Robert Dana - Spender Once More

Until 1976 when he became my distinguished colleague in the writing program at the University of Florida, Stephen Spender was just biographical essay and a handful of brilliant lyrics I first encountered in Louis Untermeyer’s anthology of Modern American and Modern British Poetry.

Oh, I’d met him at close range back in the 1950’s when he came to give a reading at the University of Iowa and to talk to a bunch of fledgling poets at the Writers’ Workshop. After Spender’s reading that evening in the senate chambers of Old Capitol, Paul Engle had arranged a rump session so that the students could talk with Spender one on one over beer in the basement of a local bar, perhaps Irene Kenney’s. It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I recall the subject of our conversation, in which I had the presumptuousness and dim wit to chide him for certain Britishisms in his Lorca translations.

Of course, Stephen’s world was so large and his history so long and rich that, when we really did meet in Florida and share several months of our lives, he retained no memory at all of our having met twenty years earlier, and, thank god, no memory of my youthful stupidities.

Stephen was part of the bait dangled before me by the late Richard Green, then chairman of the English Department at the University of Florida. He also offered me a much lighter teaching load and the chance to teach graduate students, and more money than I was presently making at Cornell College in Iowa. I had just returned from a sabbatical in England where I’d gone to recover from some serious surgery and to try to finish the book which later became In A Fugitive Season, so I didn’t think my dean would give his permission for another leave of absence.

Encouraged, however, by my new wife, Peg, and by Dick Green, I explored the possibility with my colleagues and the dean, and was granted permission to accept Florida’s offer. It would be a full year visiting writer appointment, and I would be Stephen Spender’s colleague when he arrived for the third quarter. It turned out to be a seminal year, needless to say.

Our friendship began in a very personal way.

Shortly before Stephen’s arrival in the spring, I casually asked someone, at my wife’s prompting, perhaps Dick Green, where Stephen would be living. He was, at the time, nearly seventy. I was shocked to find that neither the department nor the university had made arrangements for their distinguished guest. In addition to getting on in years, he would be arriving in Florida from wintry England. Peg and I reasoned that someone needed to make a move on his behalf.

So we contacted the supervisor of our building to find out what furnished apartments might be available. There were several. We got the department’s approval, and then canvassed department members via their mailboxes, to round up dishes, pots and pans, silverware, blankets and linens, so that when Stephen arrived he’d have decent digs awaiting him.

When he did arrive, he needed phone service, of course. And it was here that Peg stepped in, and the episode provided one of our favorite stories. Stephen had trouble understanding the operator at Bell Southern, and she had trouble understanding his English accent, so he asked Peg to do his talking for him. At one point, she said,
“Stephen, they want an idea of how much of a bill you might average a month.” “Oh tell them a hundred dollars,” he said, grinning, and then sotto voce, “It’s probably more like five hundred.”

The bill was probably “more like five hundred” given the family calls—to his wife, Natasha and his daughter Lizzie in London and to his son Matthew in Italy; and the business calls—to his old friend Christopher Isherwood in L.A, and to International PEN on Taiwan (No, he wouldn’t be coming), and to his editor Jason Epstein at Random House in New York. Perhaps it was at that moment that it began to be clear that Stephen dealt with people straight on, by and large. He didn’t see himself as either a “great man” or a “great writer.” In fact, he saw himself as sometimes a comic “figger” as he would have said.

*
So began a friendship I could never have imagined having, and one that would last nearly twenty years until Spender’s death in 1995. A friendship from which I learned at least as much about human decency and perspective as I did about literature and what it means to live a life of letters.

One of the first things I learned from Stephen was what real achievement and fame were. His record spoke for itself. I was forty-six, had published two books, and was still getting rejection slips from various magazines. I was certainly not getting phone calls from PEN International. So there was no question of competition between us, as there always is to a certain degree, between contemporaries. Stephen wasn’t my mentor, nor
was I his student. It was a case of two poets from different generations and different cultures sharing what was there to be shared.

He shared his wisdom, his stories—of himself and Auden at Oxford (“I printed his first little book on my card press in my room.”), of his experiences in Spain during the civil war and in Britain as an air-raid warden during the blitz, and his attitudes toward poetry.

For my part, I drove him to the university when needed, explained him to his undergraduate class, which didn’t know what to make of him and treated him, at first, like a fragile family heirloom; and plied him with questions about his life and work.

In May of 1976, in my role as a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, I actually conducted a formal interview with him. It took place, as I recall, in the living room of our Gainesville apartment. Here are a few clips from that afternoon:

“…If one thinks of one’s own contemporaries who had talent or even genius. I think that, really, three qualities are necessary. First of all, to have a little genius; then to have quite a lot of talent, and then, thirdly, to want to do it... You have to want, in some crazy way, to write poetry. I think quite a lot of people want to be a poet, but that’s rather different from actually wanting to write poetry.”

“Eliot in ‘The Four Quartets’, for instance, is always really a thinking poet. And also a poet with a mystical vision. And when the thinking is intense and the mystical vision is intense, he discovers a language which is very strange, and which is what we think of as the best of Eliot. But when the thinking is sententious—about, you know, growing old, and all that kind of thing,--the form can become sententious. He hasn’t got the talent
which can invent an interest in the language which is beyond what is actually being said…
*
“…I think that American poets believe that, as Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too... And I think the American poet does feel that deeply, and he feels it’s something of a tragedy if he doesn’t get a great audience… I think that’s a tragic point of view, that you need vast audiences.”

Once, during one of our evening conversations, I asked him how he’d felt when Auden died. “I felt the way I did when my brother died—“ he said, “that now I could go out and drive the car.

“At the end of this life, dealing with Auden was like dealing with a corporation—Auden, Auden, Auden, & Auden. It wasn’t very pleasant.” And so I learned that fame, if it comes to one, is something best carried lightly. I learned that when Spender spoke of walking the shore of Lake Geneva with Merleau-Ponty, or of spending an afternoon with his friend Henry Moore, or told some anecdote about Louis Mac Neice, he wasn’t trying to impress you. He was merely recounting an interesting or pleasant moment in his life or a personal opinion.

