(Charles Baxter, Stacey D'Erasmo, Carl Phillips) There is an art to writing about the art of writing. Three highly esteemed writers and teachers will discuss the current state of critical writing about craft and how they approach writing about the art of fiction and the art of poetry through their contributions to "The Art of..." series, a line of books that examines singular issues facing the contemporary writer. Discussion among the panelists will extend to further conversation with the audience.

Published Date: November 4, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Charles Baxter, Stacey Deramo, and Carl Phillips. You'll now hear Charles Baxter provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Good afternoon. I think we all deserve a medal for being here. Thank you for coming.

Speaker 2 (00:00:42):

I'm Charlie Baxter and this panel is the Art of the Art of Series. And if that sounds too much like product placement, really what it is is an opportunity for us to talk about what writers talk about when they talk about writing their own and others. And to some degree I have a kind of polemical idea in view, which is that I want to advocate the kind of criticism that writers are able to do. I want to put a particular kind of value on it and in my own presentation I hope to do that. And I also am hoping to leave plenty of time toward the end of the session for questions.

Speaker 2 (00:01:41):

I am the author of The Art of Subtext and the other panelists this afternoon are to my left Carl Phillips, whose book in the Art of Series is The Art of Daring Risk, restlessness and The Imagination. And also to my left is Stacey Dsmo, whose book in the series is The Art of Intimacy, the Space Between. I'll introduce the three of us briefly and then we will each speak for about 15 or 20 minutes and then we'll open the session to questions. So first, the introductions. Stacey Deramo is the author of four novels most recently Wonderland, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She's written both fiction and nonfiction including essays on music, tv, women's boxing, popular culture and sexual identity. She's currently on the fiction faculty at Columbia University where she has also served as the director of Undergraduate Studies and Creative writing. She's taught at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and the Warren Wilson Low Residency M F A program and she was a founding fiction editor of Book Forum and was a senior editor at the Voice literary supplement.

Speaker 2 (00:03:13):

Carl Phillips is the author of 12 books of poems most recently Silver Chest, published last year by Ferra STRs. His books include Quiver of Arrows, new and Selected Poems, published in 2006 and Speak Low, a national book award finalist. He is a classist and has translated esophagus Philip tdi, published by Oxford University Press. His other book of literary criticism is Coin of the Realm Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry He Teaches at Washington University. I'm the author of five novels, six books of stories, the most recent one of which is titled, there's Something I Want You To Do. I've written two books of literary criticism, the first being burning down the House and the second the Art of Subtext. I've edited the stories of Sherwood Anderson for the Library of America and I teach at the University of Minnesota. Our first presenter will be Stacey Dsmo, who will be followed by Carl Phillips.

Speaker 3 (00:04:28):

Thank you and thanks to everyone for being here. Okay, so as Charlie said, the book that I wrote for the series was called The Art of Intimacy. The space between what initially drew me to the topic was my interest in seeing how it is that other writers created a sense of intimacy on the page and not only romantic bonds between consenting adults but friendships, the bonds of parents and children, the fleeting communion of strangers at a dinner party or on a train or a plane crushes being deeply moved by art or by a historical event, the relationship between reader and writer and many others. I was interested in this question, which is sort of an impossible question because my own work has often centered on intimacies of various kinds and I found myself both drawn to creating and exploring intimacies on the page and challenged by how exactly to do that in a way that was compelling and fresh and revealing.

Speaker 3 (00:05:30):

So what I found when I looked at the work of writers that I admired was that the intimacy that we feel as readers is often generated far less by characters turning to one another and saying intimate things or doing intimate things than it is by a kind of a textual atmosphere or maybe one should say a biosphere, a zone that both emanates from the characters and acts upon them very deeply and personally. And sometimes this zone has to do with grammar and sometimes it has to do with the setting and sometimes it has to do with the staging and sometimes it has to do with all of these things together. We're rarely moved solely by talking heads in a vacuum just saying, I love you and I love you more. We're moved by an entire fabric of setting narrative image and the music of the language that composes these characters.

Speaker 3 (00:06:26):

What I saw when I began trying to work this out, how these writers did it, is that it was through the creation of what I call the space between that complicated fabric that I just mentioned, that we experience intimacy on the page. It was a funny thing to see how the characters as such their personalities and histories were only one small part of what conveyed the emotional world of the book or the story. It was thinking that I was really involved with the characters and discovering that I was actually most deeply involved with the wallpaper, which was sort of disconcerting. It's not an easy thing to turn into craft in any sort of straightforward way. I can't say well mix this much dialogue with this much description and then make sure the characters have three conversations in a room by themselves. I don't have that kind of recipe for conveying a powerful sense of intimacy.

