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Hartford Courant — (Connecticut) A FICTION FIRMLY BASED ON FACTS Whether or not writers acknowledge it, there's a fine line between memoir and fiction that's drawn from experience, no matter how hard the author works to transform it. The opening sections of this new novel by award-winning poet Carol Muske-Dukes read like memoir with only the names changed. The author, who came to New York in the idealistic, revolutionary afterglow of the '60s, established a writers' workshop at the Women's House of Detention on Riker's Island in the mid-'70s. She tells the story of an idealistic girl from the Midwest who is essentially coming of age in an exciting and confusing time in the same big city. Holly Mattox, the narrator, is an aspiring poet who's trying on marriage for size and finding it a bad fit. She wants to save the world, and she wants to write verse that will change it. Clueless Holly teaches a poetry workshop at Riker's Island to tease verse out of a bunch of misfits, petty criminals and murderers as a ``writer-spy, I told myself, a writer-spy.'' She works under the supervision of Aliganth, a skeptical guard. Gullible and well meaning, Holly takes what the women around the table tell her at face value. Some hand her a carload of fake sob stories because she has what people used to call ``bleeding-heart liberal'' written all over her. Holly is trying to please too many masters, flirting with the editor of a literary review where she works and going uptown for meetings with the Women's Bail Fund, at which people who have never been near the prison take her to task for wasting time with ``poets'' when she ought to be working harder for the cause. Muske-Dukes has these earnest, essentially ignorant do-gooders down to the letter, and their scenes with Holly are frustrating and wickedly funny. Coupled with flirtation and uncertainty, ambition overtakes Holly's marriage and flattens it. So much of the personal detail here reads like memoir that it takes the earthy poets from the workshop to move the novel where the author wants it to go, but Muske-Dukes is such a terrific writer that it doesn't matter a bit. The prisoners' poems are simple, bluntly put and beautifully true -- and this is where the reader wants to sit down with the author and ask whether they're actual workshop products or whether she invented or enhanced them to serve the book. There is the girl who thinks her baby can fly and writes about it; there is the revolutionary implicated in a plot against the military-industrial complex, there's the woman who begs to be let out so she can go to her baby's funeral and before any of these, there is Polly Lyle Clement, zonked out on Thorazine and the greatest poet of all, full of tales of survival on a deserted island near Riker's. By the time Holly gets sucked into Polly's complex, moving story, she's been over the coals herself. Nothing is what the women say it is. ``Since my experience with Lily Baye," Holly tells us, ``the strongest sense I had in the workshop was uncertainty: how to proceed, what to say -- and finally, the power and danger of each woman's fear, the magnitude of each woman's longing, and the enormity of the consequent ever-present unpredictability. I was not afraid. It was just that I had, for the first time in my life, grasped what it meant to act according to circumstance.'' Now the novel takes off, leaving the reader to guess who the pseudonymous New Yorkers are in real life, or whether they and some of the prisoners are creatures of the author's imagination, how much of the character who thought she was descended from Mark Twain is invention and how much comes out of personal history. Muske-Dukes is such a wonderful writer that she manages this elegant balancing act without once tipping her hand. Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) POETRY behind bars; Few American writers created themselves quite so vigorously as Mark Twain. "I ran away," he wrote in "Life on the Mississippi." "I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory." Of course, things weren't so simple on the boat. Twain "got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerk." Packed to the gills on a slow trip down river, the novelist was, in a deeper sense, alone. Holly Mattox, the 20-something poet of Carol Muske-Dukes' winning roman a clef, has a similar experience in 1970s New York. A Twin Cities native with a busy young doctor husband, good intentions and a burning flame of poetic talent, Holly is determined to make a difference in the world. And yet all the fellow activists at the Women's Bail Fund receive her with hardened looks and sneer at her supposed naivete. "Channeling Mark Twain" tells of how Holly overcomes this judgment (and the creeps and snipes of New York's literary universe) to turn a poetry workshop she runs at Rikers Island Prison into a powerful form