The Devil's Gentleman Initial Post

Hello, welcome to The Devil’s Gentleman online book discussion. I am Clint Monson, a third-year MFA candidate in fiction here at Arizona State, and I will be hosting this conversation. I will open it will several questions: please feel free to respond to some or all of them. Also, feel free to post or contribute your own questions/concerns/confusions/observations/etc. I look forward to discussing this work with you and sharing our experiences with it.

Harold Schechter has been described as a true crime novelist, but it is far more accurate to describe him as a historian—every detail, every piece of dialogue, in his work has been meticulously researched and referenced from a verifiable source. (In his notes for The Devil’s Gentleman he mentions that he did not indulge in any of the fictional techniques of New Journalism.) That said, what about this book could cause someone to describe it as a novel? How is the information of this crime handled by the author? How is the narrative structured? How are the chapters structured? And how are the chapters arranged so that there is constant tension and release with the revelation of information?

Schechter has stated that he is interested in crimes that seem to resonate with the general public of a certain period rather than the most heinous crimes of that moment. What elements of this crime do you think made it such a sensation at the time. What about the crime caused it to virtually disappear from collective (popular) memory in the decades since?

What struck you most about this book? About the Roland Molineux story and case? Have you read other true-crime works? Or works of mystery or detective fiction? How does Schechter’s book compare or contrast with those works? How does it relate to other books of history you have read?

Harold Schechter Preview Post II

.. During his residency here at the Piper Writers House, Harold Schechter gave a public craft Q & A. Marginalia: The Magazine of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing has published a retrospective of the event, which also includes the Q & A with last month's OBC author, Kimiko Hahn. You can access the retrospective, "The Marriage of Poetry and True Crime," by Amanda Ventura by clicking here. You can access the full November 2009 issue by clicking here.

Harold Schechter Preview Post I

This post is the first in series that will highlight this month's writer, Harold Schechter, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Schechter's The Devil's Gentleman will begin November 16th and run through November 20th.

True crime and mystery writer Harold Schechter visited ASU and gave a reading as well as a public craft Q & A on October 14th, 2009

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Schechter is most known for his historical true crime work and specializes in serial killers. Most recently, he has worked as the editor of “True Crime: An American Anthology”, a 900 page behemoth displaying the notable pieces of literature to emerge from the True Crime genre, and wrote “The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century”, an exploration of the killings of Roland Molineux in 1899. He is also a professor of literature at Queens College in New York.

A review of "The Devil's Gentleman" calls the book "riveting and engaging" and it "captures a vivid slice of life at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Visit here for the full review.

In a 2007 review, the Wall Street Journal calls "The Devil's Gentleman" a "well-wrought anatomy of a murder and portrait of an age." Read the rest here.

A reviewer for his book "Fiend" says "if there was ever a guy, besides Stephen King, who was interested in the darker side of the human psyche in all its manifestations, Harold Schechter would be The Man." Adding that "You may not want to leave home for a couple days after reading FIEND.

And no one will blame you." You want the full review? Here it is.

A full list of Schechter’s work can be viewed here. Excerpts from a few of his books, including “Nevermore”, part of his critically acclaimed mystery series starring Edgar Allan Poe as main character and detective (yes, you read that right, how awesome is that?), can be perused here. Both are courtesy of his official website.

Find out why, in an interview for The Sun in 2005, Schechter says that he is encouraged by the amount of violence in television and video games.

Click here for the full story.

Radio interview question: "Does violence in movie, on television, and in comic strips and cartoons rot our children's brains and make zombies - or worse, criminals - of adults at the fringes?"

Schechter's answer: "No." In fact, he goes on to argue that the exact opposite is true, that this violent release is necessary to keep our instinctual violent nature at bay.

Listen to the entire 2008 interview on Weekly Signals, broadcast from Orange County, California here.

And as long as we're on the topic of serial killers and other horrible acts of violence, Schechter wrote a short piece for the Wall Street Journal listing his five favorite killer stories. Go ahead and start your celebration if you had "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen in your office pool.