Speaker 3 (00:07:19):

And if I did have that recipe, I definitely would not tell you so that I could be the only one who could do it. I can only say that characters like people are embedded in and produced by a world, including a world of language. They're mortal creatures inextricable from history and context and specific bodies and hearts. So my intention in one way was to explore this aspect of writing that's very delicate and subtle and as it turned out strange I was, and I remain really interested in the strangeness of an aspect of life and art so ordinary and vital that it hardly seems as if we can talk about it at all. And yet of course we talk about it all the time. I think it's one of our favorite things to talk about, one of mine anyway, but I also had, I have to admit a stealth intention, which was to suggest via the books that I chose and the way I chose to talk about them, that myriad sorts of intimacies matter.

Speaker 3 (00:08:20):

As someone who has lived with women and with men in various ways without children, someone who has never been legally married to anyone, I feel rather strongly that intimacy is abundant and surprising terrain. A lot of very powerful things go on in a lot of spaces and contrary to expectations. However, in the literary world, as in the world generally, one can still find the subtle and not so subtle idea or assumption that the most important story to tell is the story of a white man and a white woman who are married or who wish to be married and their biological children. Other stories of other kinds of relationships might be interesting, but they aren't the big story. I hate this idea. I think it's oppressive, repressive, and in its way violent. It's a power grab. It's narcissistic on the parts of those people who might be living in that particular configuration.

Speaker 3 (00:09:15):

And in terms of making literature, it has pretty clear and often material consequences. The important stories about intimacy are those that occur among the white man and the white woman who are married or who wish to be married and their biological children. And every other story about intimacy is secondary. Not only do I not think that this is true, but also I simply don't like to it as a reader. While I am sometimes interested in the story of the white man and the white woman who are married or who wish to be married and their biological children, I am at least as interested in their neighbors, if not more So I'm drawn to the two African-American men who live next door to them who wear all those interesting clothes, and I'm very curious about the older woman and the younger man who live next door to them.

Speaker 3 (00:10:02):

And I'm desperate to know what goes on among the three young women of varying ethnicities who seem to be some sort of art collective who live at the end of the block. And I want to know what goes on in the mind of that portly Asian guy who I sometimes see walking with his elderly mother. I think it's his mother in the early evening. And then I'm also really interested in all of their stray thoughts and random encounters and their dreams and what their doubles are doing, whether it's because I was in fact the biological child of a white man and a white woman who were married and one is always more interested in wandering around other people's houses or because that isn't the life I've lived and I'm hungrier selfishly to hear other stories akin to mine. I find that I have often been most compelled as both a reader and a writer by stories of intimacies that don't revolve around that particular conventional unit.

Speaker 3 (00:10:55):

This isn't choice or not choice on any level that I can access. This is temperament, it might also be stubbornness. From that temperament, I fashioned an aesthetic and I deployed that aesthetic, not necessarily in the way that I analyzed the books that I was looking at for the art of intimacy, but in the variety of intimacies created in the books that I chose consciously, I made sure that that so-called big story was only one among many stories, neither excluded nor prioritized. That's craft two, the craft of what we talk about as serious literature and why, and it isn't neutral. Syllabi aren't neutral. The canon certainly isn't neutral. I'm not neutral as a reader, a writer, a critic, or a teacher. It seems to me that the best I can do is not to aspire to an impossible neutrality or mandarin authority, but the contrary, to put my cards on the table to say, well, this is what I chose and you can consider the source.

Speaker 3 (00:11:59):

Please do. In fact always do. What I'm also saying is that I had skin in the game and I don't think that this was a liability. I think that often the best criticism proceeds from a sense that the book under discussion matters deeply to the person writing about it. That the critic is struggling to understand this life business, this art business that he or she is not a judge handing out verdicts from on high, but a kind of deep responder. I was on a panel yesterday about the vexed question of likability and unlikability in terms of character. And one of the things I often want to know when some critic or reader comments that a certain character is unlikable is why. What particularly about this character makes you particularly not like the character and why is that? What education, assumptions, ideas, values, temperamental inclinations cause you to feel that way?

Speaker 3 (00:12:55):

A word such as likable never tells me enough about a character or a book, but it also never tells me enough about who's using that word and why. It assumes that we all know what likable is and agree on the standards. Just beneath that is something a bit more coercive, which is the idea that we should agree on the standards and several of us, the ones whose opinions count already have. We know what likable is, we know what literary is, we know what beautiful is. We know what important is. We know what intimacy is. We know and if asked, we will tell you or you can pay us to tell you. Thus relieving both of us of the responsibility and the pleasure of puzzling through it ourselves on as it were, a case by case basis.

