Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves

Rules for Werewolves
by Kirk Lynn
(Melville House, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by contemporary writers discussing their influences continues with a contribution from Austin-based playwright Kirk Lynn, whose debut novel, Rules for Werewolves, relates the exploits of a group of teenage squatters entirely through dialogue. Critic Greil Marcus is already a fan of the book, stating: “You get caught up with these people. You take sides. And then Kirk Lynn confounds your expectations at every turn.”

Joe Brainard taught me everything I know. I Remember is the greatest American novel that isn’t one. Brainard writes hundreds of sentences over the years that begin, “I remember . . .” and then tells the truth about growing up queer in Oklahoma, becoming an avant-garde painter in New York, and everything in between. It is a litany that wakes you up in its repetition. I keep it on my desk. It’s better than the Internet for browsing.

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson is another novel that isn’t. It asks the reader to do a lot of the work along with it, which gives me a feeling of companionship. All of Anne Carson’s books are radical, but the narrative in this one was very personal and close to me, so I keep it near. How does love work? And when it stops working, what then?

David Markson is an assassin. He killed the American novel, that vampire that gets up again and again, thank god. But read Vanishing Point, or This is Not a Novel, and it’s hard to find a better companion book. Little histories of literature and art, complete in themselves, and totally different from one another. Read Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the book that seems to have taught the author how to write in his own voice. These are all novels told in the connection of ideas, one sentence urging the reader to think about its connection to the next. If there are composers who know how to use silence, David Markson is a writer who knows how to use his reader’s consciousness.

The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein
(Harcourt, Brace,
and Company, 1933)

Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the books that helped the future arrive. As with so much of the literature I adore, Gertrude Stein sees no reason to abandon humor in order to find intelligence. She sees no reason to abandon fact to write fiction. She sees no reason to let anyone else write Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. You can go as deep as your tolerance for strangeness and meditation will allow into Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre and always be rewarded, but you can’t go very deep into literature if you won’t dive into this autobiography.

Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman is the standard of avant-garde elegance. Fact: Unable to hear a lick, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing for the last year of his life. The novel takes the form of the notebooks the composer carried in which people wrote their questions and requests. The maestro spoke his answers, so his responses are not recorded in the novel. It’s a one-sided conversation between the world and a silent Beethoven, but the composer’s passion and outsize personality dominate the narrative and echo in your mind for a good while after you’ve finished the book.

Imago by Octavia E. Butler is all about transformation and becoming something you’re not, both inside and out. I think the book changed me. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but if you can get your hands on one or two real gems a year, it’s good for your full mental range—and Butler is one of the perfect mixologists, balancing deep thought and a ripping yarn.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson is a weird little wonder that fell into my hands when my middle school teacher, Mrs. Bathke, either assigned it or smuggled it into my life. A strange virus kills off everyone on earth older than twelve and the kids have to figure out how to feed and care for themselves, including how to defend themselves from other terrible twelve-year-olds. Dystopian fiction before it was all the rage. And the author never wrote another book and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead.

Carpenter's Gothic
by William Gaddis
(Viking, 1985)

Carpenter’s Gothic could also be subtitled, for me, “the William Gaddis book I could read.” Another novel in dialogue, this one digging into the underbelly of American capitalism and colonialism. I remember falling into a trance and reading quickly. I remember reading bits of it aloud with friends. I remember there’s only one sentence of description and it’s about the leaves outside.

Emily Dickinson, especially The Gorgeous Nothings, can be an angel who responds to doubt. She did her work her way and I’m not half feral enough to get as free as she was, but some corner of the idea that form is personal and the work is its own reward can protect you. And then the work itself is so revelatory and prophetic!

And if there is one book that inspired me after I was done with Rules and made me want to get back to the prose, it’s Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Told in short, aphoristic bursts that find some middle ground between David Markson and Anton Chekhov, this book broke my heart and made want to be a better dad and husband in addition to driving me wild with envy as a writer.

And Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write! Short, sharp, human, hilarious thinking about dialogue and umbrellas and penises. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction or essays, either, but like sci-fi if you get the right one or two a year your brain will thank you. Because these are one hundred essays all jammed into one little book, it can count for a couple years’ worth of essay reading.

James Thurber:
Writings and Drawings
(Library of America, 1996)

You can convince yourself that James Thurber is totally legit because he was all over the New Yorker. But you know who might have a problem with that is the ghost of James Thurber. He didn’t have a high opinion of people who had too high an opinion of themselves. But as far as a guide for the kind of writing that doesn’t know whether it’s funny or sad, you can do no better than Thurber. And there is an openness to his formal approach to story, he captures the odd sad moment in cartoons one minute and then stretches them out to a fable and then abandons the pictures and makes short story of the captions in a sequential story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and then sometimes takes that same conceit and dips it in real sorrow like “The Whip-Poor-Will.” A great guide if you’re looking to get lost in the American voice.

