For all its renown in academic circles, the Creative Writing department at Oberlin is home to talented yet modest writers. Two of them, Associate Professor Pam Alexander and Assistant Professor Dan Chaon, gave a much welcomed and enthusiastically received reading last Sunday as part of the Firelands Association for Visual Arts gallery’s Main Street Reading Series.

Within the many-colored walls of the FAVA main gallery, both Alexander and Chaon seemed at ease in front of the large group of Oberlin residents, students and faculty members who attended the reading.

Alexander read first, choosing poems from the third of her published books, Inland, as well as newer poems from an as yet unpublished collection. Her low, serious voice which she fretted over, telling the audience half-jokingly to raise their hands if they couldn’t hear provided a telling juxtaposition with her spunky and often humorous poetry.

Much in Alexander’s poems spoke to the processes of intersection and permeation, painting a holistic landscape in which the binaries of living/non-living, conscious/unconscious are rendered inapplicable. A line from one of her new poems, “St. Cloud and the Drifters,” in which a cloud speaks, beautifully illustrates this point: “The Earth is an animal, it says/ one animal.”

Not only did Alexander’s poems capture the fluency between the life-filled and the life-less, they were also pleasingly unusual, forging landscapes in which roads spoke and broken glass gave way to broken teeth.

“A few years ago, I fell in love with a man and with jazz. I’m still in love with jazz,” Alexander said, introducing a new poem titled “Couple at the Club.” The sharp language and smart word play showed off Alexander’s exceptional skill with language.

Alexander is the kind of poet whose work incites lapsed poets to write again. The energy is contagious and the audience responded with due enthusiasm to a poet whose first book, Navigable Waterways, won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1984 and whose most recent book, Inland, won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1996.

Not to be outdone, Chaon’s reading was lively and energetic. He read from his first novel You Remind Me of Me, due out in May from Ballantine Press.

Chaon expressed facetious dismay over the difficulty of describing his book to others, adding that the cover, which displays a pair of shoes, doesn’t really help.

“It’s like The Hours except with redneck guys,” Chaon said of his book.

Those listeners familiar with the stories in Chaon’s last collection, Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, recognized the protagonist of You Remind Me of Me, Jonah, as yet another troubled misfit struggling to overcome social paralysis and enter into what he perceives to be the real world.

In any other novel Jonah would come complete with a stutter, but in Chaon’s he is marked instead by horrific facial scars, the outcome of an attack by the family Doberman, Elizabeth.

Chaon delivered the brief excerpt from his novel with remarkable style, his voice punctuating the ironies and subtle wit of his protagonist’s inner monologue. The other characters were not left out of the fun. Chaon’s rendition of the hippie-esque Steve was especially entertaining. His favorite expressions include “wow” and “cool” and he befriends Jonah by sharing photographs of his bloody newborn son and lamenting to him, “We never seem to connect.”

Chaon’s energetic reading style delightfully accommodated the near-hyperbolic humor of his prose, and Chaon had little difficulty leaving his audience in stitches.

In addition to You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing, Chaon’s first collection of stories, Fitting Ends and Other Stories, is being reprinted by Ballantine.

The Main Street Reading Series is coordinated with the hard work of Margaret Young.