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Mike Pitoniak is an ASU undergraduate studying Creative Writing. He interns at the Piper House and loves football, baseball, eating unhealthy foods, and writing about himself in third person. He feels like he's trying to sell himself on a dating website right now.

Craft Q & As with Kimiko Hahn & Harold Schechter

Will take place at the Piper Writers House on Wednesday, October 14th 2009: Harold Schechter will answer your questions from Noon to 1 PM. Kimiko Hahn's Q & A will begin at 1:30. Both sessions are free and open to the public. Click here for a full listing of all the events in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Reading by Kimiko Hahn & Harold Schechter this Wednesday!

Will be held at the ASU Tempe Campus on the evening of Wednesday, October 14th 2009. This event is free and open to the public. Click here for a full listing of all the events in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and follow the links for maps and parking information. We hope to see you there!

Thoughts on Hahn's Use of the Tanga Form

You have probably noticed throughout this collection that some of the poems consist of numbered stanzas—these are an interpretation of another traditional Japanese literary form—tanga (or tanka), a 31-syllable poem related to the haiku—that Hahn uses intermittently throughout The Narrow Road to the Interior. If we read each section individually, we can glean out a secondary meaning for each brief poem in addition to reading them together in succession as a single long poem, amplifying and diversifying how each poem can be read.

I have found these tanga-inspired poems to be quite wonderful, and as I read them I can’t help but think of them as a kaleidoscope—each small piece, each individual color standing on its own, yet also falling into pattern with the others. Each stanza has its own voice and carries its own individual meaning, yet informs the others it has been paired with. The small poems stand as mirrors of each other, and voices that inform how we interpret the others. It’s quite impressive to see how they work together, yet also stand apart.

A particularly beautiful and simple example of how these individual sections work together is in the poem Wellfleet, Late Summer (2001) on page sixty-two. Although each single-line verse stands on its own, it is apparent how each has been woven together with the repetition of images and words. Each stanza, each individual poem speaks to the next:

“2 By the outdoor shower, the pine drop their needles in the sandy soil. By morning we find them in our double bed.

5 Rain a third day. We’ll still walk at low tide to look for moving things. I can’t stop thinking about my daughter for a second.

9 When he picks a conch out of the bay it furls back inside. Who wouldn’t?

17 Rolls of waves off Wellfleet. This could be Maui. I could be my mother.

19 At the beach I avoid the blankets of squalling children but miss my own.”

As you read through these poems in the book, what did you make of them? How did hear them speaking to each other?

What single line, tanga-inspired poem was your favorite? How did you read as an individual poem? How can you read it as a single part of a larger whole?—What craft techniques do you see Hahn using to tie this poem to the others?

To Participate in the Discussion

As with most book clubs (and our previous format), we invite a moderator to start the discussion and pose some questions about the book under discussion.

To discuss the book, one can respond to the questions posed by the moderator or introduce her/his own touchstones or questions in relation to the book. To comment on any aspect of the book under discussion please feel free to comment in response to a post (including this one) by using the comment feature at the base of the posts.

Our moderators are here to guide the discussion, not to confine it. Please join us! We welcome you in the conversation - or to start us on a new path of inquiry about the book.

Initial thoughts on language and craft in Kimiko Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior

Hello everyone!

I hope you have enjoyed reading Kimiko Hahn’s collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior. I have had minimal contact with her work prior to reading the collection for the Piper Book Club, and I can say that so far I’m really enjoying what she’s doing in this book. As you’ve probably noticed, the work is quite unconventional—even experimental—and although it retains the honesty and many of the craft elements present in her previous work, it is quite a departure from it as well. In the book, Hahn uses the Japanese technique of zuihitsu—a name consisting of two Chinese characters that individually mean “to follow” and “brush.” This technique has been equated to the modern blog by some, and it consists of loosely connected fragments of thought and observations on the writer’s life and surroundings.

