Broadway Books, the lively literary-oriented bookstore in Northeast Portland, recently hosted a celebration for Kim Stafford, Oregon’s ninth, and newly appointed, poet laureate, who succeeds Elizabeth Woody for a two-year term. We met for a bite close to the venue beforehand, joined by his longtime friend and fellow poet and teacher, Tim Gillespie. The conversation clocked in at under two hours and meandered with gusto and ease. We spoke on subjects ranging from his views on teaching, to the perils of writing programs, to the wonder of Verslandia, Literary Arts’ citywide youth poetry slam, and even to the late Irish mystic and poet, John O’Donohue (Kim brings him to mind in so many important ways), but it was truly Stafford’s way of seeing–and his friend’s way of seeing him–that left echoes for days and also sent me home celebrating Governor Kate Brown’s auspicious appointment.
Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford at Eagle Creek.
Chatting with Kim Stafford is a bit like stepping out of time. There’s something both ageless and perennial about him. He possesses a sort of egalitarian everyperson quality and inspires the feeling that he has always existed somewhere, that you could run into him anywhere, from a muddy river bank to a fancy lecture hall — that he’s spent a hundred lifetimes cultivating just the skills that make a great poet. His roots are deeply Midwestern, with a father (the poet William Stafford, who also served as Oregon’s poet laureate) from Hutchinson, Kansas, and a mother whose family hails from Beatrice, Nebraska — both quaint, conservative towns. But his parents met and fell in love in California, perhaps recognizing “each other’s homesick Midwest ways,” Kim wrote in his riveting book, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.
Kim has lived in Oregon for most of his adult life despite early years that found the family trailing behind his “gypsy scholar father.” By Kim’s eighth year of life, he had moved eight times. His father was “always looking for a different job. California, Iowa, Indiana, Alaska, from the Midwest to the West Coast. We did that several times,” the younger Stafford said. Even though there’s a hint of the way-back Midwest to him (a practicality, maybe, or a certain restraint and graciousness I always associate with some folks from my own birth region of Missouri) Kim belongs to Oregon as surely as rain belongs to the valley, a fact he seems proud of, and one that seems fitting for our new poet laureate. He relishes the diversity of our great state. “Having coast, mountains, Eastern Oregon, enables us to have different powers of thought than other, more homogenized environments,” he said. He also sees the benefit of connecting all of our disparate parts: “I am hoping that poetry can make the cultures of communities more diverse, the emotionally informed communities deepen, and make communities more curious about themselves and each other.”
“Riddley,” set in a far-off English future a few hundred years after a great disaster (think nuclear war) is about a ragtag group wandering the countryside, trying to build something new. Hoban creates his own language, based on contemporary English but twisted and angled (think of speaking Middle English today; pretty soon it starts to make sense) and the book is one big linguistic joke: He has FUN with words. The perfectly logical yet utterly wrong assumptions our heroes make about the past based on the shards of archaeological evidence they’ve found are deliciously hilarious. And who wouldn’t fall for a novel in which Punch and Judy play a crucial role in the forming of a new religion?
“Shakespeare’s Dog” is just what it says: the story of the young Will, henpecked in Stratford and escaping to London, as told by his dog Hooker, who has a dog’s-eye view of the world and is singularly unimpressed by his master’s airs and so-called talents. A dog, of course, is a very practical beast, and also one given to carnal impulses, which, unlike humans, it does nothing to suppress. Hooker tells a riotous tale, and is a natural storyteller: Will could learn a thing or two from him, and probably does.
As different as John’s Harlem world and mine were in so many ways, I felt an affinity. I was bowled over by the clear searing beauty of Baldwin’s language (in this novel, often suggesting the cadences of the King James Bible) in both his novels and his essays: I would go on to read pretty much all of both. Here, I began to understand, was a contemporary American literary master who spoke directly and deeply and with controlled passion.
The characters, of course, are memorable: not just the reluctant soulmates Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, but the whole astonishing Bennett clan, from the wise to the prissy to the utterly foolish; and what’s remarkable is that so many supporting characters who might be caricatures – dastardly Mr. Wickham, fatuous Mr. Collins, pragmatic Charlotte Lewis, odious Lady Catherine de Bourgh – have such splendid literary vigor.