of testimony - for the inmates and for herself. Muske-Dukes taught such a class for nearly a decade in the 1970s, and she seems to have taken good notes. The stagnant, poisonous atmosphere of women penned up just under the flight plan of JFK is vividly evoked, as is the cast of women who take Holly's class. There's a transsexual who cannot handle confrontation, and a Muslim convert known to have gone down in a blaze of bullets. One woman prays nearly constantly, while another talks out of a face rearranged by the back of a knife. Most of them have pimps on the outside. At the forefront of this class is a mysterious older woman who claims to be the great-granddaughter of Twain. "Channeling Mark Twain" humorously evokes Holly's bumpy path to ferrying what she thinks of as the contraband of poetry into this prison life. While she tries to teach inmates about the inner workings of a sonnet, they in turn school her on the realities of a broken justice system. Gradually, the inmates take to the creative outlet, and Muske-Dukes starts slipping their poems into her book. A terrific poet in her own right, she allows the inmates the eloquence that comes from hardened experience. "In God We Trust," writes one prisoner of going to court: "I pray hard to this/ God. Why don't these people look in my eyes?" In the midst of it all - her relationship faltering, her sense of self fading - Holly is trying to compose poems as well. Muske-Dukes includes her searching efforts, which form a kind of autobiography. "My mother and father came from the Red River Valley," Holly writes, "where the river flows, perversely (against geographic expectation) straight north." You might say Muske-Dukes swims against expectation here, too. In a publishing environment enraptured with the memoir, she has demurred by writing a novel. Not that "Channeling Mark Twain" is without period pleasures. The book is littered with actual writers, from Joseph Brodsky to Derek Walcott. A poetry editor with his eye on Holly is clearly drawn from the figure of a well-known New York editor. But by writing a novel, not a memoir, Muske-Dukes wisely invokes the rules and regulations Twain applied to himself when traveling the Mississippi. She can pick up and claim as experience whatever she chooses. She can enter and live out the lives of others. In short, she can straddle two planes - the real and the imagined - a luxury of which the imprisoned women at the heart of this sad but true little book can only dream. John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. CHANNELING MARK TWAIN Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) Book review: 'Channeling Mark Twain' In a Nutshell: Known for the beauty of her writing, both in prose and poetry, Muske-Dukes may have written her best book with this one, a novel about a poet named Holly who volunteers to teach a workshop in a New York women's detention center. Based on the author's own experiences, the narrative is filled with tension, humor and realism. One of Holly's students, a black woman, claims to be a direct descendant of Mark Twain and tries to prove it by speaking in a steady stream of words taken from Twain's writings.
Chicago Tribune Poetry behind bars; Channeling Mark Twain Poet and novelist Carol Muske-Dukes dedicates "Channeling Mark Twain" to her former poetry students at the Women's House of Dentention at Rikers Island, where she taught from 1973 to 1983. So, from the first page of the novel, the reader feels that Holly Mattox, encountered on the way to Rikers Island to teach her first poetry class, is a character bearing some reflection of the author's earlier life and the one who might matter the most to the author. This feeling grows stronger as Holly's experiences add more dimension to her personality, transforming her from a naive, self-proclaimed radical to a more pragmatic but still idealistic teacher in search of a connection between her love of poetry and political service, particularly in a way that could make poetry of use to her severely deprived incarcerated students. Holly also changes in the course of the novel from a married woman to one separated, with a contentious lover. She develops as well from a poet sitting awkwardly on the outer edges of the New York literary world to one assertively participating in editing a journal and in teaching at Columbia University in addition to Rikers. As Holly becomes more of a complex and multilayered character, though, her inmate-students start as and remain two-dimensional metaphors for challenging positions in life. There are, for instance, the stereotyped Akilah (truly, as in "a killah," and she stands accused of murder), a Black Power leader and almost-martyr who is seen regularly glaring with queenly dignity; and Darlene, who pulled the trigger on a violently abusive husband and who in prison continuously prays under her breath. Still, at times the book offers involving