In looking at the second poem in the collection, “Utica Station,” we are given the opportunity to overhear the transient thoughts of the speaker as she waits for the train. The poem introduces us to the many roles of the speaker (mother and daughter, child and adult), and gives us a glimpse into how she navigates her way through these labels. Additionally, the poem introduces us to one of the largest questions of the book—what does it mean to label, or name, the things of this world? As the speaker attempts to navigate the labels that she wears, she also understands that the process of assigning language to the things we observe in our life is an entirely human endeavor—something that we begin to do as children. Looking to the middle of the poem, on page 6, she says:

“One of my first tasks was to name things. Then it became her task. One daughter’s then the next. We’d walk from apartment to park—Pizza. Doggie. Firetruck.—naming things—Daisy.”

This tasks is something that the speaker continues to do throughout the poems in this book. We can note in many of the zuihitsu-inspired poems, the presence of lists—lists of objects, words, names—, sometimes filling entire stanzas. In reading these lists, it feels almost as if the speaker is trying to grasp the world around her—a world that we can see is, in reality, slipping away from her in a number of ways—by returning to that childish practice of simply assigning names to what she sees. The act of naming seems almost meditative and comforting to her.

Additionally, we see her playing with our conventional understanding of these words. The final three stanzas of the poem (on page 8) are a great example of this:

“Before the tunnel—those dozen poles in the river—swollen and rotted from a long-vanished pier.

That’s what the heart was—swollen—like a mother weeping for something. A pier.

Appear missing.”

The speaker seems to be grasping at selected words in her notes (in this case the word “pier”) and letting their meaning unravel a bit—the ways in which they can aurally sound, the ways in which they can be interpreted and manipulated into something entirely different—and this slipping of language continues throughout the book. I am interested to hear how you interpreted this technique—what was the emotional resonance for you as a reader in these moments? What did you make of her use of italics? How do you understand this "loosening" of language to be working in these poems?

Additionally, how does the repetition of language in these moments inform the poems? How about the fragmented zuihitsu style—how does this differentiate the work from a poem more traditional in structure?

What other techniques does Hahn use in these poems? How do these influence your reading of the poems and your understanding of the speaker?

I am interested to hear everyone’s take on the poetic choices made by Hahn in this work—it seems to be a key element in how we understand the content and overarching themes of the collection.

Kimiko Hahn Preview Post II

This post is the second of two to highlight this month's writer, Kimiko Hahn, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior will begin October 5th and run through October 9th.

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An interview with Laurie Sheck for Bomb Magazine:

"Sheck: Throughout The Narrow Road to the Interior you use another Japanese form as well, the tanka, and you make reference to and draw on several writers from the Heian period. What draws you so strongly to this particular period?

Hahn: I first fell in love with that period when I found that women dominated the literature—for me that was extraordinary. As an undergraduate I was studying Japanese literature in translation when I learned that the men during that period were writing in Chinese, the way Western men would write in Latin. In other words, the educated people would write in a language that was not their spoken language. Women, who were not formally educated, would write in Japanese. And so while the men’s writing became increasingly stultified, the women produced incredibly vivid writing, to the point where some men actually wrote in a female persona, in Japanese. Soon this became literary diction. So it was women who dominated what is considered the golden age of literature in Japan. That was my initial attraction to that era and especially to The Tale of Genji —which is such an incredible soap opera, and considered the world’s first psychological novel. It has such a wealth of themes: longing, incest, karma and the female figure being both powerful and utterly without power. All that fascinates me. And it’s such an alien world because the women—aristocratic women—quite literally lived in the dark, in a sort of twilight because while the architecture opened the rooms up to the outside, it also utilized screens to create walls. Between the screens and the candlelight—the lighting was quite dim, shadowy. This created a perfect atmosphere for liaisons—as well as for mistaken identities. The men, of course, lived in the real sunlit world."

You can click here to read Kimko Hahn's entire 2006 interview.

If you'd rather listen than read right now, here's a 2008 video interview from Hahn at the Jefferson Heights Poetry Festival. Includes a couple readings.

Another interview, this one from Loggernaut Reading series.

