Good Natured Poet

Debra Nystrom

Debra Nystrom who is teaching as Associate Professor, Poetry Writing has the following degrees
MFA, Goddard/Warren Wilson, 1980B.A., University of South Dakota, 1976 ; The books following have earned a reputation for her

Bad River Road (forthcoming, Sarabande Books, 2009)
Torn Sky, Sarabande Books, 2003
A Quarter Turn , Sheep Meadow Press, 1991

Her poems were published In
Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lyric, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Slate, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

And her works were anthologized in

Best American Poetry 2008, Scribner, 2008
When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems by American Women, Autumn House Press, 2008
Red, White and Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America, University of Iowa Press, 2004
Strongly Spent: Fifty Years of Shenandoah, Shenandoah, 2004
Common Wealth, University of Virginia Press, 2003
Birthday Poems, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002
Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, University of Iowa Press, 2002
Acquainted With the Night, Columbia University Press, 1999
The Sheep Meadow Anthology, Sheep Meadow Press, 1999
More Light, National Writer’s Voice Project, Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1994

Current Projects

On the Bluff: Land, Family, Race and Law (memoir)
The Capacity to be Alone: the Lyric Poem (essays)

Honors and Awards

Virginia Commonwealth University, Cabell Memorial Reading and Panel, 2008
James Dickey Prize in Poetry, Five Points Magazine, 2007
University of Virginia Arts Research Grant, 2006
“American Life in Poetry” feature, Poetry Foundation, October 2005
Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, 2004
Writers’ Almanac feature, A Prairie Home Companion, September 2004; May 2004
PoetryNet Poet of the Month, April 2004
Shepard Memorial Visiting Writer, University of Wyoming Conference on Social Justice, 2004
Heart/Borders Poetry Prize, 2002
Lantern Society Award for Women’s Education, 2002
James Boatwright Prize for Poetry, Shenandoah Magazine: 2000 and 1994
Pushcart Prize nominations: 2004, 2003, 1990, 1988, 1985, 1984
Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Fellowships in Poetry: 1997 and 1987
Balch Prize for Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1991
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of Torn Sky, published in 2003 by Sarabande Books, and an earlier volume, A Quarter Turn, from Sheep Meadow Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Slate and The Threepenny Review. She has received the James Boatwright prize from Shenandoah, the Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review, and has been awarded two individual artist’s grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, as well as the HeArt/Borders Books Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and daughter.

Statement of Poetics

I grew up in South Dakota, among reserved farming and ranching people. The sense of the unspoken was always palpable there, amid the homesteaders’ descendants, the native Lakota, and in the landscape itself.

I think that my curiosity about what language can do comes from a wish to grasp— through patternings of sound, rhythm, syntax and image— the kind of meaning that is experienced physically: that can't be easily paraphrased, but attests to the inner self which hasn't many opportunities for expression in our culture.

Yeats said that "we believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body." When a poem communicates to us in that way, it's possible to feel for a moment less essentially alone. A poem like Robert Frost's "Mowing" or Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" touches that most isolated, inarticulate part of me that had despaired of intimacy.

I write in an effort to bring forward into clarity and drama (though not into explanation) that part of life which is usually kept back.

Window

by

Debra Nystrom

The window of her last room,

in the subacute ward, building

next door to death,

was lovely in the evenings, after visitors

had come and gone, after Dad

had taken Brad back to the farm

and made his last stop in, and

all the machines and tile faded

as snow outside grew violet, then

white against the dark, a steady

glow beneath us. I could leave

the curtains apart while she slept

more heavily with the bigger night

dose of morphine, and I gave up

reading my Chekhov story.

After the first days she hardly

opened her eyes, and the sky

had clouded over, so I left it there

all the time, that square of world

we seemed to have known before,

though we'd never been there.

Now I picture snow, stark, definite

against the trees, then realize, no:

it was just September; even in

South Dakota an early snow

wouldn't stay on the ground

that long. Maybe there wasn't

any snow, only the pale light,

and her window altering

the way light passed through it.


Floater

by Debra Nystrom

—to Dan

Maddening shadow across your line of vision—

what might be there, then isn't, making it

hard to be on the lookout, concentrate, even

hear—well, enough of the story I've

given you, at least—you've had your fill,

never asked for this, though you were the one

to put a hand out, catch hold, not about to let me

vanish the way of the two you lost already

to grief's lure. I'm here; close your eyes,

listen to our daughter practicing, going over and over

the Bach, getting the mordents right, to make the lovely

Invention definite. What does mordent mean,

her piano teacher asked—I was waiting in the kitchen

and overheard—I don't know, something about dying?

No; morire means to die, mordere means to take

a bite out of something—good mistake, she said.

Not to die, to take a bite—what you asked

of me—and then pleasure

in the taking. Close your eyes now,

listen. No one is leaving.