Speaker 3 (00:13:44):

Criticism at its best it seems to me is not judgment. Criticism is thought that seems so simple, so banal, and yet it seems to me that too often we get or even request judgment, thumbs up or thumbs down, what grade, how many likes, when what we need and should be producing is thought. Thought takes more time and it requires a deeper, one might even say a more intimate relationship to the work being thought about, but it also requires something else, which is allowing oneself to be seen in a state of vulnerability, vulnerable to the world, vulnerable to the world that made you vulnerable to doubt vulnerable to changing one's mind. It seems to me that it is in this very state of vulnerability that we often learn and teach the most.

Speaker 3 (00:14:41):

I want to illustrate this with a concrete example. I'm teaching a graduate seminar this spring called Questions of Identity in which we look at various books in which identity is fluid, liminal, reversible, or challenged At the root we're reading books such as Invisible Man, never Let Me Go, Theresa Hak Young, Cha's Dict, Jeanette Winterson's, written on the Body and so on. It's been a good spring and it's a good group of students. Good discussions this week, however, the book that we read was Karen Joy Fowler's. We are all completely beside ourselves. This is a little bit of a spoiler, but so many people have read this book just if you haven't close your eyes. Anyway, it's about a character who was raised with a chimp for a sister. The parents were scientists, so I wasn't sure as I was prepping for class how this was going to go.

Speaker 3 (00:15:32):

Grad students can be kind of a tough audience and the book doesn't do anything fancy in terms of language. There's lots of humor. It reads fast, which are qualities that do not always endear a book to a conference table. So I did my prep and I went into class to find as we began the discussion that half of the students were in tears. They had been so moved by the novel that they still couldn't talk about it without crying. So we started to talk Why specifically were they crying? How did Fowler do that? What are the issues that are raised by the relationship between the human girl and the chimp girl? Why are these issues so difficult as it turns out to resolve? What does that have to do with identity? What is the human? What is consciousness? What is a family? It was the best discussion we've had all term, and the level of thought in the room was much higher because the engagement was so much deeper.

Speaker 3 (00:16:31):

The students and I were visibly vulnerable to the book and to one another, to a degree that hadn't happened before. The thinking that we were doing mattered because the characters mattered to us all so much. And because Fowler had made those characters so well and also had posed the questions so well, firm answers were hard to come by. I think we all left that room thinking harder than when we walked into it. If I had asked those students at that moment to write at some length about we are all completely beside ourselves, I think they might well have been able to delve into really thoughtful essays about the issues that the book raises because the book had done such a fine job of posing the questions so movingly and yet with such complexity as well, opposable thumbs up or down just wouldn't have sufficed. As a writer, I aspire to making readers not only feel, but also think that deeply as a teacher, I aspire to empower my students to make a book their own in the way that my students did with Fowler's novel. And as a critic, I aspire to keep my skin in the game or never to forget that it already is. Thanks.

Speaker 4 (00:17:58):

I am always intimidated following someone who has typed something. Thank you. Stacey. Going to talk a bit about how I came to even write any criticism given that I can't stand it and then how my thinking about criticism changed and a different idea I came to. I think about what it can be. Part of why I don't enjoy it is because I've always found a lot of criticism bloodless. It seems as if there's no human being behind it and it ends up putting me off of the work that's being discussed and often makes me feel stupid. And the other thing is that for whatever reason, I don't enjoy reading linear arguments, maybe because I can't make one. And so if we go back a few years, I was asked to teach at Warren Wilson College and it wasn't mentioned upfront, but later I learned that part of your duties, it includes reading a craft talk, writing a talk about craft, and then talking.

Speaker 4 (00:19:07):

So I thought, okay, I wouldn't have signed on if I'd known that because to me that's like having to write a paper for a class or something and I don't like that, but I'm fairly dutiful and I found myself writing essays that went into the first book, but they weren't meant as essays. They were things about the prose poem or about myth and fable. And I found that I would sort of construct them by working and that would save me having to make an actual clear argument and I could just look at a few things. I thought, well, instead of writing a lot, I could just find poems that seem to represent what I'm saying and then I can talk a little bit about them. And then the poem will take up a lot of the page. And then I'll say a little bit, this worked for four years.

Speaker 4 (00:19:54):

It was very effective. Everyone liked them. So anyway, they went into my first book, coin of the Realm. But later it seemed to me that that book was very judgmental. It's a little haughty in its tone to be honest. And I thought that's not actually what I like to read and I don't know why I was writing that way except maybe insecurity. So you have to sound very smart and all of that and declaim. So in the meantime, I was asked at the university, Washington University where I teach to do these humanities lectures and they could be about anything. They had to be accessible to the general public and undergraduates and graduate students. And I thought, I don't really have anything to say, but I wanted the honors. So I said yes, and I started going over the old essays and I found it interesting looking at them to see which poems I had chosen to write about.