Stephen had no need of boasting or name-dropping because he was sure of who he was, even if he tended to underplay his achievements. His autobiography World Within A World makes it clear that early on he had ceased to lie to himself or anyone else aboutwho he was, or why he did what he did. (“Oh, it wasn’t politics that caused us to go to Berlin. We went there to chase boys,” he said to me once, with a laugh.) He had learned
young to rely on his intelligence and his sense of humor. His dignity, generally, was as sure and casual as his rumpled clothes.
*
After Florida, we met almost once a year between 1976 and 1978, and sporadically thereafter, both in England and the U.S. When I left the University, they offered me a position. But upon returning to Iowa, I learned that the poet I’d replaced, and whom I’d thought of as a friend, was circulating a document damning both me and another member of the writing faculty. I was stunned and couldn’t believe it. When Stephen heard what happened he was furious and came to my defense. Even after the poet had been let go, Stephen telephoned him and demanded that he apologize to me and withdraw his remarks. The man refused, of course, but it was
a surprising measure of our friendship.

I was instrumental during these years in bringing Spender to Detroit where I was the visiting poet at Wayne State. He gave a reading and a lecture on Modern Poetry and Modern Art. It so happened that the original paper wall-sized cartoons of Diego Rivera’s mural in the Detroit Institute of Art had just been discovered in some dusty old archive of the museum. We were invited to view them from a mezzanine where they were rolled out below us.

He also came to Cornell College where I taught and spent a month there. He taught a seminar on Modern Poetry to a group of handpicked students, and gave three lectures and a farewell reading to packed houses. Writers and literary people came from all over Iowa came to hear him.

Mount Vernon, Iowa, is of course, a very small stage for such a large player, so one weekend, Peg and I arranged a visit to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Since Stephen had known Tyrone Guthrie, the theater people set us up with fine seats and a backstage tour.

One of the plays was “Waiting For Godot.” It was a compelling and polished performance, so when it was over Peg and I inquired what Stephen thought of it. “It was quite good, you know. I saw the play in London and didn’t like it at all and walked out after the first act,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
*
I saw Stephen several times after that, once at his house one evening in St. John’s Wood where we had a wonderful supper of “scraps” that Natasha had prepared, and another time with Peg at Westminster Abbey when he delivered the eulogy for Henry Moore, after which he took us to The Groucho Club, a spot whose patrons' books were displayed behind the bar.
*
My world’s a smaller place without Stephen. But the sense of perspective I gained from being in his presence from time to time, my sense of what’s really important, my sense of decency and compassion and craft is a
legacy that’s still with me.

“I think continually of those who were truly great/Who, from the womb, remembered the
soul’s history,” Stephen wrote in an early poem. Oh, yes. And so should we all.

----

Robert Dana was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1929. He served in the South Pacific in World War II as a U.S. Navy radio operator. After the War, he moved from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, where he attended Drake University and worked as a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register. Later he studied at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and received a Masters Degree in 1954. From 1954-1994 he served as Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. In 1964, Dana was responsible for the resumption of the publication of The North American Review, and served as its editor for a number of years. He also taught at the University of Florida.

Dana has published over a dozen collections of his poetry. In addition, Dana's work has appeared in publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Poetry (magazine), The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and The Sewanee Review.

Dana's poetry has won a number of awards. His poetry collection "Starting Out for the Difficult World" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1989 he was the recipient of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry, given by New York University. He received a Pushcart Prize in 1996, and has been awarded the Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry. He has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1985 and 1993).

In September 2004, Robert Dana was named poet laureate for the State of Iowa. He has also served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at several American colleges and universities.

________________________

Tony Barnstone - Letters from Dead Friends

“Po Chui, dead these many years---ah, he's not dead.
Agnew is dead.
What we've got to reach in America is some understanding of the great Chinese.”

—James Wright, from an interview with Michael André

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.

—Robert Hass, from “Meditation at Lagunitas”


I have always loved the poetry of poor, alcoholic James Wright, who until cancer of the tongue rendered him silent wrote beautifully of the sadnesses of the devastated coal mining towns of the midwest, populated by the “ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,” the “sons grow[ing] suicidally beautiful,” the dead Indians, “the chemical riffles of the Ohio River,” where as the “nostrils of slow horses / Breathe evenly” “the moon darkens” and he is “lost in the beautiful white ruins / Of America.” His images are recorded with the precision and subtlety of the best Chinese poems, which blaze across the centuries without diminishment. For Wright, the Chinese poets seemed "to have saved their souls in the most violent circumstances" (Wright 1983 124), so that for us, in at time when our "imaginations have been threatened with numbness and our moral beings are nearly shattered by the moral ghastliness of public events and private corporations," the Chinese poets retain an "abiding radiance," they are a kind of salvation (Wright 1983 125).

Here is Wright’s poem about the great Tang Dynasty poet Po Chü-I (better known these days as Bai Juyi):

AS I STEP OVER A PUDDLE AT THE END
OF WINTER I THINK OF AN
ANCIENT CHINESE GOVERNOR

And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
—Written A.D. 819

Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

Bai Juyi was a scholar-official who shared with his friend Yuan Chen (Yuan Zhen), the dream of being a reformer. It was a common dream among Chinese poets, rooted in Confucian tradition due to the model of the first Chinese poet whose name we know, Qu Yuan (c. 340-278 B.C.), a reformer who suffered slander and exile for his efforts and eventually drowned himself.1 Bai Juyi also found himself banished from the capital (in 815 a.d.) for his reformist efforts. His lifelong friend Yuan Zhen suffered a similar fate, and the two poets sent beautiful poems of friendship to each other across the great expanse of China, for years meeting each other only in dream:

SEEING YUAN ZHEN’S POEM ON THE WALL IN BLUE BRIDGE INN

In spring snow at Blue Bridge you were called back to Changan.
In autumn wind I was exiled to the Qin Mountains.
Whenever I got to a horse station I would dismount
and meander around walls and pillars, hoping to find your poems.
—Bai Juyi2


WHEN TOLD BAI JUYI WAS DEMOTED AND SENT TO JIANGZHOU

A dying lamp’s low flame tosses the shadows.
This evening, told you’ve been demoted to Jiujiang,
I am so startled I sit up in my final sickbed.
Dark wind is blowing rain into cold windows.

