Stray Questions for: Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poetry and three books of essays, including most recently “Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.”
What are you working on?
I’m just finishing up a novella and stories to be published early in 2010, called “Apparition and Late Fictions.” And a book of poems — my fourth — called “Walking Papers.” Living in fiction is very seductive — the creation and destruction of characters, the hoops we make to make them jump through en route to their little dénouements — a fetching and terrible enterprise. So I’ve made a start on a novel about life in the Bush years. The main character’s a youngish clergywoman who comes to grief, goes astray and, I suppose, learns the lessons of redemptive suffering. Poems are the necessary counterbalance: all metaphor and formal language intrigues — the art of subtraction and careful counting — the reading and writing of them are essential practices. On one corner of the desk I’m piling up heretofore uncollected essays with an eye toward maybe a book of same.
How much time — if any — do you spend on the Web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?
If it’s a distraction, it’s one that suits my purposes. Montaigne would have approved of the Web, seeing in it, as I’m sure he would, a paradigm for the ties that bind even the most disparate things — much the way Gordon Lish once told me, “eventually everything rhymes with everything else,” or my late grandmother would always insist, “everything is the same but different.”
The Web is like having my favorite haunts — library and post office, theater and gallery, newsroom, museum and archives — all in the same stone’s throw. No less the mall, casino and bawdy house; but those are dissipations I’ve, for the most part, avoided. For pure pleasure, an hour’s mousing around dictionary.com is hard to better.
Whose books are generally shelved around yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be between them?
At Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor — one of the nation’s great bookstores — my poems sit between Jane Kenyon and Edna St. Vincent Millay on a shelf that narrows to Robert Lowell and Richard McCann, Thomas Lux and Archibald MacLeish. Grand company: the living and the dead. My essays are shelved with Phillip Lopate, Brett Lott and Jacki Lyden — pals and heroes of mine. Of course, it’s always a shock to see something you’ve done in private, taking its place in the public square. To be among such elegant voices, well, it is the thing to be wished for.
December 5, 2008, 11:00 am
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