A Moveable Famine (3 page)

Ridge said that Bly, an Iowa MFA himself, had come to his first workshop carrying a bag of snakes and combing his hair with a fork. The reading was to take place in the basement of the Unitarian church and I was curious, as the student poets in The Deadwood both praised and damned Bly.

The Thompson twins invited me to their party for graduate students and Mandy made me promise I’d come. Mild and childlike, she wore homemade clothes and brought baskets of pickles and buttered cornbread to our seminar in transcendentalism. The party was the same night as Bly’s reading, but I accepted Mandy’s invitation out of loneliness.

After several rounds of charades, we played “Killer,” a game in which the anonymous killer’s job is to wink covertly, sending the others to their deaths. I was murdered early by George, a handsome older fellow in a sweater-vest who had been writing his dissertation on Blake’s theosophy for five years, and which he called “unmined territory.” Relieved to be dead, I went to a corner of the room and sat at Mandy’s desk where I saw her résumé. Under “Previous Employment,” she listed:

When I realized I could have been hearing Bly read his translations of Neruda, Lorca and Tranströmer, which I had admired in his magazine, I asked myself how serious I was about poetry. Mandy fell victim to a wink and joined me. I hinted that these positions might not be suitable for an academic vita, and she was impressed with my worldliness. We faced the living room where the killer was still squinting discreetly, cross-legged on the floor. Mandy moved her hand to mine and invited me to go on a Saturday morning jaunt to collect fallen leaves to staple to her Emily Dickinson paper. I was afraid to discourage her, especially after having criticized her résumé.

When “Killer” ended, the room got into an argument about whether Shakespeare was an age or a man. Mandy hugged me at the door, saying she would call about our foray under the oaks and maples. After that night I decided to apply to the MFA program, and planned my days around meeting Ridge at The Deadwood.
Rolling Stone
paid ten dollars for the tiny poems in its back pages, and we wrote dozens of them over beer and bourbon. I received a ten-dollar check for “In Van Gogh’s Room.” It was on the basis of that poem, Ridge said, that I was admitted to the writers’ workshop, and in particular for one alcohol-driven line, “Crisp flowers show their teeth.”

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

POI-EMS—THE GREAT CRAFTSMAN—BARKHAUSEN—WHO’S HARVEY?—FIRST POETRY WORKSHOP—LOUDMOUTH—YELLOW SUBMARINE—MY FAULT

W
e were hell-bent to become poets, but we were students. Those who taught us were hell-bent to become poets, but they were teachers. We were all hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way.

The writers’ workshop consisted of a hall of six faculty offices, a bulletin board, and a tiny lounge with a couch, encouraging the hundred and twenty students to go elsewhere, and that elsewhere was usually a bar. The director, novelist John Leggett, came from the New York publishing world. Educated at Andover and Yale, his sharp gray suit matched his silver hair and silver tie tack in the shape of a martini glass. A former navy lieutenant, he marched crisply past the scruffy students in bell-bottoms, some of whom walked barefoot, looking them over, and then disappearing.

On my first day, I read the board’s flyers soliciting submissions to little magazines, applications for fellowships, and ads selling books, clothing and furniture and met another new student, David Pryor. Small, bearded and nervous, he kept licking his lips, hoping to catch a glimpse of our teachers. Mitchell Lawson, the elder statesman of the poetry faculty, darted past. His bowl-shaped haircut and the bangs across his forehead made him look like an actor in a movie about the Holy Roman Empire. I had been introduced to him at The Deadwood when I was in the MA program. He said, “Oh yes, I’ve read some of your poems.” He was referring to my application manuscript, and he pronounced “poems” as “poi-ems.” He had snapped at the waitress because the wet table stained the suede elbow patch on his corduroy jacket.

When Pryor saw Lawson, he did a double take, and said that before he left his hometown of Syracuse, he had decided to look him up, as Lawson lived there as well, and also was heading to Iowa. He found his address in the phone book and, when he arrived, a man was watering his lawn. Pryor asked for Mitchell Lawson. The man told him that Lawson had packed everything and moved to Florida. “And now,” Pryor said, “I see it was him!”