—Yuan Zhen3


For two thousand years, poetry was the high road to political power and social success in China, and for the old scholar-officials it also spurred this sort of epistolary connection, a genre of farewell poems, visitation poems, exile poems, commemorating friendship. For the American poet, who has suffered an intense decline in the cultural importance of his or her art, these poems seem to have had special importance, coming across the centuries like missives from lost companions. In fact, there is a whole subgenre in American poetry of intimate poems of friendship written in homage or response to the spirits of the great, dead, Chinese poets.

When I was a young teen, I had a fantasy about spirits. I thought, if there is a god, or a world spirit, it must be a dumb god, a mute one, a force that doesn’t know itself, but manifests itself in the world as a way of articulating itself to itself. Here is a poem I wrote to my best friend of that time, titled “Hungry Ghosts”:

HUNGRY GHOSTS4


Old friend, you write, Why write? It’s all trash,
nothing to say. Maybe you’re right. Why keep writing
with this tool to inscribe time, line by line, measuring
what is lost as it leaves? No one reads this stuff.

If only the words were a body I could inhabit
and you could feel me through this membrane,
like skins touching. I remember one day telling you
I felt I was just starting to wake from the long dumb

sleep of childhood, but was lost in the dark rush
of the senses, and I imagined my spirit
as a blind reaching through flesh and tickertape
consciousness, a hand trying to grasp itself.

I would like to believe in souls reaching through
the flesh for understanding, hungry to be seen
and detecting each other through defective means.
I would like to believe this life is a sleep we’ll wake from,

that some conductor drives our spirits through
this tunnel and for a reason. But I find myself talking
in darkness, huddled around the narrow flame
of my own being, the way a child I knew, yes, me,

would walk home from the bus stop chanting nonsense
because when he fell silent the empty dark
closed in and made him know how blind he was,
how ravenous for dinner, lights, and mother.

And he would make the television blaze and shout
just to stop that dead black eye from staring.
And in bed, he’d pull the covers over his head
when his mother said, Lights out, and pray for sleep.

It’s a nice fantasy–that the universe is seeking gnosis, making itself into creatures because it seeks to awaken to itself, and finding that knowledge through love and through friendship. (I like the fact that the Quakers call themselves “friends” as they search for the inner light.) Sure, it’s science fiction, but it’s no nuttier than any other religious belief, and I still have fondness for it, because helps answers for me the question of why poets bother to write at all. We write, or at least I write, “to inscribe time, line by line, measuring / what is lost as it leaves.” We write, as my friend Li-Young Lee says, with our deaths perched upon our shoulders, always aware of our own mortality, and determined to know something before we die. We write because like Andrew Marvell, at our back we “always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.”

In “To Wei Ba,” The great Chinese poet, Du Fu, visits a friend he rarely sees, and they mourn their dead friends, their advancing age, and share many cups of wine, since “Tomorrow mountains will come between us, / and we’ll be lost in the world like mist.” Contemporary poets, even those lucky few who have the plum jobs, win the large prizes, are chased after by presses and the better magazines, are lost in the world like mist, making great art for a diminished and skeptical audience. And so James Wright writes: “Po Chu-i, balding old politician, / What's the use?” What’s the use of poetry when we are all in exile, in our “own black twilight,” longing for absent friends, for the lost paradise of Peach Tree Spring, “the city of isolated men beyond mountains,” even for the obliteration of everything by the vanished sea “that once solved the whole loneliness / Of the Midwest.” What’s the use of poetry when Bai Juyi and his friend are dead, when Du Fu and his friend are long dead? What the use when James Wright is also dead, and will be frozen in his loneliness in the spring of 1960 for the next thousand years?

Perhaps there is no use, except to make a temporary stay against loneliness, to “roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball,” which we call a poem. The poetry I love is like that of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909 - 1944), a Jew whose poems were seized and banned, and who was shot in the head during a forced march from a Nazi camp. In 1946, when a mass grave was exhumed, his wife found a notebook of his last poems in the pocket of his overcoat, many of them written to her as he walked to his death. In his poem “Picture Postcards,” he writes of the murder of another prisoner, "I fell beside him; his body turned over, / already taut as a string about to snap. / Shot in the back of the neck. That's how you too will end, / I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.” Each time we pick up a book of old poems, we are reading postcards written from the grave. Like Walt Whitman in “To You” the poem speaks from the tomb and says:

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

It comes to us like a letter tied to the leg of a migrating crane, carrying word of the keening of the ghosts on the battlefields of the north, of how the flowers silently fell all night and covered the steps in blossoms, of how the moonlight on the floor tonight looked like snow. It whispers softly in our ears, like the voice of a friend, and, as the distance between collapses, we might even smile in our exile.

---

Tony Barnstone is Associate Professor of creative writing at Whittier College. His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, the National Poetry Series Prize, and the White Pine Prize, appeared with the UP of Florida in June 1999. His chapbook of poems, Naked Magic, appeared in 2002 with Main Street Rag Press. Other books include Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1993), Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (Hanover: UP of New England, 1991), The Art of Writing: Teachings of Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), and a number of textbooks, most recently The Literatures of Asia and The Literatures of the Middle East (Prentice Hall). His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals, from APR to Agni. He has won an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, as well as many national poetry awards. A few of his other books are The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2003) and a number of textbooks for Prentice Hall, including The Pleasures of Poetry: An Introduction (2005), World Literature (two volumes, 2003), and Modern Poetry: An Anthology with Contexts (2004).


