Southern Bookman

Lorrie Moore Upholds New Yorker's Tradition

A delicious sense of anticipation warmed me when I saw the New Yorker's table of contents for the July 6 and 13 issue included a short story by Lorrie Moore. The story, "Childcare," met my expectations, enthralling me with strong characters and wonderful language.

How rare it is now for a reader to enjoy a short story in a general interest magazine. Esquire still publishes fiction, along with the New Yorker's weekly contribution, and I recently read that the Saturday Evening Post is re-entering the field. But mainstream fiction is an endangered species. Sure, the literary quarterlies still perform admirably, and short story collections continue to roll out. Yet the short story appears in retreat from our central culture (if such exists anymore).

Writers like Lorrie Moore keep the form vital. I've been reading her work for years, and looking again at what she's achieved in light of this newest story, I place her in the upper tier of writers. I sometimes thought of her work as too light, too wry, but "Childcare" shows her mastery at giving apparently mundane words and events deep significance. And, thinking back to her stories and novels, I recall how she's given light to some of our deepest subjects. The author's note said that Moore's coming out with a new novel this fall. I'll be looking forward to every sentence.   

San Francisco's Golden Days

Last week in San Francisco, I made the obligatory visit to City Lights Bookstore, that cathedral of Beat history. I had my own memories of the place, having bought Jackson Bate's exellent biography of Keats there 25 years or so ago. Over the years, memories grow hazy, but I've always paired my love for the book with the happiness of browsing the shelves at City Lights, the energy of the North Beach streets, and the glow of walking in the same place as Kerouac and his comrades.

This time, older and not so enamored with the Beats, I still marveled at the bookstore's fine selection. But when I went upstairs to the poetry room, and an obviously stoned young man stared at me with deadened eyes, I felt sad and weary. "Howl's" lament about the best minds of the generations made a hollow echo. Only days before we'd happened upon young medical interns celebrating their graduation into residency, and their energy and purpose made a bright contrast to these young people sitting morosely in the poetry room. I revere reading and the life of the mind, but the kids there struck me as human cliches.

 Finally, we emerged into the cool San Francisco twilight, and headed down Jack Kerouac Alley. Remembering the joy of his books, his sense of wonder and the ecstatic, I wondered what he would have thought about being turned into a label, a tourist destination. (Well, I was a tourist, with my shaggy late middle age white-man look). Yet, what an accomplishment he had made. Like Thoreau and Whitman, he'd struck deep into a strain of Ameican thought, stepping back from the corporate orthodoxy, the machine of success, to celebrate the natural and the spiritual, although his vision took it to its extreme dead end, as he himself recognized.

Well, so much for City Lights and the Beats. Later, on Fillmore Street, I found a book I've been searching for for some time: a collection of Leonard Michaels' essays. I'd never heard of Michaels until years after his death. He'd been a consequential writer of the '60s and '70s, and I discovered his short stories and novels when they were reprinted in the late '90s. Yes, like Richard Yates and others, he'd been rediscovered. I'd heard his essays were also reprinted, and had searched vainly for the book in Atlanta's corporate bookstores. Then, I saw my long-sought treasure at Browser Books, a shop with an outstanding selection. Going up to Alta Park to a bench overlooking the city, I dipped into the first essay, on the essence of the story, and was happy to encounter Michaels as a fine critic and thinker.

San Francisco is one of the few cities left in America where independent bookstores still thrive, and Borders and Barnes & Nobles don't dominate. The beautiful old city of hills and cliffs and rainbow-hued Victorians swung me from excitement to heart break second by second. A beautiful young woman, a homeless mental case cursing the universe. Lovely fountains, soaring buildings, stunning ocean vistas, and beggars, men without hope sleeping all morning in green city parks, whores and cons on Geary Street. From block to block, you witness the full arc of the human condition.

So many quotes in store windows and institutional walls from dead writers, from Herb Caen to Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac. I sensed a city living too much on its past. But at a bar or in the train, I would overhear young people talking, speculating, dreaming. Surely, new stories, new literature, new ideas, new music will arise in such a place.  

  

 

The Eternal Keats

I recently discovered a fine poem, "The Resurrection of John Keats," by a young poet in Cleveland, Virginia Konchan. The poem, published in The New Republic, delighted me with its quality of a conversation heard through a door, a veiled language that offered its own meaning. I was also delighted to see that Keats' power continues into new generations.

