A Moveable Famine

Poet and Ploughshares editor Skoyles (The Smoky Mountain Cage Bird Society) launches this crackling autobiographical novel with a brash preface "bemoaning... the wasted lives of everyone who [does] not see the world through the lens of poetry." This passion for the poetic life is treated with both mockery and sympathy, as we follow Skoyles from Queens, N.Y., to the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop in Iowa City; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.; and the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Witty vignette by witty vignette, drink by stiffer drink, this leisurely paced autobiography chronicles the peculiar codes of the "claustrophobic," competitive workshop culture and the "extracurricular activities at poetry's finishing schools." Its structure is pleasurably slack, casually zooming in on those writers living "grant-to-mouth." One mild-mannered poet plays with his food by stamping out dactyls (smashing one pea, leaving the next two untouched), a classmate's propensity for malapropisms energizes his verse, and a drunken Alan Dugan manages to throttle a graduate student and trip over a seagull in one action-packed night. Quietly emerging from this raucous, entertaining book is a portrait of the aesthetic education of a poet and a fond tribute to his "colony-hopping" fellows: "Many were eccentric, some were slightly mad, but all were thoroughly human." (May)