dialogue between the inmates during class, and for each student the reader is treated to a tautly constructed example of her poetry, intriguing to read. Darlene's poem, for instance, grips with its closing lines: "I am the God of Three, put the gun unto his head "And offer him to me. Then Darlene, he said, then the trigger." But as the novel progresses, the reader becomes increasingly uncomfortable and disappointed in the realization that the incarcerated women are rendered in a quite-limited way primarily to provide growth experiences for Holly as she struggles to find larger meanings in the writing of poetry, use of the imagination and the intersection of literature and politics. The maddest of the inmates, the one so delusional that she functions as a seer, is Polly Lyle Clement. Polly channels Mark Twain. Again, for the reader, there is unease, here in recognizing the cliche of assigning visionary and highly articulated sight to a madwoman, balanced against something more engaging: appreciating Muske-Dukes' deft inventiveness with transitions and dialogue as the author wedges quotes from Twain into the unlikeliest conversations. It could be argued that most characters in most novels are metaphors, and further that many novels are in one way or another autobiographical. But in "Channeling Mark Twain" it's the contrast between the fullness of Holly's character and the flatness of the personalities of all those around her that alienates the reader from this otherwise, in a line-by-line sense, intensely and poetically written novel. Sentence by sentence, words are carefully, even aesthetically, chosen, yet overall the message they send is not so much one about the brilliant potentials of poetry, but instead about narcissism's greedy colonizing of others. Maud Lavin teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her next book, "The Oldest We've Ever Been: Seven True Stories of Midlife Transitions," is due out in the spring. People Channeling Mark Twain In the mid-'70s newlywed Holly Mattox leaves the Twin Cities for New York, naïveté intact. While her doctor husband works long hours, she puts her passion for social justice into action by teaching poetry on Rikers Island where her angry, broken students include Polly Lyle Clement, who claims Mark Twain speaks through her. (Each chapter ends with one of the prisoners' gritty or ribald poems). At the same time, Holly also gets swept up in Manhattan's literary scene, partying at the townhouses of her wealthy patrons. The story's emotional core centers on Holly's divided heart. Can she straddle both worlds? It'll take Twain-channeler Polly to help figure that out. Dukes' last poetry collection, Sparrow, memorialized her late husband, the actor David Dukes. In this elegant work of prose she's even clearer about the power of language: Sometimes words are all we have left. Times-Picayune (New Orleans) We are family; BYLINE:By Susan Larson, Book editor Sometimes we find our family in friends, sometimes in books. These three novels -- all wonderful summer reading -- show us three families of choice. In "Michael Tolliver Lives," Armistead Maupin returns to the characters we love from his "Tales of the City" series, the lives of straight and gay characters who live and work in San Francisco. In "Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician," Daniel Wallace gives us a tale of a family of circus folk. And in "Channeling Mark Twain," Carol Muske-Dukes brings to life the bonds of women in prison who share a creative writing class, and the way they change the life of their teacher. Armistead Maupin is, for many readers, the voice of San Francisco, its neighborhoods, its people, its wonderful character as a place in which people come to realize their eccentricities in full bloom, finding there the freedom to be themselves. In the "Tales of the City" books, collecting the episodic story originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle, readers saw Michael, affectionately known as Mouse, and Mary Ann and Brian and Mona and the mysterious landlady, Anna Madrigal, come together and grow into a family. Now, years later, in 'Michael Tolliver Lives' (HarperCollins, $25.95) we see them growing older and changing. As Michael says, "Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation: You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy. "In other words, I was ready for Ben." Ben and Michael, romantics, marry in a civil ceremony at City Hall. Michael, ever the gardener, still has a few clients, and he is happy to be on this earth, part of a "sweet confederacy of survivors." He still sees Brian. Mona has succumbed to breast cancer. Michael recalls, "Several years later, when those planes hit the Twin Towers, I remember thinking how shrewdly she had timed her exit. Her big wounded hippie heart would not have prospered in this cold new climate." Anna Madrigal, once a pioneer