Taking a Break from Andres Dubus (III)

I never thought I would like a poet named Bucky Sinister, but today I am pleased to announce that I have risen above my own preconceived notions of myself. I recently read Good Sir Bucky’s poem “The Gray Side of the Moon” on theRumpus.net, and really enjoyed it. It's kind of a plain-spoken narrative, (darkly) funny at times, about leaving Boston as a youth and becoming a drug addict in California, and it mixes in imagery from The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. You should take a look. Since reading it, I ran an author search on ohiolink for Sinister, Bucky but apparently no public universities in Ohio have climbed aboard the Bucky bandwagon. I’ll have to be content waiting until someone gives me an amazon.com gift card, though I have no idea whether or not his other material is anything like this.

I’ve also been indulging in my Andres Dubus (III) addiction, reading both Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andres Dubus, and Townie by Andres Dubus III. I was a little hesitant to do this, since I like them both so much, and what I really wanted was to know more about their lives and writing rather than feel like I understand them. Are you with me? I just wanted more, but not for any end goal. I wasn't out to dissect the eagle. My second fear was that I would read something about them that would make me dislike them as writers. My episode with reading about Bruce Springsteen throwing a cake in a woman’s face at a concert still haunts me, though he was young, and there was a reasonable explanation for said cake-throwing. Not to say that I expect pristine lifestyles from writers, or even that I care very much about what they do, but Andres Dubus (not the third) writes with so much compassion that to find out he was a wife-beater or something would have deadened his writing for me.

I’m not going to launch into Townie other than to say, it’s really good, and reading it along with Meditations made for an interesting comparison. Lots of the same periods are covered from different angles—such as when and why Dubus the former started carrying a firearm, Dubus’s accident (he was hit by a car while stopping to help someone outside Boston and was in a wheelchair the rest of his life), and the relationship between Dubus and his first family. The latter circumstance is sad, especially how Dubus III and his family are essentially abandoned by their writer father, who never seems to realize how bad off his kids are.

In Townie, Dubus III’s slow journey away from the violence of his Boston youth is riveting. He’s able to articulate the consequences of physical violence and the restraint necessary to resist it so well. My only qualm is that he never really summarized where he was at with his opinion on the necessity of physical violence—in a long, beautiful passage at the end of the book he shows through a confrontation on a train that he’s willing to die to protect a boxcar of sleeping schoolgirls, but he also shows he’s willing to die rather than fight. He never really delves into a situation where violence might be necessary for the prevention of further violence, which I would have been interested to see him write about. Would he go so far as to say such a situation doesn't exist? I doubt it.

Finally, with less than two weeks left of school, I'm thinking about embarking on a summer reading project. All of Yeats, or something like that. Tracing the complete oeuvre of an author from beginning to end (probably a poet), which is something formal education doesn't (and shouldn't) make the space for.  I'm thinking Yeats, or Wallace Stephens, or William Carlos Williams (this would mean Paterson...ugh), or maybe someone more contemporary? I don't know, but am open to suggestions.