A few moments later, Lawson walked by again, and Pryor confronted him. Lawson’s face reddened, and he denied it, returning to his office and slamming the door. Pryor swore his story was true. Then Lawson reappeared and said, “If I was rude, I’m sorry!”

Other new students joined us and I learned that the undergraduate mentors of my classmates were also workshop graduates. Archibald Silver came from Montana’s Richard Hugo. David St. John was out of Fresno by Philip Levine. I did have one thing in common with them—each of us had edited our undergraduate magazine and I was consoled that their journals,
Montage
and
Collage,
carried names as silly as mine,
New Frontiers.

Ridge and McPeak came down the hall and introduced themselves to the others. Pryor pointed to a poster, advertising an upcoming reading by Charles Pless, who had visited his college. Another said that he had Pless’s new book, and a third said that the dedication of Lawson’s new poem,
to CP,
was to Pless. I had the same displaced feeling as when I moved as a child from Bayside to a block in Elmhurst with the forbidding name of Judge Street. The day we arrived, my mother handed me a bag of cowboys and Indians while she and my father unpacked. Kids sprawled at the roots of an oak tree, and from their prone positions, I could tell they were setting up and flicking down their men. I opened my paper bag and they scorned my braves and cowpokes, saying it was soldier season. Did I have any infantrymen? How about tanks? A cannon?

Pryor asked where I had gone to school. The name Fairfield was met with silence. Ridge interrupted. “Who cares where we came from?” he said. “Where are we
going
?”

McPeak straightened himself at Ridge’s wisdom, put his arm around me, and said, “The Deadwood.”

Workshop orientation included a party for new MFA poetry students at The Mill, where we hoped to mingle with Lawson and meet Harvey Clay, the other permanent member of the poetry faculty. I had seen Harvey only once, wearing a turtleneck, flipping a quarter into the air and performing magic tricks with a kerchief in front of the bulletin board. He wore a goatee and was as garrulous as Lawson was removed, as stocky as Lawson was thin. Lawson had been Harvey’s teacher and had published two slender books of poems in rhyme and meter, a lean output that added to his stature as a perfectionist. Students revered him as a “great craftsman” who dissected their work with his razor intelligence. A telling difference between the two men was how students referred to them. Everyone called Harvey by his first name. Lawson was Lawson. No one called him Mitchell, and few called him Mitch.

The day of the party, cold currents layered the afternoon breeze, and by evening it was frigid. My old Comet took a long time warming up, and I paged through the book of Shakespeare quotations Ridge left in the glove compartment for me to read while waiting. I drove the icy streets and parked across from The Mill. Lawson walked in, hands in both pockets, clearly a duty.

Pryor leaned against the bar and waved. His five-foot frame was diminished further by his taller wife, Wendy, a pretty, freckled redhead. A rock band played, the singer exhorting people to dance. Pryor said they had just arrived, but it was enough time for him to have torn several cocktail napkins into heaps of confetti. The band’s name, The Sad Tantamounts, was scrawled in magic marker on a pizza box. I studied the bass player—a brown leather vest over a bright white T-shirt, a dark head of hair. It looked like Artie Barkhausen from the master’s program. I had met him at the Thompson party and remembered wondering if he was joking for calling Pound’s great work “The Santos.”

“I know that guy playing bass,” I said to Wendy.

“Is he a poet too?”

The “too” surprised me. It was a title I didn’t give myself, but in Pryor’s household he was known as a poet.

“I’m not sure,” I said. The bass player’s head hung down, hair in front of his eyes, his whole body vibrating like one of the thick strings.

Lawson held a glass of Scotch and went from student to student, introducing himself, but the students were more interested in playing darts with Harvey, who was throwing with great accuracy from behind his back and in other contorted positions. I was surprised to see Ridge enter this party for newcomers. He went straight for the prettiest girl in the room.

