I have been found by Mr. Briggs Arthur of Barclay's Bank

This e-mail arrived today; it's pretty wonderful, save for Mr. Arthur's assertion of his skin color. I'm not sure how to read that number -- a billion? some unthinkable sum of millions? -- but it sounds good. I like the way the writer seems to have just given up on credibility, as if he's tried more modest proposals and now he might as well just pull out the stops. Anyone want to write and claim the treasure?





My Dear Partner,I am contacting for good.



I have 100.000.000.00 Million Pounds that I want to Transfer to your Bank Account.



Please Reply Immediately to enable me give you more Informations about this Transaction.



I am a white Man and also a British Citizen.



I will send to you a Copy of my International Passport Once I receive Reply Ok.



Please we will deal only through Email for security Reasons.

Email contacts : (barclays_bank62@yahoo.co.uk)



From Yours Partner



Mr.Briggs Arthur

Director Barclays Bank

London-England.

Nantucket, Maggie Conroy's tobacco barn, and Dean Young on the culture of creative writing

Paul and I got stuck on Nantucket (I know, the limerick possibilities immediately spring to mind) this week. Every boat off the island was cancelled due to the high seas and wild wind, but our friend Maggie Conroy graciously came to our rescue. I'd known Maggie a little in Iowa City, when I was teaching there; we used to go to great parties at her and Frank's house. We hadn't seen her for years, and she appeared as a rescuing angel, loaning us her Ford Explorer and welcoming Paul and Ned the pup and me into her amazing house. It was built, forty years ago or so, by Frank and a carpenter, constructed of cherry-wood beams from an old tobacco barn. They kept the barnlike feel -- a great room in the center, small rooms off to either side. We had a wonderful time; it was a privilege to be in the dreamy, inviting house with Maggie and our friend Joy and Maggie's dog Neville while the rain came down on the salt marsh out the big windows.

I was thinking about these friendships -- all of us brought together by times held in common in various institutions that are part of the culture of creative writing -- as I was reading Dean Young's THE ART OF RECKLESSNESS, one of the new volumes in Graywolf's series of short "handbooks" for writers. I put that term in quotes because of course there isn't any such thing, once you get past manuals or style. These little volumes, a various lot, look into aspects of craft, and their intent isn't so much to explain things as it is to complicate the conversation about craft, providing signposts for exploration.

Early in Dean's book there's a terrific manifesto/rant about graduate education in creative writing. Since MFA-bashing (and now PhD-bashing) is such a perennial activity, I want to post Dean's artful defense here.

"Let us put to rest all those huffy complaints about the proliferation of MFA programs, as if courses of study that offer support and allowance to people for the exploration of their inner lives, for the respected regard of their imaginations, their harmless madnesses and idiosyncratic musics and wild surmises, somehow lead us to a great homogeneity as well as a great dilution of the high principles of art. Some people try to convince you they love poetry by showing you how bad all the poetry they read (more likely don't read) is, just like those who love love so much they've come to the conclusion that nothing and no one deserve to be loved. Some people try to convince you poetry is so important you have no business trying to write it without severe indoctrination. But POETRY CAN'T BE HARMED BY PEOPLE TRYING TO WRITE IT! The billions of MFA programs and community creative writing workshops and summer conferences and readings, all of it is a great sign of health, that the imaginative life is thriving and important, and worthy of time and attention, worthy of conditions in which it is honored and encouraged to wildly grow. It's not a marketplace where the bad forces out the good. We are not a consumer group; we are a tribe. The MFA programs may be booming because our business is to boom. OUR BUSINESS IS BLOOMING. If there is a problem, it is in the professionalization of creative writing. J'accuse, AWP! When Tomaz Salamun was asked by one of my students what was the one thing he would like to tell a young poet, he said, Be artists, not careerists. I do realize that people have real economic concerns, and two or three years of graduate study are traditionally geared toward the establishment of a career. But realistically, all these young writers cannot be English professors, nor do many of them actually want to be. Our creative writing programs would do a better job offering students guidance in other possible employment options, suggesting courses, outside creative writing and literature that could lead them to decent work outside academe. But when I walk into a creative writing class of any kind, I am thrilled with the liberty that all of us in that room have managed to achieve through a faith in and dedication to art, and the profound sense of possibility that something one of us does can become a vibrant part of that art."

I especially love "the liberty that all of us in that room have managed to achieve through a faith in and dedication to art..." But I'd add -- and this surprises me a little -- that in the literature course I taught this spring, a seminar on Whitman and Dickinson, I had that same sense of liberty, of our freedom, dedication, courage and pleasure as readers.

And, in some way, our pleasure inside the dry barn house while the winds battered the island -- thirty miles out to sea! everyone likes to say -- felt a part of those same communities of writers and readers.

