For over four decades poet Larry Fagin has delivered no-nonsense writing advice during private classes held in a setting that is decidedly unacademic: his own New York City apartment. The Glass Filter I WAS LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY, eight months from earning an MFA in creative writing, when a friend suggested I take a class with the poet Larry Fagin. She said it would salvage an education from what we mutually agreed was a broken program. I’d stopped attending fiction workshops a month before, unable to sit through abstract critiques from a professor who either hadn’t read submissions or didn’t have time to write meaningful comments. Many of my classmates seemed more interested in explaining what they thought literature should or shouldn’t be, instead of investigating the problems a particular story presented. The blanket support the program offered seemed more damag- ing than helpful to most of us—especially those, including me, who simply needed to be told that our manuscripts were lousy and our best bet for writing something of substance would be to throw them out and start over. The school allowed graduate students to take one exten- sion class per semester at no extra cost. I was paying my own way—working two jobs, plus a work-study gig in the audio- visual department—and was bent on getting my money’s worth. I was also exceptionally lost as a writer, trapped in a web of clichés, meaningless abstraction, and just about every pitfall a young writer can stumble into. So on a chilly Tuesday night in September 2003 I joined thirteen other students for BY P O R T E R F O X the first session of Fagin’s class Experimental Poetry. PHOTOGRAPHS BY PIETER M. VAN HATTEM

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profile LARRY FAGIN

The poet was sitting at the far end (he also called it “verticality”), you have of a rectangle of tables when I walked a better chance of creating something in—handouts, briefcase, scarf, and interesting. jacket heaped beside him. He waited Some of Fagin’s anecdotes referred for us to take off our hats and gloves to his time with ’s circle of and open our notebooks before ad- poets in San Francisco and later with dressing the group. the second generation of the New “None of us will ever be famous,” York School of poets, among them he said. Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berk- The woman to my right set her pen son, and Aram Saroyan. He’d pub- on the table. The clock ticked. Fagin lished most of them in his magazine looked cheerfully around the room, and small press, Adventures in Poetry, then assigned our first exercise: Make starting in the late 1960s, and was very a list of five questions about writing. active in the downtown writing scene. As a fiction student I already felt out He codirected the Poetry Project at of place, so I watched in dread as Fagin St. Mark’s with Anne Waldman from black mountain institute picked up my list first and read it aloud: 1971 to 1976, and founded Danspace, offers up to three residential fellow- “How do you have a successful writ- the dance program at St. Mark’s, in ships to published novelists, poets, ing career without selling out?” Then 1975 and directed it until 1980. playwrights, journalists, literary non- he said, “Career…. Carrreeeeeeer. Fagin has authored or coauthored fiction writers, historians, political sci- Kho-rreeaahhrrr. Korea.” fifteen books of poetry—most re- entists, and independent scholars The class laughed. Fagin read my cently, Complete Fragments, published whose work ranges away from the next question: “What do you need to this past spring by Cuneiform Press. American experience and into inter- know to be a great writer?” national terrain, and who have an on- Despite being a voluminous writer who going project that would benefit from “Everything!” he said gleefully. overlapped several literary circles, he a period of sustained immersion. For the next two hours he talked somehow managed to keep a low pro- about ego, distraction, inspiration, Ken- file relative to most of his peers. As Candidates for the 2013-14 academic neth Koch, Michelangelo Antonioni, for his reputation among them, Allen year must have published at least one alien abductions, foot traffic in the Ginsberg, who lived down the hall book at the time of application. One East Village, the beginning of the end from Fagin’s apartment for two de- fellowship each year is reserved of the world in 1973, cats, strangeness, cades, once said, “I don’t know of a for an international writer; foreign the Naropa Institute, and . better editor and teacher of poetry or nationals conversant in English are He spoke slowly, choosing his words, al- prose.” encouraged to apply. There are no ways angling toward a larger idea—that He doesn’t pull his punches in the degree requirements. writing is hard, there’s some magic in classroom, and by our second meeting it, you can’t control the magic, once a two students had dropped out. The Fellows receive $50,000, a comput- work is in print it’s no longer yours. And following week—after a rant on aca- er-equipped office, and access to when you give up the illusion of success demic brainwashing—there were ten UNLV’s Lied Library. All fellows will of us left. Two weeks later, when we fi- work daily in the BMI offices, partici- nally began working in earnest on our pate in a special public forum, and at- PORTER FOX is a writer, teacher, and the manuscripts, seven students remained, tend other BMI programs. editor of the literary travel-writing journal each of whom had canceled obligations Nowhere (nowheremag.com), who lives in on Tuesday nights so as not to miss a Brooklyn, New York. His fiction, essays, moment of the class. Application deadline: and nonfiction have been published in the December 1, 2012 Fagin’s knowledge of literature, art, New York Times Magazine, the Believer, and music is expansive and exhaus- To apply: blackmountaininstitute. Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic tive. I’d only heard of a fraction of the org/programs/fellows.php Adventure, Powder, Salon, Narrative, the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third on his reading list—it was 935 titles Coast, and Conjunctions, among others. He long—and couldn’t put down the ones has been anthologized in Best American I read: James Schuyler’s Alfred and Travel Writing, nominated for two Guinevere (Harcourt, Brace, 1958), Mi- Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the chael Rumaker’s Gringos (Grove Press, 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. 1967), and Jane Bowles’s My Sister’s

