Goon Squad Wins Pulitzer

Last week, Jennifer Egan won the 2011 fiction Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad. Does this mean I should quit bad-mouthing her second novel Look at Me? Seriously, I didn't like it. But she has received quite a lot of praise for her novel The Keep as well as Goon Squad. The Keep is in my reading queue currently (actually, the audiobook is my exercising MP3 player, but it isn't getting a lot of use these days). So, I'd better add another one to my list.

I will definitely have to read Goon Squad, but it got me thinking about what other Pulitzer winners I have yet to read. Below is the list of fiction winners since 1990--the ones in bold I have actually read:

2010 - The Tinkers by Paul Harding
2009 - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
2007 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006 - March by Geraldine Brooks
2005 - Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2004 - The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003 - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002 - Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999 - The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998 - American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996 - Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995 - The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994 - The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992 - A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1991 - Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

Just six in the last twenty years. I'd better get reading.

Poetry Is Good For Business

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Danny Heitman makes the case for poetry in today's business world. He writes,

Although the brevity of Twitter and fleeting attention spans have been widely bemoaned by business professionals who are trying to get their points across, poets throughout the ages have routinely confronted the challenge of saying a lot—and saying it memorably—in small spaces. Read John Keats, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and learn how it's done.

I remember learning the biography of Stevens as a working undergraduate and taking heart that someone could be both a poet and a professional. That the two sides could not only coexist but complement. But poetry isn't only good for teaching people to write briefly and with purpose. People need the imagery and abstraction of poetry as well. They need new ways of seeing things, of understanding the impression the world makes on them, despite all of the noise of the day's activities. A little poetry is good for everyone.

Electronic Guilt

I feel so guilty. My poor neglected network. My month’s old Facebook status. Or my disturbingly irrelevant twitter update. And that aging blog, taunting me like a blank page. And then there’s the reading. Newsletters, blogs, my overloaded instapaper account. All of things I am missing. All of the things I am getting wrong. I know. Believe me, I’ve bookmarked or saved all of those articles on how to leverage a network, to build an online community. And I neglect it all.

It’s not as if not an expressive sort. I have plenty to say and think that most of it is worth being heard. It’s just that it all overwhelms. I am writing a novel, you know. While trying to get an agent for the last one and trying still to get a slew of short stories published. Oh, then there’s a career. And three children and a wife. Never mind the looming bookshelf of unread books towering behind me right now as I write this. The newspapers, the weekly and monthly magazine (Call that Print Guilt, I suppose). I might just have a few demands on my time. In all of this, it feels like there are little more than a few minutes available to dabble online.

I know I’m not alone in this. I am not the only one who fantasizes about it all going away. About being in some Montana cabin or seaside shack without the internet, out of cellphone range. Managing all of the demands on us, especially the electronic ones, will always be a challenge. Somewhere there is a way to manage all of it, or at least to feel more like it is all being managed. I see it done. I am always amazed by the people I know who are busy, kids and careers, but still manage keep up, to post the videos of their kids, to make me interested in reading their updates.

So, I ask your forgiveness. Forgive the missed birthday messages, the “likes” of the video you posted, the retweet of your link to the essay on James Salter. Forgive the silences, the disappearances. Forgive me and I will do my best to not let the guilt push me away. Though it overwhelms, I will try to be a better participant in our new electronic era.

First Draft Finished; On to Revision

Two hundred pages and 40,000 words, the first draft is DONE. Actually, I call it the second draft. The first draft is handwritten in three spiral-bound notebooks. It only gets minor revisions when I type it into the computer, but that complete version is "Draft 2." Now, begins the heavy lifting.

Actually, since it was written with the notion of just getting it written, I think it would be a mistake to just dig in to chapter one. I think the first step is to read the thing as a whole so that I can evaluate its form and structure. I need to sort out what is missing, what might need to be moved around.


