Fiction for poets

What's better than writing for a workshop? Writing about a workshop, of course. Lan Samantha Chang -- grad and director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop -- just published a novel called "All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost," which tracks the trials of two poets passing through a university program.

Bernard Sauvet and Roman Morris, budding poets, are enrolled in a seminar taught by Miranda Sturgis, the school’s “brightest star.” At 31 — slightly older than his classmates — Bernard couldn’t care less about publishing his poems, applying for fellowships, winning prizes or finding a teaching job. To him poetry is a religious calling; he will devote his life to writing and rewriting one long epic. Roman, however, craves a more worldly recognition of his gifts. Vigilantly, he submits his verse to literary magazines and keeps meticulous files, noting that “strategy was said not to matter, only talent; and yet strategy must matter.”

Brenda Wineapple's review in The New York Times is lukewarm, applauding the novel's goals while acknowledging its failures. One can imagine her offering Chang such feedback around a seminar table (where, indeed, Wineapple often sits -- she teaches at the New School's MFA program):

The issue here is provocative: to what extent does one’s (symbolic or real) intimacy with one’s teachers open professional doors — or undermine one’s sense of achievement? At least initially, Bernard and Roman raise questions worthy of Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, or any thoughtful student or teacher: What is the relationship between talent and craft, genius and mediocrity? Can writing be taught? Does one ever improve? Yet the central characters in “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost” are neither mad enough, wise enough nor even, so it seems, well-read enough, to dare answer them. (Although Bernard can explain what poetry is by quoting Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”)