"The Resurrection of John Keats" is an apt theme, for the young poet, who died in his early 20s in apparent obscurity, is now the most enduring poet of his Romantic era. Books and poems about him keep arriving. The resurrection of Keats began among his friends in the early Victorian era and keeps growing into the early 20th century. The power of his life and work is reflected in his influence over William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald ("Tender Is The Night" from "Ode to the Nightingale"). Their sensibilities owe much to Keats.

I have seen the house on the Spanish Steps in Rome where Keats died; his grave in the Protestant Cemetery there, with its famed inscription, "Here Lies One Who's Name Was Writ in Water"; and his house in Hampstead in London where he wrote "Nightingale" and met Fanny Brawne, the young woman with whom he fell in love and who haunted him in his last months. Above is a posthumous portrait of Keats by Joseph Severn, the heroic young painter who traveled with him to Rome and nursed him during his agonizing last weeks and hours. 

Among the Romantics, Keats can lay claim to rivaling Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer and others among the greatest English poem. To me, "To Autumn" is the most perfect in the language, and I love the odes. And then there's his letters, full of philosophical and poetic riches, along with narrative color from his daily living. Byron keeps getting biographical interest because of his salacious life. Shelley is heroic, and I want to reread him. I still love Wordsworth, although he grew into a boor in old age, and Coleridge, but no one excites me like Keats. 

Reading about the Cannes Film Festival, I discovered a new movie, "Bright Star," has been made about the doomed love affair between Keats and Fannie Brawne. I'm looking forward to seeing the film. I hope it delves into Keats' journey from England to Italy and to Rome. 

 Until the movie arrives, I'll have to keep re-reading Ms. Konchan's "Resurrection."   

Two Fine Works of History

Southern literature's greatness is generally considered the province of  novelists and short story writers, from William Faulkner to Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy. Eudora Welty and on an on. But the South's violent past, racial tensions and rise from crushing poverty have inspired many fine history books.

 

Two from the past five years continue to hold their power over me. One is Steve Oney's "And the Dead Shall Rise" and the other, Diane McWhorter's "Carry Me Home." Oney's is an encyclopedic examination of the Mary Phagan murder case and the subsequent conviction and lynching of Leo Frank. The other is a history of Birmingham and the civil rights era, interspersed with McWhorter's memoir of growing up in the violence-wracked city as a member of its upper crust gentility.

 

A recent week working in downtown Atlanta, where history remains visible and vibrant despite constant attempts by the city and its leaders to destroy it for most of the late 20th century,  brought to mind Oney's brilliant work. My job was on the other side of downtown from where the murder occurred, but the looming gold dome of the state capitol summoned the political windstorms that culminated in the Frank tragedy.

 

I'd always throught of the late 19th century and early 20th century as genteel and guarded, a Victorian age of  deep reticience and secret shame about sex and race. But Oney shows the era as raw and vulgar and open about bodily functions, desires and needs. Civilization and law have thin roots, and civilization and culture are crushed by passion, hatred and anger, the power of the mob. Yet, Oney shows how out of this shocking serious of events, those norms and standards re-emerged, their power deeply engrained and inviolable.  

 

 After reading the book, I searched downtown Atlanta for the site of the National Pencil Factory, which Frank had managed and where the murder occurred. I wrote this poem about that experience:

 

 

Downtown

Atlanta

. Early March. A Cold Wind

Where her broken body lay, the parking garage rises,

Latino boy in glass booth, singing to the radio,

as cars enter the dark and disappear.

The federal office tower hulks above the street,

once Terminal Station, whorehouses on the other side.

Lawyers in suits and courthouse ties stalk by, grasping

briefcases, as crazies spout their jive.

The basement where they found her, deep below …

I imagine the dark descent,

still there, the stain, indelible.

Shivering, I hurry toward the viaduct,

Five Points Station, where the pitchman

in Hawaiian shirt and thin Cuban moustache hawks

fruit, peanuts, bottled water, Coca-Cola, candy,

shouts in ragged rhythm, not a heartbeat,

throb or moan, but something very close,

anticipated, like the body’s private moments. …

The crowds swirl above the escalators, hurry down the sidewalk, alive.

 

 

Like Oney's book, McWhorter's shows how history and the past keep their grip upon us, no matter how we try to escape. Like Oney, she presents a wealth of details, personaities and events with biblically rich language to show a city and a society in which civilization quickly breaks.