The novel was written out of sequence. I wrote all of one character's story before writing the other's. So, I know some work may be necessary to link up the stories properly. And 40,000 words is much too short. I know that in the quick pace of writing the first draft, I skipped some moments of high conflict. I passed over the critical scenes, using exposition instead of taking the reader there to that moment or demonstrating something only described. Many, many pages still remain to be written.


What I have, at least for the character of Darren, the male protagonist, is a quest story. Triggered by a sequence of events, he sets out on a journey. I need to evaluate thre trials he encounters along the way. Oh, he's no hero and the decisions he makes throughout should prove it. Nicole, his wife, is on a sort of quest as well, though her story is less conventional. Her arc is not linear. She is dislodged in time and part of her struggle is in trying to find a now, an identity in which to exist today. I need to make sure her dilemmas, and the scenes used to convey then, are as evident to the reader.


It is said that you should really know everything about your characters. "Take him home and sleep with him," one writing teacher instructed me. Know how he does things, know what concerns him, know him intimately. You want to be sure that you give them the depth they need to make them real to the reader. The issue I have now is in differentiating what it is I know and what I've related in the story. If I know this thing happened in her past, I must remember that the reader doesn't know it until I reveal it. And then, I need to consider when I want to withhold information until some later point in the novel.

The first phase of revision, then, will involve rereading the manuscript in total and creating an outline, complete with notes on ideas for revising each chapter. Only then can I begin thrashing my way through the words on the page.

Wanting to Read David Vann's Caribou Island

It seems rare anymore that I can here an interview with an author and read a review of his book and know then that I really want to read the book. This has happened with David Vann's Caribou Island.

I heard Michael Silverblatt's interview with Vann and was extremely interested. And then the reviews kept coming. I even sat down in my local Tattered Cover and read the first chapter just last week.

The story centers on a man who is obsessed on building a house on an island in already-remote-enough Alaska. From the wife's persepctive, the novel deals with dark subject matter--one of its appeals for me--including suicide. The pain and frustration that exists in the story, the desires and obsessions, and the let-downs, all served to make my very interested in the novel.

My reading list, though, is long. And it feels like a shame to cheat on all the unread books on my shelves to bypass them and go out and buy and then read something brand new. What about all of those classics I still need to read? The recent award winners? The Franzen novel I'm trying to get through now? So many things around me are begging to be read, but it won't stop me from pushing, here, a book that sounds to me worth the time--despite everything else in the queue.

Just some of the reviews of Vann's Caribou Island:
LA Times - "Darkness and loneliness in Alaska, woven into a compulsively readable story."
Telegraph UK - "Caribou Island is as bleak as the shoreline of the brooding Skilak Lake"
Guardian UK - "at his best, Vann is a forceful, potent writer"
SF Gate - "gives us a climax as haunting and realized as any in recent fiction."
NY Times - "gets to places other novels can’t touch."
Seattle Times - "won't do much for Alaska tourism."

New Yorker - "The harsh beauty of Alaska is the star turn in Vann's disturbing novel."

And the excerpt you really should read: Browse Inside Caribou Island: A Novel

Why the Paperback Edition Can Have a Very Different Cover

WSJ's Jeffery Trachtenberg looks at the new cover for the paperback edition of Brando Skyhorse's The Madonna's of Echo Park and the changes from the original hardcover edition. The reasoning for the change, in this case, is very sound. I've often wondered how in the world they have gone with covers so dramatically different than the original. Here, though, the publishers still get it wrong. The original had it's issues, but they've made the paperback even more offputting. Maybe they're hoping to capture the book club set, but they've made me less likely to pick it up.

Here are some other cases where they seemed to get it wrong.

Can you tell which one's were the original hardcover dust jackets and which covers graced the paperback?

The original black and white cover of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone was mysterious, trying to convey the bitter cold of the novel. Yet when the book went to paperback, the aesthetic was lighter, emphasizing the young female lead, complete with hanging laundry in the snow to convey they rugged domesticity. It isn't horrible, but a little light for how heavy the book is.

