Discovering moments of consolation

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 to Frank Duffy and May Black in Glasgow as the eldest child of the family, and has four brothers. She moved to Staffordshire at the age of four.

Her father worked as a fitter for English Electric, stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party and managed Stafford Rangers football club in his spare time. Raised a Roman Catholic, she was educated at Saint Austin Roman Catholic Primary School,St. Joseph's Convent School and Stafford Girls' High School - where her literary talent was encouraged by English master J.A. Walker. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and she always wanted to be a writer.

Duffy's poems provide voices for an extraordinary number of contemporary characters, including a fairground psychopath, a literary biographer, a newborn baby, disinherited American Indians, and even a ventriloquist's dummy.

Many of the poems reflect on time, change, and loss. In dramatizing scenes of childhood, adolescence, and adult life, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. She explores not only everyday experience, but also the rich fantasy life of herself and others.

Of her own writing, Duffy has said,"I'm not interested, as a poet, in words like 'plash' - Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words but in a complicated way Singer-composer Eliana Tomkins, whom Duffy collaborated with on a series of live jazz recitals, says "With a lot of artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership. She never does that. Her aim is to communicate."

In her first collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she often uses the voices of outsiders.

Her next collection Feminine Gospels (2002) continues this vein, showing an increased interest in long narrative poems, accessible in style and often surreal in their imagery. Her 2005 publication, Rapture (2005), is a series of intimate poems charting the course of a love affair, for which she won the £10,000 T.S Eliot poetry prize. In 2007 she published a poetry collection for children entitled The Hat.

Many British students read her work while studying for English Literature at GCSE and A-level, as she became part of the syllabus in England and Wales in 1994.

John Mullan wrote of her in the Guardian that

"Over the past decade, Carol Ann Duffy has been the most popular living poet in Britain, her sales greatly helped by the fact that she has succeeded Hughes and Larkin as the most common representative of contemporary poetry in schools (and, it seems, the most commonly read writer of verse, but there are also aspects of her poetry that appeal to English teachers for good practical reasons. Her poems are frequently humorous; they use clear schemes of rhyme and metre; they can be satisfactorily decoded by the diligent close reader."

According to the journalist Katherine Viner,

"Her poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She is read by people who don't really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings 'with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a pop concert'".

Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999 (after the death of previous Laureate

Ted Hughes but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion. According to the Sunday Times, Downing Street source sources stated unofficially that Prime Minister Tony Blair was 'worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England. Duffy later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that 'I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie.

No self-respecting poet should have to.' She says she regards Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea of a contest between her and him for the post was entirely invented by the newspapers. "I genuinely don't think she even wanted to be poet laureate," said Peter Jay, Duffy's former publisher. "The post can be a poisoned chalice. It is not a role I would wish on anyone - particularly not someone as forthright and uncompromising as Carol Ann." The Guardian has also stated that Duffy was reluctant to take up the role in 1999 as she was in a lesbian relationship at the time, and had a young daughter, so was reluctant to take up a position which would have put her so prominently in the public eye.

In August 2008, Duffy's poem 'Education for Leisure' was removed from the AQA examination board's GCSE poetry anthology. This followed a complaint from an external examiner relating to references to knife crime in the poem. According to news reports, schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology, although a statement from AQA denied this. Duffy countered the removal with a poem highlighting violence in other fiction such as Shakespeare's plays, called 'Mrs Schofield's GCSE'.

Duffy was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002. She now resides in Manchester and is professor of poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University'sWriting School. She succeeded Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009 and is the first female and first Scot to hold that position.

Other works

Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) Loss (1986), Casanova (2007). Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture.Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Oldest Girl in the World (2000).

She also collaborated with Manchester composer, Sasha Johnson Manning on The Manchester Carols - a series of Christmas songs that premiered in Manchester Cathedral in 2007

Awards

• Eric Gregory Award 1984
  
• Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for Standing Female Nude and The Other Country, and again for Mean Time)
• Somerset Maugham Award1988 (for Selling Manhattan)
• Dylan Thomas Award 1989
• Cholmondeley Award 1992
• Whitbread Awards 1993 (for Mean Time)
• Forward Prize (for Mean Time)
• T.S.Eliot Prizefor Rapture)
• Forward Prize (for Rapture)
• Greenwich Poetry Competition (for Words of Absolution)
• Nesta Award 2001
  
