Interview with Kevin McIlvoy

An interview with faculty member Kevin McIlvoy appears online at r.kv.r.y quarterly.

Mc-McIlvoy

The starting place for me as a writer was the luck of growing up hearing truly marvelous oral storytellers in my father’s large family, particularly the oldest women in his family. Their rambling, chaotic stories were spellbinding to me. They were a form of singing that shifted in register and expressiveness according to what the storyteller was feeling in her body.

The story had not been planned (as a self-conscious design), it was not thought out and, so, poured out; it was unplanned (as an unselfconscious wreckage) and, so, spilled out. The story was not driven by a compelling plot or theme regarding our ways of becoming; it was driven by the sensations and the enigmatic vulnerabilities of the body and its ways of being.

Themes and plots arose in the story only as happy accidents. At no point was the story constructing an experience of comprehension for the listener’s mind; it was, instead, creating a way to listen with the body. This kind of story left me with the impression that storytelling existed above all else in order to give us new ways to be fully present — in all our senses, in our skin and flesh, in our noses, on our tongues, and always in our sensitive ears — to the world before us.

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“Good Days”

“Good Days,” a poem by faculty member Stephen Dobyns, appeared recently at Union Station.

Good Days
Jack McCarthy, Stand-Up Poet, 1939-2013

It had been one of those good days with friends
and now we were sitting around the bonfire
telling stories—a circle of light within the dark.

The wind through the trees above us sounded
like faraway conversations, perhaps the talk
of friends around bonfires in the past...[Keep Reading]…

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Essay by Steven Schwartz

“How I Broke Up With (for good I thought) and Fell Back in Love With the Short Story,” an essay by faculty member Steven Schwartz, appears online at Beyond the Margins.

Steven-Schwartz

Yes, the short story and I were through.  I’d written two books of stories but decided after one previous failure at writing a novel that I’d try again at forty-two years old.  And this one worked.  It worked so well in fact that I came to agree with what other writers have sometimes said: that stories were only an apprenticeship to writing novels.  And the short story form did feel, well, limited.  Any good idea or great line or irresistible incident could fit somewhere in a novel.  I began to believe as Cormac McCarthy opined in his dismissal of short stories in favor of novels, “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth the doing.”

I remembered my fellow MFA students who painstakingly spent their entire three years of graduate school working on a novel, with something akin to the faith in an afterlife. Instead of acceding to the common exhortation that they experiment with stories, try out different voices, explore a diversity of material, fool around, they thrashed onward, failure be damned.  Maybe they had it right. …[Keep Reading]…

Steven is the author of the story collection Little Raw Souls (2013, Autumn House Press).

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A Discussion of Antonya Nelson’s Short Stories in The Missouri Review

Rebecca Meacham discusses faculty member Antonya Nelson’s short stories “Fair Hunt” and “Female Trouble” at The Missouri Review, as part of their celebration of National Short Story Month.

It started because I wanted to shoot a dog. In a short story, that is. The stories for my first collection— then my doctoral dissertation— were character-driven epiphanies hinging on a character’s decision to act, or not to act. A story with a gun on page 1 and fired by the ending—this sounded like big, explosive fun. So I shoehorned a dog-shooting into a story that really didn’t need it.

My dissertation advisor looked over my draft and said,  “If you want to shoot an animal in a story, read ‘Fair Hunt,’ by Antonya Nelson.”

He was right, of course. Nelson’s story is both explosive and character-driven, introducing me to her ability to capture the internal voice, and painfully limited awareness, of her characters. Her stories are also fearless: Nelson writes from the vantage points of husbands stealing strangers’ children, masturbating boys, men having sex, women having affairs, parents fumbling drunkenly, and children exploiting their own tragedies. Like her character Daisy in “Female Trouble,” as a writer Nelson seems “up for whatever.”

…[Keep Reading]…

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Beauty and the Beast

“Beauty and the Beast,” a poem by faculty member Gabrielle Calvocoressi, appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine. The poem is accompanied by an original drawing by artist Joshua Abelow.

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He’s huge. Standing there in the woods where I didn’t even see him at first. He doesn’t know I’m looking and then he moves a little bit and kicks the ground. I was walking by myself as the sun set. I kept going in deeper to the greenest spot until I found a clearing. He was the clearing. He took the clearing up and stood there still and watched me till I saw him. I saw his shoulders first and then his neck. I think he was so golden in the sun I didn’t know what he was. And I thought the branches were his horns. I thought he was an eight point stag. And how his chest made a kind of giant heart out of me out of my eyes looking. And he let me look. …[Keep Reading]…

Gabrielle is the author of Apocalyptic Swing Poems (2009, Persea Books).