More on novel

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of four poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, will be published by W.W. Norton in October 2009.

Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton.

Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback inJuly 06. Little Beauties was chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available fromc cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

Addonizio's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Fame blessed Kim Addonizio’s family in triple corners .Her mother Paulinen Betz Addie (b.1919), four-time U.S. singles champion in the 1940's, was renowned for her peerless backhand and 'killer instinct.' When international play resumed after World War II, Betz became one of a handful of champions to win on her first try at Wimbledon in 1946.

Raised in Los Angeles, Betz learned tennis on public courts. She was offered a scholarship by Rollins College where she played Np.4 on the men's team and graduated as the top economics student in 1943. Letz later earned an M.A. in economics from Columbia University.

As an undergraduate in 1942, Betz won her first U.S. singles title. She repeated her victory in 1943 and 1944 and triumphed at both Wimbledon and Forest Hills in 1946. That year she also played a key role on the U.S. Wightman Cup team, dubbed the 'Betz Club.'

Betz turned professional in 1947, enjoying a 13-year undefeated career on tour with such notables as Don Budge and Bobby Riggs. In 1949 she married Washington Post sportswriter Bob Addie. After retiring as a player she remained an active teaching professional while raising her five children. In 1990 she received the USTA's Sarah Palfrey Danzig Award for her contributions to tennis.

Kim Addonizio’s father Robert Addie (February 6, 1910 - January 18, 1982) was an American

Sportswriterwho covered baseball for The Washington Post and Washington Times-Herald. Addie was known for his clean style, hilarious anecdotes, unabashed sentiment, red socks and dark glasses.

Bob covered the PGA after baseball moved from Washington. Bob wrote many articles for the Post after his retirement from the paper in 1977.

He wrote a book about his sports writing career entitled Sportswriter which was published in 1980. They have five children, a daughter and four sons.

Previous occupations: waitress, fry cook, tennis instructor, Kelly Girl (deadening temporary office work), attendant for the disabled, auto parts store bookkeeper.

Kim Addonizio’s daughter, Aya Cash, born on 1983, San Francisco, California, graduated from

the Guthrie BFA acting program at the University of Minnesotam, a New York Stage actress; performed three seasons with The Great River Shakespeare Festival, won three California Governor's awards for acting and is a two time California Regional Shakespeare Champion, and a graduate of San Francisco School of the Arts.

She is an amazing actor who lives Brooklyn. She'll be appearing as a guest star on "Law and Order" in early 2009.

Kim Addonizio has four brothers; her SIGN Leo, FAVORITE COLOR Teal blue
FAVORITE POETS John Keats Walt Whitman Elizabeth Bishop all the ancient Chinese & Japanese Jack Gilbert C.K.Williams Ovid Antonio Machado Emily Dickinson William Blake Dean Young
FAVORITE SINGER/SONGWRITERS Adam Duritz Patty Griffin Sarah McLachlan Ani Di Franco Tom Waits Steve Earle
SHE CONSIDERS HER PREVIOUS INCARNATION IS Edna St. Vincent Millay
WHO SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE Old black man sitting on the porch playing blues harmonica all day long

HOW SHE SPENDS HER TIME WHEN SHE IS NOT WRITING Weightlifting, tennis, ice skating, yoga, teaching, reading, listening to blues, playing my Mississippi Saxophone, drinking wine, spending too much money on eating out, watching TV & DVDs, feeling fucked up, feeling happy, feeling important, feeling stupid and inconsequential, obsessing over Iraq & other corporate imperialist misadventures

Adam Goldwyn inteviewed Kim Addonizio, author of My Dreams out in the Street
Kim Addonizio’s new novel, My Dreams out in the Street, tells the story of Rita, a drug addict and prostitute, and her boyfriend, Jimmy, a petty crook.

As we follow their story, we also get a chance to see late ‘90s San Francisco at its worst: drug addiction, prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, dirty cops and, worst of all, the indifferent masses of the well-to-do who pretend not to see a thing.

My Dreams out in the Street is, however, a story about people: their (often overwhelming) faults and weaknesses, but also about their eternal optimism and sheer will to live. Above all, it is a love story, reminding us that love can blossom and endure even under the harshest of conditions.