----------------------------
---------

Lola Haskins - Writers' Friendship

When I meet someone on a plane, and they ask what I do for a living, I
say, well, I teach Computer Science for a day job, but my profession is
poetry. What usually happens next is that their eyes glaze over and I
can see them mentally checking their watches to see how much longer the
flight is going to take. Then, unless they think to ask me something
about computers, usually to do with whether they should scrap their pcs
for the latest hot-lick models, they tend to develop a sudden, burning,
interest in Sky Mall. If I’d been some other kind of writer, a
novelist or a screenwriter for instance, I’ve always thought it would
have been better, but maybe not, because to most people watching cars go
airborne over the top of Gough Street, heading down towards the bay,
screenwriters seem as irrelevant as tinsel on last year’s Christmas
tree. Be that as it may, I think it’s fair to say that we poets find
ourselves at the bottom of the interest scale with most of the non
reading public.

One of the consequences of that is that we have fewer chances to
connect with audiences than people who work in other literary genres do.

So, being in the minority and being relatively poor, even in the
literary world, we help each other out whenever we can, right? Well,
in my experience, not necessarily.

For example, when I meet some poets, I get the feeling that they’re
sizing me up to see if I’m any threat. If the verdict is that I’m not,
then they relax. If they decide otherwise, they clam up and start
looking over my shoulder for someone more useful to talk to. Sometimes,
it goes much farther than this, perhaps even to the point of paranoia.

For instance, a few years ago, when two poets came to my town to teach
in the writing program, I thought, great, more poets, and bought their
books. But not only have they not been polite to me, without ever
exchanging more than ten words total with me in all the years since
they’ve come they put me down to their students on a regular basis. So
why are they doing this? I’ve decided it’s because they’re protecting
English, which they see as their territory. It seems such a pity, but I
know it’s not an isolated case. I’ve heard other stories like that,
where certain writers seem to have peed on their four corners, to make
sure interlopers are aware that only they, the purveyors of urine, and
their students are welcome within their borders. And if someone tries
to cross that line, he or she finds out what that odd odor means and, to
mix a metaphor, in spades.

Luckily, this isn’t universally the case, maybe not even generally so.
Over the years, I’ve met some hugely generous people, to name only a
few: Andrea Hollander Budy, Nick Samaras, Jo MacDougall, Frank Gaspar,
Maurya Simon and, more recently, Ruth Schwartz, all terrific poets and
all genuinely happy when any of us gets lucky. We buy each others’
books and tell people about each others’ work. To be fair, we’ve often
became friends in the first place because we did like each others’ work.

If you think about it, how much more deeply can you know someone than
by living with his/her poetry. And sometimes -- in the ancient
tradition-- we talk in poetry. For instance, a few years ago, Andrea
and I had a poetry conversation, with the goal being neither of our
greater glory but both of our greater growth. During that exchange,
Andrea wrote some lovely poems which wended their way into her most
recent collection, and I profited too, spinning off her intelligence in
directions of my own. Nick Samaras and I are now doing a similar thing-
we send each other a poem a month, which we then critique back and
forth until it falls to rest. Nick’s a fine critic, and I’ve learned a
lot from him. And those are only a couple of examples. I have many
wonderful friends and teachers among other poets. In fact, like many of
us, I feel friendship, even kinship, to writers I’ve never met, just
from their work.

But the most important of my own friendships are the warm, live ones.
It’s a wonderful feeling not to need to explain why I do what I do,
because they already know since they’re the same, and in that mutual
knowing I feel the sort of acceptance which I can’t always, in the last
analysis, get from those closest to me. In fact, sometimes I think of
my friendships with other writers as a kind of home base on the field of
my life.

I’d like to leave you with an analogy. My husband makes beautiful
stained glass. And because he wants to give something back, he donates
windows to poor churches. We go to Mexico often, making that part of
our trips, and when Gerald’s finished a project, we prospect for
another. A few years ago, it was a church on a bumpy street in a barrio
in Patzcuaro. Ger spent an especially long time on those windows-
there were eight, and he designed them beautifully, with an Indian
woman in the foreground and colors which seemed just right for the
bright plastic streamers which adorned the inside of that church. When
the windows were ready, we took them to the sacristans in Patzcuaro, a
couple named Adolfo and Josefina, to explain how install them and help
them do it.

It wasn’t an easy job because the windows weren’t set up to
receive glass, so there was a fair amount of improvisational
engineering- a sort of engineering skat- to be done before we could
start the actual installation. The three of us, Adolfo, Ger, and I had
been working for several days, and neither Adolfo not Josefina had said
a word about the windows. Now, I knew how hard Ger had worked on them–
months and months in the barn. So, though I felt guilty about it, I
was also beginning to feel let down and a little annoyed. More and
more, I wanted someone besides me to admire those windows. Or at least
thank Ger for his trouble. But then one day Josefina and I were
sitting at the table in her tiny house with its glass-less windows and
its dog on the roof, where they lived with their eight children, and
she said: You know, we don’t have much, but everything we have, each
person gets a little bit.” And then I understood why they hadn’t
thanked us. Because, of course we’d shared what we had. And that felt
right to me, and I think it’s how we poets should be to each other too,
how my dear friends are already and how I’d like to be too: we don’t
have much, but everything we have, each of us gets a little bit.

--

Lola Haskins’ poetry advice book, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to
the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press) appeared in 2007, as did a collection
of her fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor, Solutions
Beginning with A (Modernbook). Her most recent of eight books of poems
is a new and selected called Desire Lines (BOA, 2004). She continues to
do as much radio as she can and to collaborate with other artists, her
most recent collaboration being poetry with dance and cello called Of Air
and the Water, performed at the Hippodrome State Theater, Gainesville, FL,

Lucille Lang Day - Living With A Writer

You are a writer. Imagine that in the next room is someone who has read a lot of your work, perhaps more than anyone else, and that although this person is not available 24 hours a day to read your new work, you never need wait more than a few hours for an opportunity to say, "Would you read this?" He or she, being a writer too, has come to you many times with this same request. Each of you knows that at worst a short wait will follow: the answer will always be "Yes."

