Nonfiction

We were trudging along the dry road toward the dunes and I was telling Octavio Paz about DeWitt Henry's issue of Ploughshares (2/2) devoted to realist fiction. "Realist fiction!" His eyebrows arched in mock surprise. "This is a logical contradiction, no?" *     *      * If Ploughshares has, as we like to hope, come of age, it…

A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear…

"Chris? Is Wystan somewhere about?" I am twenty-two years old and never in the realm of fact or fancy have I heard five words more difficult to "take in." The cherub at the top of the stairs who has just uttered them turns away. His voice resounds in distant murmurs through the length of the…

The reason I am keeping a journal this season of the hearings and the horses is to put down those "bits of the mind's string too short to use," as Joan Didion once said. Things tie themselves together with little quote marks and perhaps the string crosshatches itself into a statement in time, who knows?…

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to freelance ghost writer to publicity writer. He has taught at the New School…

I can remember writing Lie Down in Darkness in total belief, at the age of 23 to 26, that somehow. . .I was contributing my share to the human race – but in such organ-like tones. There was great music droning through my mind as I wrote it, and I think it's a pretty good…

I wanted to begin with perfectly simple things, things that were indivisible, safe from analysis. Without knowing it, I tried for years to write protocol sentences. My mistake was to think that such dregs, even had I reached them, were what I had to say, its "true" form, my "real" meaning. "John joy now." "John…

First of all: this is not going to read like an interview because when Asher and I went to see Backett it was to pay homage, not to pick his brain clean for the delectation of the nation. It was a conversation, not an interrogation. And second: The three of us drank most of a…

I Today the idea of writing poetry is generally an absurdity. Too many of us must come home from a day's routine labor before we can sit down to think and/or feel poetry within us. Flashes come and go during the working day and it is possible we see the world constantly through our poetic…