Speaker 4 (00:20:51):

And it seemed to me if I just looked at that, it became almost memoir. It said a lot about me personally that I'm attracted to certain kinds of poems and not others. And then I started looking at what appeared on the various syllabi I'd had over the years. And there too, I thought this actually students have noticed it too. They want to know why do we always read about sad things? Why do we always read about violence? Aren't there happy poems? And I would say, yeah, but they're not any good. And I realized they are good, of course, but those weren't the ones I was drawn to. So one of the things I thought they all had in common is they seemed to look at spaces of restlessness, of weird chances being taken or else the way language was deployed was in some way that I thought was risky, not risking being too difficult, risking being too weird.

Speaker 4 (00:21:45):

And these are also the things that appeal to me when I'm judging things, I actually like things that seem to not want to behave. One of the hardest things I find in judging manuscripts is that they're usually very neat. They look nice and it's hard for me to find anything I can complain about, but I want something to complain about. I want to think this is weird, this I don't understand. This annoys me. I feel as if there's a sensibility then that's not easily giving itself over to me. It's resisting me. And that's somewhat seductive. So I thought what goes through all of these is a kind of restlessness and the idea of taking risks because you're slightly bored with where you are. And so this will push you into a different space of surprise that will lead you to think differently. Hence, it sort of amplifies imagination or at least gives you that possibility.

Speaker 4 (00:22:42):

So I deliver these three essays that were kind of about restlessness and risk taking. And at the same time while writing them, I started realizing that it would be worth talking a bit about why I chose certain poems and what about my own life had anything to do with restlessness and risk. And that's where something like autobiography I suppose or memoir crossed the line with criticism. And I hadn't really thought that criticism could do that. It seems to me you're supposed to stay out of it a little bit and just talk about the poems and get out of the room. But I actually thought it might be more interesting to speak about personal connections and it ties in perhaps with something Stacey was saying about being, if the writer is passionate about what's being written about that comes through and I think it has the chance to make the criticism less and it actually embodies the criticism and makes me feel as if I'm spending time not with an intelligent mind, but with an intriguing sensibility so that I want to see how this mind works, not just what it looks at what it thinks about, but why and in what way.

Speaker 4 (00:24:01):

And to me, the way to do that seemed to be to say something about the personal. So it was very, I feel odd in this series because I feel as if mine is the least craft-based. It doesn't look specifically at syntax. Yes, I look at poems and we look at rhyme schemes where it is one or how meter works, but it's more often sort of exploring what questions are provoked by how this poem is deployed about the sensibility of the poet, but also in some way, what does it say that we want to read this poem and not that one? Or what does it say that we write this way and not that way? And I don't know, I've never studied theory or anything. I know nothing truly, I don't know anything about it though my students don't believe me. So maybe there's a theory about all this, but to me it seemed like a new discovery to think of writing in this way.

Speaker 4 (00:24:58):

I'm writing criticism in this way. And it also seemed to make sense then that if your mind works more highly, okay to write an essay that leaps from subject to subject doesn't resolve, it leaves it as I think many of my poems do, leaves people with more questions then they have when they entered. And for some that's going to be frustrating. But I think that's the way to start really thinking about literature is by being left with questions and left alone with them not told, here's what the questions are and here are the answers. So now you've got the solution, but how do we live in that space of not knowing and remain sort of in a way, in a state of restlessness, having read a piece of literature. Again, that's a sensibility issue. I mean, I also don't like movies that end and everything's solved, but some people do are frustrated if you get that weird movie where you think, I don't even know where the character's even alive the whole time, and that's fascinating to me to have a question like that at the end, but other people would say no, and it's not good for kids and it's not palatable.

Speaker 4 (00:26:06):

So those three lectures, the humanities lectures ended up being the first three essays in this Art of Daring book. And I actually didn't know how the pieces were going to go together. I wanted the book to actually just be those three essays and graywolf do it. That wouldn't be enough pages. And I don't understand why people think that way, but they do. And so I mean they say it would be really thin compared to the others. So what's wrong with that? I mean, many books are too long and so they should only be as long as they need to be. But anyway, they said, come back when you have more essays. And I assured them, I hate writing essays, but over time people ask you to do something and you say, I'll do it, and fine, suddenly you have a whole bunch. So finally they said, yeah, we'll take this except you have to write one big essay, just something to end the whole thing that will maybe tie everything else together or something.

