First Fiction

Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.

A Novel

Debra Weinstein

Random House: 248 pp., $23.95

“Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.,” Debra Weinstein’s brilliant send-up of the world of poets, workshops and literary ambition, kicks off with the best opening lines you’re likely to encounter this side of Dylan Thomas or Anne Sexton:

“This is the story of how I came to momentary prominence in the world of poetry, and, through a series of misunderstandings, destroyed my good name and became a nobody.

“It was fall, my junior year.”

Opening lines, of course, are serious business in poetical precincts, and, if you haven’t already made haste to the nearest bookstore, there are plenty more memorable ones in this seductive and surprisingly touching little book. Many of them pop up in the alarmingly authentic workshop poesy that Weinstein concocts here, and some are generated by her heartbreakingly eager narrator (or, perhaps we should say speaker) Annabelle, an aspiring poetess from the suburbs of Long Island attending the fictional University of New York City in the early 1980s. (She still waxes nostalgic about the Walt Whitman Mall back home.)

To Annabelle’s mounting dismay, many of her best lines seep into the work of her celebrated mentor, the Flower Poet Z., author of such rapturously received tomes as “The Amazing Journey of the Singular Flower,” “The Flower Daughter Poems” and “Flowers of Fate.” On work study as Z.’s assistant (and, later, promoted to personal assistant), Annabelle is required to make the rounds of New York’s public gardens, taking lyrical notes on flowering asters, maiden pinks and wisteria: “like hysteria, only it clings to a building.” These are character-building exercises, Z. assures her. Annabelle’s effort to press a spiked lobelia for her imperious poetical taskmaster results in an upbraiding that scans like, well, verse:

“What is this? If a flower -- not recognizable!

“Remember: tenacity is a poet’s most important quality!

“Please work to make future pressings more flowerlike.”

Weinstein works this conceit, of random everyday texts as quizzical found stanzas, like a veritable Milton working Satan. The resulting mischief is subtle and utterly infectious. In Weinstein’s able hands, even a string of words as innocuous as “Get Mailing Labels” -- jotted down by Annabelle during a moment of deep organizational resolve -- becomes a comic epiphany.

Ever the earnest naif, Annabelle slowly discovers that her current poetical life has more to do with mailing labels and buying the right kind of cat food than recollecting moments, a la Wordsworth, in tranquillity. Similarly, she finds that Z. takes the color and thickness of hand towels just as seriously as meter, metaphor and her shrine-like writing room: “a sacred space,” of course. For Annabelle, who often pines for the uncomplicated attentions of her first poetry teacher back in Long Island (Arthur Feld, author of “The Uncompromising Vision of Arthur Feld”), every day in New York City with Z. is as revelatory as it is baffling: “Standing in Z.’s kitchen, refilling her filtered water pitcher, I sometimes thought, What is poetry?”

“What is poetry?” is Annabelle’s stirring refrain as she wanders this weird poetry wonderland like a lost Alice. When she takes a seminar with Z.’s upstart rival, Braun Brown, Annabelle finds that her well-meaning critiques aren’t appreciated by her uppity cohorts and that her appreciation for the younger, sexier poet brings on Z.’s supreme irritation. Meanwhile, Annabelle gets mixed up in highfalutin, erotic high jinks with a grad student named Harry Banks, who likes to pretend he’s James Joyce, and in a potentially dangerous friendship with Z.’s Adam Ant-obsessed teenage daughter, Claire. As Annabelle’s endless attempts to write a poem about virginity go nowhere, her own flower descriptions for Z. -- the ones that will filter into Z.’s next book -- blossom.

“Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.” is as acid a parody of academia as anything from David Lodge or Kingsley Amis, and yet it never loses its disarming sweetness. And, like any great work of poetry, it can be read in countless ways, as the title suggests, from A to Z: as a smarter, workshop-world version of “The Devil Wears Prada”; as a probing tale of two women separated by age, renown and temperament; and as a heartfelt reminder that poets are actually humans.