• Lannan Award 1995
  
• National Poetry Competition 1st prize, 1983 (for Whoever She Was)
• Signal Children's Poetry Prize 1999
• Poet Laureate 2009

“Warming Her Pearls”

for Judith Radstone

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress

bids me wear them, warm them, until evening

when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them

round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk

or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself

whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering

each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She´s beautiful. I dream about her

in my attic bed; picture her dancing

with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent

beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit´s foot,

watch the soft blush seep through her skin

like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass

my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see

her every movement in my head ... Undressing,

taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching

for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does ... And I lie here awake,

knowing the pearls are cooling even now

in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night

I feel their absence and I burn.

Blending oneiric imagery with everyday life

Anna Piutti

Born and raised in Vicenza, Italy, she is currently a student of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Verona. She has been writing free verse poetry in English since 1998. She often adopts a cryptic, highly metaphorical style in which she alternates or blend oneiric imagery with simple aspects of everyday life. She has also translated poetry from French into Italian. She is passionate about literature, art, and music. Her interests also include linguistics, philosophy, medicine, theater arts, cinema and photography.

Some of her poems

Current by Anna Piutti

Fibers,

flesh. Electricity

transudes through a

sigh.

Sun-bordered clouds migrate from

your eyes to my core:

swooshing of curtains, temples

like drums.

Hypnotic pulsations mark lines

between dreams

and life, as

time contracts in us.

And with the last loud blink
of a light bulb,

the shadows withdraw,

and kaleidoscopes convulse.

Clarity

Was I thinking so loudly?

A heart absorbs the absurd

on a regular basis.

Primordial fears and poisoned

skies are

stage smoke;

but fragrant whispers from

your skin are

open windows

on relief.

And I see,

and I laugh:

I

know

nothing.

Anew

Submerged by

liquid stillness,

we mute

the looping theme

of recollection.

Be

blank.

Our mirrored strokes

discard

each tingling residue

of turbulence.

Let go:

these pupils

aren't trapdoors.

For once in this glide,

innocence means

voiceless triumph,

and stainless gazes

trigger shifts

in luminescence.

In the backstage

It is delicately wild

to lip-sync the movement

of a heart --

there, on the other side,

where no floodlights blind.

Only there does breath prelude

waves more powerful than laughter,

as silence shatters thought

into transparency.

Here, where illusion isn’t praised,

no truth, no flaw is concealed

from the discerning eye.

It is here that I stand,

here to stay,

unmasked

before you.

Baptism

Can you feel me?

I’m not the one they used to know.

You’ll find me standing beyond the water wall,

my eyes bearing scars from tainted dreamlands;

my hand reaching out

to touch yours through the icy flow.

May this cold shake me out of my limbo.

Dumbstruck,

misread,

defectively refracted,

I’m now standing behind the water wall,

my heartbeat catching up with me:

may I be redeemed.

Let me feel true light can’t lie, and

time and space will

reconcile

at the confluence of our fingertips.

Noise

Layer after layer,

gloom gurgles through

weary senses.

It spreads like oil, and binds to

every atom

to infect,

to obscure.

I find myself second-guessing

the obvious, retracing my steps

a thousand times, lest syntax

betrays me.

And I struggle to broadcast

vital signs through this static;

and I pray

that my truth won’t be too maimed

when it reaches you.

Blend

Your stare pours sunshine into me

as a long-awaited rush

connects our heres and nows.

I want to be blood

to irrigate your cells,

and feed delusional eternities

through fleeting flesh.

Now feel us shuddering in unison –

I'm bound to you by warmth;

Inside you I'm made whole.

And consciousness hums

so deafeningly;

from pulse

to pulse

it echoes --

red as wake.

Thank you

Tonight's heartbeat

is as joyful as

the intermittent glow

of fireflies:

it plays a frantic game

of hide and seek

with love-filled stares;

it mimics seconds, and

the song of our steps

being poured into

the taste buds

of the earth.

Good luck

You stand in silence,

frozen by the morning's glow.

You won't record those

red-framed paintings made of

sun and glass.

