“Cool Customer”: Joan Didion at the 92nd Street Y

posted by Pearl Abraham

Asked whether she wanted an autopsy of her husband, Joan Didion said yes. She also wanted to be there, in the room, though she knows how gruesome autopsies are. Why? To know what happened; to be there; to see. This is also why she writes, and so The Year of Magical Thinking is a book written in order to know what happened, perhaps to absorb and believe it. It is possible that the human need to recite the details of trauma and grief is always a way of making it real. “Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks…I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.”

Ms. Didion compared non-fiction writing to sculpture, in which you have a large unformed mass, your notes, your mountain of research, and your thoughts, at which you then chip away to give it shape. With fiction, she said, you have nothing, you have to make it all up. “You wake up every morning only with a smile and a shoeshine… You have to re-animate yourself every morning.” You ask yourself “whether the world really needs another novel, and does it need this novel. After which, you don’t get interested again in this novel until 5 p.m.”

And now I must go back to asking those questions of my novel.

20 October 2005 | events |

Words of Awe

posted by Pearl Abraham

I attended the W.S. Merwin tribute at the 92nd Street Y on Monday night (courtesy of Beatrice.com) and came away with the feeling that I’d heard our prophets speak. Each of the three poets who read, by way of introducing Merwin, has a particular relationship with him and the poems they selected reflected that. Naomi Shihab Nye, whose work I don’t yet know, read, among other poems, a Lucille Clifton poem dedicated to W.S. Merwin; Edward Hirsch, who has an interest in Sufic writings, read some of Merwin’s more mystical work, including one about his black dog Molly, animals being a frequent subject of Sufic poetry; Gerald Stern spoke of and read poems set in NYC, specifically the Waverly Place walk-ups in which he and Merwin once lived. And then Mr. Merwin himself stepped out and read a selection of poems that ranged from his earliest books to most recent, some not yet published. W.S. Merwin’s words, the meanings they made, his quiet attentiveness to the natural world, and most palpably, his celebration of what’s good in this world imparted a numinous quality not often experienced at public events, sitting, as I was, in a near full house at the Y’s Kaufman Hall.

W.S. Merwin’s, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), is a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry.

13 October 2005 | events |