 

The constant violence of Birmingham, culiminating with the murder of little girls in the 16th Street Church bombing, is sickening yet riveting. Her personal narrative mirrors the historic and public events. A graduate of Wellesley, like her mother and grandmother, she is a product of the finest eduction of Northern society. Yet, her father, though she never knows for sure, could be connected to the network of violent men who seek to destroy the civil rights movement.

 

She is the offspring of two strands of Southern life, the women of grace and gentility, and men who love hard work, family, tradition, and the violence of hunting and drinking. As the violence continues, she slowly turns from the Southern defense of segregation as represented by her father, and shows the heroism of the black struggle for their rights.

 

These books stand among the best I've read about the South and its history. They both show how the past informs and shapes the present.  

Sharing Summer with Flannery and Eudora

Recently, I received "Eudora, A Writer's Life," by Ann Waldron, which joins my unread books chair along with "Flannery, A Life of Flannery O'Connor" by Brad Gooch. So, my spring and summer of literary biography will continue with the lives of the great Southern ladies, who, like certain NBA stars, are branded for fame with only their first names.

The two obviously shared similarities. Both had solitary lives in quiet Southern towns, apparently never finding romantic connections, and displayed deep devotion to their art. Both are considered short-story masters, although their novels have adherents. Flannery died young of lupus, and her literary reputation reached its heights following her death. In contract, Eudora lived into old age and enjoyed the accolades of the literary world, frequently celebrated and honored.

With such quiet lives, their stories are unlikely to entice me with the scandals and the outrages of two other literary biographies I've recently finished, one on John Cheever and the other on Donald Barthelme. Both fought alcoholism and myriad literary and personal battles.

Although Bartheleme's biographer, Tracy Daugherty (see interview below) barely mentions Cheever, Cheever's biographer, Blake Bailey, delves into Cheever's jealousy of Barthleme, centered on the New Yorker. The magazine essentially made both writers' careers, publishing their early classic stories and giving them a base for their books. But Cheever, and Barthelme, eventually saw the magazine grow cold to their work. Cheever felt that Barthelme displaced him at the New Yorker and was bitter that the magazine rejected a lot of Cheever's later experimental or surrealistic stories while accepting Barthelme's even more experimental work. Cheever believed that he laid the foundation for the use of fantasy and surrealism in American fiction. Of course, Cheever's editor was William Maxwell,  more conservative and the nurturer of the classic "New Yorker story" at which Cheever excelled, while Barthelme was edited by Roger Angell, who was more open-minded to new forms and persuaded famed New Yorker editor William Shawn to accept Barthelme's tradition-upsetting stories. But Shawn grew tired of Barthelme's literary tricks and turned against his later work. Barthelme, like Cheever, ended up feeling betrayed by the magazine.

Both biographies show how the New Yorker could ruin talent as well as develop it. The books shed light on the New Yorker's notorious payment system, in which writers would be given regular payments, "advances" in the magazine's parlance, for its rights to see their work first. The writer usually ended up in debt to the magazine, and felt tremendous pressure to keep producing work that would meet the magazine's constantly shifting tastes. Reading Daugherty and Bailey's accounts of how this sapped both writers, I was reminded of the sharecropper system of the post-Civil War South. Perhaps New Yorker founder Harold Ross got the idea for the system when he worked as a newspaper reporter in Atlanta and saw sharecropping closehand. The New Yorker's paternalistic structure crippled a number of writers, most notably Joseph Mitchell.

O'Connor and Welty were better off remaining outside of the New Yorker's clutches, although Welty published stories there. Growing up in Southern states with deeply embeded sharecropping systems, they would recognize the magazine's velvet coffin of servitude.   

Biographer Tracy Daugherty Looks Anew at Donald Barthelme

        

During the breathtaking, earth-shattering late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Donald Barthelme spoke to my generation as if sharing our secret inner language. Breaking the boundaries of traditional narrative,  with stories that displayed the surrealistic logic of an acid trip, loaded with hip cultural references, Barthelme was like the Bob Dylan of the printed page. He tore down and re-configured beloved cultural myths, such as Snow White. His novel about her gave us a new, grownup view of the female figure we’d loved as childhood, as the star of the Disney cartoon.