(Kim and I discussed a number of different topics: her choice of setting, her views on beauty, the purpose of literature, the role of literary prizes and the difficulties even two people in love can have in maintaining their relationship. – AG)

Adam Goldwyn: First, let me ask you about the setting of the novel. My Dreams out in the Street is deeply imbued with the sights, sounds and spirit of San Francisco, a city famous for its counter-cultural fervor. Your characters often hang out in the city's legendary counter-culture hot spots, like the Haight-Ashbury, but also the city's seedier areas, such as the Tenderloin and Mission districts, and other famous landmarks like Golden Gate Park. In terms of time, the novel is not set in the '60s and '70s, the hey-day of San Francisco rebellion, but in the '90s, when San Francisco was just becoming famous again, but for an entirely different reason: its new wealth as the center of Silicon Valley. Indeed, the famed corner of Haight-Ashbury now boasts a Ben and Jerry's, the epitome of bourgeois respectability. Perhaps you could talk a little about the relationship of the setting, in terms of time and place, to the novel: why did you decide to set the novel in San Francisco just as the dot-com boom was beginning? Could this novel have taken place in another time or location? Could its characters have survived anywhere else, or is theirs a uniquely a San Franciscan story?

Kim Addonizio: In the time the novel is set, the dot-com money was flooding San Francisco, driving up prices, and displacing a lot of poorer people. In 1997, the year the novel occurs, there were particularly heavy rains (winter is the rainy season there), and the homeless died in record numbers. Reagan, when he was governor of CA, closed mental institutions in the sixties, thereby kicking out a lot of mentally ill people into the streets, and the facilities to care for them never really materialized after that. So it's a particularly San Francisco story in that way, but these characters can be found in almost any major urban area. San Francisco is the city I know well, since I moved there in the late seventies. I moved across the Bay to Oakland in 2001. So I used what I knew and what I observed-big encampments of the homeless in Golden Gate Park, for example, or the Goodwill store where Rita goes to dig through bins for cheap clothing.

AG: That's interesting, because, though I hadn't thought of it as a novel about social consciousness, now that you point that out, it seems to me that it is one of the novel's major themes.

To go to the obvious question: do you see this book as in any way political, or as a call to some sort of action?

Are you trying to make a statement about public health or government policy? Were you trying to make people aware of the living conditions of the urban poor?

KA: I think this book has a social conscience, but I don’t think it’s particularly political, and it’s not a call to action; it’s a novel. I guess Upton Sinclair would have a different idea, but I don’t think novels are meant to work on that level; non-fiction or a documentary can generally accomplish a lot more in that direction. I’m just trying to write about characters I find interesting, but if this novel had the effect of making someone slightly readjust their preconceptions I’d be happy.

AG: San Francisco's famed counter-culture stems in large part from its unique literary history: it was home to Kerouac, Ginsberg and several other authors of the Beat movement, which was the first literary movement to depict the counter-culture of easy sex and easy drugs. Your characters are for the most part drug addicts, prostitutes and petty criminals: the types of characters the Beats championed.

There seems to be a pretty strong literary genealogy for My Dreams out in the Street with the Beats, and other authors like William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, and again, there seems to be this San Francisco connection. What influence did the Beats and the San Francisco literary scene have on My Dreams out in the Street? What other works influenced your writing? As a novel, it necessarily draws from previous literature, but it also seems to be a novel about experience, by which I mean lived experience from the real world, not experience drawn from reading. In your writing process, or in the finished work, what is the relationship between lived experience and literary experience?

KA: Of course the tradition goes back farther than the Beats, if you hop over to Europe-back, I imagine, to the beginnings of literature. Some writers I read early on were people like Baudelaire, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille. And Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn was huge, for me. I liked the Beats, but I was never more interested in them than, say, Keats. I read Kerouac and Brautigan and Ginsberg and Burroughs, but I can't say I ever felt some big Beat influence.

Everyone was reading them then. In high school I was a big Philip Roth fan. And then there was Aldous Huxley and Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, some Dostoyevsky in there. Kafka. The Beats were just a part of that list. As for lived experience, imaginative experience is a part of life, so I don't separate them so much. There are autobiographical elements in all my work, but you wouldn't be able to know what they were, what's been transformed, what's been completely invented.

At least, I hope not. I'm not interested in writing my story but in writing my characters' story. They're all some all some piece of me, though I've never been a homeless junkie prostitute, or a former child pageant star with OCD, or a pregnant teenager, or a criminal investigator. Personally I don't care if an author has lived through something physically or not.

I want to know that she can write really well, create characters I feel for. And I want to undergo some sort of transformative experience through reading the book. I want to know the author has felt something deeply and thought about it and can convey some mysteries and discoveries.

AG: It's true that the Beat genealogy, and drug use for artistic purposes does go back a lot further than twentieth century America. I suppose this touches on a larger question about the interplay between literature and life. In one part of the book, two petty thieves and drug addicts, Jimmy and Stan, are at Stan's apartment, and you write: "Jimmy sat on a couch and picked up a few of [the books]. They all had little prize announcements on them– finalists or winners for the Pulitzer or National Book Award.

Stan and his self-improvement bullshit. Jimmy opened one and flipped through the pages, looking at the lines of type, not seeing the words." You are obviously a well-read author, but all of your characters are decidedly uninterested in literature. Also, I couldn't help but notice that on the cover of the novel, just under your name, is written: "National Book Award Finalist." Are you having a little fun at your own expense?