Lawson retreated to the bar, detached and wan. A drunk, sweet-faced student wearing a skimpy top grabbed his arm and tried to get him to dance. He pulled away, but she persisted. Two of her girlfriends tried to distract her, but she kept leaping onto Lawson’s back, palms on his shoulders. He turned and smiled, patting the next stool. Soon they pulled dollar bills lengthwise, playing liar’s poker.

Pryor’s wife danced and danced. I stood next to him at the bar as he tore napkins and matchbooks. He said his latest project was a sonnet sequence about lightning.

“Ever hear of ball lightning?” he asked.

“Lucille
Ball
lightning?” It was Barkhausen. The band was taking a break.

“Who’s this asshole?” Pryor asked me as Barkhausen laughed.

I put out my hand. “Artie,” I said.

“I’m starting the workshop,” he said. “Like the name of the band? I just invented it.”

A faculty member with shoulder-length hair and a long mustache climbed on stage and banged the drums like a windup monkey. Lawson watched and shook his head sadly. The bartender poured him another Dewar’s, and something for the girl whose eyes seemed to melt like snowflakes.

“I didn’t know you wrote poems,” I said.

“I didn’t know you wrote poems either,” he said. “I couldn’t take the dissertation idea, so I threw in the talc and joined the workshop.”

I wondered if I’d misheard Barkhausen amid the clanging cymbals. He said he was filling in for the bass player who was late. He jumped on stage, complimenting the flailing, long-haired drummer who Pryor told me was Dan Cook, the novelist. I said I thought this was a party for the poets.

“It is,” he said, “but I hear he comes to everything just for the girls even though he’s married. A real gash hound.”

Wendy talked with a student who told her he had edited his college literary magazine,
Quill.
She grabbed the poet/editor and kissed him sloppily. Surprised and embarrassed, he put her at arm’s length, but she just smiled and whispered, “Listen, Bub, I’m not a happily married woman.” He moved away and sifted through the crowd. As Wendy stared after him, Pryor reached over, expressionless, and splashed a bit of beer down the back of her party dress. She didn’t move.

“It’s a natural phenomenon,” Pryor continued. “I saw it in England.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Ball lightning!”

Wendy screamed, her drunkenness had anesthetized her for a few seconds, but then she felt the cold liquid and spun around bewildered, hoping to catch the culprit.

“I’ve got twelve sonnets so far,” Pryor continued. “Hey, babe,” he called to Wendy. He ordered coffee and pushed a stool under her. She gazed dumbly into the crowd.

“Something spilled down my back,” she said.

“It’s your imagination,” Pryor said. “Drink this.” He handed her the cup.

“Am I wet?” she said, turning and showing me the stain.

“A little,” I said, “but not too bad.”

“It feels bad,” she said.

I patted her freckled skin with a napkin, and she looked at me sideways, saying, “At least I didn’t fall into the pool!”

“There is no pool, you airhead,” Pryor said, building the wet napkins into a pyramid.

“I meant like last time,” Wendy said. “Back home, at the Aqua Cave.” She turned to me again. “Someone pushed me, and it was the deep end!” She began to cry, and Pryor put his arm around her. I excused myself when the bass player arrived and Barkhausen joined us.

“Let’s see Lawson!” he said, clapping his hands.

We stood behind Lawson and the drunk girl as they continued their game. Lawson folded dollar after dollar into the breast pocket of his shirt. Barkhausen reached between them, grabbed a bill from the girl and slapped it to the bar.

“She’s drunk!” he yelled into Lawson’s face.

“He took all my money,” the girl said, pouting.

Lawson said, “It’s not serious.”

Barkhausen shook out a Marlboro and lit it. “How much did you lose?” He spoke with the cigarette between his lips.

“I don’t know,” she said sadly. “But a lot of money has changed hands!” She sat upright, listed to one side, and Lawson pulled eight or so bills from his pocket and tossed them onto the bar.