        Of course, Barthelme was a serious writer, like another favorite Kurt Vonnegut using humor and deceptively simple language to look through a new mirror at war and the sacrifice of the young, love and sex, the lies of the state and cultural schlock. Others in our galaxy of writing were Richard Brautigan, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Later, we’d love the openness of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

      I’d sort of drifted away from Barteleme, having a sense of his work weakening in later years. I was vaguely aware of his death in the 1980s, when I’d joined the working world with a job and a family.

      

Tracy Daugherty (left), in his “Hiding Man,” a biography of Barthelme (St. Martin's Press), restores the writer’s place in American culture. He shows why Bartheleme’s work was important to us then, and why it should be important to us and our children and grandchildren today.

      Daughtery, a student of Barthelme’s at the University of Houston, looks fondly at Barthelme, but doesn't shy away from his weaknesses. He speaks to a large number of people who knew, and loved, Bartheleme at different stages of  his life.

       I knew that Barthelme had lived in Houston at the end of his life, but I didn’t know that he had been born there and lived there during his formative years. One thing I love about the book is its portrait of Houston , which, along with New Orleans, gave me a large part of my urban education when I was a young man. Another part of Barthelme unveiled in the book is how his paths crossed with many of the writers of the era, and how he gave them support and fellowship, from Walker Percy and Kirpatrick Sale to Pynchon and Grace Paley. Percy and Paley were also two favorites.

        A distinguished novelist and the head of the writing program at Oregon State University, Daugherty generously agreed to participate in this Southern Bookman interview. He joins an outstanding lineup, including Tim Suermondt, Rosanna Warren, Kelly Cherry and Beth Ann Fennelly. (See Below).

 

1. As you detail in “Hiding Man,” Donald Barthelme was one of the major cultural icons of the mid to late ’60s, as celebrated as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary. Yet you show that in many ways, he was a man of the ‘50s, with his love of jazz and modernist furniture and abstract art. And, his work mainly appeared in the New Yorker, a bastion of mainstream, middle-class culture (I was amused at your accounts of puzzled readers protesting to the magazine when his early stories appeared). What quality in his work made him appeal so strongly to the generation that came of age in the ‘60s?

          A number of social forces began to converge following the Second World War.  When mixed, they became combustible, and the resulting explosion is what we now think of as "the sixties."  Don's work contained, reflected, and played with them all.  World War II spawned several writers whose work came to be characterized, by some, as "black humor" -- Salinger, Heller, Mailer, to name just a few.  This dark laughter -- coping with trauma through jokes -- appeared not only in the "high art" of serious novels, but in the "low art" of pop culture:  stand-up comedy routines (Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May), comic books, and early TV shows. The blurring of "high" and "low" styles also characterized the art of the fifties and sixties. Don lived and breathed all this.  He worked for a while as a movie and entertainment reviewer for a Houston newspaper, so he absorbed a lot of pop culture.  At the same time, he was studying existentialist philosophy in college, and of course he was a serious reader of literature.   So perhaps it's no surprise that he forged a literary style that combined high seriousness with camp, irony with parody and satire, and that many of his early stories lampoon TV, movies, comic books, and specialized jargon of all stripes.  This roiling stew captured the increasingly anarchic, and often playful, spirit of the American 1960s. 

   

2. As well as your complex portrait of Barthelme, you also vividly capture the broader historical and cultural scene in which he operated. The Greenwich Village of the ‘60s, postwar Houston and its cultural emergence in the 1980s, the political and social undercurrents of PEN and the University of Houston writing program are all fully and compellingly explored. Did your background as a novelist help you to create such a broad portrait?

 

          Perhaps so, although I have been unable, up to now, to present, in my novels the kind of broad sweep I think I was finally able to achieve in "HIDING MAN."  So maybe it's the other way around:  the demands of biography may have shown me how to open up my fiction in the future. I hope so.  The driving force behind "HIDING MAN" was my need to understand where Don's unique literary sensibility came from -- to tease apart that convergence of social forces we just discussed.  Don was my way in to all of this.  As the receiver, the absorber, of these cultural forces, he could be like a character in a novel entering a strange new land.  In this case, that strange new land was America at mid-century.   

 

3. Barthelme was such a widely talented person, as you show. Not only a groundbreaking writer, he also excelled as a museum director, an academic administrator, a magazine designer, an editor, a booster of careers, and a music, movie and art expert, not to mention literary scholar. Did his broad interests end up hurting him as a writer, or did his variety of interests strengthen his work?

