brown literary arts

Podcast • February 17, 2011

Jaimy Gordon’s Racetrack Revelation in Lord of Misrule

Jaimy Gordon impels us to find the other great small-press writers we’ve never heard of. She is this winter’s longshot winner of the National Book Award, for her gorgeous racetrack novel Lord of Misrule. The ...

Jaimy Gordon impels us to find the other great small-press writers we’ve never heard of. She is this winter’s longshot winner of the National Book Award, for her gorgeous racetrack novel Lord of Misrule. The 40-to-1 payoff is for readers who, but for the big prize, might never hear of non-commercial fiction or savor it’s very distinctive pleasures.

Lord of Misrule was reviewed in the Daily Racing Form before it was noticed by the New York Times. It may never get noted in the Times Sunday Book Review. But anyone who opens it will recognize instantly the real old American thing: horses, jockeys, trainers and touts with Damon Runyon names like Medicine Ed and Suitcase and Two-Tie, loners and outcasts on their own crummy racetrackers’ planet in far West Virginia. Just as quickly we meet characters, both equine and human, whose lives, language and trials feel entirely new.

I wanted to write a social novel of a kind, I wanted to represent, in one way or another, all the orders of humanity of this world. I think my previous books were usually dominated by one reckless human being, usually a young woman, whose fortunes would horrify and interest the reader.

In the case of Lord of Misrule, I think I was getting to be of an age where I could identify as much with the family-less loan shark, Two-Tie, and Medicine Ed, who’s looking for a home at the age of 72, not sure that he’s made the right career choice in being a groom for 60-some years … I think that since, as a writer, I felt that my career had never broken big and I was getting into my sixties myself, [I wondered] had I made the right career choice here? I think that, like Medicine Ed, I didn’t feel competent to do anything else and I couldn’t have pictured myself anywhere else than on my racetrack, which is the world of American fiction, but I couldn’t see exactly where I was heading.

I think that the charm of the book, if it has any, is that the writer is fully as much inhabiting Medicine Ed and Two-Tie as the young woman. I used to be the young woman in my books, but now I am just as much the old guys, looking into a kind of bitter and insecure unknown.

Jaimy Gordon with Chris Lydon at the Boston Athanaeum, 2. 11. 2011.

One of the great epiphanies of her life, Jaimy Gordon remarks, came at 17, working illegally in a bar on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was the first time she was surrounded by people who “didn’t speak proper English,” and she was amazed at the poetry in their conversation.

I venture that Jaimy Gordon’s work is marked by a kind of comic maximalism in the manner of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, every type of literary effect exploding on every page. Indeed, she’s telling me, she claimed maximalism as her métier when she studied writing at Brown — with John Hawkes and Keith Waldrop, among others — and minimalism was all the literary rage. She points to John Updike’s novel The Centaur, which also won a National Book Award, as her inspiration for transferring the kind of far-fetched, daring metaphors common in poetry into plot-driven prose.

Jaimy Gordon assures us that despite the echoing laments for the death of literature, we are in a sort of “Golden Age of American letters,” fueled by more than 350 college-level creating writing programs. In this conversation she gives us some of her favorite practitioners, well-known and unsung: Katherine Davis for Hell, Labrador, The Girl who Trod on a Loaf; Kellie Wells for Skin, Compression Scars; Joanna Scott, Russell Banks, Peter Carey and Paul Harding for his out-of-nowhere small-press Pulitzer Prize Tinkers. We are blessed.

Podcast • October 7, 2009

Whose Words These Are (9): Sarah Kay

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating ...

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?

Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s poem “Hands,” rocketed her to 18-year-old fame when it, and she, were featured on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam. Sarah is a senior at Brown now, a teacher of spoken-work poetry at Hope High School in Providence, and a coach of students of all ages. She founded Project V.O.I.C.E. to encourage teenagers toward creative self-expression. She tell us how her own voice is the product of a Japanese American mother, a Brooklynese photographer father, of New York City and the influence of “page poets” ranging from William Carlos Williams and Adrienne Rich to Rumi.

Q: What were the poems that made you want to write poetry, and told you you could, or had to?

A: In the page world: William Carlos Williams, Rumi, Wislawa Szymborska, Adrienne Rich, Billy Collins — all over the map, really.

In the spoken world: Taylor Mali, Buddy Wakefield, Rives, Anis Mojgani, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t, yet?

A: A thicker skin. I don’t know if that counts as a talent. I would love to be athletic, which I am utterly not.

Q: Who’s your favorite character of all time in fiction?

A: Does Winnie the Pooh count? My favorite book, my favorite piece of fiction is 100 Years of Solitude. That’s the only book that I have memorized the first line of the book:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums?

A: My father is a photographer; he and I share a love of finding the moment and trying to capture it. He does it visually, I do it with words.

I love Renee Magritte. I think that his work is very playful and often dark, but also he’s very concrete. He uses things that I can see and recognize and feel, and that’s something I try to do.

There’s a filmmaker named Wong Kar-wai, from Hong Kong, who made the film In the Mood for Love, and 2046.

Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet?

A: There’s a saying which is “write what you know” and I was taught “don’t write what you know, write what you don’t know and are trying to figure out.” For that reason, it comes from a very personal place.

Q: What quality do you look for and love in a poem?

A: I love a good ending — if you have a killer last line, that’s really something.

Q: What’s your motto?

A: “Say Thank You.”

Hear more of Sarah Kay’s poetry here.