I think this might be the only mention of literature in the book itself. What is the role of literature in their world?

Who is your intended audience?

Is it the real life Stans and Jimmys, or the middle and upper classes, which are almost entirely invisible in this novel?

KA: Well, Stan is buying these books. He is in fact part of the audience for prizewinning books. How else would someone like him choose a book? He relies on the sticker. Jimmy is indifferent to literature, but Stan is actually interested, even if he doesn’t really get all of the content. And I can assure you that’s absolutely true to life. I didn’t know my publisher was going to put the NBA thing on my book, so no, I wasn’t really thinking about myself, just commenting on how books find their way mysteriously into all kinds of people’s hands.

As for my intended audience, that includes people like Stan and anyone else the story might speak to. In the past, I’ve gotten correspondence about my work from prisoners and kids in juvey and high school girls in Japan and freshman creative writing students. My intended audience is anyone who wants to listen. Or rather, anyone who hears something interesting, even if it isn’t exactly what I tried to say.

AG: There is a moment when the PI Gary Shepard looks at his wife Annie's photographs and thinks to himself: "Black-and-white studies of poppies and lilies. Kids splashing in fountain spray or running across wide lawns. It's not that they were bad photographs. It was just her idea of beauty; it contained no difficulty, no darkness. He couldn't explain to her the kind of beauty he saw in people who were being pushed down, not allowed to bloom. Just that they survived was astonishing to him."

When I read this line, I thought to myself that this could as easily be the aesthetic manifesto of My Dreams out in the Street: the novel is beautiful, not in Annie's way, but in Gary's.

Am I right in thinking that there is some authorial confession coming through here, or is it purely for the sake of characterizing Gary Shepard? What is it you find beautiful about these types of characters and situations? What attracts you to writing their stories?

What aesthetic principles do you adhere to?

KA: You mean, why would I want to write about these kinds of people rather than a soccer mom at the mall?

If she's sleeping with her husband's brother and addicted to pills, I might be interested in writing about her. I guess I'm feeling for the edges of things, where more is overtly at risk. Maybe it's as simple as what Janet Burroway says-the first rule of fiction is: "Only trouble is interesting." Or Tolstoy's lines about happy families are alike, but all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way.

If you're trying to write anything accurate about life, you have to include the fact that there is incredible suffering and evil in the world. You don't necessarily have to dwell in it, but you have to acknowledge it.AG: So Rita is a sort of twentieth century American Anna Karenina? I like that. Rita and Jimmy are a family, as are Gary and Annie Shephard, and they are all definitely unhappy in their own way. There is incredible suffering and evil both in the world and also in your novel, yet nevertheless, the novel, to me at any rate, is a happy one.

There does seem to me something heartening in Rita's optimism and fortitude. Am I reading it totally wrong? Where do you, as an author, draw the line between "acknowledging" and "dwelling" in unhappiness? And why is "writing accurately about life" a desirable goal? What is it that draws you towards that?KA: Every writer worth reading wants to write accurately about life. Actually, the writers worth reading are the ones who succeed. But that has to be a starting point.

AG: At its core, My Dreams out in the Street is a novel about the relationships between people, particularly, it seems to me, the impossible distance between them. There seems to be a pattern in the novel, wherein the people who are physically the closest are the most emotionally distant, and those who are the most physically distant are the most emotionally intimate.

Rita certainly has no emotional attachment to any of her johns, though she obviously has sex with them, and Gary and Annie's marriage is fraught with distance and tension that there is almost no emotional connection at all. Indeed, the relationship at the core of the novel, and the only one in which both people actually love each other, is the one between Rita and Jimmy, two people who have completely lost contact with each other and spend the whole novel trying to find one another.

What interested you about the relationship between Rita and Jimmy?

Why is physical intimacy so often tied up with emotional distance, and what is the connection between the two?

What about relationships were you hoping to explore in the novel?

Why is having a decent relationship so difficult in the world of My Dreams out in the Street?

KA: I find having a decent relationship difficult in the real world. When I started the novel I was yearning for someone, so I suppose that was one thing that drove the emotional dynamic of the book. Rita and Jimmy do love each other, but Rita hasn't developed enough of a sense of self to feel that she can survive without him, and Jimmy has kind of opted out of the difficulties of struggling with those issues that come out of real commitment.

And everyone in the book is dealing with childhood shit. I know we should all get past it, but the stuff that happens to you when you're young-if it's difficult in some way-just forms the core of you, because you're not yet able to integrate it into something larger. And it's a kind of chicken-and-egg thing, to me. Poverty and the general ugliness of impoverished circumstances breed violence and ignorance, and it's hard as an individual to get above that.