 

    Most writers will admit that their strengths are their weaknesses, and vice versa, and part of what you're doing when you shape a literary style is turning your weaknesses to some kind of advantage. Stylistically speaking, Don is not really a narrative writer.  This could be considered a weakness:  how do you achieve forward momentum in a story if you lack cause and effect?  Well, Don made the ABSENCE of cause and effect a hallmark of his style.  Crazy juxtapositions, a sort of hilarious collage effect, characterize his fiction and make it unique. Similarly, as your question suggests, his energy and attention were pulled in many different directions, and this could conceivably lead to a lack of focus in the writing.  On the other hand, his varied interests offered him a huge range of fascinating subject matter.  So that was the challenge for him:  turning, we might say, attention deficit disorder into erudition and flexibility.  The challenge, outside the work, was not to get so distracted by his other interests that he had little time left over to write.  In his final years, he was extraordinarily generous with his time -- to students, to colleagues at the University of Houston -- and I can't help but think that more might have gotten written if he had been a tad more selfish.

 

4. How do you think Bartheleme’s novels, stories and essays will continue to speak to new generations? Have you perceived a renewed interest in his work as the result of your book?

 

 Before "HIDING MAN" appeared, there were stirrings of renewed interest in Don's work.  Books of his that had been out of print were being republished, and young writers such as Dave Eggers and George Saunders were writing appreciations of him.  Its probably too easy to say that our current era, with its war traumas reminiscent of Vietnam (a subject behind some of Don's work of the sixties) and its Kafka-like global conspiracies make Don's themes and preoccupations, and his spirit of satire, seem more current than ever, but I think there's something to that.  Our changing ways of processing information, with the worldwide web and so on, fit his jazz-quick, free-associational style. His best stories have not dated and still have much to say to us.  And they are historically valuable, in the way that literature can be. To my mind, they present the best literary portrait available of middle-class urban life in mid-twentieth century America, which is reason enough to return to them.

 

5. What about your projects for the future? Do you plan to return to fiction, or do you foresee any more biographies?   

         

    Happily, both.  I will publish a new short story collection next spring with the longtime publisher of my fiction, SMU Press.  And I've just completed a new novel.  I've also begun research and interviews for a biography of Joseph Heller, a project suggested to me by my editor at St. Martin's Press.      

      

         

 

     

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell's Joy and Tragedy

I'd resisted reading "Words in Air," the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After years immersing myself in Lowell's and Bishop's letters, biographies of them, and their poetry and prose, I'd figured I'd had enough of their heartbreaking friendship. But when I saw the hefty Lowell and Bishop collection at the library, I succumbed.

Despite all of the evasions, their hospitalizations and mental breakdowns, the turmoil they bring to their loved ones, I mostly find the letters captivating and charming.  They both are so alive to the world, so in love with poetry and the literary world, so attentive to each other. Lowell keeps imploring Bishop to visit him and his family, but she keeps avoiding it. Finally, at one visit to Lowell's place in Castine, Maine, with her doomed lover Lota, Lowell spins off into one of his manic attacks, driving her away. I suppose that over the years, she felt wary of causing him to "speed up."

Although the letters are full of charming observations, witty comments on writers and the arts, humorous and barbed gossip, the years of pain bring an appalling toll. The title "Words in Air" makes it appear that their words and actions had no consequences.  After Lowell quotes his wife Elizabeth Hardwick's personal letters and other private documents in poems in "Notebook," Bishop chided him in a letter, saying that art just wasn't worth such a personal cost. If their fragility was the flip side of their poetic achievement, Bishop's admonishment to Lowell could apply to both of their lives. I love their poems, and prose, but wonder if it were worth all of the pain.

Both of them, with that acute selfishness of art, mainly accepted the deal, and as a reader, I'm certainly blessed. But Lota killing herself; Hardwick constantly having to pick up the pieces after Lowell's manic attacks; Lowell's first wife, Jean Stafford, having her face ruined when Lowell crashed a car in which they was the passenger. And on and on. The work remains, and they, and most of their contemporaries, are gone. I haven't heard much from Lowell's children, a telltale sign of the pain they must continue to bear.

