Conversations with Jay Parini

By University Press of Mississippi

Jay Parini (b. 1948) is best known for his novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year, The Last Station, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; a former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London.

Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years--Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others.

These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626741713

Book preview

The Poets—Strangers

on the Edge of Town

Tony Cannella / 1977

From the [Scranton] Times-Tribune (October 2, 1977). Reprinted by permission.

In the days of old, poets occupied center stage in their societies. Their epics and romances enthralled disparate audiences in village squares and royal courts. The lyrics they spun were not only passwords in their lovers’ hearts but also their credentials for success—or at least success—in the workaday world. If a poet praised a king with panegyric, he was patronized and fed well. If he chose to lampoon the throne, he had the power to topple it or the privilege of losing his head in a noble cause. One way or another, the poet was heard. He counted.

And now, in the pragmatic ambience of technocratic society, where does the poet fit in?

For the most part, he doesn’t. For poetry as an expression of mass appeal, the times are threadbare, with one possible exception—the emergence of women as a substantial part of the poet population.

In the words of Jay Parini, a twenty-nine-year-old poet who will soon return to his native Scranton for a reading of his works, the contemporary poet often feels like a stranger at the edge of town. He wanders by himself, looking in, listening. His words ring in his or her own ears, and they may or may not find an audience. Poetry was once a language of communication, to some degree. Now it’s really language in search of its deepest voice, an effort to discern its truest lineaments. Robert Frost called it ‘the sound of sense.’

Parini spoke from his office at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where he is an assistant professor of English and director of the program in creative writing. "People look on poets as marginal figures. Once, centuries ago, poets occupied the center of culture. Poetry was the original form of literary expression, and our earlier major texts inhabit that form. I’m thinking of the Iliad and Odyssey. Gilgamesh, the great Sumerian epic. Or the Sanskrit epics, such as the Ramayana. Or the Hebrews Psalms—which is really the Norton Anthology of Hebrew lyrics, written by many hands. Nowadays, books of poetry are set aside, they rarely sell. But this might be a good thing, too. The lack of attention to poetry allows for a certain detachment. This is necessary for a poet’s work. When W. H. Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ he put his finger on a good thing. Poetry lives far from the commercial world, and this unburdens it, to some extent. It makes its own way."

He talked about the landscape of his poetry. Every poet has a private landscape at the back of his or her mind. For him, it’s the Scranton region, Lackawanna County. He says, It’s not a faceless, monolithic suburb. It has a distinct culture, a richness—the old buildings, the terrain, the people. I often make use of the imagery of this region, find metaphors in the coal mines, the abandoned breakers, the culm dumps.

Parini’s portraits of Scranton and Lackawanna County are not literal representations. They are distilled by imagination and the passage of time and they are representations of his youthful experiences here. As in Walking the Trestle, which follows, a recollection of a time when he walked out alone on a train trestle, having taken a bet that he would do it, his friends taunting him as he walks

Reviews for Conversations with Jay Parini

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thoroughly engrossing interviews with a man I believe to be one of America's finest living men of letters --novelist, poet, essayist, biographer, teacher, philosopher, Parini counts Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Borges, Peter Akroyd, Seamus Heaney and many other literary greats among his friends, colleagues and mentors. Inevitably some of these pieces are a bit repetitive, as the same ground was covered by more than one interviewer, but Parini never sounds like he's tired of his subject, or working from a script. And one or two of the selections are so thought-provoking and informative that I will be re-reading them often. Especially not-to-be-missed: Parini's "self-interview", in which he gets to all the questions he wishes people would ask him.Reviewed August 2019