My husband, Richard Levine, writes mostly prose; I write mostly poetry. I have absolutely no sense of competing with him. Our work is so different from each other's that the idea of competition seems as remote to me as the idea of competition with someone who practices a different art form, say music or painting. Yet, since we both work with words, we are able to respond critically to each other.

We are honest when we read each other's work: we don't automatically say the things ("Brilliant!" "Incredible!") that the other longs to hear. I am friends with many writers, and I often share unpublished work with them. There are only a few, however, who've ever ventured to say anything downright negative, such as "That image is a cliché" or "The ending of that poem is really unsatisfying." Every writer needs someone who will do this, and I am grateful whenever I hear it from my spouse instead of embarrassing myself by showing my pimply young poems to other friends.

Richard's feedback is the most detailed I get from anyone. He seems to consider each word in my poems as carefully as if he'd written them himself. He even comes up with alternative images for me. For example, in a poem I wrote about the war in Iraq, I had the lines "fear gathers like clouds/and saturates the earth—unwelcome rain." Richard, bless his directness, said, "That's a cliché." He didn't stop there, but went on to generate a list of alternative images, including "fear falls like feathers of birds/shot from the sky." This inspired me to work more on these lines, and eventually I came up with "fear rises and swirls like a dust storm/engulfing the streets." To get from the clouds to the dust storm, Richard and I considered 15 versions of these two lines—three of his and 12 of mine. Who but your spouse would put up with this? Afterward I asked him if it bothered him, when, after he'd put so much time into the poem, I didn't use one of his images. He said "No," that he understood my need to make it my own.

Both of us feel that giving feedback to the other is helpful to our own development as a writer, that the process gives us experience that enables us to look more critically at our own work. After all, both poets and prose writers use images, are concerned with voice, and need to get rid of unnecessary words. I have to admit, though, that responding to Richard's stories would be a lot less rewarding if he weren't such a good writer and I didn't enjoy his work so much.

If Richard is disgruntled for any reason when I give him a poem to read—e.g., if he's feeling frustrated with his own work or annoyed with me—he waits until later to read it. He says he's harsher when he's not in a good mood. I don't think his mood affects his ability to evaluate a poem, but it definitely has an impact on how he presents his criticism!

When we work on one of his stories or my poems, it's always clear whose piece of writing it is, and who will therefore have the last word. I'm not sure Richard and I could co-author something unless we were writing separate chapters of a book or separate sections of an article. We once spent an hour working on a single sentence for the guest book at a bed and breakfast inn: "It was lovely to stay in such a personal space, watched over by the mermaid—a magical eyrie." Richard preferred "the Motel 6 of our dreams" to "a magical eyrie." He finally threw up his hands and said, "I'm taking the suitcases to the car. Write whatever you want."

It would be dishonest to leave the impression that the bed-and-breakfast incident was the most serious disagreement Richard and I have ever had over writing. A worse one that stands out in my mind (and I am sure there are others in his) was the night I wanted to work on a poem when he felt that he needed my help because all he could get was snow on our new television set. I will leave the details of this one to your imagination. We survived it, we are still married, and he is still my best editor and my best friend.

In addition to discussing our own writing, we talk about poetry and fiction we've read, as well as theoretical issues such as deconstruction and reader-response criticism, and the aesthetics of schools of writing such as Language Poetry and New Formalism. We often revisit the question, "Is an interpretation of a story or poem valid if the author didn't have it in mind?" I would say "Yes"; Richard would say "No." There doesn't tend to be a winner or loser in these discussions; we just get clearer and clearer about what someone else thinks.

Our bookshelves hold many volumes by authors that one of us wouldn't have read if it weren't for the other. To name just a few, I wouldn't have read novels by Charles Baxter and Ann Patchett if Richard hadn't said "I think you'll like this," and he would probably have missed the poetry of Pattiann Rogers and Ruth Daigon if it weren't for my enthusiastic oral reviews. Every Friday evening before dinner, we light candles, say blessings over the bread and wine, and read a poem to celebrate the cycle of the week.

BIO NOTE:

Lucille Lang Day's poetry collections are Infinities, Wild One, Fire in the Garden, and Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, which was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She has also published three poetry chapbooks, most recently The Book of Answers (Finishing Line, 2006) and God of the Jellyfish (Cervena Barva, 2007). She is the founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books (www.ScarletTanager.com), and the director of the Hall of Health, a museum in Berkeley.

____________

______

Comments - "A Random Reader"

Just wanted to drop a note to let you know how much I am enjoying the series 'On the Nature of Literary Friendship'. I stumbled upon it, and am delighted with the diversity of both the writing and the perspectives offered. Thanks for compiling it.

--Valerie Polichar (a random reader & editor of the journal Grasslimb)

Comments -Good job!

Hello Robert!

My name is Jalina Mhyana. I was just reading your

article about writers' friendships and was completely

engaged by the idea and the honesty with which you both

approached it. Wow, great stuff! Most writers are so damn

irritatingly appropriate that they would never admit to such

feelings. For instance, in my MFA program, all of the

students agree with whatever the guru-writer of the day is

saying, without question, wagging their tails and nodding

their heads. Gee whiz! I love this honesty stuff you're

giving us. Let's have more humanity, less phony

graciousness. Good job!

My Best,

Jalina Mhyana

____________________

_________

J.J. Webb remembers Michael McNeilley, 1947 - 2001

---------

In Memory - Michael McNeilley
____________________________________
So the computer screen passes writers at me on a constantly evolving Internet and this one blues piece, in '93, holds my screen a long time with its intricacies. I ask, "who the hell is this guy McNeilley?" The screen says, 'editor of the Olympia Review, in Olympia, Washington.' Within a few days there is an introduction. Within a few more days there's plotting. A few more, collaboration. And one day, friendship.

The collaboration started on one of the Internet's first Ezines. An Art and Literary Ezine called 'The Hawk' had started in '93. Michael became the fiction editor of 'The Hawk' just before its second issue. When the Ezine became 'poetry only' in '95, its name was changed to 'ZeroCity'. And Michael and I became its co-editors.