"My new book is a collection of zuihitsu that I've collected from the past dozen years, and tanka, from over the last several years. Both are classical Japanese forms that I've tried to make my own. The zuihitsu—for which there is no Western equivalent!—looks like prose and sounds like poetry. Tanka are, in Japanese, thirty-one syllables; my own are basically one-line nature poems that I hope contain a Japanese sensibility. I have intertwined these two chronologies."

Here's the whole thing.

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Mike Pitoniak is an ASU undergraduate studying Creative Writing. He interns at the Piper House and loves football, baseball, eating unhealthy foods, and writing about himself in third person. He feels like he's trying to sell himself on a dating website right now.

Kimiko Hahn Preview Post I

This post is the first of two that will highlight this month's writer, Kimiko Hahn, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior will begin October 5th and run through October 9th.

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Kimiko Hahn, visiting ASU October 14th with husband, true crime writer Harold Schechter, is the author of seven books, won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in 2008 and an American Book Award. She holds degrees from the University of Iowa and Columbia University.

For more biographical information, and a chance to listen to her read her poem "Sweetwater Caverns", click here. (Since we're interested in making things easy for you at the Piper House, you can also go here to hear her read her poem, Sweetwater Caverns).

If you're interested in a taste of Kimiko Hahn's work, you can visit Smith College's Poetry Center to read a couple of her poems, including "Reckless Sonnet #7", "Things That Make Me Cry Instantly", and "Gowanus Late Summer".

To listen to Hahn an excerpt from her poem "Sparrow", you can visit Poems Out Loud, for which she has also written a recent column.

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Mike Pitoniak is an ASU undergraduate studying Creative Writing. He interns at the Piper House and loves football, baseball, eating unhealthy foods, and writing about himself in third person. He feels like he's trying to sell himself on a dating website right now.

Commenting on an earlier post about the poem "Desire," fellow Dobyns reader Anthony astutely noticed one way in which the poem separates our psyche into two parts: On the one hand, there's our bright shiny public persona, which is polite and helpful and holds the door for someone without objectifying him/her—and on the other hand there's the more primitive and ravenous part of us, unapologetically, gleefully greedy for pleasure and connection and, as Dobyns puts it, "relief from the self."

All this put me in mind of Robert Bly's pop-Jungian A Little Book on the Human Shadow (where he speaks so authoritatively about the flip side of being a terminally "nice boy"), but also another poem from Velocities, "Uprising":

Straitjacket, straitjacket, straitjacket:
we are tired of this quiet life, tired of climbing
this mountain of pleases and thank yous.
It's time to kick a nun in the butt,
time to buy our prick a goddamned big car
and let the world frazzle our ears.
It's time to stop this tiptoeing around,
to stop being the property of our property.
Who lives in this holy temple anyhow?
Let's get the formaldehyde out of our veins.
Let's strip this lampshade off of our head.
It's time to stand at the door, shouting, Come back!

...and so on, ending with its magnificent last line: "Let's make sure they bury us standing up." ("Goddamned big car" is an evident reference to Robert Creeley.)

Again I'm reminded forcefully of the poems of Rumi, whose first spiritual inklings about the holiness of chaos came when his friend Shams threw his precious schoolbooks in a duck pond. We have so many names for this untamed element, wherever it appears in culture: Mercury (currently in retrograde!), Coyote, Dionysus/Pan, Uranus—all the trickster figures, the faeries, the ones who always mess everything up just when we think we have all the hatches battened and everything sealed up tight. Dobyns' work repeatedly celebrates this unbridled messiness—and I think American readers really respond to his so doing, if the happy crowd at the MU a week ago was any indication.

I'm also reminded of William Blake's assertion that Milton "was of the devil's party without knowing it." Do you think ALL poets are of the devil's party? In "Uprising," Dobyns goes on to list the Christian sins, only they become more like mischievous imps rather than something for which you'll spend eternity in torment. What do you think—can you let Dobyns get away with that? Isn't it reprehensible?

