August 29, 2007 - 1:44 PM | Comment
Despite her popularity on the reading and lecture circuit, Grace Paley, the great short story writer and poet who died Aug. 22. at age 84, handled her own correspondence and for many years even her own personal appearances without benefit of a booking agent.
When I wrote her a letter of appreciation and invited her to read in Hallwalls' Fiction Diction Series in 1983, I was stunned to receive her handwritten response, which included an unlisted phone number.
I dialed the number and found myself speaking to a woman who sounded like a slightly more focused and cerebral version of one of my great aunts. She was a whole lifetime wiser than me, but gracious enough not to call attention to the fact.
When I asked her about coming to Buffalo, she wanted to know more about Hallwalls and the brilliant young photographer Cindy Sherman (Hallwalls’ co-founder). Sherman and her gender role exploring "Untitled Film Stills" were then the talk of Manhattan. Grace had been to one of her shows. "Were there more artists like Sherman in Buffalo?" she asked.
"Uh, we're all like that up here," I lied. "This town is a regular Salon de Refuses," I stammered, which was not all that far from the truth. She laughed.
"Now how about Leslie Fiedler and Robert Creeley, will they be there?" she asked. "I'll make a point of inviting them personally," I promised. "Alright then, cover my expenses and I'll be there," she said. "How does the first week of April sound to you?"
"Great," I said, "our snow should be melted by then."
"That's too bad. You know, we never get any snow at all here in the hills of Vermont," she said dryly, referring to the farmhouse she lived in with her husband Robert Nichols, when she wasn't at her Manhattan apartment. My turn to laugh.
Since I had promised to drive her and Nichols up to see Niagara Falls before the evening reading, we spent most of afternoon cruising the Niagara Parkway in my garish, fire-engine red Chrysler K car with the cheap vinyl seats. Whenever I made a sharp turn in that car, my passengers tended to slide right out of their seat belts, owing to my overzealous application of vinyl protectant on the bench-type seats.
I was so embarrassed at chauffeuring one of America's greatest writers around in my tiny econobox that I made a joke about the red "K" on the dashboard standing for "kosher."
“Do you really think that Lee Iacocca would hire a rabbi to oversee production on his assembly lines?” asked Grace. “Don’t apologize, I wasn’t expecting a limousine.”
It was one of those foggy gray days in early April that Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land. When we finally got to the so-called "Honeymoon Capital of the World," the mist was so thick that you could hear the falls, but barely see it. The view wasn't much better from the Canadian side. On the drive back to Buffalo, we reminded ourselves of Oscar Wilde's famous dictum about Niagara Falls being "one of the earliest and keenest disappointments in American married life."
“Really?” said Nichols, “I always thought he said it was the second greatest disappointment of married life.”
“What was the greatest disappointment?” asked Grace, with mock innocence.
“Wilde never said,” Nichols deadpanned, “and neither will I.”
The 40-minute drive back to Buffalo was like the dramatization of a classic Paley story about a long married couple for whom life was a single ongoing conversation. “Forget about Wilde,” said Grace, “his wife was disappointed in plenty of ways. What I want to know is how Tolstoy got away with that first sentence of Anna Karenina.”
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — that sounds like something only a man would write,” she said. “Did anyone ever bother to ask the women whether or not they were happy?”
“Not Tolstoy,” winked Nichols, “he never had a research assistant.”
The banter went on like that all the way back to Buffalo and through dinner that evening. When we got to Hallwalls, which back then was in the Theatre District, there were more than 200 people waiting for us.
I corresponded with Paley briefly and very occasionally over the following years, and saw her twice after her initial reading in Buffalo. The last note I have from her was a “thank you” for a review of her Long Walks and Intimate Talks (a mix of poems and stories) in 1991.
I wouldn't presume to say that I knew her as anything other than an enthusiastic reader, and for one afternoon 24 years ago, as a not very knowledgeable Niagara Falls tour guide.
Still, if you had the good fortune to meet her, Grace Paley was one of those people you would never forget.
August 22, 2007 - 12:05 PM | Comment
From 1975 to 1990, the Niagara-Erie Writers played a key role in the growth of the local literary community.
NEW (as it was known) brought several hundred writers from widely disparate backgrounds (i.e., urban and rural, tenured academics, labor movement activists, feminists and environmentalists) together in an organization that sponsored readings, workshops, and a monthly "NEWsletter. That publication, edited by the late Robin Willoughby, was the definitive source of literary news and information for poets and writers across the region.
NEW's demise was not a result of declining membership or internal dissension. Instead, it was the victim of a kind of paradigm shift in public funding for the arts. With little earned revenue or corporate sponsorship, NEW was unable to adapt to changing criteria for how groups applying for public support were evaluated.
Beginning next month, a new reading series organized by former NEW program coordinator Ryki Zuckerman and sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center pays tribute to NEW's legacy. The "New/reNEW Series" will bring together poets and writers associated with the former Niagara-Erie Writers with promising "new voices" emerging from the community.
The initial reading at 7 p.m. on Sept. 20 at Impact Artists' Gallery (Suite 545) in the Tri-Main Center, 2495 Main St., Buffalo, will feature poet Michael Basinski, a former executive director of NEW who is now curator of the poetry collection of the University Libraries at the University of Buffalo. The widely published Basinski's improvisational text and sound-based performances are like archaeological digs through the deep structure of language. You never know what linguistic treasures he might unearth amid the ruins.