Impermeable, you won't absorb

pure honey from those

amber leaves:

you'll let them flee your tired

stare; you'll hear them rustling like

a butterfly storm headed nowhere but

The spokesman for defenceless fringe of civilization

Peter Huchel

Huchel, Peter (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1903-81, Staufen, Baden), studied from 1923 to 1926 in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna, travelled extensively, and in the 1930s contributed a number of radio plays to Berlin's radio station. Called up in 1940, he became in 1945 a Russian prisoner of war, but was released to work for the Soviet-controlled radio station (Berlin), whose cultural director he became.

In 1949 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the newly founded literary periodical Sinn and Fum, which soon bore the stamp of his own cultural vision. His inadequate orthodoxy, however, led to his enforced resignation and subsequent isolation and surveillance; in 1971 he was at last allowed to move to the West.Huchel's poetry is deeply imbued with the image and spirit of the landscape of the Mark Brandenburg, in which he spent his childhood and youth; at the same time this region shaped his social consciousness, which became an integral part of his perception of nature.

The pervasive melancholy mood of his poetry with its prevalence of bleak images and shadows focuses on diverse country folk, poor despite toil and resigned to their lot. To Huchel they came to represent the defenceless fringe of civilization. As his experience of a dehumanized world deepened, he found his metaphors in the exposed marches, where nature follows its perpetual reciprocal cycle of devouring: ‘Die Natur war für mich Fressen und Gefressenwerden’ (‘Die Nachbarn’ is a late example).

With the same clear-cut departure from customary associations he integrates biblical, mythical, and literary motifs, from which his poetry derives both variety and cohesion. ‘Atmet noch schwach, / Durch die Kehle des Schilfrohrs, / Der vereiste Fluß?’ read the last three lines of ‘Winterpsalm’. At the same time such expressions of numb paralysis allude to specific spheres of experience even when these are not directly addressed.

In ‘Polybios’ the Greek chronicler of Antiquity, pointing to a fallen warrior, consigns the inexpressible to the metaphor of the thistle (‘Hier liegt einer, / Der wollte noch singen / Mit einer Distel im Mund’), which, a key to the hermetic verse of his late poetry, is resumed in ‘Unter der Wurzel der Distel’ (‘Wohnt nun die Sprache’).

The vision of death and oblivion is nowhere more immediate than in the tightly wrought verse of ‘Schnee’; but, dedicated to the memory of Hans Henny Jahnn, it is also a statement on the function of art. Special significance attaches to the recurring motif of the highroad (Chaussee), witness to the ravages of war and its refugees.After Der Knabenteich (1932), the first post-war volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1948, Chausseen Chausseen in 1963, Die Sternenreuse in 1967, Gezählte Tage in 1972, and Die neunte Stunde in 1979. Huchel was awarded a number of honours, notably the Austrian Staatspreis for European Literature (1971).

His influence as a leading contributor to modern verse is marked by the Peter Huchel Prize for Lyric Poetry, whose recipients include Sarah Krisch (1993). Correspondence with Hans Henny Jahnn, Briefwechsel 1951-1959, appeared in 1974; Gesammelte Werke (2 vols.), ed. A. Vieregg, in 1984. Huchel edited the first posthumous volume of poetry by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Gedichte, 1975).
Life

Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freidburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg.

In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple divorced in 1946 and Huchel married Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945.

After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form ("Sense and Form"). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorshop of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi (secret service) surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the German Democratic Republic and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breiscau, where he later died.
Peter Huchel

Huchel, Peter (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1903-81, Staufen, Baden), studied from 1923 to 1926 in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna, travelled extensively, and in the 1930s contributed a number of radio plays to Berlin's radio station. Called up in 1940, he became in 1945 a Russian prisoner of war, but was released to work for the Soviet-controlled radio station (Berlin), whose cultural director he became.

In 1949 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the newly founded literary periodical Sinn and Fum, which soon bore the stamp of his own cultural vision. His inadequate orthodoxy, however, led to his enforced resignation and subsequent isolation and surveillance; in 1971 he was at last allowed to move to the West.Huchel's poetry is deeply imbued with the image and spirit of the landscape of the Mark Brandenburg, in which he spent his childhood and youth; at the same time this region shaped his social consciousness, which became an integral part of his perception of nature.

