Nonfiction

Charles Simic, whose most easily available collections of poems are Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974), spoke on a Friday afternoon in March, 1975 with George Starbuck in a New Hampshire kitchen. Much of the conversation centered on another book, White, (New Rivers…

Our conversation began by wandering into the visual arts. Knowing Mark Strand had painted, and had come to Iowa from the M.F.A. program at Yale, I asked if he kept up with the work of contemporary art. S: I follow the work of a few friends and sometimes write art catalogs or brochures, but I…

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?…

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…

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…