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Hand in Mine (Ecco Press, 1978), among others. He emphasized strangeness (not cuteness), the in- formal, the idea that the writer should keep the reader off balance and never allow the reader to be completely comfort- able. He taught that you can save a poem by tak- ing the poetry out of it. “Simple ideas in complex relationships,” was one of his mantras. He spoke of ellipses and the impor- tance of oblique angles. He taught elliptically, too, explaining tension by describing a scene in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Handouts included a list of the Ten Best and Ten Worst Jobs in attempt to break out of the rut I was in. learning to finish something. For over , letters to customer-service He looked at the first poem for some a year in New York City I hadn’t fin- centers, poems by former students, and time. I waited, uncomfortable, sweat- ished a single story. Yet when I reached Japanese children’s poems. Coming ing, vividly aware of what a terrible the sidewalk, I knew with more cer- from my graduate program, where one writer I was. He put the poem aside, tainty than I’d ever known anything teacher couldn’t remember the protag- flipped through the rest, and set them that this story was complete. onist of the book we’d been studying down. all semester—much less our names—I “These aren’t poems,” he said. I nod- AGIN is seventy-five years realized that for the first time someone ded. He was right, of course. “They’re old. As a young man he had was actually trying to teach me some- stories,” he said. For the next hour he Dudley Moore’s narrow thing. removed line breaks and stitched sen- F features and heavy-lidded Toward the end of the semester tences and paragraphs together. When eyes. He stood five-foot-eight, wore Fagin asked if I’d like to study with he needed a line, I gave it to him and he tailored pants and shirts, and kept his him privately. He teaches poetry, fic- inserted it. When he thought of one, he wavy dark hair formulaically unkempt. tion, nonfiction, and screenwriting to wrote it in the margin and looked up at He is handsome and expressionless in around thirty students either in his me, eyebrows arched. The dialogue was photographs from that time, seemingly apartment or online (which he now good, he said, but the story line needed looking past the lens at something promotes on his website, larryfagin to be “skewed.” The reader should be more interesting. Friends recall how .com). In eight weeks he’d already made unsure not only of what comes next, instantly likable he was, with his wild my MFA experience worthwhile, so but sometimes of what just happened. sense of humor and breadth of interest the following Wednesday I climbed Halfway through each piece he’d stop and knowledge. “When he entered a the stairs at 437 East Twelfth Street, and say, “Aha!” and scribble a title at room,” Padgett says, “it was if he might knocked on the door of his tenement the top of the page: “Which Is More have owned it at some point. And he walk-up, and stepped into the apart- Powerful?,” “My Favorite Things,” never left. They had to drag him out.” ment where he’d been writing, editing, “Dans La Manière De.” His hair is snow-white now and and teaching since 1969. By the end of the two-hour session he wears a thin gray beard, still dark Fagin was sitting at a circular oak we’d finished one story and had a good under his chin. He wears Levi’s and table editing a manuscript when I ar- start on three others. I read the com- running shoes almost every day. After rived. He didn’t look up. He pointed pleted piece as I walked down the stairs. nine years of mentoring and friend- to the chair beside him. A few minutes It was short, just a page and a half. A ship, I can say he is the most generous, later I handed him a sheaf of poems friend once told me that the greatest knowledgeable, and devoted teacher I’d written that summer—a Hail Mary thing an MFA program can give you is and writer I have ever met. Like Spicer,

