Their Dogs Came With Them

Their Dogs Came With Them

Helena Maria Viramontes (Atria Press, April 2007)

Read my review of Helena Maria Viramontes’s latest novel at PopMatters.

What’s Your Idea of a Good Time

What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977–1985

Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006)

Mr. & Mrs. Reason & Desire

“Don’t you think a friend anyway is worth questioning intimately both to egg on friendship…and to find out whatever can be said, what can never be said at the table, or even for shyness of topic, in letters? So, yes, we make sense, if only to each other.”

—Bill Berkson, letter dated May 28, 1981

In 1977, poets Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer started writing to each other from opposite coasts. Though this written conversation continues to this day, the bulk of the letters were generated during an eight-year period. What’s Your Idea of a Good Time collects the letters from 1977–1985, which include interview questions, anecdotes, poetry, and, ultimately, an intimate friendship. At times poetic, at times self-conscious, What’s Your Idea of a Good Time reveals two writers as they reveal themselves to one another.

Typical of the New York School with which they are associated, Mayer and Berkson employ a healthy dose of humor and experiment throughout. The questions volley between the absurd and the deeply personal, delving into their lives, philosophies, and poetic practices. Folded inside of colloquial and playful cover letters, the interview questions alternately probe and amuse: What is your secret inner life? How did you become a poet? Do you like Valentine’s Day? Do you know when you are being serious? What’s so great about Dante? Whaddya think Bill, are we nuts or something? How are your teeth? And the answers are equally eclectic: rants, poems, diversions.

Often long, introspective, and private, there’s a monologue quality that seems to be a product of the manually typed letter format they employ, which, unlike E-mail, doesn’t expect an instant response. Bill acknowledges the uniqueness of their process: “Is it the semi-privacy of interview as we’ve proposed that confuses us who rarely write with any thought to the private?” There indeed is a sense of privacy in the letters—that between two friends and that between a writer and the page. Which led me to wonder, could a collection like this be generated today, when communication is so immediate and accessible? Would it instead be splattered with emoticons, abbreviations, and shorthand? As poets, both are acutely conscious of process, and discuss it in their letters. Bill says: “I have so many reactions to this interview process….I want to find out if I agree if ‘narcissism’ (rather than transpersonification?) is what’s going on in the interview/interviewee mind. I don’t think listening to one’s own mind is narcissistic. But writing from the mind of a transpersonified interviewee does have a funny Shanghai’d mirror-quality of extrapersonal disclosure. Do we really care if it’s us saying these things?” (90). This method of exchange captures a level of candor that’s not in the same way possible in the writings they create for public consumption.

It is when they are least paying attention to process, however, that this candor becomes poetic. In a letter dated July 11, 1982, written from Lake Buel, Mayer reveals her frustrations with being a poet, with culture and politics, with writing. She says, “I think the odds against writing our works are easy, it’s the odds against knowing what to write that are so great. One can write and write and write (well maybe this is my problem) & still never feel a part of anything, that one is doing anything or even being read.” This letter addresses much of what is being explored in this book: the way these two are figuring out how to live as poets in the world. In the course of discussing their daily lives, readers learn about the weather in New York City (from Bernadette); the flora in Bolinas, California (from Bill); their children’s birthdays; their infidelities; dental visits—but also their hopes for their own work; and their reactions to the work being made around them. Written largely while Bernadette Mayer was the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, there’s also a good deal of gossip in the book. They ask each other to describe the characters of other poets they know, such as Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett, offering a rare insight into the poetry community of the time.

