When I told a friend I was moving to Michigan, she replied, “Get four coats.” This was temperature-related advice, I think (it’s eleven degrees at the moment) — but, had I followed it, I could have worn something different to each of the readings I attended this past week. Ann Arbor was aglitter with literary lights — Donald Hall, Uwem Akpan, Brad Leithauser, Andrei Codrescu — and I was stuck in Eddie Bauer basic. Where was my mackintosh, my frock coat, my doublet, my smoking jacket?
No matter. I would have enjoyed the first reading had I been dressed in tatters. Donald Hall taught at the University of Michigan from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s, and he returned last week as a conquering laureate. He recalled bringing Robert Frost to campus fifty years earlier, and having coffee with Robert Graves in the Michigan Union. (How did Graves have the energy to produce three or four books a year? Hall asked. Graves’ answer: “Twenty-minute naps.”) During his years in Ann Arbor, Hall wrote each morning from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., “drinking black coffee and looking at line breaks.” He wrote magnificent poems — “The Long River,” “The Man in the Dead Machine” — and he met and married Jane Kenyon. The two poets moved to Hall’s family farm in New Hampshire in 1975; Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995. At last week’s reading, Hall spoke of writing “Without,” the title poem of perhaps his best-known collection, while Kenyon was still alive. “After she died,” he said, “I put it in the past tense.”
Uwem Akpan is having a present-tense moment. As the first short-story writer to be anointed by Oprah, he’s seen his well-reviewed collection Say You’re One of Them soar to the top of the Times best-seller list. Akpan’s connection to Ann Arbor is more recent than Hall’s: a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest, he received an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Michigan in 2006. His first graduate-workshop teacher, Eileen Pollack, recently wrote a lovely piece about her student on CNN.com. And Akpan returned the favor at his reading, lavishly praising Pollack and his many friends and mentors in the audience. The best part about the reading, in fact, was how little it felt like a reading. Akpan answered questions; he joked and giggled; he exhorted students not to commit suicide and not to “skip class for three weeks because your boyfriend dumped you.” It was more of a revival than a reading. And afterward, a small miracle happened — but miracles always get their own (future) posts.
Brad Leithauser’s The Art Student’s War, while passed over by Oprah, was selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2009 by The New York Times. I can see why. Leithauser remains one of our great literary shape-shifters — equally adept at fiction, poetry, light verse, and criticism — and his reading, held at the Ann Arbor Borders (the flagship Borders, or “Borders #1,” for what it’s worth), allowed for several of his gifts to shine. Beginning with a witty riff on Marvell and academia, he soon turned to his new novel, set in 1940s Detroit. The following passage left me howling with happiness:
They stood and watched a very animated chimpanzee behind a sheet of glass. He swung from a sort of hat rack, he hung upside down, he bounced off a stool on springs. There was a sign on the wall behind him: “Greetings! My name is Custard and I used to play with a spare tire. But I turned it in for salvage, as my part in the War Effort.”
Custard, the irrepressible patriot, peered out coyly from behind a wooden crate. Then he stooped low for a drink of water. He must have been ten feet away.
And then (with an altogether astounding accuracy and jetting force) Custard squirted from his mouth a stream of water, directly at the two of them. The water crashed and broke against the glass, sending Henry and Bea leaping backward — it was all so sudden! — and Bea released a little scream. And Henry, too, released a cry — a much higher sound, almost a bleat, than you’d ever expect from his measured throat.
And Custard? Custard threw back his evil skull and howled and howled. He danced — he bounced and leaped with blazing glee. From ear to ear he grinned, grotesquely. The human beings? Their backward stumbling and stunned sheepish looks — these were everything Custard had hoped for . . .
From Detroit, then, to Bucharest. The week’s final visitor, Andrei Codrescu, delivered an elaborately titled talk: “How to Make a Revolution: A Guide to Romania’s Fin-de-Si??cle Media Spectacle as Performed by a Dying Regime, a Willing Populace, and the International Press Corps.” He attributed the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe less to Ronald Reagan than to Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen. He spoke of the “certain gift that the Communist leaders had of looking dead before they were actually dead.” Taking questions, he turned on an audience member, calling the man’s question “insane.” The final question from the crowd was actually a comment:
Audience member: “I’ve been listening to your commentaries on public radio for many years, and it’s a pleasure to reconcile the voice with a face.”
Codrescu: “It’s just a body; I have a closet full of them.”