One of the saddest things in the books is the photograhs of them at the beginning of each chapter. We see them age, decade by decade. She grew old prematurely, but he kept his vitality despite his manic/depression. One piece of news: I'd thought that his manic attacks lessened as he aged and he discovered medication, but apparently they lasted until the end of his life. And she was always haunted by depression and alcoholism. Words on Air? No, words etched in despair. 

Wells Tower's Ravaged Vision

As one of the dwindling members of a print culture, I still grow excited over literary debuts. When a new writer comes along, I will try to acquire his first book, as if it's 1925 and Ernest Hemingway has just come out with "In Our Time." I also will buy a lauded new novel, as if such a thing remains of major cultural significance.

A few months ago, I began noticing articles popping up about a writer named Wells Tower and his first book, a collection of stories called "Everything Rvaged, Everything Burned." The articles kept calling Tower  the next major American writer, so I happily went to the bookstore and bought a first edition of the book, with its vivid yellow, red and blue cover. The book's publisher is Farrar, Straus and Giroux, once the leading publisher of quality writers, and I suppose continues to be, despite now being just another part of some huge conglomerate.

Well, the book failed to uphold my enthusiasm. Most of the stories were of the late Southern Gothic, rednecks come to the city and gone wrong genre, already worn down. I was encouraged by the orginality and coherence of the first story, "The Brown Coast," but none of the others came up to its level. They all seemed to have bits and pieces of themes and characters and plots I'd seen too many times. Most of the adult characters were losers, psychopaths, pedophiles. weak fathers and husbands, weak mothers and wives, etc. The most appealing characters were children, but none of them left a strong impression. 

Tower is a gifted writer. His stories made me keep reading, and his language can be striking, although he can go too far with his attempts for the vivid phrase. But all in all, his work doesn't strike me as having the force and originality of the great debuts of the past, such as Hemingway's.

All too often, Tower appears to use perversion for shock value, rather than aesthetic purpose. The title story, the last one, attempts to satirically re-create Viking culture through the lens of modern culture. I suppose it's a brilliant as people claim; I seem to lack the gene for appreciating a lot of comic writring and acting. I never cared anything for Monty Python, as well as a long list of other writings/performers that many people find funny.

Of course, writers shouldn't just create appealing characters. But Tower's characters lack depth and artistic fullness. Comparing Tower's creeps to a character like Flannery O'Connor's The Misfit shows how badly he falls short artistically. Perhaps he will grow into a master like Hemingway and O'Connor. But this book doesn't match the overgenerous praise. Once again, the few literary forums that we have left reveal themselves as organs of puffery rather than critical scrupulousness.

Beth Ann Fennelly: A Journey to Brazil to Explore the Concept of "Home" in Her Work, and Elizabeth Bishop's

  

What attracts me most is a poet’s voice:  the unique rhythm, use of language, the special lilt and color that mark the writer’s special vision of the world. Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems strongly possess that perhaps indefinable quality of individuality. Comic, light-hearted, tender, loaded with vivid sensory details and narrative force, Beth Ann’s work immediately announces itself as hers, an authentic and stirring voice.
   I first encountered Beth Ann’s work in one of David Lehman’s “Best American Poetry” series. Her funny and resourceful “I Need to be More French. Or Japanese” instantly entered my personal anthology of poems that I’ll keep re-reading. Further reading strengthened my appreciation of her depth and variety.

   Beth Ann teaches at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford with her husband, the writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter Claire, and son Thomas. She graciously took time out from a trip to Brazil to answer the questions that I e-mailed her. Beth Ann joins Kelly Cherry, Rosanne Warren and Tim Suermondt as distinguished Southern Bookman interviewees (see below).

     

1. First, at the time of this interview, you are in Brazil. If possible, could you tell us about your project? What are your impressions of Brazil and its citizens’ feelings about Americans?

   I’m in currently living in Brazil’s third biggest city, Belo Horizonte, (the name means “Beautiful Horizon”), in the state of Minas Gerais.  I’ll be here for five months on a Fulbright Fellowship, half teaching, half research.

   For the research part, I’m studying the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil for almost 20 years.  I’m focusing on her poems that explore the concept of “home,” and I’m writing poems that explore the same theme that will become part of my fourth book of poetry. For the teaching part, I’m giving a class on American Literature at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The University is quite good, and my students are wonderful; I’m teaching in English and I’m impressed by how well they are writing in a second language.