73 P OETS & WRI TERS profile LARRY FAGIN though, he’s been known to join ranks Helga has an eating disorder. She’s a with what Horace called the irritabile monist. I can dig vatum, “the irritable race of poets.” He it. I mean, why did the universe go to refers to my generation—I was born all that bother? in 1972—as “pod people” and believes Bears drunk on honey wrestling with that our lives, minds, writing, and art monkeys, elec- are programmatic. He can be impa- tric burgundy odd-toed ungulates, tient and curt in the classroom but and the two-headed never spiteful. He laments “the recent snake—one head for eating and death of imagination,” but has some- drinking, the other how retained an inexhaustible desire to teach, lead, create, and reveal. just for thinking. Complete Fragments is the first non- collaborative book of Fagin’s poetry to Fagin is the antithesis of a name- be published in over thirty years. The dropper, neglecting to mention—and eighty-one prose poems take in phi- sometimes denying—that he played a losophy, art, war, jazz, cartoon whales, part in the New York School move- Chinese emperors, shrunken heads, ment. He talks about the past in a birds, poetry, identity, time, silence, dismissive tone that masks his regret sex, and death—the last two treated that some people, ideas, scenes, and with sarcasm. Some of the poems times are gone. (He quotes from a let- were written spontaneously, and oth- ter wrote to Kerouac in ers deliberately; there are connections 1958: “Where did the great love we put and correspondences but little con- out for them go?”) He rarely sched- ventional continuity. As David Shap- ules readings and seems disinterested iro says, “Larry Fagin’s new work, like in how he will be remembered as a lit- fine mosaic, is an essay, a threshold, erary figure. and something like figures in a land- So it took a few years, nine to be scape blasted apart. Unlike Rimbaud’s exact, for me to ask him in any detail lush prose poems, which so many try about his past. I eventually learned to imitate, these engage in an aesthetic that he was born in New York City— of deflation. They are the art of sinking in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of while remaining solid.” From Complete Queens—on July 21, 1937. He lived in Fragments: a three-story apartment building with his parents and maternal grandparents Unplanned Account on the corner of Mott and Frisco. “I’ve Everyone has a story. The mountain been told that I take after my grandfa- threw rocks at me. ther,” he says. “He was from Budapest I stood up to it. At the top I built a and had a wicked sense of humor. He shelf for my record. worked for the Roosevelt administra- There was enough sky for another tion in some minor capacity. He was a life, an abutment of ward heeler and sold real estate and in- air. Science itself authorizes blue, surance. Sometimes he’d visit a house- whoever comes along wife during the day, ask her to cook may have some. Up here one can her husband’s favorite dish for dinner, appreciate the eye as then go back that night to sell the guy an exposed part of the brain. That’s life insurance.” Helga, the chick His father took a job managing a who shares my pad. She’s not really construction firm in Los Angeles in orange, it’s the 1942, and the family, grandparents reception. We’re moving the aerial included, moved to Burbank. Fagin’s into the hall. I’m an parents were generous and easygoing emotional guy who lacks a cohesive and, after the birth of his sister, he was point of view, and left largely to himself. He explored the