Speaker 4 (00:27:04):

It sounded good when they said that and they said, you have a year to do it. So I thought, that's fine, I'll come at something. So predictably, it was a month before it was due and they reminded me about it and I thought, okay, fine. And that's where I decided not to actually look at poems very much. I thought, what do you actually think about this, Carl? You've spent 25 years writing about ticking risks, chances, blah, blah, blah, be restless. Everyone else is so boring. They all play it safe and live in their safe world and they stay in the same relationship and they don't get drunk and they don't put things like drugs and stuff in their mouths and without asking what they are, things like that. And I thought, yeah, what's wrong with people? But as I started thinking about it, I thought, what do you really feel about that now at this point in your life?

Speaker 4 (00:28:04):

And it's been an interesting question to me because I do actually believe that the only way to keep growing really as a human being, but as a writer is to keep taking chances and daring yourself to go into spaces that might be frightening and different. And at the same time, I think as we get older, at least as I do that we kind of would like to stay alive and we would like to be healthy and not get hurt. And so how do you reconcile that? And also what does it mean to spout off about risk and restlessness? But there you are a tenured professor at a nice school. I mean, how daring is that?

Speaker 4 (00:28:45):

And so how can you and I feel as if I've lived my life by trying to make sure that I keep that daring element in my life, which some might say, yeah, as in he doesn't act his age and should, but I think why not take some chances at the same time? I started thinking, yeah, but you've taken a few chances that have actually been very disturbing and very dangerous, and you got out of them fine. You survived it, fine, but you might not have. And is it really worth it? So I wrote this final essay that really was about the possible costs when you actually start thinking about it, what is the cost of restlessness and risk and how much are you willing to gamble in order to keep it in your life? And maybe there, there's some in-between space that one can live in.

Speaker 4 (00:29:33):

And I don't know, I felt as if it became, the final essay became a very memoir piece and one that includes things about previous relationships I've been in. There's a apparently controversial scene rape sort of thing. I mean, it is, I'm not laughing it. And it was very strange because when I wrote it, it seemed very like, yes, this must be written about. And then when I got this call from Jeff sch at Graywolf, I think the first thing he says, you are going to have to give Charlie some time with this because it took me a while. I thought, oh, why is there something odd about it? And he said, well, there's this scene and anyway, but I like it. I like that in the course of I hope reading the essay, but for me and writing it, it became an act of taking a risk or of daring to write it, to write something true that had happened to me.

Speaker 4 (00:30:33):

And I'd never really, I always think it's easy to write poems and people may think, how much of this is really his life or is it made up? And you always say, it's the speaker. I don't do these things, I just imagine them, but what does it mean to speak in an essay about actual things that are behind particular poems? And I started looking at excerpts of poems of my own and using those as the reference points instead of other people's poems, which I thought would seem maybe a little self-centered. But I was hoping it would be interesting to sort of see for someone to, I mean I would love it if George Herbert, for example, would speak again and say, actually what I was thinking and what was happening the day that I wrote this particular poem was blah, blah. And no one ever does that.

Speaker 4 (00:31:17):

It's always supposed to be this divorce between real life and art. And yet I feel as if not only do they have everything to do with one another, but the danger is that they so often for me can be blurred where one wonders did that happen or did I write it or in writing it Now do I want to make it happen? Have I written myself into a certain kind of person and therefore now I'm that way, which is frightening. I mean, it reminds me of say, an actor who gets in a role and then takes on the character so fully, but what if you can't step out of it? And I don't know, I think in a way the book ends with more questions. It's not saying, well, yes, risk is still great or that it's bad, just that it's worth thinking about the fact that there are all kinds of risks and restlessness maybe, and they don't have to be ones that are quite as personal.

Speaker 4 (00:32:10):

They could be taking the risk of writing a sina because you always write fragmented free verse, and that's not going to do any harm. My students, they have asked me, they'll say, nothing happens to me. Do you think I should go to this side of town? Should I do this? There's a drug party going on. And I think, no, no, you don't have to. There are other ways to be risky, including you could just go to a restaurant that serves cuisine you've never had that's still making yourself vulnerable in a certain way. So I guess for me, I feel as if it reshaped my idea of what criticism can be in part what we read and why we are drawn to it, I think says something in autobiographically. It's sort of the reason we choose this or that says something about who we are. In the same way that I think anything we write is autobiographical because the fact that we chose these words and to string them together in this order that's different from how someone else would.