Tolstoy is as acute an observer as Dostoevsky but gentler, perhaps more sorrowful, in his evocations of the human heart. Chekhov is peerless in his tragicomic descriptions of people and cultures in unrest, choosing to diagnose but not prescribe. Of the three he also may be the most compassionate toward his characters – or maybe it’s just that I like the theater. I choose Dostoevsky and “Demons” because it seems to connect the nation’s conflicting sides: in addition to its compelling language and sharp cultural observations it has a satiric, gruesomely comic edge about the ways that societies let their gyroscopes spin out of control; how an entire culture can be toyed with egregiously by a small, determined, malevolent group. His demons stir up trouble not because they’re true believers in an ideology or a religion or anything else (although nihilism gets a sound spanking, and various other isms come into play as excuses and prods) but basically just for the hell of it, because it’s fun. Might that, at heart, account for at least some of the appalling mischief being performed in our own time and place? – empty souls, in it for sport, manipulating the devout and credulous?
Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was first published in English in 1963, and I read it soon after, while I was still in high school. It’s an astonishing book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describing the desperate banalities of a single prisoner’s adjustments – he is innocent, of course, of the charges against him – to the casual brutalities of it all, and the small existential decisions he makes to get through a single day. Hard, quick, plainspoken, it’s a matter-of-fact horror story that happens to be largely true. In a repressive system everybody’s under pressure, everybody makes decisions based on survival, every movement has political import. Somehow, these things also made the book an enthralling read.
Jonathan’s Swift’s novel, first published in 1726 under the title “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships,” is one of the most hacked-at and sanitized books ever written, and those are the versions, unfortunately, in which most people encounter it. That seems to be largely because its fantastical elements (little people, giants, talking horses, flying cities) tilt it toward the catch-all of children’s literature, despite its often coarse detail and sophisticated adult themes. It is, underneath the flimsiest tissue of whimsy, a scabrous satire on European morals and politics, and quite rude on the subject of bodily functions, and such things will never do for the young and tender-cheeked. (Nor is it the only book to be hogtied and forcibly hustled into the children’s playpen in spite of its original intentions. It’s a bit of a jolt to remember that the Grimm folk and fairy tales, which have been so resolutely cleansed and prettified for nursery and adolescent consumption in the almost 200 years since the brothers first published them, were themselves sanitized versions of older, even more savage folk traditions.) In brief: Take out the scruffy parts of “Gulliver’s Travels” and you’ve ripped out its heart and soul.
I consumed the Freddy books, every one, waiting impatiently at the town library if one I wanted was checked out, and for the purposes of this list I might have chosen the deliciously sly “Freddy the Politician” or “Freddy and the Ignormus” (“ignormus,”with its inescapable suggestion of “ignoramus”: a strangely provocative word for a pre-adolescent mind in the late 1950s) or “Freddy the Magician” or “Freddy and the Men from Mars.” I choose “Freddy and the Bean Home News,” because in it Freddy and his barnyard cohorts – a rooster named Charles, a cow named Mrs. Wiggins, a cat named Jinx, and many more – become newspigs, newshorses, newsroosters, news you-name-its. And they do it because fake news is a-flyin’, and they’re duty-bound to set the record straight.
In Dunn’s title the words “geek” and “love” are co-equal – flip sides of the same equation, shaping each other in their own terrible and wonderful images. The novel introduces a family of side-show entertainers, genetic mutants created deliberately by their parents to be “exotic” enough to fascinate the paying rubes as Binewski’s Carvival Fabulon rolls from town to town and keeps the family fortunes flowing. The shock – the atrocity – of the thing is captivating and overwhelming; a genetic engineering as coldly calculating as anything by Joseph Mengele, yet also, unlike Mengele’s horrors, suffused somehow with a kind of strange and bountiful love. A boy with flippers instead of hands and feet; a hunchback albino dwarf; conjoined twins; a telekinetic powerhouse: In a culture that values conformity above all else, every freak, every deviation, is an affront. Yet here, among the deliberately misshapen Binewski clan, it was all in the family, and the idea of normalcy was flipped on its head.
Lopez’s book, as tough as it is, is much more than an indictment. “I single out these episodes of depravity not so much to indict the Spanish as to make two points,” he writes. “First, this incursion, this harmful road into the ‘New World,’ quickly became a ruthless, angry search for wealth. It set a tone in the Americas. … The second point I wish to make is that this violent corruption needn’t define us. Looking back on the Spanish incursion, we can take the measure of the horror and assert that we will not be bound by it. We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we intend to mean something else to the world.”