SEP T OC T 2012 74 profile LARRY FAGIN neighborhood on his Schwinn with his and . For the next few way. Poets get in their own way.” Spicer pals and hitchhiked into Hollywood to weeks, Fagin shared a tiny room there was a reluctant mentor, but proud and go to the movies at Grauman’s Chi- with two British students who were possessive of the group’s work. When nese Theatre. His gang of roughneck passing through town. Ginsberg, who George Stanley moved from San Fran- kids wiggled under the electrified fence became a lifelong friend, introduced cisco to New York for a year, Spicer surrounding the back lots of Warner him to Tristan Tzara, one of Fagin’s shunned him. “He didn’t want poems Bros. at night to play on the fake pirate heroes, and other poets, artists, and to even cross over to the East Bay,” ships used in the old Errol Flynn mov- musicians. When he returned to New Fagin says. ies. Or they’d sneak onto W. C. Fields’s York Cit y he met LeRoi and Hettie Spicer’s letters in After Lorca deeply property in Toluca Lake and swim in Jones and became friendly with some influenced Fagin’s own poetry, espe- his pool when the great man was on of the writers they published in their cially the passages on writing: “The the road. magazine, Yugen. perfect poem has an infinitely small In 1952, Lou Fagin accepted an offer After graduating from the Univer- vocabulary.” It took three years for to work for the U.S. Army Corps of sity of Maryland, Fagin moved to San Fagin to show Spicer his work, which Engineers in Salzburg, Austria, where Francisco to study literature at San by then had achieved the sparse, the family stayed for four years. They Francisco State College. For the next precise lyricism that Berrigan ad- lived in a small villa at the foot of the four years he lived in a series of rooms mired when he described the poet Gaisberg and had a cook and a gar- and small apartments in North Beach. “whose formal concerns are power- dener. Fagin took the Orient Express He reconnected with Meltzer and met ful, whose elegance is self-effacing, to boarding school in Vienna and re- Michael McClure, , and whose conclusions, however di- turned home on the weekends. Some- Richard Brautigan, and others. For a sastrous, are always accepted.” where along the way he fell in with while he lived at 444 Columbus Av- petty criminals selling black-market enue, across the street from Gino and The Skeleton cigarettes and tobacco. He bought Carlo’s Bar, where a group of poets, in- The skeleton has his own packs for twenty cents on extra ra- cluding Spicer, gathered nightly. One bathing suit tion cards at the PX, then sold them afternoon Fagin was studying Peter for seventy cents. At age fifteen he was Robinson’s Chaucer in a booth, when He enjoys swimming and being flush with cash. He spent the money on Spicer, from an adjacent table, asked in the world books, clothes, and travel. That year he what he was reading. read Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Tropic “Troilus,” Fagin said. The xylophones are playing of Cancer. Posing as an older man with “Read from it,” Spicer replied. peacefully “woman problems,” he corresponded After nodding along with the verse with Henry Miller. (Fagin: “What for a few lines, Spicer recited a col- The skeleton is dancing do I do about this girlfriend?” Miller umn and a half from memory. He on the beach (quoting Basho): “Throw away your asked Fagin to drop by the bar that crutches! Walk on!”) A year later he night to meet some poets. Fagin did, We respect his frugality, neatness began writing poetry and short fiction. and continued to do so for the next patience, tact Fagin spent much of his late teens three years. and early twenties traveling between “Spicer’s circle wasn’t just a forum He’s not just another Europe and the United States. He en- for Spicer,” Fagin says, “but he was the skinny person rolled at Los Angeles City College in most compelling person there. The 1957, where he met poet David Melt- bar talk was mostly gossip, baseball, Spicer was a heavy drinker most of zer. In West Germany, he took Uni- and occasional literary references.” his life and by his last public reading, versity of Maryland extension courses He began to read the authors Spicer at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and continued to write. The follow- recommended: “Chaucer, Pope, early in 1965, he was in serious decline. At ing July he was in , walking in the editions of Tolkien, Raymond Chan- the conference, Fagin met Berrigan, Tuileries, when he saw a young man dler, some science fiction, and all the Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Lewis carrying a turtle on his shoulder. It Oz books.” Warsh, Ed Sanders, and others whose was Piero Heliczer, a poet, filmmaker, Spicer wore white socks with his suit, work had been collected in Donald and proprietor of the Dead Lan- sat in a corner booth, sipped brandy, Allen’s influential anthology The guage Press. Heliczer brought Fagin and listened more than he spoke. “His New (Grove Press, to the famous “Beat Hotel” at 9 Rue thoughts on writing were straightfor- 1960). When Spicer died on August Gît-le-Cœur, where he met Ginsberg, ward,” Fagin says. “It’s very difficult to 17, the poets at Gino and Carlo’s dis- William Burroughs, , write a good poem. Beauty gets in the persed. Fagin flew to London, where

