Library Notes
Rebecca Hyde


If you’re interested in the craft of writing, as a writer or a reader, you may want to look at the new “Art of” series, in which the art of criticism is used to “illuminate” the art of writing. Each book in the series explores an aspect of creative writing (syntax, description, time, poetic line). The authors are “contemporary practitioners impassioned by a singular craft issue.”

Take, for instance, Mark Doty’s “The Art of Description: World into Word.” “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” he says, this poet who is known for his passionate search for the exact word and phrase, all the while recognizing that it is an exercise in naming the unsayable (“But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf…). Why bother to try to turn perception into words? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To match words to the world to give those words to someone else or to savor them for ourselves? “The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing,” he concludes. Doty examines the poetry of Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others who capture sensory experiences that “leap toward transcendence,” like Bishop’s fish, caught, stared at, and released (“The Fish”).

In the last part of this engaging little book, Doty offers his lexicon “Description’s Alphabet.” He begins with “Art”: “Description is an ART to the degree that it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness.” He concludes with “A to Z”: I reach the end of my lexicon and feel that my effort to describe description is happily partial, partisan, a work of advocacy….I declare myself here on the side of the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say.”

Other titles in the series include Sven Birkert’s “The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again,” where he examines the impulse to write about the self and the art of the memoirist in assembling patterns of meaning in experience. In “The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes,” Joan Silber illustrates the ways in which time is used as a technique in writing fiction: “A story can arrange events in any order it finds useful, but it does have to move between then and now and later.” In “The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song,” poet Ellen Bryant Voigt turns to music, “a helpful analog in any consideration of artistic language use.”