Alice Munro's dust jacket for the hardcover of A View From Castle Rock uses an aged portrait to convey exactly what the book is: a telling of a family history. And I don't know what exactly the publishers were thinking with the paperback cover. Nothing about the text really identifies it as as a ladies' beach read. I understand that we'll use any technique to catch the chick lit audience, but I don't know that we should go so far as to mislead readers.

I am always prepared for the cover change from hardback to paperback, and I'll always be grateful when the cover remains the same.

McCarthy's Sunset Limited Coming to HBO

HBO is set to premiere a film version of Cormac McCarthy's play The Sunset Limited, staring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. I haven't read the play or seen it performed, but this trailer is enough to ensure I'm interested.

First Draft Almost Complete

I'm closing in on the end of my first draft of my current novel, tentatively titled Another Blade of Grass. And it's been an interesting process. Before, I used to get stalled, especially on key scenes, by trying to get it "right". This time, the goal has just been to get it down. More important it was to me this time to get it written and then go back and fill in the gaps, straighten it out. This, of course, takes its own bit of patience. It has been necessary to accept that a just "finished" chapter is a piece of crap. Sure, the elements were there, what happens is supposed to happen, but maybe the tone or the voice is all wrong, maybe a key piece of dialogue was left out, or maybe the writing just stinks. But when the window is open to write, when I have the scheduled or stolen hour to write, I am going to do it.

Because so much remains undone, I am looking forward to revision. I am looking forward to adding that missing exchange, adding the color, the elements of setting that were left out. There are whole chapters, I believe, that need to be rewritten from top to bottom, with a blank piece of paper and the original writing as a guide.

The goal, in a way has been to make revision a more integral part of the writing process. Too often it has been a chore. When the work feels more or less "completed", changes beyond simple line edits can be difficult to do. Now, though, I know changes I want to make, know that much is left to do to make it complete. All of which makes me anticipate the next part of the process.

Barnes County Rejections

An agonizing thing it is to put your hard work out into the world with the great likelihood that it will be rejected. While I've grown used to this (though it is still difficult) with my short fiction, I somehow expected something different with a novel. It is not even a novel--it's just a query letter. Maybe I could believe that it is the letter itself that failed, not the work, not the plot and characters. Of course, agents can be just as callous as literary journals. The "impersonal note" above (it's a rejection; let's not mince words) was sent to me by Barer Literary.

The rejection above came from Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group, the representative of both Daniel Woodrell and Marilynne Robinson. I thought she'd be responsive to the rural setting and the grit in the novel, but I doubt that my letter made it past some intern or assistant.

I know that my lack of a signficant publishing history hurts me. It's one thing to take on a debut novelist, but one without even some success publishing short fiction is a greater risk. I know. I don't think it's important to list the few things I had published in the college's annual lit journal when I was an undergrand. And I didn't include the one, more recent, piece of journalism published in a trade journal. I think these things are more distracting than anything.

So, I need to just buck up and send it out again.

Book Review: Too Much Happiness

Too Much Happiness by Alice Murno

Alice Munro has been one of my favorite writers since first reading The Beggar Maid. There is always an ease in her style that is balanced with a dryness and a distance that spotlights the isolation of her characters. Her writing has always struck me as very mature, as writing for grown ups. There is nothing flashy in Munro’s work. What she does is almost always just exactly what is required. Just what the story deserves.

Too Much Happiness, another short story collection, does not disappoint—for the most part. It is as pleasant as you would expect of Munro, until you get to the title story. Like View from Castle Rock, “Too Much Happiness” tries to establish relationships that span generations and continents. It goes so far beyond the simple, direct relations that surround someone to the histories that preceded them. The story is disjointed, too filled with facts and information to bring the reader in, make us feel close to the characters.

While I doubt that Alice Munro would publish a book that I wouldn’t read, I wouldn’t recommend a novice to her work begin with this, her latest collection. Her books are so full of excellent work that nearly any other other book on the shelf might be better.