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his parents were living, then traveled also improvised a lot. Kids came up with MASTER OF through Europe. He ran into Wald- some startling images and offbeat ideas. FINE ARTS IN man and Warsh at a party a year later. And every kid was published in maga- They’d been living in New York City’s zines paid for by the school districts.” East Village and convinced him that it Fagin taught in all five of the city’s was the place to be. In the fall of 1967, boroughs off and on for eighteen years, Creative Fagin packed his things and moved usually sitting in on three forty-five- back to New York for the last time. minute classes one day a week. The pay was seventy-five dollars a day—enough WArT iCUtNiYng ’D never thought much about how to live on back then, he says. He wrote teachers learned to teach, in the a teachers guide with Padgett called same way I never wondered how “Book of Methods” in 1972, then a I parents or priests learned to do study of catalogue verse, The List Poem ONE MAGNIFICENT CITY what they do. They seemed ordained: (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, To question how they got their post 1991). would be to question your faith in In 1975 Ginsberg and Waldman FOUR REMARKABLE them. So I was surprised when I asked asked Fagin to teach at Naropa Institute MFA PROGRAMS: a fellow student how Fagin got such in Boulder, Colorado. The Jack Kerouac BROOKLYN COLLEGE great results from his students—he’d School of Disembodied Poetics was still just placed two in Bard College’s uncredited and semi-improvised. There CITY COLLEGE highly competitive graduate writing were dirt roads in Boulder then and no HUNTER COLLEGE program—and he told me that Fagin malls. Some of the poets lived in the QUEENS COLLEGE learned to teach from the best. venerable but (at the time) down-at-the- Around the time Fagin moved back to heels Hotel Boulderado, where faculty New York City, the Academy of Amer- stayed up most of the night gossiping ican Poets created a program called and gabbing about poetry, Buddhism, Poets in the Schools, which brought and teaching. (Though he never took guest writers to the city’s public school Buddhist vows, Fagin considers himself system. Koch participated, then headed a Buddhist—a “fellow traveler,” he says.) up a more intensive class the following In addition to Ginsberg and Waldman, year at P.S. 61 on East Twelfth Street, the faculty included Burroughs, Corso, funded by Teachers & Writers Collab- Fagin, Michael Brownstein, and Dick orative. Koch’s book about teaching at Gallup, as well as a rotating list of guest P.S. 61, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (Chel- teachers: Creeley, Whalen, Robert sea House Publishers, 1970), launched Duncan, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette the program into the national spotlight, Mayer, Jack Collom, and Anselm Hollo. with reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Fagin spent every summer and a ALL PART OF THE Newsweek, and LIFE, and an interview few winters in Boulder for the next ten CITY UNIVERSITY with Barbara Walters on Good Morning years. He married Susan Noel, whom OF NEW YORK America. he met at Naropa, in 1980. When they State arts councils across the country returned to New York full-time a few started hiring poets to work in schools, years later, he brought what he’d learned CUNY.EDU/ACADEMICS/PROGRAMS/NOTABLE/ and in New York City many of Fagin’s to a growing roster of private students. CREATIVE-WRITING-AT-CUNY.HTML peers began teaching. Fagin’s first gig “What had been missing for most of my was with Bill Zavatsky at the Brooklyn students was one-on-one, in-depth per-

Children’s Museum in 1967. “The kids’ sonal attention. That kind of close study poems were generally more exciting isn’t available in a university setting. So than most adult poetry being published, I began ‘piano lessons,’ working with and that’s probably still true,” Fagin individuals of any persuasion and any says. “We had a captive crew of seven- age. What I tried to develop ultimately to ten-year-olds and started developing came down to mirroring my students. ideas like ‘ingredients’—which were five “Most writers have been taught to words the kids had to use in a poem or write poetry and fiction the way it ap- in a story. We gave assignments, but we pears in books and magazines. Too

SEP T OC T 2012 76 profile LARRY FAGIN often what’s left out is the most valu- ing assignments that were so precise able thing of all: daily speech, how we they seemed like drug prescriptions— actually talk. A lot of what passes for and the results were often as transfor- imaginative writing, especially poetry, mative. I wasn’t a true believer, though, is dominated by words and phrases the until I lost a manuscript he’d edited and writer has never once said aloud. So it I asked him to edit it again. I found the becomes literature. That language can original a month later and was amazed be stuffy, brittle, false, unless it’s coun- to see more than seventy-five identical terbalanced by or mixed in with some- line edits on both copies. thing more supple, offhand, spoken, Fagin’s lessons went beyond writ- strange. How do you teach strangeness? ing. We talked about art, film, history, At least you can point it out.” philosophy, sports, and human rela- I visited Fagin once a week during my tionships. Every few weeks he’d call last year of grad school. His apartment to ask if I wanted to go to a movie or was always in a state of controlled chaos. an art exhibit. We started a cineclub at Books, manuscripts, galleys, letters, and my apartment with a half dozen other bills sat in neat stacks on the kitchen students and watched movies by Hitch- counter. The building was constructed cock, Ford, Ozu, and Cocteau—after in 1894; the paint was peeling and the pizza and a short lecture. pipes hissed. In the living room, three His relationship with some students bookshelves held art books: Uccello, was reciprocal. I installed a new air con- Kline, Guston, Watteau. ditioner in his bedroom and invited him He edited on paper with a Blackwing to a Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium, 602 pencil. On his computer he used where he refused to stand for the na- 10-point Adobe Garamond Pro font tional anthem and almost got us into (14-point for titles), double spacing a fight. I fixed doorknobs and windows for the draft, and a 1.2-line spacing for in his apartment and counseled him the final copy. (“Single spacing makes through problems with his computer, me sick,” he says.) He read slowly, tap- cordless phone, bank, and remote con- ping each word with the pencil, mak- trol. Throughout, he constantly urged ing check marks, question marks, and me to read more, think harder, write suggestions in the margins. He crossed harder, and broaden my frame of refer- out anything resembling sentimental- ence. ity, melodrama, confession, or name- “Some people equate the far left with dropping. Modifiers lived on shaky the middle of the road,” he says. “They ground. Metaphors were doomed. can’t tell the difference anymore. But He treated my stories like physical I keep pushing the left because that’s things during our sessions, speaking where all the surprise and excitement about them in medical, psychic, even and strangeness is. You can’t mandate Jungian terms. He said it was difficult strangeness, but it can be recognized in for the writer to get any distance from other people’s writing.” himself. He spoke about myopia as if I had actually contracted it, instructed HERE is a glass filter between me to marinate a finished story for a few teacher and student that re- weeks “like a flank steak.” He quoted fracts information toward Spicer’s belief that Martians dictate T what a student needs. What poems from outer space and that a I needed was to write something real, writer is like a radio: You need to fine- and to do that I needed real criticism, tune yourself, keep the airwaves clear of models, and a teacher I could trust. static (egotism) for the message to come Every story I sent to literary journals through. He said that one of the hardest before I started working with Fagin skills to learn is telling the difference had been—justifiably—rejected. Two between “what’s in your head and what years after I started private lessons, you put on paper,” and prescribed read- every piece I sent out was published.