The pervasive melancholy mood of his poetry with its prevalence of bleak images and shadows focuses on diverse country folk, poor despite toil and resigned to their lot. To Huchel they came to represent the defenceless fringe of civilization. As his experience of a dehumanized world deepened, he found his metaphors in the exposed marches, where nature follows its perpetual reciprocal cycle of devouring: ‘Die Natur war für mich Fressen und Gefressenwerden’ (‘Die Nachbarn’ is a late example).

With the same clear-cut departure from customary associations he integrates biblical, mythical, and literary motifs, from which his poetry derives both variety and cohesion. ‘Atmet noch schwach, / Durch die Kehle des Schilfrohrs, / Der vereiste Fluß?’ read the last three lines of ‘Winterpsalm’. At the same time such expressions of numb paralysis allude to specific spheres of experience even when these are not directly addressed.

In ‘Polybios’ the Greek chronicler of Antiquity, pointing to a fallen warrior, consigns the inexpressible to the metaphor of the thistle (‘Hier liegt einer, / Der wollte noch singen / Mit einer Distel im Mund’), which, a key to the hermetic verse of his late poetry, is resumed in ‘Unter der Wurzel der Distel’ (‘Wohnt nun die Sprache’).

The vision of death and oblivion is nowhere more immediate than in the tightly wrought verse of ‘Schnee’; but, dedicated to the memory of Hans Henny Jahnn, it is also a statement on the function of art. Special significance attaches to the recurring motif of the highroad (Chaussee), witness to the ravages of war and its refugees.After Der Knabenteich (1932), the first post-war volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1948, Chausseen Chausseen in 1963, Die Sternenreuse in 1967, Gezählte Tage in 1972, and Die neunte Stunde in 1979. Huchel was awarded a number of honours, notably the Austrian Staatspreis for European Literature (1971).

His influence as a leading contributor to modern verse is marked by the Peter Huchel Prize for Lyric Poetry, whose recipients include Sarah Krisch (1993). Correspondence with Hans Henny Jahnn, Briefwechsel 1951-1959, appeared in 1974; Gesammelte Werke (2 vols.), ed. A. Vieregg, in 1984. Huchel edited the first posthumous volume of poetry by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Gedichte, 1975).
Life

Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freidburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg.

In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple divorced in 1946 and Huchel married Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945.

After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form ("Sense and Form"). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorshop of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi (secret service) surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the German Democratic Republic and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breiscau, where he later died.
Some poems

Eastern River by Peter Huchel

Do not look for the stones

in water above the mud,

the boat is gone.

No longer with nets and baskets

the river is dotted.

The sun wick,

the marsh marigold flickered out in rain.

Only the willow still bears witness,

in its roots

the secrets of tramps lie hidden,

their paltry treasures,

a rusty fishhook,

a bottle full of sand,

a tine with no bottom,

in which to preserve

conversations long forgotten.

On the boughs,

empty nests of the penduline titmice

,shoes light as birds.

No one slips them

over children's feet.
Answer by Peter Huchel

Between two nightsthe brief day.

The farm is there.

And in the thicket, a snare

the hunter set for us.

Noon’s desert.

It still warms the stone.

Chirping in the wind,

buzz of a guitardown the hillside.

The slow match

of withered foliage

glows against the wall.

Salt-white air.

Fall’s arrowheads,

the crane’s migration.

In bright tree limbs

the tolling hour has faded.

Upon their clockwork

spiders lay

the veils of dead brides.

Meeting by Peter Huchel
For Michael Hamburger

Barn owl

daughter of snow,

subject to the night wind,

yet taking root

with her talons

in the rotten scab of walls,

beak face

with round eyes,

heart-rigid mask

of feathers a white fire

that touches neither time nor space.

Coldly the wind blows

against the old homestead,

in the yard pale folk,

sledges, baggage, lamps covered with snow,

in the pots death,

in the pitchers poison,

the last will nailed to a post.

The hidden thing

under the rocks' claws,

the opening into night,

the terror of death thrust into flesh

like stinging salt.

Let us go down

in the language of angels

to the broken bricks of Babel.

Melpomene by Peter Huchel
The forest bitter, spiky,

no shore breeze, no foothills,

the grass grows matted, death will come

with horses' hooves, endlessly

over the steppes' mounds, we went back,

searching the sky for the fort

that could not be razed.

The villages hostile,

the cottages cleared out in haste,

smoked skin on the attic beams,

snare netting, bone amulets.

All over the country an evil reverence,

animals' heads in the mist, divination

by willow wands.

