The English seminar I designed for the boarding school in which I teach, Strange Literature, has been attracting a steady flow of seniors. A “strange” title? Well, the syllabus offers no Sci-Fi, let alone Fantasy with its frequent adjunct Horror. What I intended was to teach selected books with a unique slant toward life and which had a unique writing style.

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I open the course with a pair of short story opposites. Raymond Carver offers a Minimalist style and a somber survivalist look at life. “In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom.” (Why Don’t You Dance?) On the other hand, John Updike is one of our most ornate fiction writers in the 21st century. “The woods at their distance across the frosted lawn were a Chinese screen in which an immense alphabet of twigs lay hushed; a black robe crusted with white braid standing of its own stiffness.” (Crow in the Woods) Both men are able to look deeply into character and motivation. If their plots seem truncated, their intent is to show life is like that, often unfinished and unexplained.

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One of my non-fiction choices is an autobiography by Stephen Kuusisto. The premise of this book, as Kuusisto states late in the plot development, is that he was a blind man for the first thirty-six years of his life who pretended to see so he could be accepted into “normal” society. His encounters are hair-raising. “One of the fellows lifts me to my feet, spins me around. He’s talking spitfire cartoon gibberish. ‘What the. . .how the. . .didn’t you. . .waddya BLIND?’ I have concrete in my hair and beard. It hangs from my shirt like pelts strung around a fur trapper. ‘Yessir.’ “ (Planet of the Blind).

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Again using short fiction, I conclude the course with a duet of foreign writers. Poland’s Isaac Singer mystifies while making the students guffaw. “I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck.” (Gimpel the Fool) His shtetl characters are full of life, and the plot is often rambunctiously outlandish. Luis Borges brings the world of South America alive. Since he is the forerunner of Magic Realism, I try to choose stories that feature a more concrete rather than abstract premise. “With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it.” (The Waiting)

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Some of my students have been greatly moved by these books. One student wrote a very emotional essay inspired by Planet of the Blind, because he could see parallels to his brother with muscular dystrophy. Another boy could relate to the brutality in the neighborhood that Carver writes about. Someone finally spoke for him. Still another student was made more environmentally aware by reading Lopez’s Desert Notes, then on his own River Notes. If I could put my finger on the specific area in which I was influenced by this unique literature, I would note that I write more freely and more associatively now, as in this poem:

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WAITING FOR THE WORD

Through the filth, degradation,

pain, an inmate of Auschwitz

waits for the right word;

surrounded by light and wine

and camaraderie

the poets speak of

jazz, existentialism,

humor late into the night.

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The victim waits and nods

waits and nods until

almost offhandedly

he hears the word Hope

and his ancient soul sleeps;

the poets not knowing

what they have contributed

to the world beyond.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Ray Greenblatt, Guest Blogger

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Ray Greenblatt’s poetry has appeared in America, International Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly. His reviews have been published in Drexel Online Journal, English Journal, Joseph Conrad Today. His latest book Leavings of the Evening was published by Foothills Press.