While reading Karen Russell’s stellar hit, Swamplandia!, I did a double take.

I know the book is intended to be a novel and it certainly reads like one. It has a story: a beginning, a middle, an end; a protagonist, a climax, etc.  Despite these facts, Swamplandia! reads, to me,  like one big, epic poem.

Nowadays we rarely see long poems in the poetry world. What happened to those epics, like the Iliad, which frame western literary history as we know it? I think perhaps they’ve dissolved into a certain kind of novel —one that reads like poetry and presents as a novel. One of the reasons for this “re-formatting” may be the publishing industry’s preference for novels over shorter forms of writing, and all of poetry, in general. Writers know it’s certainly more lucrative to write 300 pages then to write 100, and to produce full-length novels rather than novellas. This preference is uniquely contemporary, and for that reason, I seem to stumble upon true poetry in the novels of certain modern and contemporary writers.

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In the history of world poetry, there have been all kinds of limits and forms we writers have forced ourselves to adapt to over the centuries, such as sonnets, iambic pentameter, odes, pastorals and free verse. Even contemporary novels are often forced to meet certain page requirements to be considered for mass publication unless you happen to be Salman Rushdie or Thomas Pynchon.

While earning my English degree at school, we took a survey class on American and British literature starting from the medieval era, on through the twentieth century—though I believe our class was so disorganized we only made it halfway through the nineteenth century. A certain professor lectured us solely on the title page and the preface or forward for a whole week. We examined how different editions of the same novels evolved with first prefaces then second prefaces then third and so on.

All this “to-do” without even getting to the first page drove me nuts. I’ve always hated conventions and restrictions and necessary evils yet I marvel at the thought that writing without abiding by a specific set of rules is a contemporary conception. Where do we go when we are liberated, when possibilities are limitless? We can make like New York School poet Frank O’Hara and impose our own rules (complete a poem during lunch hour) or abandon the notion entirely to genre-shattering effect (Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son).

It used to be that modern meant free verse, yet we’re surrounded by programs like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. These sites encourage piecemeal sound bites, snippets of our lives, slices of our day. So why not use these platforms to express our creativity? Read more »

It all began with a psych evaluation, one that would figure out what was wrong with me and what was right. Turns out, my IQ is bordering genius level with regards to the right brain and borderline normal with regards to the left brain. About half of that of my right brain. Among other things, I was diagnosed with a learning disorder that has no name. Essentially, the doctor explained, I cannot sequence properly.

He learned this by placing six cards with various scenarios drawn on them. Man frying eggs, man in bed, man putting coat on, man walking out door, etc. When asked to put the cards in order, I did and explained how it worked. The doctor looked baffled. Eyes bulging in a way that expressed intense disbelief, he barked, “How the hell did you make it through life? I mean you’ve just been accepted to VASSAR! How the hell did you do that?” Throwing his hands upwards, as if to alert the Man Upstairs what a freak I was, he half chuckled and choked on his own dramatic facial expression before quickly refocusing on the very specialized testing process (one that oddly resembled a culmination of pre-school’s greatest hits: playing with blocks, tossing colored rings, drawing pictures of my mommy and daddy, etc.)

I thought the ordering of the cards made sense. Sometimes I have eggs before bed. Was that a crime? My learning disorder was so “severe” that I should have been handicapped at a young age. I’m guessing my freakishly smart right brain helped the left side along with training wheels and though my essays were sometimes a mess logically speaking, I made A’s and found myself enrolled in gifted programs and classes.

The first time I heard about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I was spending some time with a ridiculously smart friend of mine. He was teaching undergraduates at the age of 17. Having skipped middle school completely, he enrolled in college at the tender age of 14. We sat in a white room scattered with mid-century furniture and he threw the 1,000+-page behemoth at the wall, leaving a proper dent. “I give up!” he said. “I’ve stopped and started this thing six times and I just don’t understand it.” And that was that.

