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NER Recommends | Leslie Harrison Interview

November 30, 2011

Visit leslie-harrison.com

At Brian Brodeur’s excellent site How a Poem Happens, writers talk about the genesis and themes of their work. Leslie Harrison discusses “The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning,” from her Bakeless Prize winning book Displacement:

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

This poem seems to work the way a lot of my poems do—as a kind of fiction masquerading as fact. Fiction dressed up as fact for the costume ball with its sequined mask and slinky dress, so it can sneak in the door and dance with all the true things poems always wants to dance with. But isn’t this what metaphor is, in a way, fiction masquerading as fact seducing truth?

Filed Under: NER Recommends Tagged With: Brian Brodeur, Displacement, How a Poem Happens, Leslie Harrison, The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning

NER Recommends | Jesmyn Ward Interview

November 23, 2011

Jesmyn Ward’s brilliantly compelling novel Salvage the Bones won The National Book Award in Fiction last week. In this interview at The Paris Review Daily, she talks about facets of her book including Hurricane Katrina, the enduring influence of William Faulkner, the role of Greek myths in the story, and the political space of the novel as an art form:

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother’s flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.

A forthcoming memoir will chart new territory in the “life’s work” that the writer described in her acceptance speech.

Filed Under: NER Recommends Tagged With: Greek myths, Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award, Paris Review Daily, Salvage the Bones

NER Recommends | Plotting Against Plot by Vincent Czyz

November 16, 2011

In AGNI Online, Vincent Czyz argues with the idea of plot in fiction:

Moby-Dick doesn’t have much plot to speak of; in 500–plus pages, the action can be reduced to a one- or two-page synopsis without leaving out anything vital…The book as a whole is aimed at some “ungraspable phantom of life,” is obsessed with the inscrutable depths of the sea—surely an allusion to the mysteries of the soul or psyche (choose your spin)—with the inexplicable lure of the color white, with the undefinable symbol of the whale, “be he agent or principle.” And then there’s the friendship between Queequeg and Ishmael to infuse Melville’s metaphysics with something warm-blooded, an emotional handhold for the reader. No, plot doesn’t figure in as one of the things that make this book memorable. Rather it provides a loose framework for the things that make the book hard to forget.

Filed Under: NER Recommends Tagged With: AGNI Online, Moby-Dick, Plot, Vincent Czyz

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Volume 39, Number 4
Cover art by Emilia Dubicki

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Interviews

Michael R. Katz

Behind the Byline

Michael R. Katz

A conversation about translating Gogol and the golden age of Russian literature.

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