Kirk Lynn is one of six co-producing artistic directors of Austin’s Rude Mechanicals theater collective and also the head of the Playwriting and Directing Area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Recent works include Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2014, and the 2014 Lincoln Center commission Stop Hitting Yourself.

Previous “Influences” posts:
Jabari Asim • Deborah Baker • Kate Christensen • Jennifer Gilmore
Lauren Groff • Lev Grossman • Alan Heathcock • Jane Hirschfield
Sara Jaffe • Alexandra Kleeman • Amitava Kumar • Adam Levin
Annie Liontas • Dawn McGuire • Dinaw Mengestu • Jim Moore
Manuel Muñoz • Maggie Nelson • Viet Thanh Nguyen
Geoffrey O’Brien • Arthur Phillips • Carl Phillips • Karen Russell
Timothy Schaffert • Philip Schultz • Mark Statman • Emma Straub
J. Courtney Sullivan • Ellen Ullman • Adam Wilson

Christopher Benfey on Lincoln’s Gettysburg sonnet

Guest blog post by Christopher Benfey, author of American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South and editor of Stephen Crane: Complete Poems and Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings, both published by The Library of America.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at Deerfield Academy about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. The subject of the Civil War, during this 150th anniversary year, came up repeatedly, most pointedly in the contrast between Whitman’s open engagement with the war, both in the poems of Drum-Taps and in his nursing of wounded soldiers in Washington, and Dickinson’s less explicit response—in poems that seem, however cryptically, to register the distant fighting and dying. “War feels to me an oblique place,” she wrote her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was leading an African-American regiment in Florida. Inevitably, we talked about Whitman’s elegies for Lincoln: the stilted allegory “O Captain! My Captain!” (which reads as though protean Whitman was trying to squeeze himself into Dickinson’s tight meters) and the grand and mysterious masterpiece “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

One bright student raised his hand and asked, “Would you say that Lincoln was just a failed poet?” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that, I replied. In fact, I found myself saying instead that Lincoln was the third of the great American poets of the nineteenth century. Based on his three greatest speeches alone—his Gothic “House Divided” speech, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural—Lincoln, for the sheer pressure of his language and the surprising new uses he found for the rhythms and buried eloquence of our ordinary speech, stands above any American poet of his time other than Dickinson and Whitman.

Lincoln’s greatest poem is the Gettysburg Address. Scholars have teased out its echoes from Thucydides and noted its Biblical grandeur. But I think that beneath its artistry lie the formal skeleton and the verbal machinery of the sonnet. (I should note that there have been attempts to “translate” the address into the traditional 14-line structure of a sonnet.) For Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats, the sonnet provided a small field for exploring the shifting meanings of a few words. It generally had a simple, two-part structure, with a so-called “turn” signaling the seam. The two parts often fused an emotional subject with an analytic treatment, summed up in an epigram at the end.

At this point, someone will want to object that Lincoln’s sonnet is in prose. Well, so it is! But Emerson wrote “Woods: A Prose Sonnet,” in which he asked the woods to give him something new to say, “along with “the tune wherein to say it.” Lincoln finds a new tune for the sonnet in the sinewy prose of the Gettysburg Address. The specific words he “worries” include simple ones like “here,” used nine times, and most beautifully in the contrast between words and deeds: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.”

The more elaborate word of course is “dedicate,” used six times, which shifts from abstract (“dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”) to more literal (“to dedicate a portion of” the battlefield). After the great “turn” of the sonnet, which occurs with the reflection “But in a larger sense we can not dedicate…” Lincoln proclaims that “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here…” Then comes the closing, cinching epigram: “this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What poet could have said it better?

Also of interest:

• H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Lincoln as storyteller: “Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder,” a previous Story of the Week
• A recent LOA interview with Chrisopher Benfey about Stephen Crane: Complete Poems

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings (paperback)

Helen Vendler at 13: “I learned Dickinson’s poems in the bad old versions”

Jenny Attiyeh, whom New Yorkers might remember from her days as a reporter for cable news station NY1 and from her weekly programs on WNYC-TV, has launched a new series of online interviews focusing on “a specific piece of writing—be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus—that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them.” The series can be found at ThoughtCast, the Web site that hosts Attiyeh’s recent audio and video segments for various academic disciplines.

The first interview is with poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler, who discusses how she first became enthralled with the poetry of Emily Dickinson—and how the Dickinson that fascinated the young Vendler was a different poet than the one we know today.

Attiyeh:You discovered [Dickinson’s poems] when you were about thirteen and memorized some of the more famous poems, which, I believe, have lingered with you all these years.

