What Poetry Does
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30 December 2010
I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think
it is) so I could talk about how different
the trees are around me here in the rain.
It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank spaces in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
We use them sideways. The way we automatically
add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.
So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,
“I love you” while we search for language
that can be heard. Which allows us to talk
about how the aspens over there tremble
in the smallest shower, while the tree over by
the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them
go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,
and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet
and other times is powerfully quiet.
-”The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper” by Jack Gilbert
12 December 2010
Here is a book you should know about, if you don’t already: The Literary Life, by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane. The book’s subtitle is, “A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950,” which rather says it all. It has the physical feel of a high school yearbook, and some of the gossipy excitement of Facebook.
Year by year we learn of seminal books published in the US and around the world, awards granted, important works in other artistic disciplines, deaths (of literary personages), and a particularly fun section called “In the Margin,” made up of tidbits like
DH Lawrence, 27, elopes with Mrs. Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, staying at Metz, Germany, where local authorities arrest Lawrence as a spy (1912), and
Employed as an assistant night manager in a New York hotel, Nathanael West, 25, works on his first novel, and “arranges” special rates and free rooms for various friends, among them Dashiell Hammett, who finishes The Maltese Falcon (1927)
The book is also filled with notable (and little-known) author quotes and photos (just like a yearbook). The Literary Life is out of print, but ABE Books can point you to some copies.
22 October 2010
Click here to read about why the wonderful essayist at Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner, grew weepy and then wise, thinking about cruelty to rare animals – like Grunbein’s okapi – and the book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough.
**
“To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo”
by Durs Grünbein (trans. Michael Hofman)
The clank of a steel door, and the ignominious entrance
Of the heraldic beast, trembling, because it’s feeding time,
And the keeper wants to knock off, and the beastly onlookers are laughing…
These are things not writ in any unicorn legend. Okapi—
The word is from jungle languages, now themselves extinct,
Insufficiently tall for the savannah, this patient, rust-colored
Throat merits its pellets of straw, and its locked stall at night.
Because the free range world will be strange to him,
As strange as to the bemused visitor
This combination of giraffe and zebra,
Equally remote from the familiar childhood cutout of either.
One more ruminant from the olden days, a sentry
Planted along the zoological roadside, as though to warn
Against the pathos of the exotic throwback.
15 September 2010
I’m doing a two-part “Staff Pick” for September at The Millions: two books about work. Today, a brief look at Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a book that’s been vital to me since my early years of “Am I a writer?” angst. Also, very much my inspiration for lighting out to the country and finding my (slow) rhythms for work. This, along with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life would likely be among my top 5 desert-island books.
Next week, I’ll write about Matthew Crawford‘s Shop Class as Soulcraft — wherein ”a philosopher-motorcycle mechanic makes the case for the cognitive riches of manual work, for living concretely in an abstract world.”
27 June 2010
From the Literary Review last week, a review of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, Daisy Hay’s new group biography. (How can one resist a title like that?)
This bit from the review fascinates me, particularly the last sentence:
Hay makes clear it was the women, those in the indigent [Leigh] Hunt household, as well as the wives, lovers and muses of Shelley and Byron, who had most to lose from these experiments in living, and who frequently suffered from the scandals they provoked. Bess Kent survived to write botanical books. Mary Shelley, who continued to write fiction, became the keeper of Shelley’s reputation, editing his poems and domesticating him for Victorian sensibilities. She hoped her only surviving son would be taught to think like other people, and he duly became a conventional citizen.
9 March 2010
I really appreciate this review from John Lehman at the Rosebud Review — for its thoughtfulness, and because the reviewer is both male and a poet.
Let me be upfront with you, this is a beautifully written story that takes concentration. It is layered both in subject matter and in emotion. It’s one where you dog-ear the “Main List of Characters” at the beginning of the book and return to it often. Sections of chapters not only change setting, but sometimes countries and time periods. At first I found this complexity a fault, wished the author had spared me her pointillist approach, but then about half-way through the parallel lines start to intersect and like a masterful poem it is not longer someone else’s story, it is our own.