Recently, while perusing the always wonderful tabled selections at The Strand, I lifted the hefty volume in my arms, opened it, and while I semi-discreetly sniffed the pages, I decided that I too, must try to read Infinite Jest. Hailed as an absolute masterpiece due to its impeccably tight writing (not ONE wasted word), length and composition (the rules of narrative definitely do not apply) by a former Claremont College professor and nationally ranked tennis player who hanged himself in 2008, the book needed to be read. I’m the kid who plowed through the works of William Shakespeare at age 11 and had to read Gone With the Wind because it was roughly 1,000 pages. So, natch, it had to be done. Reading Infinite Jest has become my February and (also maybe early March) proposition.

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While I have already expressed my love for Joyce Carol Oates and for Tony O’Neill and Jerry Stahl, all sort of gothic figures in their own right, I have neglected to discuss my other favorite author, Haruki Murakami, and his bizarre, beautiful graceful treatment of the gothic. His amazingly creative stories and phrasing aside, Murakami deals with what feels like a Japanese post-apocalyptic wasteland landscape, something like a deranged mish-mash of New York and Los Angeles that is, however, authentically Japanese.

His books, along with other contemporary Japanese authors, appeal to me because they feel so fresh, just as the American Gothic felt to me as compared to the English when I first discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now we also have the Southern Gothic (Flannery O’Conner, Faulkner, Ahem). I’d like to argue that Murakami and his contemporaries, such as Natsuo Kirino, write in the genre I’ll call the Urban Japanese Gothic Arena—a genre I have just completely made up here.

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The blinds are half-drawn in the retired detective’s office.  Two cigarettes smolder in an antique ashtray stolen from The Plaza, no doubt, in better days. The dank bulbs of fluorescent lights blink and bleep with each of the ex- detective’s heavy steps. May as well have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. He tore through piles on his metal desk, dinging drawers, feeling for moldy files that probably weren’t even there in the first place. A rattling, and a curvy brunette in a teddy and torn stockings appeared in the corner. “That commode couldn’t service me with my veins pumped full ‘a morphine,” she drawled in an accent every bit Staten Island as Marilyn Monroe…

As you can see, I’ve been reading noir lately. Not the good old classics, which the above text is meant to suggest, but those I’d like to call the “modern noir,” stories with all the pulp and theme told by characters that might have been dreamt up by Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs or, frankly, anyone whose lives have been touched by level-5 desperation—something I believe to belong to the noir’s essence. Read more »

Everyone has his or her literary “nerd” moment. You don’t realize how much you truly love the stuff until you do. Like an addict finally “hitting bottom,” the literary nerd moment comes when you least expect it, when you’re set for cruise control, when your eyes are sick and tearing with stretches of nameless, placeless road, somewhere crawling through Nebraska, Iowa, Western Illinois, Central Illinois. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” scrawls on loop and you have yet to notice the song continues to end and begin again, time and time again. The back seat of the car is full of trash from McDonald’s, Burger King, and oh—Culver’s, from when you did that detour into Wisconsin by mistake (or maybe it was really because your craving for a frozen custard started gnawing away at your soul so savagely you just had to stop at Culver’s). And then, bam! You’re in New York City with a bunch of Jersey plates honking at your back trying to cross the GW.

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This weekend, I was fortunate to attend a lecture given by one of my personal heroes, Joyce Carol Oates. Queen of the contemporary American (specifically New York-based) gothic, Oates is as prolific as she is profound.

I finally found my way to The Hilton on 53^rd Street and Sixth Avenue after taking 3 subways, a cab and then sprinting on my sprained ankle through the Casimir Pulaski parade on Fifth. Unable to find a seat due to my late arrival, I perched on the table in the back with my journal and a bleeding pen. There she was: the small, pale woman with shiny eyes that haunts the back cover of her books. I was surprised by how, well, sweet she sounded when not discussing evil fetuses and murderous country wives. These are the types of things that get me excited! Call me sick or macabre, but when I’m having a bad day, I appreciate the sound of a chainsaw mercilessly tearing through teenage flesh (on-screen only, I swear).

Though the lecture seemed to be geared towards the casual reader (not the obsessive gothic-loving freak of an English major I am), I found some gems in her speech, or at least some confirmations of my methods and madness. Read more »