Okay, just one more final stray asociation: Dickinson saying primly, when asked if she'd read Whitman: "I never read his Book—but was told it was disgraceful." I rather think Miss Emily is not being completely truthful on this matter...but the question remains: How can poets write about the messiest truths of our lives without being "disgraceful"? Those in the audience last weekend seemed to relish poems in which Dobyns unabashedly names body parts and shoots from, as it were, the hip (or maybe the pelvis in general). They're ribald and raucous—on the surface, anyway, yet perhaps also interwoven with something a great deal more pensive and shuttered and even tragic.

Do you like these poems?

"the sudden emotion, the confusion, then nothing?"

This morning, reading some of the recent poems at the beginning of Velocities (well, they were recent in 1992!), I notice that Dobyns sometimes executes a little maneuver at the end of some of his poems which I actually think comes down to us from Dickinson. There's a certain distinctive way in which her lyrics start out with a bit of deceptively pretty imagery or musical language, and then take that sharp metaphysical turn or infolding, until in the last stanza the reader is often left with some insight so abstract as to be all but incomprehensible. (It was a great moment for me as a reader when I began to be able to keep up with Dickinson all the way through her dense and complexified last stanzas.)

This is all very fancy and theoretical; but Dobyns, too, I think, also seems sometimes to end up somewhere vastly different from where he began—as in "Contingencies," perhaps, or maybe particularly in "Red Geraniums." And I also find that his poems are most successful when they do this—when they become more than they seemingly set out to be. I wonder if anyone else noticed any instances of this? Or if you felt you could "keep up" with the shifts/twists/ending of "Red Geraniums"?

A few random thoughts:

• "Six Poems on Moving" is creepy and, I think, rather wonderful.

• "Uprising" seems to me almost like a Rumi translation—though I doubt Dobyns would admit any debt to Bly!

• What do y'all think "The Men with Long Faces" is (at least nominally) about?

To Post a Comment

If you would like to join the discussion, then simply click on the the comments link directly below the post. Comments will be moderated and posted periodically each day and throughout the week.

"a single red flower and a bird crossing the sky"

Hello Piper Book Club readers! I hope you were able to come to Mr. Dobyns' reading last Thursday—the house was packed and I think we did ASU proud with our attendance. By request from me and a faculty member (only it was more like, dogged insistence rather than mere polite request), the poet did read two of our favorite poems—though I'm sure they're favorites for many other readers, too: "Desire," from Body Traffic, and of course "How To Like It" (which, in case you missed the reading, you can hear Mr. Dobyns read below, in the pretty fabulous collection of links and facts assembled by Ms. Amanda).

(And, just as an aside, I think it's hilarious that poets.org is asking readers to "adopt a poet." Of course, by the time most poets appear on that website, they're not in any particular need of adoption...still, I suppose it is the invaluable service provided by the AAP's site which one is, in fact, adopting—so who knows, I may just sign up for a piece of John Ashbery myself!)

I'm linking to "Desire" because I think it's as fine a place as any to start the discussion about Dobyns, his oeuvre, his tactics, and his obsessions. I was working as a bookstore clerk in 1992 when Velocities came out, and actually that particular poem had already appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology the previous year, I think. At any rate I remember being completely floored by it. In all my deep college-girl acquaintance with Plath and Glück and Sharon Olds, I'd somehow forgotten (!), or neglected ever to notice, that desire was also a male experience. That it should share such common features, have such an undeniable overlap with my own experience, was revelatory—as was the stripped-down and baldly transparent style in which the poet told it, or seemed to tell it. I read the poem to my housemates, to my coworkers, to my boyfriend, to the guy I'd had a crush on for years—I read it to everyone who would put up with yet another recitation. In fact, after just a few such few readings I'd all but memorized it, without even trying, and I'd read enough Auden, Hardy, and Frost to know that easy memorization was only possible because of the poem's authority with regard to technique, effectively concealed beneath its deceptively frank tone.

Let's look at part of the poem:

But it's the glances that I like, the quick ones,
the unguarded ones, like a hand snatching a pie
from a window ledge and the feet pounding away....