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In the fall of 2010, Fagin and I flew or how to say it. He underwent several “Well, that’s perfect!” Save. Print. to Paris to see some of the old haunts tests that winter and in the spring had The galleys arrived from Cuneiform he’d described to me. We went to Jar- a stent implanted in an artery. When via e-mail last December. Fagin for- din du Luxembourg first, then took the he was released from the hospital, he warded them to me and I read them Metro to Polidor, a favorite of James said he wanted to go to the ocean. We late one night in bed. The poems were Joyce, Miller, and Ernest Hemingway. drove to my aunt’s house in Hampton different from his earlier work. They We were up early the next morning Bays, walked on the beach and cooked were lyrical and sweeping. The humor to drop by 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur and salmon on the grill. The next day he was still there; so were the ellipses and then the old Surrealist café, Les Deux spent the morning working on his strangeness. I stayed up for hours and Magots. We found tiny Square Rapp, Complete Fragments manuscript. His read slowly. The experience was like with its beautiful art nouveau lattice plan called for eighty-one poems and deciphering a dream, with bits of rec- that afternoon, then went to a park he was on number seventy-nine. When ognizable information and giant leaps bench near the Eiffel Tower where his I returned to the house, he’d finished in between. wife once drew a portrait of him. the eightieth. Fagin began making last-minute We stayed up late that night, talking Later that winter we laid out a changes until, after two weeks, he was to the new owner of Hôtel du Nord— proof of the book’s cover in Microsoft happy with the layout. Still, it had been where Marcel Carné made a film of the Word. I’m not a designer and had no three decades since his last book of same name in 1938—now a chic bar idea what I was doing. He’d had me poetry and he was apprehensive about near Canal Saint-Martin. Later still, “freak” images onto countless chap- the blurbs and some of the prepubli- we climbed out our hotel window onto book covers over the years, though, cation publicity. It was funny to hear a tiny balcony and looked at the moon- so I inserted a drawing by Glen Bax- him wonder aloud about how the work lit roofs of the fifth arrondissement. ter, and he placed the title. Then we would be received. In an ironic twist, I A few months after we returned jostled it around—“Stop moving so realized that it didn’t matter. The book to New York, Fagin looked down at fast!”—until he held up his hand. He was merely a book. There were poems a page in a book, saw the word also, looked at the image for a moment, in it. They came from outer space and and couldn’t figure out what it meant leaned close to the screen and said, no longer belonged to him.

Pan-European MFA Creative Writing

Dublin Barcelona Vienna/Bratislava

Faculty: Writing is a journey... Fred Leebron (program director) Robert Antoni Gwyneth Lewis and a destination. David Bezmozgis Dinaw Mengestu Je!rey Greene Jayne Anne Phillips Aleksandar Hemon Kathryn Rhett One annual summer residency Jake Lamar David St. John

Faculty and locale profiles at mfa.cedarcrest.edu.

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