Scott Martelle

Regular readers of The New Yorker will recognize Dana Goodyear as the Los Angeles-based correspondent who keeps trying to explain us to the Manhattanites who think the West Coast is somewhere over there on the other side of Tenth Avenue. And she's done some very nice work in that regard, including this recent piece on a sub-radar dining fad: Chef Craig Thornton and his private dinners.

But Goodyear also is a poet, and the Los Angeles Times has a short profile I did of Goodyear tied to the release of her second collection of poems, The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard. From the piece:

Poet and journalist Dana Goodyear perches on a swivel chair in the second-floor writing studio behind her Venice home, the windows cranked open to a gentle ocean breeze. Low rooftops and tall palm trees stretch to the horizon, and Goodyear points to an anomaly just across the alley — a faded surfboard tossed up and forgotten atop a neighbor's single-story house.

Such juxtapositions appeal to Goodyear, a New Yorker magazine staff writer. And while the misplaced surfboard doesn't make an appearance in her new book of poems, "The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard" (Norton, $25.95), it reflects the kind of unexpected encounters that she says drives her poetry.

"There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness," Goodyear says. She finds it's more effective to deal with that immediacy in poems than in her better-known nonfiction magazine pieces, which she describes as "more outside and objective. For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader."

It was a fun piece to do. Any time a writer gets to spend a couple of hours with another writer talking about writing, well, you get the point.

Oh, and she's working on her first nonfiction book, too. It's on American foodie culture. And I suspect her piece on the private dining fad will be a part of it.