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“Tarp”

“Tarp,” a poem by faculty member Rick Barot, appears online at Poetry Magazine.

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets

under the trees, catching the rain

of  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness

of   the one covering the bad roof

of  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color

inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath.

Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.

I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go on

this way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thing

itself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over …[Keep Reading]…
Rick is the author of the poetry collection Want (2008, Sarabande Books).
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Praise

“Praise,” a poem by faculty member C. Dale Young, appears online at Waccamaw:

The hawk need not measure distance.
It need not estimate the time from drift or glide
to the lightning bolt necessary to pluck
the chick from the edge of the yard.
God’s cleanest predator—its beak is perfect,

its talons perfect, its hunger and its manipulation
of air perfect. You have to respect the hawk.
Over the field, I watch one circle and circle
tracing the symbol for infinity. Even at this
distance, I can see the rustle in the grass

that betrays not the wind but an animal. …[Keep Reading]…

C. Dale is the author of the poetry collection Torn (2011, Four Way).

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Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America

“Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America,” an essay by faculty member Tony Hoagland, appears online at Harper’s Magazine.

tony-hoagland-portrait

What went wrong? Somehow, we blew it. We never quite got poetry inside the American school system, and thus, never quite inside the culture. Many brave people have tried, tried for decades, are surely still trying. The most recent watermark of their success was the introduction of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and some e.e. cummings, of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “In a Station of the Metro” — this last poem ponderously explained, but at least clean and classical, as quick as an inoculation. It isn’t really fair to blame contemporary indifference to poetry on “Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Nor is it fair to blame Wallace Stevens himself, who also left us, after all, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem that will continue to electrify and intrigue far more curious young minds than are anesthetized by a bad day of pedagogy on the Ice Cream Poem. Let us blame instead the stuffed shirts who took an hour to explain that poem in their classrooms, who chose it because it would need an explainer; pretentious ponderous ponderosas of professional professors will always be drawn to poems that require a priest.

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Alix Ohlin on Inspiration

Faculty member Alix Ohlin gives some advice for creative inspiration as part of the Poets & Writers’ “Writers Recommend” series:

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Here are two things that have helped me when I feel depleted or confused, which is often. One: I find that ideas like to come when they’re most inconvenient. So I daydream my way through situations where writing is impossible. In the shower. While dog-walking. On the subway. I don’t rush out of that situation to write anything down—I just let my mind go, fabricating and wandering, until the end of the day, when I make a record of where my thoughts have gone. It gives me material to start with the next morning. Two: When I’m in direst need of inspiration, I do what I call ‘sentence stealing.’ I find a sentence from a writer I admire and write it down. ‘In the beginning I left messages in the street.’ Or, ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Then I write my own version of the sentence, focusing only on its rhythms: by which I mean, replacing a noun with a noun, a verb with a verb. What’s left is a ghostly echo of the original sentence with no relationship to its actual content. And I follow that new sentence wherever it takes me, down the road to an unfolding story.

Read more at Poets & Writers.

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Faculty Book Reviews in NY Times

Reviews of books by faculty members Daisy Fried and A. Van Jordan appear in the New York Times Book Review.

Women’s Poetry, by Daisy Fried

Fried is a poet who will “tense up” when she hears “an affirming poem,” finding “Sourness a kind of joy I try for intricately.” Her present-tense poems vividly record the impressions of our moment: road rage, smartphones, magnet loops, Facebook, a “gun megachurch.” In “Kissinger at the Louvre (Three Drafts),” the background of a cellphone self-portrait captures “a dark figure” who “looks familiar,” but “I look fat in it,” a tourist decides, “And deletes.” …[Keep Reading]…

 

The Cineaste, by A. Van Jordan

Ekphrastic poetry — poetry about other art forms, that is, like Edward Hirsch’s consideration of Edward Hopper’s “House by the Railroad” — has a long tradition, and now includes not just fine arts but also films. Jordan devotes his fourth and best book, “The Cineaste,” to depictions of movies, from “The Red Balloon” to “Blazing Saddles.” Two sections of the book address individual films, either exploring Jordan’s responses as cineaste or (more often) presenting monologues from the characters’ points of view. …[Keep Reading]…

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