Book festival takes novel, poetic approach

She opens. He closes.

She's this nation's poet laureate. He's arguably this nation's foremost novelist.

She's Kay Ryan. He's E.L. Doctorow.

They bookend the eighth annual Vegas Valley Book Festival as keynote speakers. She's tonight (7 p.m. at the Historic Fifth Street School auditorium, 401 S. Fourth St.). He's Sunday (7 p.m., Clark County Library Theater, 1401 E. Flamingo Road).

This is her at work:

"As neatly as peas / in their green canoe / as discreetly as beads / strung in a row / sit drops of dew / along a blade of grass / but unattached and / subject to their weight / they slip if they accumulate / Down the green tongue / out of the morning sun / into the general damp / they're gone." ("Dew")

This is him at work: "He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel." ("Ragtime")

Two bright, high-wattage lights of American literature, illuminating Las Vegas not as a city of revelers, but a city of readers.

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She crafts vivid verse described as "accessible," "subtle," "sly," "witty" and "exhilarating." And short.

"I was thinking how well my poems would work on an iPod," she says. "You could see the whole poem on the screen. It's like I knew I was writing to a future need. ... It doesn't seem to have the surface horrors poetry has for some people. I hope I have a lot of imagery and rhythm and a ton of rhyme going on. And you can say, 'At least it's short. How bad can it be? I'll be through with it in 30 seconds.' "

• • •

He crafts atmospheric prose, engaging characters and epic narratives unfolding across colorful eras of American history. His lauded catalog includes "Ragtime," "Billy Bathgate," "The Book of Daniel," "Welcome to Hard Times," "World's Fair," "The March," "City of God" and this year's "Homer and Langley." Historical figures -- J.P. Morgan, Dutch Schultz, Sigmund Freud, Booker T. Washington and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, among many -- are woven into his novels, interacting with complex fictional characters.

"That happened almost by accident," he says. "There was Harry Houdini at the beginning of 'Ragtime,' which was a totally improvised book. I wrote it to find out what I was writing. He led the way for other characters. Writers have always done that. Shakespeare used historical characters and interpreted them, perhaps unjustly, but brilliantly. Using historical figures is equivalent to a painter who paints a portrait. It's going to be the painter's idea of the person."

• • •

She's a product of the American West, born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., raised around the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert, and initially a reluctant rhymer.

"It was embarrassing to think about being a poet," Ryan says. "Would you like to introduce yourself as a poet? People get this pained look and say, 'I just don't understand it.' "

Yet poetry's charms penetrated her defenses, intruding even when reading prose, words morphing into rhymes in her mind, what she has called "a little insanity taking me over."

• • •

He's a product of the American cityscape, born in 1931 amid the gritty apartment houses and fire escapes of the Bronx. Named after Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was to the typewriter born, discovering cultured pleasures at his high school's literary magazine. Several jobs later, a position as a book editor at New American Library put him into the orbit of several greats of the written word.

"I worked with Norman Mailer and James Baldwin and William Kennedy, a wonderful time and it helped me with my own work because I learned to be as objective looking at my own pages as I was looking at other people's books."

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She's a woman of verse, yet long absent from the ranks of America's power poets. "I didn't have anything to do with the poetry community for decades," Ryan says. "I didn't take or teach creative writing programs, I didn't hang with poets, I didn't apprentice myself to the editor of some swank magazine. I just had to wait and hope doing the writing and trying to throw it over their transoms would eventually work." Successfully: The librarian of Congress last year tapped her as America's 16th poet laureate -- a position she nearly rejected.

"To talk about whether poetry is relevant just bores the pants off me."

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He's a man of prose who begins with a picture. "There's never an outline or a ton of research, they begin in an evocative state of mind," Doctorow says of his novels. "In 'Ragtime,' the inspiration was that I lived in a house in New Rochelle (N.Y.) and I started to write about the house one day when I had nothing better to do. Then I thought about how things were like when that house was built, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and women carried parasols. One image led to another and I was off on a book.

"For 'Billy Bathgate,' it was an image in my mind, I don't know where it came from, of men in black ties standing on the deck of a tugboat. I thought that was a rather odd combination, and trying to figure out what they were doing there led to 'Billy Bathgate.' "

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She blends the dark and the light. "When I do readings, I love to make people laugh," she says. "I don't want them to just sit there and sigh. But I warn them that when they take these poems home, they'll find they've changed and they're not so funny. It's a trick. They understand there's a lot of mortality and a fair ration of despair in the poems."

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He acknowledges acclaim but is unmoved by fame. "It's nothing you think about," Doctorow says. "You are grateful for any attention you get and the respect of your colleagues and some critics. But this is not where you live in your mind. You're doing your work and hoping it will last. Everything around you, which fluctuates, is irrelevant to your intimate professional existence."

• • •

The poet, the novelist, the Vegas Valley Book Festival. She opens it. He closes it.

Neither wrote this line -- credit belongs to E.P. Whipple -- but both would agree:

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.