Industry Optimists, an epidemic

At an industry conference I recently attended in Orlando, just down the road from that magic kingdom, there were no mouse ears in sight, but with all of the optimism on the stage one would have expected to see some cartoon characters. Granted that my industry went through a healthy downturn, begun by industry-specific events and then acerbated by the global financial crisis, so maybe the outlook from here looks pretty darn good. I’m just beginning to believe that optimism in business is an epidemic.

We can’t all be as pessimistic as Nouriel Roubini, or as prescient, but it is practically a requirement for people in business, particularly people representing publicly-traded companies, to be optimistic about the future. In the eternal efforts to boost stock prices CEOs have little to say about the future that isn’t rosy. Oh, they might caution. They might even revise earnings estimates (conveniently just one week before earnings are released). But by the time they have the earnings call, it will have been forgotten. Everyone just wants to hear how great the next quarter or the next year will be. It was the CEO of a company who gave the first presentation of the conference. All smiles when revealing the last slide with the dramatic chart, with the bars going sharply up and to the right.

But it’s not just company management; it’s the analysts as well. The people who we trust to be watching things closely, churning through 10-Ks to decipher the truth, to give us an accurate view on the health of the company, and to give us guidance on whether it’s worthwhile to invest our hard-earned money in the company’s stock. The analysts share the same sickness. By the time of the earnings release, the last quarter is the past—irrelevant. Tell me about the future. It’s all about the sequential growth, the year-over-year growth. As long as things are pointing in the right direction, the analysts will forgive all errors.

This previously-mentioned CEO was responsible for a $150 million capital investment that was cancelled--$150 million sunk, but did the analysts take the CEO to task? Did the stock get downgraded for management’s poor decision making? No. In fact, the stock went up after the announcement because the future was clear and understandable. The project was poorly timed and would have cost the company plenty if continued to completion. Good for them to call it quits, but the analysts never questioned the company’s judgment for wanting to do the project in the first place.

Maybe it’s personal. I was burned going into this downturn, predicting that things would not be as bad as some of the numbers were showing. Certainly, I didn’t foresee the way that the global meltdown would put a freeze on markets. Now I’m a little reluctant to think that recovery will be swift and hardy. My own analysis of the industry also produces a chart going up and to the right, just maybe not so steeply. Things within the industry are pointing in the right direction to keep the CEOs and the analysts smiling, but externally we still have plenty of unknowns. I don’t think I’ll be putting on a pair of mouse ears anytime soon.

Book Review: Lush Life

Lush Life by Richard Price


I have never been to the NY's Lower East Side, except for a quick dip into Chinatown, and I had no idea of the upheaval taking place there. No knowledge of the history and the current mix of cultures there. Richard Price, though, tells us all about it, immerses us in it, and makes us feel like we've been there. As I breezed through Lush Life, it was like an immersion course or a travelogue. I read in an interview that Price threw out 300 pages, and I'd have to say that I wouldn't mind seeing them.


Let's be clear, though. As much as I enjoyed the novel, it is no masterpiece. It is good, and the praise Price gets for his dialogue is well deserved, but the book does drag at times. Not that it slows down, but it's more like the author didn't know where it was going. Indeed, some of the plot developments later in the novel happen by chance, instead of something that was at least subconsciously expected.

Price does make an attempt, though, to get into the minds of his characters. It's just that it only goes so far. The emotions are on the surface, very evident. The complexities in them are slight.

These flaws don't take away from the enjoyment of the novel. Sometimes you need to read a novel that does just what Lush Life does.

Book Review: The Story of Lucy Gault

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

The premise of William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault is compellingly tragic, and I had hoped that the overall novel would share this same sense of tragedy. When parents leave behind a child who has runaway and been injured, believing her to have been drowned, the disappear from their previous life. Their daughter is left behind to live with the servants and with the guilt of the misery she has put her parents through. Her parents also suffer with the guilt of their daughter’s death, the result of a hasty decision to leave their home because of the danger and political strife in their region of Ireland without consulting with her or helping her to understand. This state of misplaced guilt and misunderstanding, though, rules the novel. As the years then proceed, the characters are locked into this state, the parents in exile in Italy, the daughter awaiting word from them, and no one moving forward.