   So far I have to say Brazil is amazing. The people are incredibly warm and welcoming, and the natural beauty here is astonishing.  The city where I’m living isn’t on the ocean, and isn’t visited by tourists, and perhaps for this reason we’re a bit of a novelty, but in a really nice way — I can’t stop someone on the street and ask for directions without getting involved in a conversation about who I am and what I’m doing here. The Brazilians are very friendly and helpful and seem to regard Americans highly. Thank God we have a new administration in the White House, so I don’t feel that I need to apologize for Bush, whom everyone here seems to dislike heartily.

 

2. I love the humor in your work, such as “I Need to Be More French or Japanese.” For years, most poems were pensive and brooding. Do you see yourself as part of a return to more light-hearted work?

   I don’t see myself as part of a movement in this regard, though there might be one.  For me, using humor was more of a natural evolution that came out of feeling I wanted to bring the full range of human emotion to my poetry. It wasn’t so much that I started trying to write funny poems as I stopped preventing myself from writing them. 

   I think when I was younger I was so concerned with wanting to be taken seriously that I felt I had to write serious poems all the time. But I started to loosen up and my work did, too.  I like it when I read a poem and I have a sense that the writer had fun writing it. Not every poem can or should include humor, but I think, in a volume or poetry, there can and should be humorous moments — for enjoyment, for range, for balance, and because humor can make the sad parts sadder.

 

3. You recently did a recording of “Kudzu” for YouTube. Do you feel that Internet sites like You Tube and Facebook will help popularize poetry? Will they make poetry more of a performance, oral art, than a literary art?

   I think that nowadays we are such a visual culture that any way we can appropriate popular media to serve poetry is a good thing. I believe deeply that poetry needs to be heard aloud, be spoken and recited, and there are a lot of really exciting ways that that is happening now.

  My limitation in this regard is lack of technical knowledge — the Kudzu film was made independently of me, using a voice recording I had made for the online magazine Blackbird.  I wouldn’t know how to go about making such a film myself, but I’m glad someone else did, and I like the kinds of films and podcasts of people’s poems that I’ve seen on You Tube. They are finding people in new places — for example, in the elevators of the last Associated Writing Program conference.  Much cooler to hear a poem being read than listening to elevator music.

 

4. Recently, David Orr published an essay in the New York Times Book Review on poetic greatness, about whether any poets today will achieve “greatness” like poets of the past did. Do you and others writing today strive for “greatness” like poets of the past did?

   Hmm, without having read the article I’m not sure exactly what Orr meant, but I’d say writers today strive for greatness as they always have — that fundamental machine, ambition, keeps grinding its gears. 

   

5. I remember reading an essay you wrote about moving to Mississippi from the Midwest. Your poem “Kudzu” alludes to this transplanting. How do you feel about the South now? Do you find it still a special region, or has it become just like the rest of the country?

   Moving to Mississippi was a profound experience for me because (for no obvious reason) Mississippi felt like home. That made me start to wonder how we choose and define our homes, and how landscape influences psychology. These are questions that still interest me, and in fact, have to do with my Bishop project here in Brazil — why did Bishop, from the Eastern seaboard of the United States, come to Brazil and feel like she’d found a home? 

   The South is still a special region to me, and I think it always will be. A lot of the things I enjoy about being an American of Irish decent — the emphasis on family, the music, the literature — are valued in the South, and these values define the region and preserve its uniqueness.  I don’t imagine we’ll want to live any place else.  We made several moves early in our marriage — getting started in academia often involves a lot of one or two year gigs — but we’re happily settled now.  I joke about my next move being next to Faulkner in the town cemetery.

Kelly Cherry: "Music’s at the heart of all that I write"

Kelly Cherry is among those writers with whom I feel a special affinity. Her work affirms the written word as an avenue to the sacred and the higher reaches of human thought and emotion while delighting in the humor, joy, pleasures and pratfalls of our mundane daily existence. Proud of continuing the heritage of Southern literature, she like past Southern masters Robert Penn Warren and George Garrett excels in a range of genres, including poetry, essays, memoir, travel writing, criticism and the novel. As with our past Southern Bookman interview subjects, Tim Suermondt and Rosanna Warren (see below), I e-mailed Kelly five questions, and she sent back her responses. Our conversation follows.

 1. You’ve strongly identified yourself as a Southern writer. Is your generation the last that will do so? With the South becoming more and more urban and suburban and with its language homogenized with the rest of the country’s, will young writers born in the South ever again think of their work as having qualities unique to the region?

