Grant Faulkner

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Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop: A Love Affair of Letters

November 6, 2008 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment


I used to love to write letters.

I think letters were my genre. I wrote better letters than I wrote short stories or poems or novels or scripts or journal entries.

I thought of my friendships through letters. I dashed to the mailbox each day with anticipation. I wrote letters that passed through days and weeks–full of confessions, observations, pretensions, aspirations.

But I no longer write letters. I’d actually feel a bit foolish writing a letter these days, especially the sort of literary letter I used to write. I suppose I’d feel foolish because all of my friends are on email (or Facebook or Twitter!), and they wouldn’t respond to my letter with a letter. They might not respond at all, in fact–unless I emailed them.

I’ve wondered for a while whether the advent of email would spell the demise of collections of letters between authors or lovers or great leaders–and all of the interesting insights they provide.

After reading the New York Times review of Words in Air, the letters that Robert Lowell and Elizabeth, I think the answer is yes. Email just doesn’t quite encourage the kind of luxurious indulgence in self and relation to another like a letter does. There’s something about the process of writing a letter, sending it, and waiting for a response–the time and geography of it all–that creates a dramatic tension. And then there is the pen on the paper, the personality of a letter, the pauses between thoughts and sentences, the need to express more than just a passing thought.

Words in Air presents 30 years of correspondence conducted across continents and oceans as their poetry drove them together and their lives kept them apart. What a lovely premise for a friendship of letters–except that their letters also formed a peculiar love affair, a lively collaboration, a critical treatise, a comfort.

“I think I must write entirely for you,” Lowell wrote to her. (Somehow, I think the phrase, “I think I must email entirely for you,” seems less poingnant)

Eight years before he died, he wrote, “I seem to spend my life missing you!”

William Logan writes, “Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop’s dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. “

Sure, it could have all happened online. Except that it wouldn’t have, or it would have all transpired differently–with the cursory comments, the tiny jousts and flirts and ha ha’s that define email, perhaps even the occasional emoticon, links, tired jokes and YouTube clips.

I’m sure there will be fascinating collections of email, especially since email is so easily archived. Still, something will be different.

Filed Under: Blog, literary commentary, Poetry

Emily Dickinson: Truth at a Slant

August 20, 2008 by Grant Faulkner 1 Comment


“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” This was Emily Dickinson’s credo.

Walker Evans applied a similar aesthetic approach to photography—a preference to take photos when the sun’s light was slanting, toward evening or in the early morning.

The approach begs the question of whether life should be represented in full illumination. What does it mean to represent something or someone in full light?

Perhaps truth—not to mention mystery and wonder—can only be found in the “slants,” the corners, the shadows.

I’m not sure if an artist needs to know much more than this, but of course these simple words require such keen interpretation and creative judgment.

What is truth at a slant, after all? It goes beyond sunrise and sunset.

Filed Under: Blog, Poetry, writing tips

T.S. Eliot and Portishead: Never Doubt That T.S. Eliot Is Cool

July 14, 2008 by Grant Faulkner 1 Comment

Here’s T.S. Eliot reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with an accompaniment by Portishead.

An unlikely pairing?

Listen to it and you’ll think otherwise. This kind of juxtaposition accentuates how contemporary and edgy and mysterious a poem like Prufrock is. In fact, Portishead (this must be a late ’90s or early 2000 song?) sounds more dated than Eliot. It’s always a revelation how great art can be so startling and fresh after so many years

Filed Under: Blog, Poetry

Dean Young: Skid

May 14, 2008 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment


Dean Young is an easy poet for me to like. His congenital, sometimes twisted, joie de vivre leaps off the page. He’s a prankster, a Dadaist, a writer whose words and images juke, jab, dash, pirouette, and jump—just when you think you know where one of his poems is going, it changes course like a dare.

He’s one of the few writers who can surprise with each phrase, if not each word, tossing coarseness into a highbrow thought, switching from the sanguine to the lugubrious in a snap of the fingers. He rarely settles for a single note in his poems, in fact, but allows a playful, discordant, dreamy contention of words to define his universe.

You could read Young’s poems as a series of ornery winks, but he’s really trying to find a way to balance himself in this precarious universe, these precarious systems of meanings, whether he’s grasping on to Lorca or Love. His poems, which can be erudite, don’t lend themselves to academic essays—they’re not supposed to be illuminating as much as they are meant to be felt (and yet they are illuminating).

A friend of mine says that Young needs to edit himself more, to pause a bit, not trust his instincts so much. That could be true, but I think of what is lost with such restraint rather than what is gained with his recklessness. I don’t think Young is questing after the perfect poem, after all. He doesn’t want to be anthologized, even if he was nominated for the Pulitzer a couple years back.

Within all of Young’s shim sham—within all of his posturing even—there is a fundamental sadness, a fundamental pondering that grounds everything, as he asks ye’ olde question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ As he puts it in “Sleep Cycle”:

But we can do no more than pass through
these rooms and their sudden chills
where once a plea was entered almost
unintentionally that seemed at last
to reveal ourselves to ourselves,
immaculate, bereft, deserving to be found.

His opening quote for Skid gives a macabre, yet humorous tone to all that follows: “The main thing is not to be dead.” True, but Young’s poetry makes me think there’s more. Young is a romantic who has no business trusting romanticism. He’s somehow a buoyant tragedian, a believer who’s trying to figure out why he believes. It’s the “trying to figure out” that seems much more important than the “not being dead” in the end.

As he says in “Whale Watch”:

Haiku should not be stored with sestinas
just as one should never randomly mix
the liquids and powders beneath the kitchen sink.
Sand is both the problem and the solution for the beach.
To impress his teacher, Pan-Shan lopped off
his own hand, but to the western mind, this seems rather extreme.
Neatly typed, on-time themes
strongly spelled are generally enough.
Some suggest concentrating on one thing
for a whole life but narrowing down
seems less alluring than opening up
except in the case of the blue pencil
with which to make lines on one side
of the triangle so it appears to speed through the firmament.
Still, someone should read everything
Galsworthy wrote. Everyone knows
it’s a race but no one’s sure of the finish line.

Filed Under: Blog, Poetry

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Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of 100 Word Story, writer, tap dancer, alchemist, contortionist, numbskull, preacher. Read More…

The Art of Brevity

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The Names of All Things

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