Dobyns does a lot with sound here (the consonants of quick/snatch/thunk, pie/pounding/pulse...also glances/ledge—to say nothing of the tongue-in-cheek double-entendre) but he maybe does even more with the imagery: the perfectly disembodied pie-snatching hand, or the "big spender entering the bar," are mental pictures so apt for what they depict that they prove deeply enduring—as with the steel bars slamming shut, at the poem's end.

I wonder what lyric techniques other people notice at work in this poem, and in others. In general I'm fascinated by his poems' disingenuous air of being straightforward narratives. Mr. Dobyns, however, said emphatically to some of us in a discussion last Tuesday that he was not a narrative poet, but a lyric poet. He referred to traditional narrative poems like "The Highwayman" or "Hiawatha," making it clear that his work doesn't fall into their company. What then sets this poem apart from, for example, one of the same writer's short stories? I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think—and perhaps what you also think of his recurrent themes, or how you would categorize those (if you would).

Reading by Stephen Dobyns!

Was well attended at the ASU Tempe Campus on the evening of Thursday, September 17th 2009. This event was free and open to the public. Click here for a full listing of all the events in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Craft Q & A with Stephen Dobyns!

Took place at the Piper Writers House on Wednesday, September 16th 2009: an open Craft Q & A with Stephen Dobyns! Free and open to the public. Click here for a full listing of all the events in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Dobyns Preview Post III

This post is the third in a series that will highlight this month's writer, Stephen Dobyns, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Dobyns' Velocities will begin September 21st and run through September 25th.

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Do you ever tire of hearing the voice in your head while it narrates everything you read?

We would like to ease your restlessness and entertain you with a few links to more interactive outlets to Dobyns' work....

Hear him read "How To Like It" from Velocites, and two other poems, for The Cortland Review. (2004). The Cortland Review is an online literary magazine founded in 1997 that publishes its submissions in real audio.

Listen to an interview with Dobyns by The Cortland Review as he takes readers through his career, Anglo Saxon riddles, the writing process and the "exaggerated experience" that unites the human mind and poetry. (2004). This is the interview framework of the previous link.

Watch him read "Spider Web" and "The Invitation" at Georgia Tech's Poetry at Tech event on Youtube.com. Additional links to videos of Dobyns' readings are streamed on the side bar of this Youtube page.

Listen to a podcast of "Beauty" by a student at the University of Washington, who finds its subject matter an unsolved constant in society's flawed doors of perception.

The piece discusses the life of an Iraqi grocer who moved to Detroit to escape the violence of Baghdad only to be shot by a black man. The racial undertones, mirrored by today's sensationalized media, highlights the value and misconceptions of a photograph. If every picture is worth 1,000 words but receives 100 in the paper, 900 are left to those who consume the media without compassion or humane curiosity. The juxtaposition of perception, and how one photograph affects the world is a powerful image, and the narrator's voice captures it like a greiving news anchor.

Adopt Stephen Dobyns at Poets.org!

Poets.org is asking for contributions to help maintain its nonprofit resource Web site. "By giving a special gift to adopt one of the poets on Poets.org, you can help us make critically needed upgrades and improvements to the site—and help us make sure that, in the coming year and beyond, we can continue to offer students, teachers, poetry enthusiasts and all Americans the most educational, entertaining, and comprehensive poetry resource available anywhere."

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Amanda Ventura is an undergraduate at ASU. She is studying journalism and creative writing, interns with Hayden's Ferry Review, works at The State Press and the School of Earth & Space Exploration. In addition to fiction and autobiographies, she loves coffee, live music, and people watching.

Dobyns Preview Post II

This post is the second in a series that will highlight this month's writer, Stephen Dobyns, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Dobyns' Velocities will begin September 21st and run through September 25th.

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You may think that reading a review of a book may turn a new literary endeavor into a less spontaneous experience that drags burdensome expectations, promised by its blurb, along for the entire ride.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

Reading a new book is a lot like dating. You must decide to take time out of your schedule to read it, you listen to its stories (even through the dry parts), you sometimes have no clue where its going, and its presence always manages to be somewhere in the back of your mind.