    

      What I love most about the idea of being a Southern writer is the Southern reader. Southerners who read do so with their hearts and minds — and without preconceptions about how characters should behave: This is good for the Southern writer, because a character is a complex construct, not a role model or simple representation, and likely to behave in surprising ways. Southern readers relish surprises.   

    I would like Southern readers to embrace my work, but though I am a Southerner, my work may not be Southern. I was an adult before I read very much Southern writing (Faulkner, Porter, and Williams were exceptions). My early influences were not often Southern. I did grow up on my parents’ stories about their lives in Louisiana and South Carolina.  I did have an English teacher who told me that I should move beyond my Southern accent, but I think I still have it.

     I don’t know what the future South will be like. The South has certainly changed a lot, mostly for the better, and presumably it will change more. But people are still attached to the land here, and to the climate and the flora and fauna. And some are attached to their history. And some to the attempt to confront that history.   

  Will future writers from the South choose to identify themselves as Southerners?  For a while, they will, but in the more distant future, I doubt it. At some point we may all be part of a global culture, even if nations continue to exist. Will this be good or bad?  Probably both.

  

2.Christ and his life have played a central role in your work. How has your conception of Christ evolved and what role does he have now?

 

     I sometimes say I believe in Christ but not in God; I don’t think there is a heavenly father, or an afterlife, or divine destiny. I also don’t think any of these things are essential to religion.  I see Christ as the symbolic nexus for humankind’s deepest fears and desires. “Symbol” may suggest an inert image, but Christ is a kinetic image, a narrative that helps us to understand the real world in which we live. I think, too, that religious language allows access to distinctions of meaning that are necessary to a full life.

    I don’t care whether there was a Jesus; I care that we are transformative beings, able to create heaven and, alas, hell on earth.  That is our glory and our shame. 

  

3. You’re successful as an essayist, poet, novelist and travel writer. Do you have a different approach to each genre, or do have the view of Gore Vidal, that writing is writing and there should be no difference in a writer’s approach to different forms.

    Vidal is wrong about this. Each genre has particular strengths and it behooves a writer to make the most of those strengths. Moreover, each genre has its own music, which is crucial to the shaping of an idea.

 

 4. You’ve written engagingly about your childhood with two parents consumed with their vocations as violinists. You’ve compared your language to music. How does music inspire your work, and does it inspire your poetry more than prose?

       Music’s at the heart of all that I write in every genre. That’s not necessarily to suggest I always succeed, though I hope I consign at least most of my failures to the wastebasket.

     In my childhood, Beethoven’s late quartets taught me about joy, transcendence, despair, hard work, determination, love and the miracle that is art.  In my adolescence I learned from my father’s understanding of Beethoven’s structures. At about 11 or 12 I also discovered that Shakespeare made a comparable music out of language and character.

      Beethoven and Shakespeare were not everything, of course, but they were for me the beginning of everything. (Along with the King James Version of the Bible, which angered me and made me want to refute it, because it was so beautiful and so mean.)

     I used to dream my way into work by listening to music — the ideas came to me out of the music and were rhythms and shapes, harmonies and dissonance, volume and texture and pitch before they were worded. But by now I’ve written many of those ideas, and sometimes I think I hear music even more intensely today because I can concentrate on its physical properties and patterns without feeling I have to corral it into a poem or novel or story or essay.  Nor do I listen to music while I’m writing, though once I did: that’s become like trying to listen to two pieces of music at once.

  

5. You’ve written about your travels in Russia and other countries. Do you agree with that Nobel official’s comments about the parochialism of American writers, and should American culture, particularly literary culture, have a more global outlook?

     I do think American literature tends to be parochial, and I think this is largely a fault of publishers. But publishers need to make a living if they are to continue publishing, so they publish what they think might sell. Their judgment about what will or won’t sell is wrong more often than right, but they try.

     Meanwhile, I think most serious American writers do make an effort to read widely, recognizing that if we want to understand our own country we need to know something about the literature of other countries. We do grow up on classics from around the world. Unfortunately, we are not as well-educated as we might be, and that is grievous.

    It would be great if readers in general made a point of reading at least one book from another country every year. Especially politicians, ministers, and corporate heads. We tend to pay attention to other countries only when a crisis arises, which is always too late.