on the front lines of transsexuality, has a new celebrity status among the young, but she too is growing old, dispensing her wisdom: "You don't have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open." Meanwhile, Michael's biological mother is dying back in Florida, and his family obligations will take him to a land of Christian real estate agents and nursing homes with names such as Gospel Palms. Will he ever gain understanding and acceptance from his family, or will he have to settle for forgiveness? Those are the tough, enduring questions of this sweetly comic and deeply satisfying novel, a bittersweet reminder of the fact that "youth is not contagious" and "love is always on loan, never the nest egg we want it to be." Readers who've never been to Barbary Lane, never knew these characters in their heyday, can catch up with reissues of the original series; those of us lucky to have known them all along will take a deep and rueful pleasure in sharing their journey to a new age. Daniel Wallace, author of "Big Fish," has created another tale of family mysteries and magic in 'Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician' (Doubleday, $21.95). Set in a touring circus of the 1950s, this novel is a tale of a magician fallen on hard times -- the mysterious Henry Walker. One by one, the members of Jeremiah Musgrove's Chinese Circus recount their experiences with Henry. And of course, they all have interesting stories to tell about themselves. Henry Walker has been kidnapped by three violence-prone teenagers who have only one use for a black man, and not a good one. But Henry, missing in action, is remembered for his past -- he survived the war, gaining a certain amount of fame as his comrades recounted his magical powers. "By the time the war was over, Henry Walker had become the most famous magician in the world." But upon his return, he gave only one successful show -- a shocking evening in which his beloved assistant, Marianne la Fleur, died and he brought her back to life. But such scary magic is not for a popular audience, only a desperate one, and soon after, for many obvious reasons, he is reduced to the sideshow circuit. But the story goes back further than that, back to the days when Henry's mother died and he and his sister Hannah and his father lived in a hotel, where his father was the janitor. Henry and Hannah would amuse themselves in the hotel, and there they are taken up by a mysterious guest, Mr. Sebastian, who teaches Henry magic. Such magical power comes at a cost, as great power always does, and when Mr. Sebastian disappears, he takes Henry's beloved sister with him. Henry struggles to make a living with his magic, and is aided by Tom Hailey, the man who makes Henry into a Negro. In Daniel Wallace's world, nothing is simply as it appears, and just because Henry has dark skin, well . . . Seeking, always searching, the characters in this novel are not freaks at all, just filled with human longing. What makes us love one another? What makes for true magic? What makes us who we are -- certain proof or sure belief? Once again, Wallace has taken readers on a magical mystery tour, trying to pin down the truth of a man who was larger than life, but in the end, just as human as we all are, a reminder of how easily -- and finally -- people disappear before our very eyes. In Carol Muske-Dukes' 'Channeling Mark Twain' (Random House, $24.95), a different kind of magic is at work, the magic of poetry, with all its power to transform and transport. Holly Mattox, who works in the AfterCare program at a prison, decides to teach a creative writing class at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island. She goes bearing contraband notebooks and pens and chocolate bars, naively thinking that she will change the lives of these women, but in truth, she will be changed, of course. Her students have the expected troubling pasts, with dangerous and difficult men, lost or murdered children, and a strange beauty emerges in their work. One in particular, Polly Lyle Clement, will claim poetic power for her own. Polly claims to be a descendant of Mark Twain with the ability to channel his voice. Her great-grandmamma, "prettiest whore in New Orleans," has once known Samuel Clement. Polly's soul, to be sure, "has grown deep like rivers. "Meanwhile, Holly's life at home offers its own share of challenges. She and her husband, a doctor with a heart of gold and a passion to serve the disadvantaged, seem to be drifting apart as Holly finds herself drawn into an affair with another poet. And then there is New York in the 1970s, with its heady mix of feminism and poetry, that time when the personal became political. Holly remembers her mother's love of poetry, wonders if she is living the life her mother imagined for herself. In one wonderful moment, Holly recalls when her mother asked if she knew what a sonnet was as her brothers came into