Speaker 4 (00:33:11):

So even if I can't say exactly what everything means, there's some way in which it's revealing something about the lens of our own sensibility through which we see the world. And I figure why can't criticism be that and why can't criticism also be what? To me, the best poems are, they're not so much narratives of a story in the usual way, but there's psychological gestures and emotional trajectories. And I like this idea that by the end, we feel as if we've, I don't know, we've lived in a similar space to the writer, to the critic, and yes, along the way gotten to learn something about some literature, but it hasn't been all of that. We've also, I find that it's more authoritative and believable because I believe a real human being is behind it. Perhaps that's a nice time to stop. Okay, thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:34:15):

I think I'll remain seated. What I'm going to argue in the time I have is that there is no reason not to think of criticism also as an art that some of the most interesting criticism can be written and perhaps should be written by other writers. And that the kind of criticism that I am now interested in reading almost always indicates what kind of stake the writer has in his or her own life and how that life relates to the poem or the story or the novel or the piece of nonfiction that's under discussion. And I should also say that as I was preparing for this talk, I got a phone call from a friend of mine of Longstanding who is a professional academic, and she asked me what I was doing and I said, I was preparing a talk about the art of series that I had helped to start at Gray Wolf Press. And there was a long pause, which at first I thought was a friendly pause and then realized was hostile. And I said, I can't help but notice you're not saying anything.

Speaker 2 (00:35:52):

What's what are you thinking? And she said, well, I've read some of those books. And I said, and well, they're kind of nice to read. She said, now remember, she's a professional academic who, alright, I mean you get to pick it. And I said, you have objections to it? And she said, yeah, they're all unprofessional. And I said, and that means what? Well, she said, you've sort of gathered these gifted amateurs. They've been writing about whatever they've been feeling and this kind of close reading, you could sort of hear the air quotes over the phone, this kind of close reading she said has been superseded. And I said, by whom? And she said, by the professionals. I want you to think about that because when you see articles about writing programs and the A w P and there's a kind of air of sometimes obvious and sometimes not so obvious hostility behind it.

Speaker 2 (00:37:17):

Finally what she said to me was, oh, the A w P, all those people who want to be writers, and my response was, and I was getting pre agitated at this point and if she hadn't been on the phone, I would've taken it outside. I said, no, all those people who want to be readers, and in some sense that's where I want to begin with my comments about the art of series. That these books have their origin in a kind of passionate reading experience that is both autobiographical and in some cases obsessive and that the obsession bodies forth a sort of passion related to the material that's under discussion, you wouldn't think that this would be a polemical position to take that readers read with a stake in what their reading and can therefore when they start writing about it, create criticism that is also art.

Speaker 2 (00:38:31):

But there are, I think many people lined up against the kind of criticism that I have come to believe in. I began as an academic critic doing critical theory. I still admire that sort of work, but I think there is room in the world for another kind of criticism and that's the sort of work that I hope we have included in our series. I have some written comments I'm going to dash through some of them. My thoughts about subtext, for example, have never been judicious and impartial and disinterested. Subtexts used to throw me into a panic. I was drawn into writing about the subject from purely autobiographical motives, mostly because I grew up in one of those Midwestern households where people were trained never to say what they actually meant. Social life at home at my home was like a perpetual poker game. You could never say what you meant because what was going on in the family was not the same as the way the family members liked to think of themselves.

Speaker 2 (00:39:45):

A slight fog of invisibility and dissimilation seemed to cover everything like the fog that invades the household in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's journey Tonight, I know that fog, I grew up in it in my family. If someone said what they really meant, they were greeted as often as not with an embarrassed and shaming silence. Therefore, I felt when I was writing about subtext, I was writing a kind of disguised autobiography and I was interested in those sorts of truths that are forced down beneath the surface of polite social life. Writing about subtext was for me a desperate enterprise, one in which I had to clarify my own thinking. For me, everything is on the line with that topic in fiction as in life. What happens when people do not get to say what they really mean? How do they behave? What sort of tells are there that will tell you what's really going on?

Speaker 2 (00:40:54):

What happens? For example, and this is a subject that I've gotten more and more interested in when people who are pretending to listen are not actually listening, and how does that become a kind of dramatic situation on its own? I've been arguing to my classes, to my friends, to anybody who will listen that we have entered a period when model of the Victorian novel in which someone says something, another person is listening and responds to what has been said and that statement in return has been listened to, has responded to. I don't think that's how we live now and I think we have to pay attention to the way in which people are no longer paying attention or are listening selectively. And that's all about subtextual materials and things that people are not say. In any case, the idea in the Art of Series was to create a series of short books of criticism written on topics of crucial importance to writers and readers.

Speaker 2 (00:42:05):

Excuse me. In the words of the series publicity handout. Each book will be a brief, witty and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned on a single craft issue. I think both of those items are important. There's a craft issue, but there's passion and in the kind of criticism that we have envisioned, the idea of discussing a craft does not form itself in isolation. There is always something at stake. There is always some emotional tie that the critic has to the materials that he or she is examining. This has raised some objections from some readers who want practical suggestions on how to proceed with their own work and what I would argue, what I've been arguing of from the inception of the series is that the Art of series doesn't give you rules. It tries to resist them. It tries in its modest way to provoke and also in a modest way to suggest that criticism is an art and that any good book about an art is an inquiry, a series of questions that arise at the point where judgment, not a judgment value, not a final judgment is called for, but some judgment is invited.