Later, up in the North,

stag-eyed men

rushed by on horseback.

We buried the dead.

It was hard

to break the soil with our axes,

fir had to thaw it out.

The blood of sacrificed cockerels

was not accepted.

A Corporate Poet

Katherine Lederer

Katherine "Katy" Lederer is an American poet and author of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.

Lederer is the daughter of bestselling non-fiction author Richard Lederer and the sister of world-class poker players Howard Lederer and Annie Duke. She graduated from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where her father was on the English faculty.

Lederer later attended the University of California at Berkeley,from which she received her BA in English and anthropology. After graduating in 1995, Lederer moved to Las Vegas to study poker with her siblings, and was subsequently accepted to theIowa Writer's Workshop on an Iowa Arts Fellowship.

While at Iowa, Lederer founded the zine Explosive, which was published in a limited edition of 300 with hand-printed covers by the artist and writer David Larsen. The tenth and final issue of Explosive was published in 2006. From 1998-1999, she was the editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter out of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery . Lederer continues to publish limited-edition books and chapbooks under the Spectacular Books imprint, and also serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence magazine.

After completing her studies at Iowa in 1998, Lederer moved to New York City, where she worked for psychoanalyst Arnold Cooper. After this, she worked as a coordinator of the Barnard New Women Poets program. In 1999, she signed a contract with Crown Books to write a memoir about her family’s life in gambling.

Lederer made her poetry debut in 2002 with the collection Winter Sex. Poet D.A.Powell described the poems in the collection “as leaps of faith, fibrillating in the dark world with a kinetic energy that rises out of erotic desire.” Her memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers was published in 2003. It was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was named a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and one of eight Best Books of the Year by Esquire Magazine..

From 2002 to 2008, Lederer worked at a quantitative hedge fund in midtown Manhattan, which provided much of the inspiration for the pieces in her most recent poetry collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The title of both the book and the opening poem is taken from the second half of Goethe’s Faust and describes paper money. Other poems in the collection reference the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Nietzsche and Edith Wharton

From an excerpt

For the past six years, Lederer, who is thirty-six and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has worked at D. E. Shaw, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with thirty-six billion dollars under its management. The other day, in her apartment in Prospect Heights, she recalled her decision to take the job: “Everyone I knew in the poetry world was pretty confused, like maybe I had gone crazy.”

She had already published a volume of poetry and a memoir, “Poker Face,” which describes her coming-of-age in a family of gamblers (her siblings Howard Lederer and Annie Duke are two of the world’s best poker players). Still, facing her thirtieth birthday, she was bouncing between illegal sublets and living on part-time jobs and peanut-butter sandwiches. “I wanted money,” she said.

At first, Lederer’s two lives—the creative and the corporate—remained separate; she was another one of New York’s day jobbers, leaving her writing each morning to toil in “pristine white hallways,” as a line from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” puts it. Meanwhile, her fortunes rose along with the fund’s; she became vice-president of recruiting, earning a salary that was “multiples of what many creative-writing professors I know make.”

Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.

The results were the beginnings of “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” (BOA Editions), whose title takes its name from a passage in “Faust” describing money. The book explores not just economic bubbles but metaphysical bubbles—the highs and lows of love, religious ecstasy, and aesthetic rapture. In “The Flower of Life” (the title is from Wharton), Lederer writes:

Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in
this river, I wonder, does anyone pray?

The poems are tense and flinty (a review in Publishers Weekly praised their “viscous push-pull between money and Eros”). From her insider’s vantage point, Lederer said, she could see that this most recent bubble was bound to explode. “It was in the air three years ago. Like, at work everyone knew,” she recalled. “Even I could tell it was going to happen. I wondered, why would people trade if they knew the bubble would burst? That’s what the whole book is about.”
“Intimacy,” probably the first love poem to cite the nineteen-eighties junk-bond king Michael Milken, describes Milken’s “pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart.” Lederer said she views Milken as a “Gollum-like” figure. “He was a creative genius, the way that he packaged debt,” she said. “In finance, that makes you Mozart. Ultimately, however, that was also his downfall.”

Just before Labor Day, Lederer left the hedge fund, though she continues to do freelance recruiting for financial firms. She is now on a twenty-eight-city book tour. (She’s paying for it herself.) Still, she said, she hasn’t been writing much. “I’ve been watching my 401k go up and down.”

