It used to be the conventional wisdom that a movie always dumbed-down the novel it was based on. When film was a new medium, film makers assumed audiences needed to be led by the hand. But even a few decades down the line, we had those awful versions of A Farewell to Arms (Rock Hudson!) and The Great Gatsby. Read the rest of this entry »
An article in the current New Republic, “The Country of the Damned” by Adam Kirsch (TNR June 25) awakened memories. Kirsch discusses the grip that the Southern Agrarian ideology held on Allen Tate, who for a time was thought of as one of our greatest poets. Along the way, Kirsch quotes some atrociously racist and anti-semitic remarks that Tate made in print in his younger days, one being a declaration in the early 1930s that certain blacks accused of a particular crime (I forget what it was) should be executed whether guilty or not. Read the rest of this entry »
Of the better-known poets who contributed to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, I hear most often from Gibbons Ruark. In promoting the collection at libraries and bookstores, I’ve more than once chosen to read his contribution to the book, a poem called “With Our Wives in Late October.” Recently I emailed him to say how much people have appreciated this lovely and delicate poem. He responded to tell me that it was a conflation of a number of days spent with Jim and Annie during an autumn when they were neighbors. Here’s how it begins:
“Wandering with weather down the long hillside,
We come to the slender reeds in the water,
All of us who lazed by our own rivers
Summer and autumn.
Looking for redwings or leaves that were falling.
Light that was flying, the red wing of summer,
Never dreaming to be by one sure river
Gathered together.”
Gibbons ends the poem by describing the first stars of evening and “the loveliest faces of women.” It’s a wonderful tribute not only to James, but to Annie Wright and Kay Ruark.
Gibbons will have a poem in the June 25th issue of The New Republic.
Last night Northern Lights Books and Gifts of Duluth, MN threw a launch party for Anthony Bukoski’s North of the Port, his fifth collection of short stories. With these books, lovingly depicting the joys and heartaches of the Polish community in Superior, Wisconsin, Tony has achieved a well-deserved national following. While his writing is rooted firmly in regional culture, his themes of love, loss, and endurance, evoked by way of the everyday, are universal. Read the rest of this entry »
The window of my study looks into the backyard, which slopes downhill to my wife’s pottery studio, hidden by various trees and shrubs that have been keening under rain and eternal clouds for way too many days now. I remember sitting on a screened porch forty-some years ago with a girl who said, “I think whenever it rains, you can remember every time it’s ever rained.” Of course we didn’t have as much rain to remember then. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a branch of literary criticism that studies the role that readers play in determining or completing the literary work. You can talk, for instance, about how Jane Austen’s awareness the audience’s expectations might have helped to shape Emma. On the other end of the writer-reader alliance, you can talk about how the way readers are wired determines their understanding of a story or poem. In a wonderful novel by Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler, a character representing the reader constantly tinkers with the plot.
The critic Wolfgang Iser argued that all literary works contain “gaps” that must be filled either consciously or otherwise by readers. This line of speculation is influenced by a large volume of psychological and philosophical writing about perception, and fancy words such as “phenomenology” are batted back and forth. Below is my contribution to this discussion.
Lovely Reader,
I will say a poem to your eyes
someday when we are by a lake
and raindrops whisper secrets in the trees.
You will move me somewhere with your eyes,
perhaps a shore where small ships nod
and oceans breathe contentedly.
The poem will be summer wind in grass,
or sounds the insects make at night,
and it will walk the pathways of your eyes
To find the sea and board a ship
that journeys where the oceans roll
in eyes that make the poem whole.