Speaker 2 (00:43:36):

Our books don't necessarily tell you how something is done or should be done. Instead, they point at something that may be quite mysterious, which may be nobody else has thought about recently or been able to think through. For example, I mean two subjects that are somewhat dear to my heart. It's been my experience in workshops that my students often will use the word that such and such a passage in a story bridges on sentimentality. And I tend to try to stop the show at that point and to ask, what do you mean by sentimentality? What does anybody mean by sentimentality anymore? If you know what sentimentality is, then do you know what its opposite is? I don't think in fact that when we use some of these critical terms, we necessarily know very clearly what we anymore. And I think the same thing is true of a word like melodrama.

Speaker 2 (00:44:36):

When you're discussing or thinking about your own work or you're discussing or thinking about somebody else's work and you say, well, I don't know. It seems to me a little melodramatic. What do you mean? What are you actually talking about? What does that word include and what does it exclude? And does it sometimes function as a way of keeping a writer from risking everything in a highly dramatic scene? My hope was with the Art of series that some of these questions that are really life and death matters for writers and which are also critical terms on which a great deal depends, could be clarified by these books. This does not mean that you come to the end of one of these volumes having a clear idea always of how to proceed. And at this point I want to quote a wonderful passage from a wonderful essay by Donald Barthel May called Not Knowing.

Speaker 2 (00:45:47):

Writing, he says, is a process of dealing with not knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled about how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written even though they've done a dozen at best, there's a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch. The anxiety attached to this situation is not inconsiderable and looking out at you. I have a feeling that all of you have felt that anxiety, how to proceed. What do I do? How do I get to where I want to go? Where's the how to book? Well, these are not quite that book. I'm just going to finish with Barthel May. The Not Knowing is not simple because it's hedged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems she takes into account, the more serious the artist, the more problems she takes into account.

Speaker 2 (00:47:07):

What that means in practice is that when we think about the work that we're generating, we're also thinking about the things that we can see about the subject, but we're also trying to see the things that we can't see. We're trying to see the thing that's standing right in front of us that has always been there, but which nobody has noticed. One of my own hobby horses lately has been that I feel that in my own work I have almost obsessively gone back to moments that I've come to call request moments in which a character says to another one, there's something I want you to do. And then it goes beyond that to say, and if you love me, you'll do this for me. And I sort of dreamed this up when I saw a production of Hamlet, which started with the Ghost of Hamlet's father saying to Hamlet, I want you to avenge my death.

Speaker 2 (00:48:10):

I want you to honor your mother, and I want you to remember me. And I'd rather that you do these things sooner rather than later. And then I happen to see a production of King Lear. King Lear gathers his daughters. There's something I want you to do. Lear says, I turn on the tv, it's the Godfather, Buer is there on Don Vito Carly's wedding day. What's happening? There's something I want you to do. You know what? You discover these things and suddenly they're everywhere. It's as if bits of your own obsessional content have just gathered themselves in the world. What I had in mind for these books as models were the brilliant and occasionally crazy critical books and essays I had read and loved by Elizabeth Hardwick, Randall Jarrell, James Baldwin, zero Connolly, Ezra Pound, and going further back, em Forrester, Virginia Wolfe and Thomas de Quincy proposition number one in criticism, it's better to be brilliant and crazy if the brilliance and craziness derive from an eloquent passion for examining a subject that affects how people live and how they write.

Speaker 2 (00:49:33):

Proposition number two, critical essays, even negative ones at their best can be loved or can be as lovable, as smart and as perceptive as literature itself, particularly if the breath of life flows through them. A person can imagine an essay also being a poem. Think of Claudia Rankin's book Citizen here. I'm going to quote my friend Carl Phillips from The Art of Daring. The problem is that the self is never enough. We may select our own society, as Dickinson says, of the soul. We may reside therefore time especially necessarily, I would say during those times when we're making what we intend as an art. But ultimately we want to be loved and we want by extension what we make to be loved. That requires an audience outside the self. Notice that word love. Notice the word audience.

Speaker 2 (00:50:43):

I have several pages here that consist of an attack on what my friend told me was professional criticism. I want to leave time for discussion, but I want to ask just as a point of reference, how many of you are familiar with distant reading? Anyone in this room know what distant reading is? It's the opposite of close reading. And my friend said, well, if you really want to know what the professionals are doing, you should read Book X. Should I give the author? I don't know if I should or not. Frankel Moretti his book Distant Reading. And the idea here is that novels not poetry, which Moretti says is a dead art. Actually, I have more quotes.