Vendler: They have—but I learned them in the bad old versions. Her family censored her considerably, along with her editor. When they were putting out the poems for the first time in 1890, they didn’t want to scare people and so they emended them, rewrote them, regularized the rhythm, changed her dashes to conventional punctuation, and made her in every sense milder than she was.

Attiyeh: Nonetheless, thirteen is an interesting age to meet Dickinson, even if she was “controlled.”

Vendler: Well, yes—and I met her in anthologies, too, which left out the more macabre of her poems. She has a wonderful poem [“’Twas here my summer paused”], that I didn’t know at the time . . . where she talks about her life having in effect come to an end, when her summer goes away and she has to live as the bride of winter instead of as the bride of summer. And it ends up: “With winter to abide”—and she addresses winter directly—“Go manacle your icicle / Against your Tropic Bride.” Just rhyming manacle and icicle and imagining winter coming along and manacling his icicle to his Tropic Bride is a scary way to end a poem. . . . So it was certainly not the real Dickinson I came across, it was the denatured Dickinson. . . .

Vendler then reads and discusses a poem that is a particular favorite of hers, “I cannot live with You”; you can hear the full interview here. Attiyeh’s next interview will be with novelist and short story writer Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children), who will discuss Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.”

Previously on Reader’s Almanac

• “Focusing the Lens of the Age on Emily Dickinson” discussed Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Vendler’s new book on Dickinson.
• Read about the first time Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited Emily Dickinson (“my partially cracked poetess at Amherst”).

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (includes 172 poems by Emily Dickinson)

Celebrate the first day of spring with a favorite poem

“A little madness in the Spring,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Is wholesome even for the King.” Decades later, in “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost echoed the sentiment, “Spring is the mischief in me.” What better mischief to kick off the change in seasons than to share a favorite poem about spring?

“May-Day,” a thirty-five page paean to spring, opens Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of poems. His close observations of nature lead to intimations of an underlying, transcendent, transformative power, as this excerpt demonstrates:

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect; . . .
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near. . .
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

Writing around the same time, Emily Dickinson’s experience of spring is more ethereal and foreboding, as these first four lines of her twenty-line meditation show:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

In the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman delights in something as simple as discovering “The First Dandelion”:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
     calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

For Robert Frost, a sense of the fleeting nature of discoveries like Whitman’s prompts “A Prayer in Spring,” which begins:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

The Poetry Foundation features links to a number of other splendid poems about spring. Won’t you share your favorite?

Related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations; Walt Whitman: Poems and Prose; American Religious Poems (includes “A Prayer in Spring”)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson visits Emily Dickinson, “my partially cracked poetess at Amherst,” for the first time

Brenda Wineapple wonders in White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson if Higginson’s extra-literary background as minister, ultra-abolitionist, feminist, and soldier made him the most incongruous correspondent for the hermit of Amherst—or the most inevitable.

Higginson (whose birthday is today) was a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly; his essays ranged across flowers, birds, women’s rights, physical fitness, and abolition. In the April 1862 issue his “Letter to a Young Contributor” described every editor’s ambition “to take the lead in bringing forth a new genius.”

Later that month Higginson received an unsigned six-line note that began “MR HIGGINSON, — Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Enclosed with the note were four poems: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” “The nearest Dream recedes unrealized,” “We play at Paste,” and “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose. ” Inside another smaller envelope was a card signed Emily Dickinson.

Higginson had never read poems like this before. He found them too strange to publish but he was eager to learn more about the author. He quickly responded with a few small criticisms and a host of questions—and began a correspondence that would last the next twenty-four years. During that time he received hundreds of poems (Dickinson otherwise shared her work only with her brother’s wife), yet he never published, nor suggested she publish, any during her lifetime. After her death he collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd to edit and publish the controversial (and best-selling) first collection of Dickinson’s poetry—controversial because of their extensive editing of her distinctive punctuation and spelling.

We are indebted to Higginson for his rare account of a personal interview with the reclusive poet. After eight years of corresponding, they finally met in her parlor on August 16, 1870, as he recounted in The Atlantic Monthly twenty-one years later:

After a little delay, I heard an extremely faint and pattering footstep like that of a child, in the hall, and in glided, almost noiselessly, a plain, shy little person, the face without a single good feature, but with eyes, as she herself said, “like the sherry the guest leaves in the glass,” and with smooth bands of reddish chestnut hair. She had a quaint and nun-like look, as if she might be a German canoness of some religious order, whose prescribed garb was white piqué, with a blue net worsted shawl. She came toward me with two day-lilies, which she put in a childlike way into my hand, saying softly, under her breath, “These are my introduction,” and adding, also, under her breath, in childlike fashion, “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what I say.”

But she quickly found her voice:

She went on talking constantly and saying, in the midst of narrative, things quaint and aphoristic. “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?” “Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it” . . . “How do most people live without any thoughts?” . . . Or this crowning extravaganza: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

His 1891 recollection omitted two memorable lines he wrote to his wife shortly after the meeting:

I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching me, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.