When change finally comes, and the widowed father returns home to find his adult daughter alive, their inability to communicate or to try to start fresh drives everyone into a state of melancholy that overtakes the remaining novel.

I am often a fan of tragedy, guilt, and melancholy, but it all takes place here without resolve. There is little progress or development. No one is awakened; there is no epiphany. These things aren’t always necessary, but the payoff for the reader comes in these sorts of changes. Even when the possibility of love enters the novel, drawn though it was with intuition and understanding, it is a dead end.

Quibble as I might with the course of events in the novel and the development of characters, what makes it all worse is the dryness of the writing. Other than the pained love of a minor character, and the growing mental illness of another, the world painted in the novel is plain and without light.

When a Novel Begins to Write Itself

I thought I was writing a simple book. Straight-forward with a single point of view, taking place over a single afternoon and evening. Yet, as I brainstormed last night about what was left to happen in the novel, it became apparent that the book wants to be more than this.

The premise off which I was writing was this: When a man learns that his neighbors are having an affair, it shakes his own idea of marriage and of himself. But after last night, maybe it’s more like this: When a couple learns of cheating neighbors, their marriage is shaken, identity is questioned, and pasts haunt the present. Something like that.

The current narration is so close to the husband, Darren (though I’m reserving the right to change it; men’s names are so difficult to choose), that we can only know the wife through his eyes. Her character, though, is begging me for a chance to rebut. She is more than he thinks she is, her troubles more complex.

While Darren’s narration is extremely close, nearly stream of consciousness with plenty of questioning and jumping from one topic to another, the wife’s (Nicole) would have to be different. It would need to be as detached in a way as she is, trying to occupy herself in the domesticity of her daily life. Her past, though, pesters her and deserves some time on the page as well. Instead of flashbacks through memory (my standard way of revealing scenes from the past), whole sections taking place in the past may be more effective.

Darren’s issues are more with the present, who he’s become, his feelings of anonymity. He is waking up to his feelings of unhappiness. Part of it, obviously, has to do with his marriage. Another part comes from his not turning out as he had hoped. There is also, for him, a large issue of morality which also comes into question after learning of this affair between neighbors.

It is to be a suburban novel, with the influence of Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, but it is also about identity and existence, with the required hints of Sartre and Camus. It is not meant to skewer suburban life, or ridicule or demean suburbanites, but it should examine how one maintains, loses, or finds identity in the anonymous suburbs. It is in this line of thinking last night that I may have also settled on a title: Another Blade of Grass. It’ll work for now.

My recent reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August has opened my eyes some to what is possible in a novel. It is not necessary to get locked into anything during the writing process, not a single point of view or a particular course of action. As I sit here now, trying to do other work, the new possibilities fill my mind and the story gets richer by the moment.

Book Review: Light In August

Light in August by William Faulkner

It is beginning to amaze me that we push exposure to the writing of William Faulkner through The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. My first real exposure (outside of “A Rose for Emily”, which is a topic for another discussion) came through As I Lay Dying. I found it dry and dreary, and not very illuminating--except for seeing the word slough in print repeatedly. Then came The Sound and the Fury, which I found much more vibrant and dramatic, but it didn’t get to me. Years later, on a second read, I liked it even more.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I learned to really like Faulkner, while reading If I Forget Thee Jerusalem: The Wild Palms. The sentences in that book went on and on, with texture and color. They were like winding vines, dark green and gripping. But it wasn’t just the sentences, it was also Faulkner’s tone, how he described the flood waters, how he let us see into Henry’s heart. I think I was the only one in that class to like the book.

