Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education

I bow down to Stan Persky in general, and my admiration for his work both in poetry and in prose has been a constant in my reading life for twenty years or so. TOPIC SENTENCE is just the sort of book I wanted from him: a big book, capacious, wide-ranging, with an assortment of intellectual pursuits tempered, always tempered, by the inimitable personality. Which I can't really explain except to describe it as Socratic and humorous. The book seems like it's been cobbled together from articles written here, there and everywhere, but the throughline as they call it in writers programs is often about the education of one man and by extension the ways in which we ourselves are invited to learn, by the culture, by the politics, and by the raw materials of nature and life that are handed to us. He is always at the center, and charmingly so, the "topic sentence" of his own life. His memory for the strange circumstances attending it is strong, vivid, always filled with sensual detail and the ring of the truth. I don't know where Persky would be without it! History has left its track in his back, but I find that the more you read from Topic Sentence the stronger your wonderment will be, for like the old saying goes, he brings history right up into the present moment in a way few educators can seem to manage. His account, for example, of the life and trials of Oscar Wilde ("Feasting with Oscar"), takes the very long view. We are with him as he manages to pry out of hiding the real story behind Wilde's double life, his pingponging back between classes that was at heart the real "trouble" that got him into gaol. We learn that Wilde was seriously in love with Bosie, while Bosie was too much of a child, or too selfish a lad, to give Wilde back what he got. We learm how Wilde got trapped by his own pride (and by his nascent politics) into bringing the disastrous suit that pretty much ended his charmed life. But then what we don't expect is that P{ersky takes all this "historical" material and brings it still quick and panting right into our present situation, like one of Burroughs' Wild Boys tossing a still beating heart onto the campfire of the guerrilla tribes halfway up the Atlas Mountains. "Not so much to propose a political agenda as to understand where we are," he writes. It is a Wilde, and a GLBT struggle, transformed by Marxian theories of the Law of Uneven Development.