So, that being said, reading the reviews is like talking to ex-beaus. Wouldn't you like to know...?

Review of Velocities by Daryl Anderson (via Amazon.com):

"Dobyns manages to capture that 'universality' in his poetry in a manner that repeatedly surprises. Lots of poetry achieves this by rooting itself in the well-known. Dobyns takes a contrary tack. The poetry in this book often seems to concern people or places that you'd hardly expect to have the slightest interest in - certainly not at the level of seemingly narrow focus that he brings to his view of the world. Would you seek out depictions of street scenes in Santiago? on the work of the artist Balthus? the last breaths of a bull in the ring? The very different-ness of these points of view and odd scenarios accentuates the twang of recognition in your heartstring when it is plucked.

[…]

Others have commented that Dobyns poetry has a "masculine" feel to it and I will, guardedly, agree - although I can't quite put my finger on the "how" of that bit. It is visceral poetry, for sure, (sometimes literally so as when the body's organs are given voice in selections from "Body Traffic") and it celebrates lusts as much as loss - even the losses that are sown by the lust. Although dark and broody at times, it also relishes the small triumphs against the relentless press of our inadequacies. If its "men's poetry", its certainly not a youth's voice. But it grazes up against the "why" of facing another day, even the why of being a jerk, a fool, a recidivist, with an oddly under-emotional shrug that might seem essentially masculine."

-Daryl Anderson, Trumansburg, NY

Read more reviews of Velocities at Amazon.com here.

Johns Hopkins gets a little googley-eyed in "Poet Stephen Dobyns tempers tragedy with humor." [A look at a reading that Dobyns gave during a recent residency.]

The Washington Post's Robert Pinsky names Dobyns "Poet's Choice" in 2006. It includes the poem "Alligator Dark."

An opinion of Dobyn's Eating Naked. [From "Futurosity" a blog published by Robert Ellis: management consultant, freelance writer for Macworld, and blogger]

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Amanda Ventura is an undergraduate at ASU. She is studying journalism and creative writing, interns with Hayden's Ferry Review, works at The State Press and the School of Earth & Space Exploration. In addition to fiction and autobiographies, she loves coffee, live music, and people watching.

Dobyns Virtual Preview Post

This post is the first in a series that will highlight this month's writer, Stephen Dobyns, and places around the net to find out more.

Discussion of Dobyns' Velocities will begin September 21st and run through September 25th.

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Are you experienced?

This question resonates deeply beneath the foundations of Stephen Dobyns work, but it also tangents to another query of infinite proportions:

Who exactly is the maestro behind what has been called "autobiographical" fiction?

Britannica's online encyclopedia describes Dobyns as "an American poet and novelist whose works are characterized by a cool realism laced with pungent wit."

And while that's a great line for a pretentious dinner party, we at the Piper House thought we'd connect you with various facets of Dobyns that you may not explicitly experience while reading Velocities.

Immerse yourself in selected poems published between 1993 and 2006, at The Writers' Almanac (a daily radio and online program hosted by Garrison Keillor and produced by American Public Media).

Then read the Ploughshares Interview (1998), in which Dobyns ascends an existential stairway to his library of metaphysical relationships, American society, noise, opinions of other writers and more:

LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR: In his book of essays, Orphan Factory,Charles Simic ends one of his essays by saying: “It makes absolutely no difference whether gods and devils exist or not; the secret ambition of every true poem is to ask about them, even as it acknowledges their absence.” What do you think about that?

STEPHEN DOBYNS: Well, I think you’re always asking about them. One of the functions of poetry is to create a cosmology, to map out the dimensions of what we imagine reality to be, and what, then, may be beyond that. We’re always dealing with our existential isolation and trying to decrease that isolation. So that by mapping out that greater area, there’s always the attempt to people it. And when one tries to people it with something larger than human, some kind of spiritual or deific creature, then one’s not only peopling it, but attempting to create a reason for being as well. It becomes part of our constant endeavor, identifying the reason for populating a cosmos. That’s one of the reasons one writes. But the basic reason is to try to erase the isolation.