Beginning with pregnant Lena on the road in search of her baby’s father, Light in August reminded me of the influence Faulkner has over Cormac McCarthy. I could see how Outer Dark came out of some of the elements of Light in August. Lena is dull and determined and I was disappointed that the narrative dropped her in favor of Joe Christmas and Rev. Hightower, or the other characters that appear, complete with generational back stories, and take over for a time. The character of Joe Christmas and his assumed mixed heritage made for a good mystery, despite despicable and violent he is. Rev. Hightower's story is considerably more sad and though there's no purposeful mystery, much about what makes him so maniacal and delusional remains unknown.

Though the novel wanders down tangents at times that felt like distractions, including a new character who takes over the novel's ending, it was addictive. The tone and setting invited immersion. I took every opportunity to read the book, coming close to picking it up while waiting at red lights.

Noting the influence of Faulkner on other writers I enjoy reading, tells me that I need to keep reading his work. Light in August is a Faulkner novel that cannot be missed.

Barnes County Query Letter Sent

Three years after starting the novel, and a year after finishing it, I sent out the first query letter for Barnes County to an agent. As much as I know that writing is a business, and that the only way to get published is to submit, there is still so much anxiety tangled up in that process. It is not simply the business-end of an artistic process; it is the act of throwing the work out into the world for criticism and comment. Though that may be the point of writing, expression, there is always so much to worry about.

I've certainly sent my share of short story submissions (not enough, certainly), but this was my first query letter. I didn't realize just how hard it would be to distill 90,000 words into something short and coherent. Especially Barnes County with its many points of view and interwoven stories. Here, though are the central paragraphs of the query:

When Terry Stegman, a beloved female sheriff’s deputy of rural Barnes County, Missouri, is killed by a meth dealer, the men around her must find a way to go forward, to adjust, and set a new course.

Though Terry’s killer is injured and jailed, Sam Summers, a big-city transplant, friend, and fellow deputy whose feelings for Terry may have been something stronger than friendship, is on the hunt for why the killer murdered two others that day. Aging Barnes County Sheriff Bill Wallis is suffering through the break-up of his marriage, the changes taking place in the county, and the growing distance from his teenage son. Terry’s hired man and close companion after her husband’s death, Franklin Redbird quickly falls into drinking and trouble. Logan Wallis, the sheriff’s misfit son, outcast because of his public profile and rebellious appearance, meets a romantic interest, but when she winds up in trouble, he seeks a violent vengeance. A recent immigrant to the county, Harlan Lustig quickly falls in with a dangerous meth cook and, after learning the trade himself, seeks to usurp him. Their stories meet, mix, mingle, and collide among the back roads and abandoned farmhouses of the fictional Barnes County in Southern Missouri.

While there are elements in the novel of mystery and suspense, Barnes County, at 90,000 words, is a story of people in flux, how they struggle to find the right way, and how some fail at it.


While I don't know that this really gets to all of it, all of the conflict and tension, all of the psychological inquiry, I think this might get someone interested.


Dropping the envelope into the box was a relief. I'm happy to have done it and have it out there. Now comes the anxiety about how it will be received.

Book Review: The Humbling

The Humbling by Philip Roth

If Simon Axler's loss of confidence in his acting ability is meant as a projection of Philip Roth's loss of confidence in his writing ability, then The Humbling should stand as an excellent example of it. The novel comes off more as a sketch of book, as if he'd written it as an outline of a more developed novel that was still to come.

This is a novel of man in crisis, and though we spend a fair number of pages in the thin book dealing directly with the subject, the book wanders into Axler's new relationship. This relationship, with the lesbian daughter of old friends, is at times cruel and superficial. Their scenes together, when not involving sex, are cursory. One scene, the parents' confrontation with the daughter, is simply told in dialogue from the daughter to Axler. Where the reader may have benefited from actually being there in what may end being a pivotal scene, Roth treats it as unimportant. And so when things change in the novel, we don't have a reason to care.