The relationship between reason and desire is at the heart of their exchange. The two discuss their struggles with maintaining a reasonable life (i.e., day job and families) while also fulfilling their desires to live as artists. Bernadette’s view: “I guess the real question is how can anyone ever achieve the right relation of reason & desire (which sounds hideous!) & at the same time get everything that’s desirable. Bullshit. It’s all manners & what Henry James calls ‘a heroism of the perfunctory’ meaning slipping your big desires through in a small way, a hallway or stairwell perhaps….Reason sits and desire moves over a little closer or gets up, goes to the nearest door & beckons.” One letter from Bill sparks a curiosity in Bernadette, who begins investigating the idea of utopia. This thread leads to the writing of Bernadette’s Utopia, self-published in 1984. Good Time is a friendship, and it’s a work-in-progress; readers are invited to enjoy the pleasure that the poets themselves take in it. Bernadette asks Bill, “Do you think writing poetry has to do with (a) desire (to please)?” And he responds, “The answer is yes, I love to please, and in writing I love to be pleased by (just) writing.” (Bill)

Ultimately, that pleasure is what drives these letters. The project was initially sparked by the question of the title, and more than anything, there is the sense that they are indeed having a good time with one another—there’s flirtation and fun underlying even the more serious threads. When I entered the title into a search engine, I found responses to its question along the lines of “hanging out with friends,” “getting drunk and then going cow tipping,” and “passing a pleasant evening with a woman whose butt looks great in jeans.” For Bernadette and Bill, however, the answer to this question has more to do with friendship and creativity—and the pleasure they get from writing. Bernadette’s response to the question sums it up: EVERYBODY SLEEPS IN ROYAL BLUE SATIN SHEETS LIKE CUCUMBERS IN A BOX OF SNOW.

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
Robert Pinsky (FSG, 1998)

This is a great introduction or refesher course for scansion and metrics in poetry. It’s definitely not the most in-depth exploration, but it does serve as a useful “brief guide,” as suggested in the title. Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the US, endows the book with an exuberant love of language that makes it quite enjoyable to read.

Sounds of Poetry introduces scansion terms and refers to many different types of poems to reinforce the metrics. Despite the abundance of free verse in contemporary poetry, I still think it’s essential to learn how to scan a poem. Being conscious of sound as device makes it easier to understand what’s at play, and how form interacts with content. Pinsky also makes this point, and demonstrates how iambic pentameter is often still present in free verse. He uses Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as an example, finding pentameter even in this most fiercly free-verse poem: “I saw the best minds of my generation/ Destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

His prose is geared more for the novice poetry reader, and at times I felt he overworded concepts to make them easier. Nevertheless, it’s a quick, enjoyable romp through poetic sounds–and how to understand them.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Lynne Truss

If you like diatribe, you’ll love this book. Comprised of 85 percent Truss’s frustration with common usage blunders, and 15 percent useful information, Eats, Shoots & Leaves works best when it’s talking about history of punctuation. Otherwise, it may grate on your nerves–it did on mine. Truss is a pretty hard-nosed prescriptivist. Her position is one of horror rather than wonder at the permutations language is taking as it evolves. Being in the wonder camp, I certainly think that there are some lamentable bastardizations, but also some exciting ones. And either way, this is the VERY thing that makes language an amazing system: constant adaptability.

Of course, I agree it’s important to understand the basic tools and learn to use them correctly. I am certainly happy that there’s a call to pay closer attention to punctuation. Punctuation is a wonderful tool to aid clarity and meaning in a sentence. Her point that one small comma can change meaning significantly is dead on.

However, British usage and American usage of punctuation are so different that American readers would be doing themselves a disservice by adhering to all of the rules set out in her book. For instance, Americans enclose most punctuation inside quotations; Brits let them float out in space: “in space”. vs “in space.” Americans also use serial commas (“Oxford commas” acc. to Truss), which in my mind are extremely useful and clarity-endowing. She almost concedes on this matter, but stubbornly holds British usage in higher esteem merely, in my opinion, because it’s British. I think that the caveat should have been made more clear that Americans and Brits use punctuation differently. She pokes fun and snubs American punctuation (without explaining its logic), while making her own punctuation mistakes throughout.

Why was this book such a bestseller? I think people respond well to cantankerous “sticklers” (Truss’s word) who assert their superior knowledge of a subject. Mostly, however, it feels like a vehicle for Truss to take her vengeance on all those misusers of the apostrophe on take-out menus and deli signs everywhere.

A great article on the book:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books1