Speaker 2 (00:51:48):

It won't take long. Moretti says for European literature to discover that it has nothing left to say and face-to-face. With so many difficulties, European literature has stalled. And as for intra European relationships, a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis. What's interesting here is how gleefully the end of literature is being announced and from another book called Macro Analysis, I'll just read you a sample of it. I am creating straw men, but I don't care. Literature is ripe. He says, for text mining to test the predictive power of each metadata category, the nearest shrunken Centro classification algorithm was employed. The N S C is a subset. This book was sent to me for review by the way of nearest Centro algorithms that begin by computing standard centro for each class, calculating the average frequency for a feature in each class and then dividing by the in-class standard deviation for that feature. This critic argues that literature is ripe for harvesting richly encoded texts. He refers to the quarry of great literature and to the literary equivalent of open pit mining or hydraulic. He means this as praise of his methods, at least he doesn't refer to refer to my ivory.

Speaker 2 (00:53:47):

It was Ezra Pound who said that gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of men. If the argument that some critics are professionals and the rest are unprofessional, amateurs is a war cry, then pound would've claimed that the professionalization of criticism was bogus. That too is a battle cry. Everyone in this shroom should be aware of the sounds of that battle raging in the distance under the circumstances. I'm happy to assume the mantle of the amateur critic after all that is one whose motivation is love. Good criticism, I think should not only illuminate the great books, it can also get readers excited and upset. Final proposition, the Art of Series has at its root a passion and love and intelligent attention to literature and to life. If that's controversial, then so be it. So we have about 15 minutes for questions, responses, and polemics. And I might ask, just to start things off, I'd like to ask Stacy and Carl, when you write criticism, do you have an audience in mind?

Speaker 3 (00:55:30):

I spent a lot of my time as a younger woman working at the voice literary supplement, which was a kind of an amazing book review and an amazing moment. I was there from the mid eighties to the mid nineties, and probably the audience for that publication is the sort of mystical audience I have in my mind all the time when I write criticism because that was a place where we still believed in something called the public intellectual, where it was a place where it was it supposed to be sort of very smart, kind of countercultural people. And it was very no holds barred and it was very open and people were very, very, very, very passionate. They'd burn your house. I mean there was really, and I think when I write criticism in some way, I'm always writing for them. I think that moment made such a deep, deep impression on me that they're always in there. They was sort of what we think of as kind of died in the little music critics are or were like the Lester Bang's and the Robert Ows, Ellen Willis, Ann Powers these people for whom those records, man, they were going to change your life or not. And that was really sort of where we lived. So probably in terms of criticism, I would say them.

Speaker 4 (00:57:02):

Well, in part I think I probably have myself in mind because I start off by when looking at a poem thinking, well, how does it work? Why do I like it or why don't I like it? And trying to answer these questions for myself. And maybe wrongly, I've assumed that other people might be interested in following those questions and might wonder themselves why We're always told that a certain poem is great, for example. But what if I've never liked it? I feel like it's horrible to say, but there are poems by Elizabeth Bishop I don't like.

Speaker 4 (00:57:45):

And I feel as if that's fair to say, if I can explain to myself why. And so in some way I'm imagining, I suppose an audience at the same time as I'm not, because that would intimidate me from writing at all if I really thought about it. But somewhere there's this half idea of an audience that also is asking these similar questions. But I also feel maybe influenced by having been a high school teacher for eight years Latin teacher. And one of the first things, I got an education degree and they tell you everything except reality of what's going to happen. So I went in and said, well, these are the nouns and these are the adjectives and this is how it works. And someone said, what is an adjective? And I thought they're in ninth grade who doesn't know that? And so I like the idea of criticism that proceeds by thinking the reader may not know what you think is obvious.

Speaker 4 (00:58:44):

And so it's okay to begin right there and speaking that way to a reader, not speaking down, but inviting them to learn and not be afraid to admit they don't know something. I found that actually maybe the most useful, and it's not that I imagine audience of high school students, but that sensibility that none of us can know everything. And as I mentioned when I was standing, the books that are off-putting, to me, they're the ones like the last quote I think that you read there, Charlie, it made no sense to me. The one with the algorithm in it that made literally no sense to me that meti or whoever it was. And I think, well, it might make sense if someone from the beginning invited me in to the conversation so I have some idea of that relationship. Anyway, to the audience,

Speaker 2 (00:59:37):

We're out of time. Thank you all so much.

Speaker 5 (00:59:56):

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