Verbatim

"I think if a book doesn’t scare me in some way, if there isn’t something about it that feels beyond my abilities, I shouldn’t write it. I want the book to push me out of my comfort zone. Otherwise I’m just going to be repeating myself."
Michael Crummey discusses the challenge of writing his new novel Sweetland.

Sunday Poem

SWAN DIVE 

I was the more deceived.
-Ophelia, Hamlet, III.i

It’s hard to stay angry on a bed of water.
Harder yet to remain above the tide— 

hence the anchor, hence the dive.
For those of us who practice our Ophelia,

we creatures of conscience, let it be known
that I have keened the lake in colder 

seasons, seen the loves returned by acts
of ice. Olive bottles, agate necklaces

bought in beachfront shops for cheap.
I shall th' effect of this good lesson keep.

I rearrange my lost and found. That man
who was discovered rooting the bottom

three decades after his death: in his boat,
a fish still writhed the line. Hear me out. 

Even the swans’ necks don’t shape a heart
when they hunt beneath the dark.

From Swan Dive (Frog Hollow, 2015) by Michael Prior 

Total Goddamn Clusterfuck

Last February, Pasha Malla travelled to Montreal to attend the Canada Council for the Arts' National Forum on the Literary Arts. He expected that "having so many people in one room who share a passion for literature would make for some good conversations." In a cutting essay, he counts the ways he was disappointed.

What happened was closer to a 250-person choir in simultaneous competition to be the lone soloist. The roughly 400 takeaway points included: the calamitous loss of our independent bookstores; “the digital revolution;” the potential for libraries to operate as community hubs; the dearth of outlets for literary criticism; the lack of respect for the timeless art of spoken word poetry; the lousy food; and then there was some guy from Ottawa who told heartwarming, possibly rehearsed stories in both official languages about his unique relationship with books, and in private confided to me he’d not been able to tolerate living in Toronto’s east end “what with all the Indians.” In a similar vein, when I commented in my working group at the overwhelming whiteness of the delegation, and wondered if it was a fair representation of the country at large, I was told that I “need to get out of Toronto more.” So. Some diversity of thinking. As you might imagine, the result at times was nothing short of a total goddamn clusterfuck

(illustration by Gary Taxali)

Cultural Heroes

Daniel Menaker makes the case for literary gatekeepers:

Right now, the principal intermediaries between writers and readers continue to be publishing companies, large and small. They make their choices, pay more or less for them (usually less), more or less support them (usually less), hope that they have good bets and good luck in the casino that is publishing. In my judgment, there are between 20 and 30 editors and publishers in New York who—along with experienced and discriminating publicists, marketers, and sales reps—have over the decades regularly and successfully combined art and commerce and, in the process, have supported and promulgated art. They are in fact the main curators of our life of letters. They have somehow survived the grinding—tectonic—friction between creativity and business and made a go of both. They are cultural heroes, actually.

As an analysand and an armchair analyst, I can’t help suspecting that whether they consciously know it or not, people like Jeff Bezos and the New Republic’s Chris Hughes want some of that. Well, they can’t have it. Like patrons of old and some of new, they can stand back and support it, sponsor it, admire it. They can give it parties at retreats in New Mexico. They can even sort of own it. But they can’t have it. Because they need to make a lot of money. And because they don’t have the background, wide experience, native zeal, eye for talent, editorial skill, intuition, and intermittent disregard for probable profit necessary to perform the role of literary concierge. (More darkly and Freudianly still, since they can’t have it, maybe they want to kill it.)

Page-Turning Prayer

Andrew Brobyn unpacks one of the anxieties behind Jim Johnstone's "rationally painful" book:

As I close Dog Ear, the purpose of Johnstone’s page-turning prayer becomes clear; this is the perpetual, ritualistic practice of a writer conquering by writing that feeling that most afflicts writers—fear. Fear of being forgotten with death; fear of being not-gotten in life; fear of not fitting in with the rest; and fear not doing your best with the time allotted to you, regardless of what convention expects.

Writer, Interrupted

The final title in Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous trilogy of travel books was published posthumously in 2014. Jason Guriel ponders the reasons for Leigh Fermor's inability to finish the manuscript.

The Broken Road, however, is far from the fully realized book Leigh Fermor’s fans were hoping for. It covers the last leg of his journey, from Bulgaria to Constantinople, but as editors Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper explain, the new book was composed before its predecessors, in the early 1960s, when a magazine invited 5,000 words from Leigh Fermor on “The Pleasures of Walking.” Leigh Fermor, then in his forties, finally began to set down the European journey of his youth, and came to focus on the final stretch. But in the mid-1960s, he abandoned the manuscript. When he resolved to return to the subject of his European travels in the 1970s, he started over, repositioning his narrator in London, the day of departure. The rest we know: Leigh Fermor’s renewed effort produced the two best works of travel writing of the twentieth century.

But for the next two decades, he was unable to make headway on a book that would bring the trilogy to an end. The editors describe a “long ice age”: the “loyal and long-suffering” publisher was lost in 1993, the wife, ten years later. Leigh Fermor consulted a psychiatrist, but his energy had been flagging for some time. “The whole subject was beginning to feel stale, barren, written out, and he feared he no longer had the strength to bring it back to life,” is how Cooper puts it, darkly, in her recent biography of Leigh Fermor.

10 Most Popular Sunday Poems from 2014

1. "Long Winter Farm," Jeramy Dodds
2. "Slack Action," Jeffery Donaldson
3. "Cruelty," Sara Peters
4. "Depiction of a Man and a Woman on The Pioneer 10 Space Probe Plaque," Donna Kane
5. "Suffer The Little Ones," Ross Leckie
6. "Day for Evasion," Suzannah Showler
7. "Local Union 64," Tim Bowling
8. "10 Sections from Ringing Here & There," Brian Bartlett
9. "Carp," Dani Couture
10. "Judgment Day," Michael Lista

(Illustration by Jacqui Lee)