An ice storm has turned out the lights in Eastern Canada, so it seems a propitious moment for our group outing to see “The Ice Storm.” I like it, a recreation of suburban Connecticut, circa 1973. My favorite motifs are the waterbed, the reference to est, the minister’s awful hair-do, and the towel blocking the crack under the door to keep the aroma of marijuana from seeping out of one’s dorm room. After the screening, Rick Moody patiently fields questions. He says that no one in New Canaan will admit to having gone to a “key party” -- where the husbands put their car keys in a bowl and the wives go home with the men whose car keys they fish out -- but at least two or three such parties definitely took place.
It wasn’t difficult to decide the subject of the emergency lecture I’m scheduled to give on Saturday. Since I’ve just finished a book on the New York School of poets, I’ll probably read from the last chapter. The book is called “The Last Avant-Garde,” and I have the complete manuscript with me because my editor at Doubleday has given me until February 1st to make final changes. Meanwhile, my editor at Scribner -- Gillian Blake, whose birthday this is -- phones with (1) the news that the Book-of-the-Month Club has acquired “The Best of the Best American Poetry,” coming in April, and (2) the urgent need to settle the copy-editor’s queries. And here I’d almost succeeded in forgetting the world of production schedules and deadlines. It’s usually easy to do that here, because -- and now follows my entry for the bad metaphor contest -- a Bennington residency is a parenthesis the length of a Homeric simile that interrupts the catalogue of ships in book II of “The Iliad” of your life.
I have also come up with an entry for the pithy summary contest: “Salesman dies. Audience forced to pay attention.” -- David Lehman
It sounds like a wonderful time. Would you recommend this program to students of poetry who want to write but have been out of school for a while and too busy raising a family to pursue a career?
Posted by: Diane Petrosky | October 18, 2013 at 05:33 PM
you recommend this program to students of poetry who want to write but have been out of school for a while and too busy
Posted by: maidne | May 26, 2018 at 02:09 AM