From an interview

Tess Vigeland: We've all witnessed a financial boom and one spectacular bust. It is the stuff of drama -- but, poetry? Katy Lederer is a poet who did indeed find inspiration in high finance. Lederer worked for six years as a hedge fund recruiter in New York. She recently left and now has a book of poems out. It's called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Welcome to the program.
Katy Lederer: Thanks so much for having me.
Vigeland: How did you come to write about high finance and money?
Lederer: I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and I was basically just doing my poet thing until I was about 30 and I just wanted security and health insurance, and I applied to work at a hedge fund. And while I was there, you know, I obviously learned a lot about finance and ended up writing about it.
Vigeland: Your book is called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" and we had one of our producers read a bit from the title poem. Let's take a listen.
Marketplace Producer:
The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.
Vigeland: So "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" -- we're talking about money, right?

Lederer: Yes. That comes from Goethe's "Faust" actually, and it's basically a description of paper money.

Vigeland: The printing of money is certainly a big topic right now as the Fed does a lot of it.

Lederer: In the Goethe, actually what happens in this scene is that an emperor is having economic problems and Mephistopheles says, 'why don't you print these contracts based on the gold that's under the ground in your kingdom that hasn't yet been discovered?' And in a way this is an interesting version of a futures contract -- an I.O.U. -- highly relevant and obviously goes to show you, as I think people have realized, these bubbles have happened throughout history and, you know, you want to hope people are going to learn from this one.

Vigeland: So, how is it that you find money poetic?

Lederer: You know, one of the answers to that question is that money is so un-poetic; it's kind of the opposite of poetry, and as opposites will do, it kind of jogged the other side of things for me. You know, in that kind of very un-poetic space, it sort of inspired me more in a way than being, let's say, in a lush garden or I don't know, a more cliche poetic space.

Vigeland: I detect a little bit of cynicism in some of your work here. Where's that coming from?

Lederer: One of the things actually I studied in college was anthropology, so I couldn't help but bring that a little bit into the hedge fund environment. So, this isn't my natural environment and certainly I had some skepticism; I'd been trained all my life to be very suspicious of that kind of environment and to feel that even if good people go into finance, you'll be corrupted, right. It's like Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" -- you could be a great person and you get that ring of power and you become a slimy, slithery preacher, and you know, you have to kind of keep that ring, that money a little bit separate from yourself or else you will be taken over by it.

Vigeland: Well Katy Lederer, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for sharing your poetry. The book is "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Thanks so much.

Lederer: Thank you.

Katy Lederer poems

Intimacy
These three bridges, like the brain, lit up and heading out toward Brooklyn.

I am slumped in the cab, thinking heady thoughts of heady things.
Like an ostrich. Or like an intellectual thriller.

For example, "Den of Thieves," in which the arbitrageur Michael Milken is at first

defined by a health ambition that later in the story turns to plot-driving greed.

It's as if his most natural desire to do good had over many years metastasized, crackling

over the phone lines, hiding out in the backseat of his de riguer black limousine, via

messenger across the Park, his pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart...

Like a toddler hiding grimly in a closet or a hamper.

Or like the king who fled the palace on the hill that's now ablaze.

Which explains, I guess, the fighter jets that circle overhead.

The surfeit of broadband, as well as this beautiful bed now bereft of our lowly ambition.

I'm lying here, there's no one else, and the flowers that you've given me are wilting in the Slurpee cup.

There is ambient noise.

Noise of jet planes,

Desire.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.
Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen

by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.

Brainworker

To learn to keep distance.

To learn to keep drear managerial impulse from the animal mind.

Along the dard edge of this reason. Along the dark edge of this mind's little prison, inside


of its bars now a silky white cat.

Howling.

Crawling in its little cage.

Inside of its cage is the bright light of disease.

To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal.

To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk.

To long for your manager's written approval.

So soon am I up for my year-end review?

The moon above settles into its shadow.

I am howling at you.


That Everything's Inevitable

That everything's inevitable.

That fate is whatever has already happened.

The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.

In this world, I am the surest thing.

Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.

Please insert your spare coins.

I am filling them up.

Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.

But yet, I am a vatic one.

As vatic as the Vatican.

In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum

I am waiting, like an animal,

For poetry.

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.