Inside the list

Note

This column will appear in print in the Dec. 19, 2010 issue of the Book Review. On the Web, the best-seller lists and the “Inside the List” column are available one week early.

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Published: December 10, 2010

DARK HORSE: When Jaimy Gordon’s “Lord of Misrule” — No. 30 on this week’s extended hardcover fiction list — shot out of nowhere to win the National Book Award last month, most reviewers were caught flat-footed. At awards time, only a handful of publications had reviewed the book, including The Washington Post, where Jane Smiley praised Gordon’s ear for dialogue and “eye for a horse,” and The Daily Racing Form, which saluted her vivid evocation of a low-stakes West Virginia racetrack in the early 1970s.

In an interview with The Daily Racing Form, Gordon — who spent a few youthful years working as a groom and hot walker at a track not unlike her fictional Indian Mound Downs — said of racetrack people, “Plenty of them are generous souls, they’re not crybabies, they’re not too moralistic, which suited me fine.” The experience seems to have given her a keen nose for slummers and fakers. Nearly 30 years ago, in a review of an anthology of work from university writing programs, Gordon lamented the vogue for unconvincing stories about blue-collar life, asking, “What does it signify that a literary generation, so consistently well educated and upper middle class, . . . has no stomach for the exploration of its own personality and circumstances?”

DEAD LEAFY GREENS: Attention completists! Gordon once wrote and performed a five-minute, one-song musical called “The Lettuce Vampire.” Alas, it does not seem to have been published (though don’t you wish Edward Gorey were still around to design the sets?). But Gordon did give a hint of her compositional style in a 1983 interview with the literary journal Gargoyle: “I can write a rather wistful and simple ditty, no more. But that would not deter me from writing the score for a 10-minute opera. I listen to a lot of Weill and Schumann. My music is like Weill and Schumann mixed together and simplified for a 10-year-old.” Gordon, who has become an overnight folk hero to unsung writers, also had some salty things to say about the anemic state of serious reading: “The number of people I know who really love books other than their own is small, and yet I know hundreds of writers. I haven’t come up with any remedies yet, but I think about it often, just as though there were a future to consider.”

TAKE TWO: Alas, there was no Tom Cruise-style couch-jumping when Jonathan Franzen finally appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Dec. 6, more than nine years after Winfrey had disinvited him. Here’s how Franzen — strolling onstage after a long segment about a New Jersey family’s secret 25-year friendship with Michael Jackson — summed up the media firestorm that ignited after he called some of Winfrey’s book club choices “schmaltzy” and “one dimensional,” among other comments: “I spoke in very long sentences, and then little pieces of those sentences sounded bad, and your feelings were probably, understandably, hurt.” (Cross my heart, that’s a complete quote.) Franzen’s “Freedom” is back at No. 14 on this week’s hardcover fiction list.

FONTE: New York Times

URL FONTE: http://www.nytimes.com/
URL MATÉRIA: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/books/review/InsideList-t.html

The Poetry of Patti Smith

John Lundberg

Writer and poetry teacher

Posted: November 21, 2010 11:53 AM Patti Smith won the National Book Award for Nonfiction this past week for her memoir "Just Kids," which recounts her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in the '60s and '70s. But "Just Kids" is far from her first flirtation with the written word.

Smith has actually published numerous books of poetry. And unlike other successful rock stars who have stumbled awkwardly into verse (Jewel and Billy Corgan come to mind), Smith's work reflects that she was a poet first, and that her love affair with the art runs deep.

Smith grew up with poetry; her mother gave her a copy of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" when she was just eight. She fell hard for the visionary Romantic and never seems to have recovered. The title of her most recent book of poetry, "Auguries of Innocence," is a quote from Blake.

Blake is known to have been somewhat eccentric (it's said that he and his wife liked to spend time nude in their garden reenacting the Garden of Eden), and Smith's views on poetry and the creative process, are, it's safe to say, eccentric as well. She once wrote:

I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.

I consider it a real physical act.

When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.

I move like a monkey.

I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing.

Anyone doubting the veracity of that statement needs only to read Smith's poetry on Arthur Rimbaud, the ecstatic French Symbolist who became the subject of her poetic fantasies. In an early prose poem she wrote of him:

he enters. leans against the four-poster. his ruddy cheeks. contemptuous air big hands. I find him sexy as hell ... he licks my hand ... we embrace. I devour his scalp.

And she wrote elsewhere:

Oh arthur arthur, we are in Abyssinia Aden making

love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but its much more.

...exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings,

open as a cave, open wider. total surrender.

Smith has also long adored what she calls the "unfailing vision" of the French poet/critic Charles Baudelaire. She sometimes dresses like him and is known to cry out his name during concerts.

But as much as she idolized the Symbolists, her writing is often stylistically closer to the Beats in its stream-of-consciousness style and deliberately shocking content. This snippet from her poem "Rape," for example, reads more like Kerouac or Ginsberg (whom she actually knew well) than anyone else:

let's whalebone let's go

let's deodorize the night.

And in performance, Smith seems born to read Beat poetry. Watch her reading from Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl" here.

When Smith chooses to constrain her ecstatic tendencies, she can still write a very good poem. "Tara," a quiet, well-paced and mysterious poem that you can read here, first appeared in the May 2007 issue of The New Yorker.

Smith chose to leave the tragedy at the heart of "Tara" unspoken. She only later explained "The Best American Poetry" that the poem deals with the tragic shooting of 32 students and faculty in April 2007 at Virginia Tech. Tara is in fact Smith's sister, and the poem takes place right after she learns that her daughter, who was attending classes at Virginia Tech, is safe.

All in all, Smith's poetry is more jewel than Jewel, and it is some of the only rock star poetry that I consistently enjoy reading. Here's hoping that the success of her memoir brings more attention to her poems.

FONTE: Huffington Post (blog)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/the-poetry-of-patti-smith_b_786090.html
FOTO: gibson.com