ten-line lyrics. What are they about? I don’t want to ruin the surprise. But I’ll just say the subject for many of them will be very appropriate for a Valentine’s Day reading. Yeah, love, but more of like that complicated love you might be a little embarrassed to discuss with your aunts while you’re sitting down to dinner.

I’ll say it again. I’m fascinated by the transition Jackson makes from Hoops to Holding Company. And I can’t help but hope he shows off that range when he reads February 14.

In order to prepare for the upcoming Inprint reading featuring Major Jackson and Alicia Ostriker, I want to introduce a little background for Major Jackson. And I want to start with Hoops. It’s Jackson’s second book. And though he’ll probably read from his most recent book, Holding Company, it can be helpful to think about where Jackson came from as a poet, just so we know where to start when we get into the newer work.

What I read in Hoops is bravado. I don’t mean that with any disrespect. I mean, Jackson knows what and how to handle poetic form, and he’s going to make sure we know that. I think the way to get an idea about my meaning is if we take a second to look outside Jackson’s work. Let me start, then, by assigning a bit of homework. Can I do that? I’d like you to go to Byron’s Don Juan and read some of the Ottava Rima stanzas in that poem. They’re all Ottava Rima, so you really could open the book to any page and start reading. It shouldn’t take too many. I just want you to feel the rhyme and rhythm of those stanzas. This, to me, is sheer delight. Add to that Byron’s quick cleverness, along with the story about a man whose fate is consistently saved by beautiful women, and you have what I feel is an absolutely irresistible read.

With that in mind, I want to come back to Hoops. The book’s central poem is “Letter to Brooks”—58 pages worth of Rhyme Royal. It’s not Ottava Rima, like the Byron, but the two stanza forms are close cousins. What that means is that you get, reading “Letter to Brooks,” that same rolling rhythm. Read any part of this longer poem, and you’ll feel the same pleasure you feel in the Byron.

I like how Rhyme Royal fits with the book’s title. I can’t help but think of each of these stanzas as a hoop. Not the kind of hoop that feels tedious, because you have to jump through a bunch of them to get something done. I suppose you could read that into this poem. But I like the image of someone on the basketball court practicing free throws. I think of each stanza like the ball sinking into the net. Seven lines of Rhyme Royal. Swoosh. Seven lines of Rhyme Royal. Swoosh. There’s Jackson, the figure of the poet, showing his mastery of this form, hitting one basket right after the other.

I like poetry that rhymes, even though I hardly rhyme in my own work. Better yet, I like poetry that fits into capital-P Poetry. And Jackson is being a little showy by making sure we know he knows exactly what’s he’s doing. The poem is addressed to 20th century writer, Gwendolyn Brooks, a major American poet, and a poet especially important to the African American tradition. Not only has Jackson written his poem in Rhyme Royal, he’s also followed the conventions for an homage. Jackson openly acknowledges that Brooks is dead, and he explains what it feels like to write something to a dead person. Both these gestures are customary for capital-P Poetry. They are part of the homage form, and they’re a sincere attempt to show that unique debt a writer feels for another writer who has influenced him.

I understand that Peter Carey really enjoyed his visit to Houston, which included not only the evening at the Alley but also a tour of our world-renowned Rothko Chapel and Menil Collection. I know that the four hundred of us who were there at the Alley really enjoyed his reading, which most certainly gave us, as he told Culturemap's Tarra Gaines, "some sense of the rhythmic qualities of the prose." Already vivid on the page, Parrot and Olivier gained an extra dimension. As he had already demonstrated with tour-de-force fictions like True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey is a master of the hypnotic narrative voice.

The epigraph of Kelly Gang comes from William Faulkner: "The past is not dead. It is not even past." This came to mind when, during the interview portion of the evening, Carey commented on how history, as conventionally presented to us, is full of "lies and silences." Most of the traces of the real Ned Kelly, for example, including the words he spoke and the places he lived, have been erased (the fate of the poor). The dynamic, voice-driven form that is the novel can be a way of breaking that silence; it can be, paradoxically, the "lie" that restores the truth, or some of it.

The extraordinary, free-flowing prose of Kelly Gang is reminiscent of James Joyce, especially the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses. I think Carey would agree with an assertion Joyce made in relation to the stories in Dubliners: that fictions can be "chapters in the moral history" of a people. In the case of Kelly Gang, that people is the Australian nation, but in the case of Parrot and Olivier it's America. And I think many Americans will recognize themselves--people who have "more stages in their lives than caterpillars"—in the pages of this, Carey's most recent novel. I think it's unsentimental love song to his adopted country.