A recluse, I know friendships with other reclusive men and women who do the same kinds of things with their reclusive natures. Write. Carve. Sculpt. Paint. They want to be alone, mostly, to examine the insides of their imaginations and to distort time, or so some have told me. Some of those friends, when called to oppose their natural, comfortable routines, come out of their seclusion gregarious, self-assured, eager, even arrogant in their approach to their friends. Demanding. Imposing. Exciting. Provocative. That friend is the most stimulating and dangerous kind of friend. Including major investments of time in revelation of naked spirit to another. And fear, too, of being overwhelmed. Of being too influenced.

Michael McNeilley pushed writers at me faster than I thought possible. Where he found them didn't matter
to me. We'd decided to do an Ezine and the fact he was three times faster than me at finding writers only
bothered me a little bit. Eventually, I told him I felt like we were in a competition and I was running second.
He said, "Great! You are the man with the perfect life AND you want to come in first in everything you do, too?
You greedy thing. So, when did this become a competition?"

"You think I have a perfect life?"
"You think you don't?"
* * *
A few weeks ago, during a discussion on the history of poetry on the Internet, Robert Sward informed me of a 1996 magazine article on Internet Ezines. He said the Ezine Michael and I had edited was mentioned favorably, though only Michael had been listed as editor. Grrrrrr. And the article was written a decade ago.

* * *
"Tell me again, why did we agree to release tomorrow?"
"We thought it would be less work?"
"At least there's only Virg and three others left to format."
"Michael, your buddy Virg is a dick. You know that?"

"Easy now, Virgil and I go way back. What's the problem?"
"He's a lawyer. Let's start there. That alone's enough, but
he's a 'know-it-all' too, and he thinks he's a better writer
than me ..."

"Well, that's probably true .."
".. hell, he thinks he's a better writer than you."

"The dick! You think we should can his pieces from the issue?"

* * *
On the next to last day of June, 2002, we spread Michael McNeilley's ashes around one of the trees in the redwood cathedral here at the Poetry Grove. Stephanie and Thom, his ex-wife and son, Jeff, one of his boyhood friends, and I scattered the ashes. My wife and daughter watched. We read poetry by Auden and by Michael. We talked about heart attacks and dying young, about turtles and Napoleon. We talked about Michael, his brother, his wives, his sons, his daughter, his poetry. We remembered him with his friends and his acquaintances. We drove out to Big Basin and Stephanie spread some of his ashes around one of the trees near 'the mother of the forest', a spot he'd taken a liking to when he visited in '99.

There were stories of Washington, New York, New Mexico, Texas and a dozen other places. Stories of drum beats on wooden legs and reckless ramblings in a gold convertible. There were conjectures on how many lives he'd saved, how many wars he'd settled, how many he had waged.

We ate steak and corn and baked potatoes on the balcony under the oak tree where Michael spent time staring out at Empire Ridge in the distance. No one can look out at these huge trees, this beautiful forest, these Holy Cross Mountains and not see heaven. And certainly, heaven is where Michael McNeilley belongs.
--Beau Blue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

McNeilley was founding director of the National Student News Service; worked as a reporter and correspondent in Washington, DC; His stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, Ezines, anthologies and broadsides, including the New York Quarterly, Poet, Chicago Review, Oyster Boy Review, Cross-Connect, Mississippi Review, Chiron Review, Poetry Motel, Minotaur, Slipstream, Cafe Review, Pink Cadillac, and many others. He was editor of the Olympia Review in Olympia Washington, publisher & editor of the 'Olympia Review Anthology'. He was co-editor with JJ Webb of the online Ezine ZeroCity from 1994 to 1998. His books and broadsides include 'Love & Beer', and 'My religion is your ass' (with Mere Smith) from Techline, 'Situational Reality' from Dream Horse Press, 'McNeilley's Monsters' & '10 by mcn' from Cruzio Communications.

-------

Beau Blue (JJ Webb) - Blue's books & recordings include 'Appalachian Canticles' (Jarus Books, 1979), 'Human Tricks' (A Little Licks Record, 1981), 'in the Electric Shadows' (A daVinci Media publication, 1994). He was co-editor with Michael McNeilley of the online Ezine ZeroCity from 1994 to 1998. A performance poet and storyteller, Blue has performed extensively in Northern California, Oregon and Nevada for the last 30 years. He lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Beau Blue Presents - http://members.cruzio.com/~jjwebb
________________________

______

Catherine Graham - Grief, Poems & Friendship

Grief, Poems & Friendship

Grief is like waiting for fifty giant black kettles to boil.

    For whatever reason deep literary friendships have eluded me. Perhaps this is due to my current geographic location as I live in the suburbs, away from downtown Toronto - the centre of Canada's literary scene. Perhaps this is due to my solitary nature - an only child I'm quite comfortable spending time by myself. Or perhaps this is due to my social shyness - I often feel more alone during literary gatherings than I do when I'm actually alone. But having said that...

   Myna Wallin and I were introduced during an Art Bar reading at The Victory Café on Markham Street in Toronto. The affinity was immediate. We had much in common, budding poets living the freelance life. But we soon discovered we shared more than that, we'd been through the loss of both parents. We were both adult orphans.

    "I think about you," Myna said. Another Art Bar reading had just ended. We stood at the corner of Bloor and Bathhurst, Myna beside her bicycle, I beside my car, about to say goodbye. The fact that my brief presence had had an impact on Myna made me feel special, appreciated, seen.

     That fall after my first book of poetry was published, Myna came to the Toronto launch at the Mockingbird on King Street.

    "I have something for you," she said. She handed me a long white box. "I saw it today and got it on impulse. I hope you don't mind."

  Sandwiched between two long cotton strips I pulled out a finely carved wooden butterfly. Myna fastened the choker around my neck. Not only did I wear it that night I chose to wear it for subsequent readings; a fitting image as my first book of poetry was titled Pupa. Myna's intuitive and impulsive gesture moved me deeply. I had myself a friend.

