Volume 24 191
students memorize poems. Brodsky was the kind
of poet who committed poems to heart naturally—
he learned English by memorizing poetry—out of
great love.”
“I became one of those insufferable kids who
are encouraged to produce poems on all occasions”
is the way Muske-Dukes wryly sums up her early
writerly drive. When she went to Creighton, a Jesuit
college in Nebraska, and then to San Francisco
State, she already knew, in a sense, what she wanted
to do. “I wasn’t very hip when I left Creighton. I just
walked into the whole San Francisco scene. I took
a course in directed reading under Kay Boyle. (You
know, I like saying this whenever I can. Kay Boyle
should be part of the canon, along with her mod-
ernist brothers.) I got my degree, went to Europe,
and even played in Hairin Paris. Then I went to
live in New York.”
Muske-Dukes wrote about the poetic and
political moment in New York in an autobio-
graphical essay in her essay collection, Women and
Poetry: Truth, Autobiagraphy, and the Shape of the
Self(1997): “When I arrived in New York in 1971,
I joined consciousness-raising groups, but I found
it impossible to express my own sense of conflict.
I eventually sought out women in prison, because
their isolation and extremity reflected a dislocation
I felt in my own life and writing.”
“I was really inspired at San Francisco State
by Kathleen Fraser, who electrified me when she
read Plath’s ‘Daddy,’” Muske-Duke says. “Fraser
seemed to be able to be both a poet and live an or-
dinary life. I didn’t see how I could do that myself.
In addition to that, the public world of poetry then
was controlled by men—as it still is. What I thought
would help was teaching in the Riker’s Island
prison, and so I was going between two enclosed
places—I was teaching at Columbia, and at Riker’s.
Eventually I set up, through the National Endow-
ment for the Arts, a program for this, ‘Art With-
out Walls.’”
If her political side was active at the time, her
poetry was also becoming known. “My first book
was published because I’d entered these poems in
a contest. I didn’t win the contest—a Thomas Rab-
bit did. But they had enough money, they could af-
ford to publish two books, so they published
Camouflage.”
In 1981, she went to live in Italy on a Guggen-
heim grant, and there she met David Dukes, in
highly romantic circumstances. “I rented a house
in Barbarino Val d’Elsa, outside of Florence. A
beautiful house built into an ancient Etruscan wall.
My friend, Jorie Graham [the poet], was in Italy
then, too. Her mother, Beverly Pepper, is world
renowned for her heavy metal sculptures. Her fa-
ther, Bill, is an author and journalist. They own a
castle in Todi, which they built from ruins of a 12th-
century fortification and tower, the Castella Torre
Olivola.
“Okay. Jorie’s brother, John, was an assistant
director on the television miniseries, The Winds of
War,which was shooting in Florence when I was
there. Among the cast was a friend of John’s—
David Dukes—who was coming over to see John
at his parents’ place. Since Jorie had invited me to
come, too, the plan was that David would pick me
up in Florence and we would drive down there to-
gether. Of course, it was a setup. We drove down
there, and imagine this place, with Beverly’s sculp-
tures surrounding the grounds like brooding sen-
tinels. Jorie and I talk about poetry, John and David
talk about acting. David was trained as a Shake-
spearean actor, he knew the classical repertoire,
Moliere to Chekhov. Now, who wouldn’t fall in
love in those circumstances?”
Muske-Dukes shows me an album of photos
of these places she made for her sixth wedding an-
niversary. It ends with a clip from Liz Smith’s gos-
sip column, announcing the marriage of David
Dukes and Carol Muske, and a news picture of the
bride and groom, looking radiantly happy.
In the early ’80s, Muske-Dukes was starting to
write fiction. Her first novel, Dear Digby,started
as an epistolary goof. “I was supposed to co-write
that with a friend, who was actually in the letters
department at Ms.magazine.” The friend dropped
out of the project, but Muske-Dukes continued.
“The letter format was really helpful for me just
starting out in fiction, because it gave a natural flow
to my chapters—you end a letter, or you begin one,
and that provides a way of swimming from one
piece of text to another.” The novel is about a
Lonely Hearts–style columnist at SIS,a feminist
magazine. Digby radiates a sort of combination
of the ingenue humor of Gracie Allen and the in-
your-face feminism of the early Gloria Steinem. “I
didn’t have an agent at the time. A friend showed
the manuscript to Viking, and they bought it. So I
scrambled to find an agent.” The book was received
with critical enthusiasm and optioned, by Michelle
Pfeiffer, for a movie. “It was greenlighted by Orion,
but they couldn’t get their screenplay together. At
one point Callie Khouri—who later did Thelma and
Louise—wanted to do it, but they turned her down.”
Her second novel, Saving St. Germ,in 1993, re-
flected her move to Southern California. By thisOur Side