Garrison Keillor Erotica?

For better or worse, when you put the words Garrison Keillor and erotica together in a sentence, people tend to make funny faces. Despite the famous Minnesotan’s folksy shtick, the fact remains: Keillor—longtime host of NPR’s old-fashioned variety show, A Prairie Home Companion—is a sexual being. The thrice-married 66-year-old’s racy new collection of poetry, 77 Love Sonnets (Common Good Books), out this month, features blush-worthy sentiments tucked into sensitive, melodious verses that explore everything from sex in the afternoon and unrequited love to parenthood and death. “A writer has no choice but to go where curiosity leads,” says Keillor. Hear the beloved raconteur read his sonnets on June 6 at City Arts and Lectures to benefit the college-scholarship program at 826 Valencia.

Why does the sonnet make such a good vehicle for the expression of love?
A form that limits you to fourteen lines with five beats in a line is going to rein you in considerably. This is good when you’re telling someone that you love her. You need to say it with style and economy. The sonnet brings out an elegance that might not come out in writing e-mail.

Do you chuckle at the shock value that your poetry inspires? Take, for instance, these lines from “The Beach”: “I crept under the cotton sky and over/ a hill with tufts of sea grass and snaked/ myself into a ravine and there found/ a delicate creature trembling with sensation/ a pink anemone that I touched ...”
I doubt that many people are shocked by the thought of a man crawling into a ravine and finding a small sea creature and tasting it. I might not read that poem on my radio show, but then there’s a lot I wouldn’t do on the radio show. But it fits perfectly in this collection of sonnets. I am in awe of the “pink anemone” in this poem. Have always been in awe of it.

Is there any part of you that considers the racy element a rebellion against your public persona?
The fit of poetry came on me rather suddenly a few years ago, after years of writing prose fiction, and maybe I could have suppressed it by taking up tennis, but why? I loved writing these poems. Nobody seems to be writing sonnets today, so it’s my obligation as an English major. A racy
sonnet is an innovation.

Your more erotic sonnets steer clear of raunch. Was this important to you?
These are love sonnets addressed to adored persons, not to cartoon figures—which is what pornography is all about—or to photographic images that feed one’s fantasy. I don’t think these come close to raunch. Oh, maybe “Room 704” does and a couple of others, but one needs to step over the line sometimes. What I aimed for were sonnets I could read aloud to the Adored that simply testify to her powerful, permanent effect on me.

Do you have a quality that has a remarkable effect on women?
I am an old, shambling galoot with a forbidding face and an awkward manner, and if women are drawn to me, I imagine pity is a factor. Of course if the lighting is poor, I can talk to them in honeyed tones and tell them that they have remarkable, indefinable, powerful, seductive qualities that drive me to my knees and make me willing to do whatever they want. Women like that—but only up to a point.

Death also plays a role in your collection, from your homage to John Updike to “The Lost Son” and “Last Words.” What are your feelings on this final act?
John was a blessed man and my homage to him is a recollection of the last time I saw him, which was on the New York subway, riding from 155th to 86th. The second sonnet is a memorial to the son of good friends of mine—a lovely boy who committed suicide. The third is simply me thinking about death when I lay me down to sleep at night, which is rather ordinary, isn’t it? As is death itself. My feelings about it are all churned up now by the recent death of my older brother, a sudden tragic blow. Every day I struggle to make sense of it and come to peace with it.

There’s a sense of regret in the sonnets. What are your biggest regrets?
I regret waste—waste of time, waste of attention and energy. I also regret friendships that were left to languish. I regret cruelty to people, but waste and cruelty seem sort of inevitable in life.

If you were to do an NC-17 version of A Prairie Home Companion, what would it be called?
It’d be The Ribald Home Companion, and it would be two hours of wonderful, filthy songs and limericks that boys used to pick up from each other, back before parents became so watchful and controlling.

In your personal history of love, would you say you are the tormentor or the tormented?
I could be either one, but in general, I see men as the tormented ones—driven, passionate, anguished—and women as cooler, more skeptical, defending themselves, avoiding rash moves. In all of my romantic engagements, I was the pursuer and I was also the one who decided when it was over. Well, almost all of them. All except one.

Are you actively harboring any secret crushes?
Yes, indeed. Oh my, yes. Yes, he said, oh yes, yes I am, yes.