Joyce Carol Oates visits SU campus

SU alumna delights her audience during a homecoming visit.

The Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium fills suddenly and noisily with Syracuse University students, staff and alumni. The spectators look down expectantly at a small maroon circle surrounded by a crowd, which includes Chancellor Nancy Cantor and College of Arts and Sciences Dean George Langford. The circle, which turns out to be a floppy bucket hat, moves and reveals a small-featured, incredibly lank woman in a turquoise turtleneck and simple gold jewelry. It’s writer and Syracuse alumna Joyce Carol Oates, and she doesn’t plan to make her homecoming presentation boring.

"The very word lecture causes people’s eyes to glaze over," Oates remarks.

An upstate New York native and 1960 graduate of Syracuse, Oates knows how to please her audience. Sometimes riotous and sometimes musical, her off-the-cuff words as she comments on poems from her 1996 collection Tenderness could easily stand alone as poetry.

Oates introduces a piece titled only "$" as "anti-poetic" and "deliberately graceless," descriptions she applies to much of her work. But even considering the stark and serious nature of the poem, Oates doesn’t forget her sense of humor:

"That’s my Donald Trump poem. He’s probably not a donor here. I don’t think of him as someone who reads poetry," she says.

Oates’ professional writing career began when the author was 19, with a short-story contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Since the publication of her first novel, Oates has been shockingly productive, often publishing multiple works in the same year.

From 1978 she’s worked with the creative writing program at Princeton University. Discussing one of her poems, "Night Driving" about the New Jersey Turnpike (the simple mention of which creates a buzz of murmurs from the audience) Oates explains memories of driving on the highway:

"Being in Princeton, going through all those amazing smells, it means you’re coming home."

While in Syracuse, Oates received the George Arents Award, a university recognition given annually to successful alumni. She also received an honorary degree from Syracuse in 2000. But despite distinctions such as these, and countless others including the National Book Award for her novel them, Oates is modest.

"The difference between utter failure - abject failure - and sudden success is like nothing," she says.

Oates takes several questions from the audience before a post-event book signing. She answers claims that her writing is sometimes quite bleak with the command and wit the crowd now expects and appreciates. She also mentions three children’s books she wrote featuring cats.

"There may be a black cloud that follows me around because I’m from the snow belt, and spent four years at Syracuse," Oates says. "Being pulled away and dashed against the rocks is part of the experience of being a novelist...Yet somehow I think it’s for my kitten books that I received my honorary doctorate."

Meg Martin is interning at Eagle Newspapers. She is a dual major at SU in journalism and English. Reach her at memart01@syr.edu.

The following is a poem by Joyce Carol Oates

$

If you have it you don’t think about it

so acquiring it is the means of forgetting it

because if you don’t have it you’ll think about it

and you’re embittered thinking about it because

to think about it is to acknowledge yourself

incomplete without it because you know you are

superior to the many who have it thus need never

think about it the way, after Death,

you won’t think about Death either.

CATEGORY: Books
TAGS: Meg Martin,$,Joyce Carol Oates,SU Orange Central,George Arents Award,Newhouse,Nancy Cantor,George LangfordSyracuse University homecoming 2009,author oates,poet oates,Syracuse
EDITION: Syracuse City Eagle

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