BOSSELAAR: Camus once told his students: “Writing is a man’s trade,not God-given inspiration.” In a recent interview in The Connecticut Review, Richard Eberhard said: “I believe in inspiration, which is not a popular concept these days.” In your essay “Writing the Reader’s Life,” you say: “The act of inspiration is, I think, the sudden apprehension or grasping of metaphor.” Can you extrapolate about that?

DOBYNS: Any piece of writing is a metaphor which, at one level, stands for or represents the writer’s relation to what he or she imagines the world to be. By relation I mean emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical. So you hit upon something that you can use as metaphor; for instance, a liar is like an egg in midair—that metaphor that W. S. Merwin uses. To hit upon the idea of the egg in midair may lead to the realization that one can use this to present an idea of the liar, what it is to lie. All art is metaphor. Even Anna Karenina obviously is metaphor. So as I say, that aspect of intuition is to hit upon something that will function as metaphor. But it may not be an idea, it may be a sound or it may be just a wriggling in the brain. One writes something to find out why one’s writing it, and one pursues it. And in that search, often the metaphor evolves. I don’t believe in inspiration as something that comes from the other. I think all that comes from within the self. But there are different aspects of the self, the conscious self and unconscious self. Sometimes that act of inspiration seems to be a joining of that conscious and unconscious self. There’s suddenly a kind of traffic between those two places, because the metaphor that one suddenly understands has to have some kind of psychological relation to the person who’s having it. It’s not an arbitrary grasping. It’s something with some personal, psychological, spiritual, emotional meaning.

Read the rest here.

The Aside Interview - (The Aslop Review's magazine of non-fiction writing on poetry and the arts)- In which, Dobyns is asked about his "recurrent ideas: the proletarian, the juxtaposition of the profane and the exalted." He also explains the relationship between violence and mystery novels, professional wresting with symbolism in the Bible, concepts of morality and humanity.

"Art takes the curve, art tries to remind the reader or the viewer or the audience, of the curve of human life: where you’ve come from, where you’re going. It doesn’t do this moralistically, but just, this is part of the information of the work, where you’ve come from, where you’re going."

Additional Biographical Information

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Amanda Ventura is an undergraduate at ASU. She is studying journalism and creative writing, interns with Hayden's Ferry Review, works at The State Press and the School of Earth & Space Exploration. In addition to fiction and autobiographies, she loves coffee, live music, and people watching.

The Piper Online Book Club Is Back

The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing’s Online Book Club has changed formats – and direction – but the emphasis will still be on good reading and lively discussion. Beginning with September’s book – Velocities by Stephen Dobyns – the club will switch from an e-mail based list to a blog format.

The moderator will post initial discussion questions, and then ask for response. Because the list will be moderated there will be no advertising or spam. Discussion will take place during a designated period of time, with the first to occur at the end of September.

Books will be available for purchase at the ASU Bookstore, with a 20 percent discount to Book Club members.

The books have been chosen for each month through March, and they will correspond with Piper Center’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and additional events, so Piper Online Book Club members will have the opportunity to meet the authors each month.

The books for the coming year are:

September – Velocities, by Stephen Dobyns, poetry. (Discussion dates: Sept. 21 -25.)

October – The Narrow Road to the Interior, by Kimiko Hahn, poetry. (Discussion dates: Oct. 5-9.)

November – The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century by Harold Schechter, nonfiction. (Discussion dates: Nov. 16-20.)

December – Winter Break, no discussion.

January – A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, by Reginald Dwayne Betts, nonfiction. Discussion dates TBA.

February (Session 1) – Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, by Francine Prose, nonfiction. Discussion dates TBA.

February (Session 2) – This Clumsy Living, by Bob Hicok, poetry. Discussion dates TBA.

March – The Dead Fish Museum, by Charles D’Ambrosio, fiction. Discussion dates TBA.