Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

Three:
    Morning, Thinking of Empire 65
    The Blue Stones 66
    Tel Aviv and Life on the Mississippi 68
    The News Carried to Macedonia 70
    The Mosque in Jaffa 72
    Not Far from Here 73
    Sudden Rain 74
    Balzac 75
    Country Matters 76
    This Room 77
    Rhodes 78
    Spring 480 B.C 80
    Four
    Near Klamath 83
    Autumn 84
    Winter Insomnia 85
    Prosser 86
    At Night the Salmon Move . 87
    With a Telescope Rod on Cowiche Creek 88
    Poem for Dr. Pratt, a Lady Pathologist 89
    Wes Hardin: From a Photograph 90
    Marriage 92
    The Other Life 94
    The Mailman as Cancer Patient 95
    Poem for Hemingway & W.C. Williams 96
    Torture 97
    Bobber 98
    Highway 99E from Chico 99
    The Cougar 100
    The Current 102
    Hunter 103
    Trying to Sleep Late on a
    Poem for Karl Wallenda, Aerialist Supreme 106
    Deschutes River 108
    Forever 109
    STORIES
    Distance 113
    The Lie 123
    The Cabin 127
    Harry's Death 139
    The Pheasant 147
    Where Is Everyone? 155
    So Much Water So Close to Home 167
    THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW 187
    AFTERWORD 217
    ESSAYS
    ON WRITING
    Back in the mid-1960s, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It's an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.
    Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don't know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that's something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O'Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kit-tredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. LeGuin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
    It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
    Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has "fundamental accuracy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track.
    I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekov: "...and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.
    I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be