    During the months that followed I was booked to do a series of readings and radio interviews. One of the interviews was with the University of Toronto's campus station CIUT, a Sunday afternoon hour-long program with hosts Nik Beat and Nancy Bullis. After climbing the narrow, rickety stairs, I was ushered into a waiting room and introduced to the poet I would be sharing the program with. Dark-haired like Myna, she too had kind, warm eyes. Sincere smile.

    "I'm Merle Nudelman. Do you mind if I go first? My husband and I need to attend a wedding reception."

    "No problem," I said. We exchanged cards.

    Before readings and interviews not only do I experience the flutter of butterfly wings in my stomach, my listening abilities go out the window. This is normal, so I'm told, but unfortunate, for it means that I'm incapable of enjoying any presenter before me. My mind is brim-filled with questions. What will I say? Which poems shall I read? So when Merle sat across from Nancy Bullis I assumed I would not be able to listen. My mind would be too muddled.

    This was not the case.

    Like my first book of poetry Pupa, Merle's first book Borrowed Light contained poems that captured her personal grieving journey after the loss of both parents. I couldn't help but listen. The poems she read were tight and effective, humorous and gut wrenching. She'd traveled that flat black landscape I knew so well. And like me she'd made her way through it.

   A few weeks later Merle and I met up for a coffee and chat. Because Merle had to leave right after her interview she hadn't heard mine. A look of amazement washed over her face when I shared my story of how I'd come to write poetry.

    "That's my story," she said. We've been friends ever since.

    When grief hits us it slams doors shut. But it if you look closely, very closely, it also opens them. After the deaths of my parents the door to poetry opened to me. Grief acted as the catalyst towards the creative life. Once I became conscious of this - journal outpourings were more than emotional release - I began to take the craft of writing poetry seriously.

   Perhaps deep literary friendships haven't eluded me after all.

Bio

Catherine Graham is the author of The Watch and The Red Element. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto, designs and delivers workshops on creativity for the business and academic communities, and is Vice-President of Project Bookmark Canada. Visit: www.catherinegraham.com

---------------------------

---------------

Rochelle Ratner - COMPETITION: A Tale of Two Friendships

Let me begin with two anecdotes. Both took place in the early 1970s:

1) A poet-friend calls me to read me his new poem, a ritual we must have gone through two or three times a week (often with my calling him, new poem in hand). This time, however, I don't like the poem. He goes into an unbelievable tirade about how stupid I am. I try to defend my views. We hang up. I feel defeated, depressed, worthless. An hour later he calls again, wanting to read me the revision of the poem. It's much, much better, mostly because he's taken much of my criticism to heart. I bemoan (or maybe whine about) his having attacked me. His response is that my criticism wasn't specific, and if he hadn't pushed me I'd never have gotten to the roots of the problem.

2) I write to a poet-friend who recently left the city to tell him that my first book has been accepted for publication. Now, this is going to be a tense situation – I know that before I write him. He's the one who suggested I try my manuscript at this press, for one thing. And he did so with a sort of backhanded compliment – "these all seem like formula poems, why don't you send it to New Rivers, he likes this sort of writing…" So in my letter I try to play down my excitement. After telling him about the book, I go on to talk about looking for a larger apartment, and mention I'd briefly considered sharing an apartment with this mutual friend of ours. The letter he sends back begins as a dream might: "When you're thirty years old, it won't make any difference if your first book was published when you were twenty-three or twenty-eight, but I know it makes a lot of difference now. Congratulations." But from that point on he launches into attack mode, telling me I'm "selfish, selfish, selfish" for not wanting to share an apartment with a perfectly nice woman. "You're so selfish I don't even want to know you. I'm going to write the rest of this letter to somebody else." Luckily, I was meeting another mutual friend for lunch that same day. She took one look at the letter and summed it up with a clarity that was eluding me: He's just jealous.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

I do. I did then, and I do now. Only by challenging each other, pressing each other to write nothing if not our best (however painful this might be), do we continue to grow as friends, and as writers. Though I'm not sure which comes first.

The first of those two friendships gradually dissolved. I don't think it was his fault, or my fault. I don't think either of us was aware of it while it was happening. But my own poetry started to change, I was beginning to explore longer forms and eventually fiction, while his writing ventured off in the opposite direction, forever exploring new ways to tighten his words. I found myself "cheating," as it were, praising poems I wasn't exactly wild about, claiming to be excited by some of the same writers he was learning from. Though we'd been through many arguments over the course of nearly 20 years, there was no final argument. We just more or less seemed to stop calling each other. I'd entered into an exciting new love affair, and it was probably months before I realized the lapse.

The letter-writer, on the other hand, remains one of my closest friends. We have very different, busy schedules, and don't see each other that often anymore, but when we do it's like we were never apart. He doesn't pretend to like everything I've written, but he's supportive, even if a playful cruelty becomes part of the banter (I once mailed him a later-aborted manuscript; he called the next day to ask if I was okay; the poems were so bad that he feared for my health). That sort of banter. When he read my early poems about mermaids, he commented that they never had any fun, and showed up a few days later with a drawing he'd done of mermaids exuberantly riding the crests of waves or doubled over in graceful dives. That sort of friend. Even though he'd originally "attacked" the manuscript of that first book, when the book was published and a well-known writer was checking to see if I'd be a threat to him, my friend drilled me on how I should have responded, pointing out all the unique aspects of poems that had been added since he'd first seen that manuscript.

I am, by nature, a very competitive person, probably more competitive than most of my friends. I'm not going to try to cover over that fact. But I at least had the sense to never apply for a writers colony – I can just picture myself caught up in the fact that others were producing more than I was, or gloating over how much I'd accomplished that day. And it was for similar reasons that I remained living alone, without any serious "relationships" until I was well into my thirties. Before that time, I couldn't picture myself living with someone who wasn't heavily involved in the arts. When I finally met my future husband, I felt as if I was on safe ground. Here was someone from the business world, my parents' world, who could also strangely appreciate me and my writing. Yet even now, his excitement about his work gets under my skin sometimes. Especially when I've had a bad day, or week, or whatever.