Lalami imagines Estevanico’s life (or Mustafa’s, as he is properly named) from his childhood in Morocco to his days in Spain as a valued slave to a young nobleman to his journey to Florida and his encounter with the native peoples in the lush inland, where the rules of slave and master are upended and Mustafa, in whose voice the tale is told, achieves a kind of freedom as the Spaniards around him sink into depravity and distress. Lalami beautifully balances a 16th century perspective with 21st century hindsight, and discovers a sad yet promising beauty in the life of this long-ago adventurer who flourishes in a land where so many, so soon, would be enslaved. Along the way she creates a vivid recollection of the people and ways of the continent before 1492, and a suggestion of how the meeting of two cultures might have gone, had the invading culture been less acquisitive and violent. Her comparisons of native and Spanish cultures cut like a knife and heal like a balm. Like Lopez’s, it’s a beautiful book that looks as much to the future as the past.
Each of the central characters in these novels is caught up in the trap of slavery by accident, either of situation or of birth. In Colin MacInness’s 1969 “Westward to Laughter,” a young Scotsman named Alexander Nairn is tricked in the 1750s by his uncle, a malevolent molasses merchant, aboard a ship that turns out to be a slaver heading to the West Indies. Things start bad, and get worse, and I won’t tell you bad they get, but along the way amazements happen. “Of my salvage by a boat hook, the fifty lashes from the Quartermaster, and all my vomiting to Liverpool, I shall say nothing,” Nairn relates, “except that I left Scotland a boy, and reached England something of a man.” And that’s on Page 18, before the adventure’s truly begun. Through a complex series of events young Alexander shifts from slaver to slave, for the island of Laughter contains both black and white slaves. He meets up with the native Caribes, and freedom fighters in the hills, and learns from the downside how the upside stays on top. There is debauchery, and brutality, and remorse, and the sinking realization that when one is caught inside a system, the system finds its way to win.
Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning 1990 novel “Middle Passage,” named for the notorious slaver route across the Atlantic from western Africa to the Southern states, also takes its metaphorical voyage of discovery via ship, this time in the 1830s, when a freed slave and petty thief in New Orleans named Rutherford Calhoun seeks to escape an undesired marriage and a pile of debts by stowing away aboard ship. “How I fell into this life of living off others, of being a social parasite, is a long, sordid story best shortened for those who, like the Greeks, prefer to keep their violence offstage,” Calhoun narrates. The ship on which he hides, unfortunately, is a slaver bound for Africa to transport the remnants of a people called the Allmuseri to the United States for sale. Cultures clash, dangers abound, astonishments occur, mystical visions rise from the ship’s hold, where the stinking cargo is trapped but not entirely helpless, and mere individuals find themselves face to face with the remorseless depths of human possibility. We are caught in the tangle of the nets we cast.
Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” jumps ship in favor of a train car, the fabled underground route to safety for slaves fleeing the South to the North taking literal shape as a train route buried underground and operated under the deepest secrecy. The story begins in Africa, where Cora’s grandmother is captured and transported to America; settles in to the Georgia plantation where Cora is a hard-working outcast; and hits the underground when Cora, in the company of a fellow slave named Caesar, flees the plantation and begins the perilous journey north. Along the way a notorious slave-catcher tracks them, some friends turn out to be foes and others staunch defenders of the faith, unlikely escapes and alliances abound, hopes are dashed and rise again more cautiously. The path to freedom is littered with death and betrayal and bravery and disease, and if the outcome is uncertain, the conditions along the way are built on a solid track of historical fact. Can Whitehead tell a tale? “The Underground Railroad” won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Whitehead’s earlier “Zone One” is surely the greatest zombie novel that never actually uses the word “zombie” ever published. ’Nuff said.
Provocative and disturbingly timely, Atwood’s tale is first of all just good writing, the first call of any novel and a pleasure because of it, no matter what its other purposes may be. But about those other purposes: although it was published in 1985, “The Handmaid’s Tale” seems more and more culturally necessary with every passing day. One of the great global crises of the 21st century is the rise of rigid and aggressive fundamentalism, from the violent excesses of radical-conservative Muslims to the astonishing alliance of American fundamentalist Christians with what may be the most corrupt, regressive, and abusive administration in the nation’s history, led by a moral lout of a president who flouts every standard of decency while evangelists cheer and embrace him as one of their own. With a cold clear eye, Atwood imagines just what a theocratic dictatorship – which so many in America seem so fervently to desire – might look like. It isn’t pretty. Unless you’re at the top of the heap, you wouldn’t want to live there.