This is a disappointing novel by one of America's great novelists. Maybe Roth is writing too much these days. A book a year might be a pace that doesn't make for good novels.

Poetry Resurrection

I miss poetry.

Last week, I stopped in the downtown Tattered Cover Bookstore to look at some poetry. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Inspired by AMC’s Mad Men to take a closer look. But standing there, reading the words, the poems jagged edges pleasing to my eye, I realized how much I miss poetry.

For the last two years, there’s been no time for poetry. Barely any time for fiction. And even before that, I’d neglected it. There was a time when I read a lot of poetry, devoured it, wrote it, read it at poetry readings, published it. I turned them into songs. I even used to send out a poem each week to a long list of email contacts. I haven’t written a new poem in probably ten years. Even in the MFA program, I stuck with the fiction writers. You kinda got the feeling you’d better not go trying to play in the poets’ sandbox.

So now, writing again after two years off in the EMBA program, I feel it might be time to reconnect with poetry. I really want to shake up my use of language, to be inspired to take chances, to not go for the obvious word choice, to seek out unique metaphor, to see things again from a poets perspective. So I pulled down from my shelves Carolyn Forché

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
“Taking Off My Clothes”

Sylvia Plath

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Not the poets I know well. I went to the library, checked out Theodore Roethke

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out all I could of all desire;
I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
“The Sententious Man”

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom
of the well where the moon lives
“Everything that Acts Is Actual”

Li-Young Lee

And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
“This Room and Everything in It”

We all should more poetry in our lives. At least I know I should.

Another Dissent of the FOMC Statement?

With the meeting of the FOMC starting today, there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about what the Fed statement will say. I’m pretty certain that there will be no change in the target rate (with the “extended period” statement remaining), the comments about the economy will be dour (but not likely strong enough to drive the market dramatically downward), and they will reiterate that they are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary as conditions warrant. The real question for me is whether Kansas City Fed Chief Thomas Hoenig will continue to dissent. For the last year or more of Fed statements, Hoenig has insisted that the Fed should be raising the target rate in order stave off inflation or the creation of another housing bubble. The facts, though, continue to point away from his fears. In fact, many are now suggesting that there is a greater risk of deflation than inflation in the near term.

I would like to see him drop his dissent. Bernanke runs a more democratic Fed and is willing to support the differences of opinion, but a dissent now will only add to the uncertainty. Investors, not just fed-watchers, are looking for something definitive out of the FOMC. They’re not likely to get it, but a dissent now, at this inflection point, would leave them questioning the statement in its entirety. It’s not a matter of differences of opinion on how to chart the course of recovery; the concern now is slipping backwards. Saying that we need to raise rates in the face of the current economic conditions isn’t going to add any much-needed stability.

Book Review: A Gate at the Stairs

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sometimes I like a novel that spends much of its time wandering through the mind of its protagonist. A Gate at the Stairs is, in fact, very good at doing that, making simple scenes stretch long as each bit of dialogue or slight action sets the main character off on a new tangent of thought. Plot, itself, shouldn't suffer. And it does here, with surprises that arrive without set up, with dead ends and changes of pace that doom the novel.

Centered around a college student who takes a job caring for the newly adopted part-African-American baby of a flighty restaurant owner and her absent husband, the novel carries us close to the mind of Tassie Keltjin, the narrator. Tassie is from the country and out of place in the college town, not a bumpkin but naive. She makes a good narrator because everything she sees in new, and as she gets swept up in this new family we want to urge her to be careful.

Not only does the plot stumble, but Moore also seems to miss opportunities to make the story richer. There are tensions surrounding the child's race, and there is discussions around it. But just discussions. No conclusions seem to be reached, no revelation or resolve of any sort. Other, secondary story lines, suffer similar fates. Then when the main storyline is interrupted by a surprise, the story just falls apart, finally wandering to conclusion many, many pages later.

It's generally not a good sign, when I want to be done with a novel just to be done with it. That was the case here.