Also of interest:

• Read more about Emily Dickinson’s home at Emily Dickinson Museum
• Read more about Higginson’s political writings at The Thomas Wentworth Higginson Collection at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Read about Higginson’s experiences as colonel of the first black regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (includes 172 poems by Emily Dickinson); American Writers at Home (includes a chapter on Emily Dickinson’s Homestead)

Focusing the Lens of the Age on Emily Dickinson

“Dickinson the writer: how do we characterize her?” asks Helen Vendler in the introduction to her absorbing new book. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries.

She is epigrammatic, terse, abrupt, surprising, unsettling, flirtatious, savage, winsome, metaphysical, provocative, blasphemous, tragic, funny—and the list of adjectives could be extended, since we have almost 1,800 poems to draw on.

Dickinson (whose birthday is today) published just a handful of poems in her lifetime; her poetry has come to us, much as Dickinson foretold in “The Poets light but Lamps” through the “Lenses” of subsequent “Ages.” “Each Age a Lens/Disseminating their/Circumference.“ Vendler appreciates Dickinson’s long vision of her work:

Dickinson allows for the appeal of different poems to different Ages (the lens of one Age may fix more rarely here, more frequently there) and also for the difference between eras (as between convex and concave lenses), but the affirmation that every Age is a new Lens for old Light is a reassuring one: somewhere, at some time, the vital poem will find its audience. . . The Circumference widens as each era adds a new Lens, until finally no limit can be placed on the influence of poetic radiance.

Vendler discerns four ages since Dickinson’s death: the Age of Publication, the Age of Biography, the Age of Editing, and the current Age of Commentary. Focusing with dazzling acuity on 150 of Dickinson’s poems—from “first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath”—Vendler demonstrates why Seamus Heaney has called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”

And in another recent book, Maid as Muse, which the late Tillie Olsen found “absolutely original and electrifying,” Aife Murray brings us to a new appreciation of who we should thank for the survival of those 1,800 poems:

On her deathbed, Emily Dickinson extracted an oath from her maid Margaret Maher to burn the poems she stored in her maid’s trunk. This maid later tearfully appealed to the poet’s brother and sister-in-law about breaking this oath.

Of related interest:

• Listen to Christopher Lydon and Helen Vendler discuss twelve of Emily Dickinson’s poems
• Read Christopher Benfey’s review of Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries in The New York Review of Books
• Watch what Poets & Writers promises will be “probably the most disturbing Emily Dickinson video you’ll ever watch”

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (includes 172 poems by Emily Dickinson); American Writers at Home (includes a chapter on Emily Dickinson’s Homestead)

Emily Dickinson’s Recipe for Black Cake (Fruitcake)

This week has been Emily Dickinson week at The Library of America. Not only is today Emily Dickinson’s birthday, but the New York staff invited members of the LOA Fellows Program to our offices for a Christmas tea, where we served Emily Dickinson’s fruitcake.

Dickinson was quite a baker; apparently her father “would eat no bread except that baked by her.” Her fruitcake (or, black cake) recipe is included in American Food Writing; it was one of several “lawless cake” recipes passed down by her family. We can recommend it as a good fruitcake even for non-fruitcake fans.

Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake
2 pounds Flour—
2 Sugar—
2 Butter—
19 Eggs—
5 pounds Raisins—
1 ½ Currants
1 ½ Citron
½ pint Brandy
½ — Molasses—
2 Nutmegs—
5 teaspoons
Cloves—Mace—Cinnamon
2 teaspoons Soda—

Beat Butter and Sugar together—
Add Eggs without beating—and beat the mixture again—
Bake 2½ or three hours, in Cake pans, or 5 to 6 hours in Milk pan, if full—

Also of Interest:

• For a modern adaptation of Dickinson’s recipe, with fuller instructions, see this Washington Post recipe.

• The Emily Dickinson Museum hosts an annual baking contest. You can find other Dickinson recipes, including her recipe for gingerbread, in the contest rules (PDF).

Related LOA volume: American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

LOA staff members Stefanie Peters and  Karen Duda, enjoying Dickinson’s fruitcake.

Emily Dickinson: “Thanks for the Ethiopian Face”

In “Ardor and the Abyss” poet James Longenbach finds quite a different Emily Dickinson—“an extraordinarily powerful woman, an artist who was intimidated by nothing–the opposite of a fear-driven recluse”—in Lyndall Gordon’s revelatory new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds

The young Dickinson was so volatile, so volcanic in her intuitions that she could clear a room. Mental and emotional acuity of that level is frightening because people have no way of explaining its source. It requires no nurturing. It expands not only without the intervention of other people but without the effort of the person who possesses it—or is possessed by it. It simply happens. Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals; American Writers at Home