Over time I've learned to cherish my competitive nature. There are moments when it can be extremely useful, and healthy. Years ago, I recall living in an apartment where, through my back window, I could see into an apartment behind mine. I never met the woman who lived there, never learned anything about her, but late at night, often at two or three in the morning, she would be sitting by the window, typing. For all I knew, she could be addressing envelopes for a penny apiece (as I did during high school). But that didn't matter. What mattered was she was sitting there, working, typing, and as long as she was there I found it very hard to just go to bed myself.

I can't now recall what I wrote during those endless hours, but I do know that I wrote some of my best work after midnight during that period, after the events of the day had died down and I had nothing that required my immediate attention. No more distractions. No more interruptions. No more calls from friends. But I knew the friends were there.

________________________

Rochelle Ratner's poetry collection, House and Home, was published in 2003 by Marsh Hawk Press. Two poetry e-chapbooks, Tellings (2002) and Lady Pinball (2003), were published by Tamafyhr Mountain Press. Also online, Sugar Mule Magazine devoted a special issue to her writing, including poetry, fiction, memoir, translations, and articles on her writing. Coffee House Press has published two novels: Bobby's Girl (1986) and The Lion's Share (1991). An anthology she edited, Bearing Life: Women's Writings on Childlessness, was published in January 2000 by The Feminist Press. Rochelle died earlier this year.

_____________________

_________

Doug McClellan - Writers' Friendship / Writers' Group(s)

T.S. Eliot, "Shrine," by Doug McClellan

by Doug McClellan

The group had been meeting for several years when I joined as something of a wild card: I had only started writing poetry when I retired from teaching and after a full career as a visual artist. My métier had been collage and assemblage. Years spent haunting garage sales and flea markets for material to be pasted or nailed into some anti-narrative context was on all counts a seriously non-linear activity. Writing (as I saw it and practiced it when necessary) being much a more sequential business and a craft I found difficult. There are limits to paste and scissors. Only when the Macintosh entered my life did my collage instincts find their writing machine. This uncorked a reservoir of things itching to be written.

As a graduate student, and later as a budding painter, I would get together with other artists for talk but we seldom discussed our work, we kept the conversation more to the comings and goings of the art world. The macho climate of the '50s art movements had marketed a distrust of verbal analysis. Statements like, "I see you're using that new red, I hear it's crap" were as close as we got to penetrating critique.

Joining the writing group with something of a second language problem ("Sorry, I don't speak literature")––my tools for dealing with a poem when it was laid open on the table were meager. This meant that I benefited much more from the group than I felt able to contribute. At the outset I also discovered what a haphazard reader I was and that I was very close to being one of those dopes I had battled with for ages, one who could say "I don't know anything about X, but I know what I like" and mean it. Time and tolerance on the part of my peers made the transition painless and to my delight, I had finally found colleagues who were willing (yea eager) to discuss each other's work.

Before the group addresses individual poems there is a short but valuable period of tea-making, general conversation and shoptalk. As a standard procedure for new poems, the poet will read his/her new piece; this is followed by another reading by a fellow member. To me this is consistently valuable. The second physical voice often relocates the poem into another poetic voice, as well as serves to catch rough terrain and line break problems along the way. Hearing my own words read by another voice, often a woman's, is invariably illuminating in that it breaks the poem free from an internal mumble that accompanies me when I write. The 'read and then shut up' rule, though not universally observed, seems to suit my needs. To have various members quiz each other about my fresh words, and to come up with such diverse (and may I say, irrational?) readings can lead to both deflation and clarification. But it always leads to a next step.

The machinery of groups, their boons and tribulations, are well known and I can't add much that's new. Rules and protocol vary: experience levels vary. I think we all agree that it is the collective, the stock company if you will, that makes things productive. As a collection of poets we are virtually an anti-school. All over the stylistic map. This seems to have great advantages, my earlier experience in brushes with art 'colonies' that have become hothouses producing a cloned product, convinces me that our differences are a genuine strength. As critics we all seem quite able to step out of our own armor and engage the poem at hand. Some groups may be more overtly supportive in style while others may dispense with foreplay entirely; we fall somewhere in between. Individual roles derive from our individual needs-hopes-dreams-fears, whatever––obviously we all have our angle of approach to a new work. But it is a diversity that can work because of an overall quality of trust and fellow feeling that has developed and continues to develop, assisted by an occasional potluck supper.

--

Douglas McClellan––1950 to present: MFA painting. Exhibited nationally and internationally. Professor of Art: Scripps College, Claremont (CA) Graduate University; Univ. of California, Santa Cruz. Dean Otis Art Inst. (LA) Six volumes of poetry, largely self-published. Currently working on digital fusion of words and image. For a sample of Doug's work, T.S. Eliot "Shrine," see above.

________________________

_____________

Barry Spacks - "Reading an Old Friend's Poems"

Reading an Old Friend's Poems

The wonderings and sweetness of this voice bring to my thought the scent of

fine paper, fine linen, shirt with a white collar for the first time worn, long

evening with a new book, dwelling over the pages.

But in its sayings of loss, this voice tastes blood on its teeth, tart taste of

blood that can neither be spit out nor swallowed.

In reverence for loveliness my friend's word-music comes upon me like air

before rain: remember?

that freshness, cool, ultimately delicate;

though air so offered may lift at times into a wind carrying sand, or into a

deluge to follow.

"Where will we go," asks the poem's voice, "when they send us away from

here?" the body gone from all its familiar desirings and gone this mind that

was a savoring, while its voice alone continues, a comfort to desire.

__

Barry Spacks earns his keep as a persistently visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara after years of teaching at M.I.T. He's published many poems in various journals, paper and pixel, plus stories, two novels, and seven poetry collections, the most extensive of which is SPACKS STREET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, from John Hopkins. A CD of 42 poems, A PRIVATE READING, appeared in October 2000.

___________________________

______________