the kitchen with a dart gun: "I watched her consciousness divide before us: she seemed to increase in size, drawing the poem and maternal admonition out of the same omnipotent address: " 'The world is -- Put that down right now! -- too much with us!' "I listened, slowly grasping a revolutionary variation of a poetic form, one that I would remember forever. " 'Little we see in Nature -- Shut that door! -- that is ours.' " Holly recognizes that her privileged life ensures that she has a kind of freedom: "I would not be locked up. I was white and educated and middle-class. Society would provide me with all the answers. Unlike my imagination which asked all the questions." This is a novel that asks all the right questions -- about writing, about life, about our common humanity. Polly Lyle Clement knows what she's talking about when she says, "Y'see, you don't want any unfriendliness on a raft -- for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind toward the others." Holly's rich poetic life informs every page of this novel. When she recalls "a line by Czeslaw Milosz . . . about how there were 'nothing but gifts' on the poor Earth," we know we will be taking account of those gifts and their true value, and whether, as the poet Adrienne Rich wonders, our wounds are the source of our power. In the end, we are left with an unforgettable teacher and her eager students, drawn together into the life of poetry, making of life itself "a power, an astonishment, a coincidence of love and language and terror -- deserving of great honor." Los Angeles Times Channeling Mark Twain WHAT good is art? Does it make any real difference in people's lives? For the conflicted heroine of Carol Muske-Dukes' rueful yet affirmative new novel, these questions come attached to uncomfortable specifics. Holly Mattox teaches a poetry workshop at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island. What use is this rarefied art to prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers? How can poetry possibly matter in the face of their suffering and their crimes? "Channeling Mark Twain" is a slim volume grappling with big issues. Muske-Dukes, an award-winning poet who has written three previous novels, packs every page with metaphor and allusion, but her narrative is never abstract. The author herself taught on Rikers for several years (the book is dedicated to the members of that group), and she confronts her intellectual protagonist with the grim everyday realities of life in the underclass. Holly's students are not simply objects of her compassion or instruments of her moral education. They have histories and ideas of their own, which are conveyed in fiercely individual voices in their classroom conversations and poems. Billie Dee Boyd, threatened with losing her children to foster care, threw her daughter out a window: "I say to you how my baby / Could fly," she insists. "But / Taneesha didn't fly that time." Arrested for the shootout murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Black Freedom Front leader Akilah Malik ("my slave name was LeeAnne Kohler") gave birth in prison and had her baby taken away. Darlene Denisky, beaten every night by her husband, heard God talking to her: "I am the God of Three, put the gun unto his head / And offer him to me. Then Darlene, he said, then the trigger." Less obviously brutalized but most mysterious of all is Polly Lyle Clement, fished out of the East River and awaiting transfer to a psychiatric institution, who claims that "Mark Twain is my great-granddaddy and ... speaks through me." Holly is out of place, to put it mildly, among these proud, damaged women. She has a graduate degree and a teaching job at the New School; her poems are being published in a trendy literary periodical whose flirtatious editor takes her to fashionable parties. But this is New York in the politically and culturally fraught mid-1970s, when the dreams of the counterculture are curdling but not yet entirely rancid. Holly took "a course in the Revolution" at Berkeley; she's married -- if not exactly committed -- to a doctor who runs a clinic at Harlem Hospital, and she belongs to a radical group called the Women's Bail Fund, though it's clear she'll soon be out the door, as she sardonically delineates her comrades' humorless dogmatism. Her agenda is more complicated than theirs. Holly's mother, whose hope of a college education blew away in the Depression's dust storms, recited poems as she hung up laundry and hectored her six children: "Do not go gentle -- 'Don't sass me!' -- into that good night." She bequeathed her love of poetry to her daughter, but her example instilled the fear that poetry could be mere decoration for an existence circumscribed by pregnancy and propriety. "I was here at the Women's House," Holly tells us, " ... because I wanted to know what it felt like to be a woman living outside the law ... to be a poet