Three splendid announcements at once

Teachers have no right to pride, really, when it comes to their students' work. All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I'm working with to feel thoroughly SEEN -- that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they've made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

But even though the writer does the work, I can't help but feel this flush of pride when first books find their way into the world. This week brings the news that THREE of my former students have just had books taken, and I am feeling beside myself with delight. Lauren Berry won the National Poetry Series; Terrance Hayes chose her book for Viking Penguin. Glenn Shaheen won the Agnes Starret Lynch Prize and his book will be published by Pittsburgh. And Lacy Johnson, whose dissertation was a formally rambunctious assemblage of text, video, photos and audio recordings, has just had a print version of the work accepted by Iowa. Hot damn. I am, in whatever relation to these books I might claim (even if it is hardly any at all other than cheerleader) inordinately happy.

In a couple of hours I will be fifty-seven, which is a gigantic relief to me. Fifty-six has been a hard year in general, but it's acquired a particular dark charge because it's the age my mother was when she died, in 1976, of cirrhosis of the liver. At first I thought my aversion to the year was a a kind of magical thinking, but then I learned that if indeed it is I'm not alone with my folly; a number of friends have spoken of their own difficulty in passing through the age of a parent who'd died at her own hand, or perished to some addiction. Perhaps we just don't want to outlive our parents, so to speak -- can we succeed where they did not, is that permitted? Or perhaps it's the fear of a toxic legacy, an inescapable inheritance.

But now I am about to leave fifty-six, alive and breathing, reasonably intact. For the occasion I've been making gestures toward the future. One of them is above: Ned, with whom I am entirely in love, and to my mind quite reasonably so. With good luck we're going to be together now for a a long time to come. And this evening I went over to my neighbor Joanne's and dug up a young catalpa tree, which is going into my garden in the morning. I've always loved them: the big virile leaves, their pungent scent -- does "pungent" really convey anything at all? Think green tomato stems, tannic acid like black tea leaves steeped a little too long. And the word, catalpa, with its Whitmanic echo of Native American speech, something southern in those three vowels, inviting one to extend the a's... In the picture, Ned is resting his head in the hole I'd been digging around the slender trunk, which you can see on the right hand side of the image. After I finished, Joanne and I had some French rose' and listened to the screech owls announcing the twilight. We tried to think why just that moment -- are they waking, is it suddenly dark enough, or cool enough, for the world to begin?

So, a good fifteen years with Ned (knock on the wood of the table where I write), decades of catalpa after I'm gone. Tomorrow Paul's taking me out to celebrate -- presents, lunch, a nursery I like in Montauk? -- and that will be all about the present. But this evening's solitary goodbye to fifty-six has entirely to do with days to come.

Deep Lane

I took this picture last week, in the late afternoon, in Amagansett, down the road a couple of miles south of our house here. Deep Lane is the most beautiful name for a road I've ever heard, I think: the two monosyllables, the two long vowels, with the higher pitched vibration of the 'e' and the more soothing relaxation of the throat required to produce 'a.' And then there are the suggestions of the words themselves: the road is deep because it dips, just before the patch you see here, but it might also be deep in the country, or deep in memory or in one's regard, or it might carry one deep into -- what? And "lane," doesn't that speak for itself? A lane is modest, it doesn't go anywhere of note, it's unimportant in the larger scheme of things. "Lane" speaks of domesticity and familiarity, a kind of ease. "Lane" is to "road" as "cottage" is to "house."

Those are part of a flock of sixteen or so wild turkeys; the others are off to the left, down in a little clearing. I've never seen so many together at once.

The dark object in the lower right hand corner is the front left fender of my car: I stopped while the turkeys continued, in groups of three or four, joining the flock.

From world to word

I'm happy to report that my little handbook for writers, THE ART OF DESCRIPTION, has just come out from Graywolf, and here's the first review -- a starred notice in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY. I know it's immodest to pass along one's own reviews, but hey... this project has been a bit of a labor of love, and a while in the making, so I'm happy to see its first reviewer express pleasure in it, and happy to pass these words along:



The Art of Description: World into Word
Mark Doty, Graywolf, $12 (152p) ISBN 978-1-55597-563-0

"To use words at all is to use them figuratively," says Doty in his writing guide, part of Graywolf's "The Art of…" series. As both a National Book Award-winning poet (Fire to Fire) and accomplished memoirist (Dog Years), Doty is not only qualified but uniquely articulate on the subject. How does a poet create color? Landscape? Context? Saying "blue" or "field" means different things to different people, and also falls short of encompassing any kind of atmosphere or significance. "Poetry's project is to use every aspect of language to its maximum effectiveness, finding within it nuances and powers we otherwise could not hear," he says, and in order to capture the "texture of experience," the poet must be aware of what is actually in front of him or her, both physically and metaphorically. Because the simple act of looking involves interpretation, descriptions are, in a sense, "self portraits"--no two people see the same way, so the poet inevitably puts him or herself into each and every image. For Doty, the art of description is mostly "a balance between terms, saying what you SEE and saying what YOU see." (Aug.)

In the old cemetery, Amherst

"And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."