[Katy Evans-Bush]

Ahhhhhh, now, Wallace STEVENS - but was he talking about his day job, and not poetry (which I believe Tom Jardine to have been talking about)?

Also, bear in mind that this is a man who, arriving off the train from Hartford to Philadelphia to attend a meeting with some insurance colleagues, declined the cab offered, walked to their offices, and when he arrived was carrying a large bag of doughnuts for the assembled company.

And indeed, consider also:

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelities of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

(Wallace Stevens)

[Mark Granier]

If you want to "publish novels and get rich" you have to be crass, like Stephen King or any other person whose books have gold lettering on the front.

To be fair to old SK, I don't believe he's in it for the money, though his is a lucky and lucrative obsession. He doesn't very often (if ever) aspire to 'literature' but he's actually a pretty good yarn-spinner if he leaves out all the padding, and he has a good ear for dialogue.

Apart from that, Katy, I'm with you all the way in that last post.

Ah, and thanks for the Stevens, which I don't understand fully, but whose language I trust instinctively and absolutely.

[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited November 11, 2005).]

[Gregory Dowling]

I agree with Mark on SK. He is certainly no stylist but there's no doubt he has a powerful, if warped, imagination. And he's never set out to cater for mass-tastes. He clearly writes what he feels compelled to write.

And yes, Katy, I agree. Stevens is an obvious example of someone who hardly made a penny out of poetry (and didn't need to). In fact, when you read his letters and see the expensive private editions he ordered to be made for himself and friends, poetry was a costly outlay, rather than a source of income.

Gregory

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Actually the only book I've ever read by Stephen King is his "On Writing." It's a really interesting book & I'd recommend it. He's a wonderful teacher, I think; I thinkt he book grew out of the classroom.

He IS in fact a stylist. It's just that it's a certain style! It's fascinating where he describes "& then I had to make this or that decision: what would happen in a situation like this?" and invariable makes the OPPOSITE structural decision to what I'd have made. He seems to go for blocking off avenues of subtlety, he likes things cut & dried. I guess that's how you build up suspense.

(Of course the tragedy of art, the reason nothing can ever come out the way it was in your head, because every time you solve a technical problem or even have a character say something, you are blocking off all the other potentials (life & Art both finite).) Any piece of writing or any other created object can only be itself: it can't be everything.

Well, this is off the track slightly. I just wanted to say that although he is a crass man, I think King is a stylist.

KEB

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Well, Katy, no more off the track than the last fifteen posts. So let me chime in to say that I think Stephen King is a serious writer. He is true to the tradition of Lovecraft, Poe, Conan Doyle et al., and he writes convincingly of his method in books like 'On Writing'. He is poetical, innovative, versatile and psychologically astute. At times he delivers some excellent social satire. His short stories are where he shines, the longer works being unashamedly commercial ventures, and I will readily admit that these have many faults. He IS extremely verbose at times, and this, along with his enormous production, clouds his talent for many readers. Although he always has a smattering of unusual phrases, he DOES use clichés with happy abandon. And all too often he works to a formula with a happy ending and has difficulty maintaining suspense in the last few miles home.

But I suspect some people of not actually having READ King's work, judging him a) from films they've seen, and b) from the negative criticism he has received in academic circles, which one suspects is more a negative reaction to the huge sales figures than any reflection of the quality of his work.

One can be a serious writer AND a commercial writer. Most serious writers have to be commercial, but many find it difficult. Should we prefer Herman Melville to Stephen King just because Melville was unable to win popular success? Seems potty to me.

Talking of potty and while I'm here - Tom - I don't know what your idea of a teacher is, but when I teach literature I am first and foremost a student of literature. Why is studying literature bad for a writer?

Duncan

[Mark Granier]

Katy, I've read SK's book on writing, and yes, its lessons are salutary; I think it was that book that alerted me to Strunk & White's marvellous little handbook, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE. I guess you could call SK a stylist (Norman Mailer thought that his style had improved); my point was that his strength is as a storyteller, in the ghost/horror genre, which I happen to have a fondness for. THE SHINING is a great ghost story, better, in its own way, than Kubrick's film. I don't know if SK is a crass man as I've never met him, but he sounds like an ok bloke to me, pretty down-to-earth, the sort of guy it would be fun to go drinking with, if he still drinks. But, of course, I've never met him so I can't really know.

Duncan, I agree with most of what you've said. One of SK's least verbose (and most refreshingly short) novels is THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, a simple tale about a young girl getting lost in the woods. Very spooky though not necessarily supernatural, it is, as I remember it, narrated largely in the girl's 'voice' It has one of the best opening lines I've come across: "The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants."



[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited November 12, 2005).]

[Roger Slater]

SK's "Misery" is a fine book, both funny and frightening, and of particular interest to writers.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Mark, I think he's a creepy character. There's something troubling about him - a coldness. It's like he's not quite tuned in to other people. But then that can be said of so many people...

[Roger Slater]

My memory is rather vague on the subject, but I believe that a "poor man's copyright" was instrumental in the plot of Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift."

[Tom Jardine]

"Copyright" does relate mostly to money, in some fashion, that is why it exists.

Duncan,

Talking of potty and while I'm here - Tom - I don't know what your idea of a teacher is, but when I teach literature I am first and foremost a student of literature. Why is studying literature bad for a writer?

I think teaching is inefficient, in a pragamatic manner, to any person's art in poetry. The rate of return, time for money, is backward. The equation is "time equals art" and anything else is spinning in place. Not to speak of institutions strangling freedom. Duncan, the a = b = c argument doesn't work here: we are all forever students.

Mark,

I see the scepticism, but poetry is big right now; an example of this, to use a poor example structured on an "if" is that if orginal manuscripts of Shakespeare were found and put on display in a museum, it would be very popular with very long lines.

Most poetry is simply bad stuff, and that has created a poor-selling attitude. Not long ago, there was a thread here about a poet getting $8,000 a reading, probably far more than any royalties recieved. So somebody asks these poets to appear at their Universities, because it is important.

Abstract free-versing navel-gazers have taken over the scene, and no doubt it will get worse before it gets better because PC demands that everyone/anyone can be/is a "poet." Why? It is what the writers programs have to 'sell.'

And THAT is one reason poets should not teach. Conferencing, maybe, association, sure, but teaching is risky. Both Frost and Auden said so themselves, and both were associated with academia, but they said it on the sly. You see, how quickly poets can be bought.

The "publish or perish" idea should be "sell books or perish."

Poetry is not a craft. Pottery is a craft.

TJ