Reading with Basinski will be Karlen Chase, a self described "serial laborer and recovering vagabond" with a MFA in creative writing from the University of Vermont, who returned to New York from a stint out west with an award-winning chapbook of poems entitled Spreading Stars to enter the master of library sciences at UB.
For information about future events in the New/reNEW Series visit justbuffalo.org.
August 16, 2007 - 2:44 PM | Comment
"Driving Home," a new poem by Charles Simic in the current issue of The New Yorker, reminds us of how important a poet Simic is: how much pathos and dissonant imagery he can evoke in just a dozen lines of simple syntax.
On Aug. 2, Simic was appointed to succeed Donald Hall as the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress James Billington.
In a remarkable coincidence, he was also selected that same day to receive the Academy of American Poets' highest honor, the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."
For those who have followed Simic's work -- his early collections Charon's Cosmology (1977) and Classic Ballroom Dances (1980) were considered essential reading among younger poets of that era -- this recognition seems a validation not only of his minimalist poetics and absurdist view of history, but also a victory of sorts for "foreignness" in American poetry.
"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15," Simic observed in a brief statement following his appointment.
Readers familiar with only his essays on poetry and literature in The New York Review of Books or his selections as coeditor of poetry for The Paris Review, may not appreciate the extent to which Simic's penchant for dark humor and surreal images was shaped by his childhood in eastern Europe.
Born in Belgrade, Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia) in 1938, he witnessed the destruction and multiple dislocations of World War II before emigrating to the United States with his family and settling in the Chicago area in 1953.
"My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go," he explained in a recent interview in The Guardian, "so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."
If you'd like to sample some of Simic's work, a good place to begin is with his collection of prose poems The World Doesn't End (which received Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990), or better yet his Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize) where you can find assorted gems like this one:
Paradise Motel
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
The literary world is full of unsung heroes whose cultural impact is greater than their name recognition.
For the last 30 years, one of these heroes has been Herbert Leibowitz, the founder and longtime editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the New York City based publication that ranks among the most influential poetry magazines of our era.
Like many readers, I've come to admire Parnassus for the clarity and depth of its reviewing, the high-minded inclusiveness of its editorial philosophy, and even the quality and heft of its volumes. But I didn't realize it was essentially put together on a shoestring budget by a college professor and a few of his graduate assistants in the spare room of a Manhattan apartment.
Last month, Leibowitz announced that the next issue of Parnassus, a 600-page, Thirtieth Anniversary "International Poetries" issue due out this autumn would be the magazine's last.
In recent years, funding the publication without a major patron or underwriter has proven to be in Leibowitz's own words, "an insuperable obstacle," forcing him to dip into personal savings to finance several issues.
Recent articles in Poets & Writers Magazine and the Wall Street Journal have reported on Leibowitz's decision, with the WSJ in particular focusing on the contrasting fortunes of Parnassus and Chicago based Poetry magazine's The Poetry Foundation, the recent beneficiary of a $200 million bequest from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly.
Ironically, even as the publication closes down, Parnassus will be honored in a high profile program at the Poetry Center of Manhattan's 92nd Street Y on Dec. 10th, and Leibowitz himself is slated to receive the newly created Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism from the Poetry Foundation.
For all its accomplishments, excellence alone was not enough to save Parnassus. According to Leibowitz, the magazine's perennial funding issues mattered less than a "failure of nerve" on the part of many of today's poets to engage in critical dialogue.
Here is a portion of his most recent "Editor's Manifesto" which you can read in full at Parnassus: Editor's Manifesto:
"Over the last fifteen years or so, as the prestige of high culture has steadily declined, the audience for belletristic criticism—as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety—has dwindled. Yet what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers...This widespread timidity, this failure of nerve, quashes the frank exchange of ideas; it closes the valves of everyone’s attention like stone, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson...If reviewers hail nearly every poet as being worthy of a laurel wreath, why should we believe them?"
August 1, 2007 - 11:06 AM | Comment
Is it poetry or is it fiction?
That's a question some readers of literary magazines and journals may be asking themselves about the new forms of narrative writing that incorporate elements of both prose poetry and short (or "flash") fiction. The distinction is increasingly one without a difference, especially among those writers who intentionally resist such categorization.
Both the prose poem and "flash fiction" (which is also sometimes referred to as "sudden fiction" or the "short, short story") are established literary forms with long, if somewhat disputed histories. The prose poem generally credited as originating in 19th century France, notably in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Arthur Rimbaud, all of whom rejected the constraints the alexandrine (or twelve syllable metrical line) imposed on early modern French verse forms.
Flash fiction is probably as old as storytelling itself and shares its ancestry with the fable, the parable, and folk tale. Advocates of the most concise examples of the form often cite Ernest Hemingway's six-word story (reputedly composed to win a bar bet): "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
It is only recently, though, that the two forms have begun to converge aesthetically. Perhaps the most extensive examination of this phenomenon in print is PP/FF: An Anthology published in 2006 by Buffalo novelist and independent publisher Ted Pelton's Starcherone Books. The anthology is edited by Peter Conners, the Rochester based writer/editor best known for his work with BOA Editions Ltd. and features 75 examples of this emergent form by 61 of today's most innovative poets and fiction writers.
In his introduction to the anthology, Conners points out that some of the work in the volume does not fit neatly into either category. "As a reader, writer, and editor, it is my opinion that this 'neither' type of writing is so contemporarily important as to define a zeitgeist," he asserts.
"For more information, or to order a copy of PP/FF: An Anthology, visit Starcherone Books | The Art Of Fiction.
