DAgata - Halls of fame: essays

John DAgata sniffs out the quirky corners of our culture and makes them revelatory. With wit and finesse, and writing thats as much poetry as it is prose, DAgata is redefining the modern American essay.

Annie Dillard

Halls of Fame is gorgeous, daring language exerted on behalf of a friendlybut very, very watchfulintelligence. John DAgata is a poet in his soul and, through his prose, on the page. He makes the essay, from start to finish, new. Here is a writer who matters.

Frederick Busch

Real art matters now. It matters that in Halls of Fame a young nonfiction writer named John DAgata is experimenting with essays that reconfigure dream, fact and reflection.

The New York Times

John DAgatas journey through genres, the American landscape, the history of thought, and the history of lyric actiona journey beautifully agonized over as he struggles between sentence and lineis the beginning of a journey for us as well with a voice that is changing our conversation of the world.

Jorie Graham

John DAgata is pushing the envelope of the modern American essay.

Phillip Lopate

An exemplar of the literary movement toward linking the genres of poetry and essay. The cutting edge of literature.

Publishers Weekly

John DAgata has created a collection of essays like a stealth bomb.

American Book Review

What I admire most about John DAgata is the restlessness of his mind, the way he writes to the directives of some internal imperative that drives him to continually seek out new shapes in language that might meet something crucial, urgent, insatiable in him. He makes his obsessions palpable and irresistible to the reader.

Carole Maso

Here is an essayist who fears nothing.

Andrei Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse

He had a knack, which was his lure, for both the mundane and fantasticso says John DAgata about one of his books eccentric population, but he could be describing his own omnivorous self. His writing is marked by an exuberance of structural invention, by an ever-churning hurdy-gurdy lexicon of lingual play, and by citizenship in the mazes of the mind and in hallways that mimic Ripleys Believe It Or Not. Or, to update that last comparison: Halls of Fame is to essays what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is to gallery dioramas.

Albert Goldbarth

DAgata writes masterful sentences, in all forms. Adept at collage, found poetry, paragraphs long and short, lists, characterization, direct quotes, the prose poem, fragments, spoofing, and a perceptiveness that sometimes only dispassionate description can achieve, DAgata hovers like a moth around the sparks created where the known and the unknown rub against each other.

Ruminator Review

With the diligence of a manic tour guide, DAgata exhaustively catalogues his encounters, inventing whole new ways of looking as he goes.

Rain Taxi

The dialectic between showing and looking, between telling and knowing, is DAgatas subject and his supremacy; these lyric essays result in further questions, for such a process does not lead to mere answers; when such prodigies of mystery as Henry Darger or Martha Graham are at issue, this turn of mind, this trope of thinking, is a revelation; that is the discursive poets program: to reveal, and indeed his progress through the generality of our native offerings is a triumphant one; not since Butors Mobile have I learned so much about Americas creases and crannies, such learning being a complexion of pains and pleasures.

Richard Howard

ESSAYS BY

John DAgata

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2001 by John DAgata

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Daytons Project Imagine with support from Target Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; a Grant made on behalf of the Stargazer Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

September 29, 1995 AP article.

Reprinted with permission of The Associated Press.

Excerpts from The Flat Earth News articles #54 (1985) and #87 (1993) are reprinted with the permission of Charles Johnson.

All best efforts have been made to obtain permission from the Darger estate for the excerpts from Henry Dargers unpublished novel.

Excerpts from the Deep Springs Alumni Newsletter, Vol. 64, No. 1, Fall 1997, are reprinted with permission.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 1-55597-314-0 (cloth)

ISBN 1-55597-377-9 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-55597-049-9 (ebook)

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-101780

Cover design: Scott Sorenson

Cover art: Woody Gwyn, Highway 1, oil on canvas, 24 X 168, 19911992

F OR D OUGIE

The halls of fame are open wide

and they are always full;

some go in by the door called push

and some by the door called pull.

ANONYMOUS