whose words could break open the bars." How romantic and ridiculous. Holly slams into reality when she storms into the superintendent's office, demanding the release of Lily Baye, an inmate locked in solitary confinement for distributing a poem about her dead daughter. How dare they? asks Holly, outraged yet "weirdly thrilled" by this demonstration of "the unexpected power of poetry to threaten the status quo." And how can they deny a bereaved mother permission to attend her baby's funeral? Because, Superintendent Ross wearily replies, Lily's pimp beat the little girl to death, she's protecting him, and she wants out so she can get back to the man who's kept her on the streets and supplied her with heroin for 10 years. "Wail, for the world's wrong!" thinks Holly, recalling her mother reciting Shelley. "I would never, could never, find a way to accept that this too was part of what women were." Muske-Dukes doesn't make it easy for her idealistic heroine. Holly gets a teaching post at Columbia, where exiled poet Joseph Kyrilikov (a ringer for Joseph Brodsky) seems to incarnate her vision of the artist as natural enemy of the state. Kyrilikov, who spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp, stands in the tradition of "Pasternak and Akhmatova, who wrote unforgettably of the Terror, whose poems were stained with blood." In America, he's a hard-drinking, chain-smoking womanizer who dismisses Holly's jailbird students: "You cannot see in the same light real poets ... who have stood up to death and prison ... and these criminals who manage to scribble one line or two behind bars." "These criminals" challenge Holly from another direction. "[H]ow is writing poems supposed to help me?" Akilah asks. "And poetry can try, but it can't make this world fair -- now, can it?" It can't, though a poem written by Polly becomes the instrument of Akilah's liberation. (To say more would give away too much about the carefully structured plot.) In the book's darkest scenes, Polly, the most vulnerable of Holly's students, is destroyed by the prison bureaucracy. Art and society collide with mortal consequences for this mentally ill epileptic, who is acting on moral imperatives she discerned in "Huckleberry Finn," a book that was written almost a century earlier by a man she thinks is her great-grandfather. But art has the last word in Muske-Dukes' impassioned narrative. The tangled threads of Holly's confused, unrealistic but ultimately unshakeable belief in the power of poetry are finally knitted together in a classroom at Columbia. "I want you to love this poem!" she shouts at her smug, privileged graduate students before she reads "The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," by Wallace Stevens. She tenderly explicates Stevens' nurturing image of "a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us," then flings at them Darlene's poem about killing her husband and the demand of militant poet-playwright Amiri Baraka for "poems shooting like guns." Poetry accommodates ugliness as well as beauty, Holly insists, "and the response of the soul to either extremity: empathy." If art cannot change the world, Muske-Dukes suggests, then at least it can change us, open us to the hearts of others. One or two of Holly's Columbia students might come teach at Rikers: "They had responded at last," she thinks. "As if the poem were a shawl wrapped around them -- and a gun held to their heads." Polly's terrible apotheosis follows this moving moment, but so does Holly's discovery of Akilah's poem, "For My Daughter," in which the tough political radical tells the infant snatched from her breast, "You deserve / a world made by love for love." Radiant with feeling yet chastened by experience, "Channeling Mark Twain" makes no claim that such a world exists or that art could ever create it. All the same, Muske-Dukes shows us, there is something magical and mighty in the connections that art can forge among human beings, across the generations from the creator of Huck and Jim to the shivering, delusional inmate who thinks she's floating down the Mississippi "on the river of their words." There are no easy answers in this novel -- only the simple, defiant assertion that "what we can imagine brings us together." O, The Oprah Magazine Think Your Life's a Prison? Think Again Poet Holly Mattox, hell-bent on inspiring female convicts to write poetry, bluffs her way past the pimps at the gates of the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island and squares off with a classroom full of talented toughs. Way more fun than it sounds, and the inmates' poetry is stunning. Carol Muske-Dukes (who actually founded the first creative writing program at Rikers in the 1970s) proves in her new novel, CHANNELING MARK TWAIN (Random House), that nobody's tougher or more tender than a hard-core poet with a social agenda. |
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