As a Westerner (who has been to Korea) there is a tendency to think of the East in a feng shui kind of way. As Sonya Chung says of Han Jung-joo… “One must focus on the tiny actions that make up the events of one’s life… If one tends to the small things, the larger things fall beautifully into place; order is created and maintained.” Except that it doesn’t happen like that, at least in the way we expect it will. Another surprise is that the author does an equally good job with understanding the males of the story as with the females, the young and the old (though the interchange between the American, Ah-jin, and the daughter of her mentor concerning mothers and daughters occasioned by a photograph of a young Kenyan girl who’d undergone female genital mutilation is exquisite). Such dynamics are the heart and soul of this book which isn’t afraid to ask questions like, what is home, family, love, and gives us the courage to ask them of our own experiences.
And the conclusion we draw, probably not much different than Ah-jin during another interchange, this time with her brother who is an alcoholic drop-out, “Most of life is pretty damn boring, you know. The music doesn’t always crescendo when bad things happen. Shit goes down. People survive.” But there is the sharing of it together that makes a difference. As the female photographer does with her relatives, as this author does with us.
- John Lehman
1 January 2010
I finished out the year by reading Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. This is a run-don’t-walk book, I’d say. I bought it in hardcover (from McNally Jackson, where you should buy all your hardcovers, if you live in New York), and I’m so glad I did. All I can think of to say about it is, “I laughed, I cried, it was better than… anything I read this year.”
It also goes down as one of those “books that inspired me to keep going.” Right now, it’s full of post-it notes, i.e. scene and character details for Sebastian & Frederick that came to me as I was reading. A great book will often inspire me in this particular way. It’s not that I read something and then think, “Oh, I should have my character climb a ladder, too.” It’s more labyrinthine than that — an idiosyncratic pathway from details and emotions that are effected by the book I’m reading, to ideas and images that drive what I’m writing. But I am keeping the post-its on specific pages of The Anthologist, to remind me of how those pathways were working.
Among my favorite ruminations by narrator Paul Chowder is this: carpe diem, despite what Robin Williams may have led us all to believe, does not mean “Seize the Day.” Rather, it means something more like, “Pluck the Day.”
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things — so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant — pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.
5 November 2009
As part of the Kundiman Reading Series, poet Lee Herrick is reading on Sunday in NYC. Details:
Verlaine
110 Rivington St.
New York City
5:00 p.m. (Open Bar 4:00-5:00 p.m.)
212-614-2494
F train to Delancey or V train to 2nd Ave
with Sandy Tseng and Lee Ann Roripaugh
Come on out, I’ll be there.
KGB Reading Pics
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25 October 2009
Belated photos from last week’s reading at KGB. Apologies that the other readers — Sara Goudarzi and Daniel Meltzer — don’t appear in these; the photographer was a little focused on yours truly. (Apparently, I talk with my hands a lot.)
I had the chance to try out a particular 20-minute section from Long for This World as an oral/aural piece, and it seemed to work pretty well.
w/Adam Sexton
w/ my girlz (and a boyfriend)
a stranger checking out the galley for Long for This World
8 October 2009
Talking with a fellow The Millions contributor today about the conflict between blog-writing and fiction-writing — i.e. the competition for both time and head space — it occurred to me just how wonderful and admirable is Maud Newton‘s recent garnering of the Narrative Magazine Annual Fiction Prize.
The ability to seek out, ingest, and aggregate volumes of literary/cultural news and book criticism; to read and read and read, both for pleasure and in order to write short essays and reviews of her own on a regular basis; and to continue to write her own fiction… this is huber-literary-capacity indeed.
In my book, Ms. Newton bowls in same league as another huber-literary-pilgrim, Ken Chen — who somewhat single-handedly runs an extremely active nonprofit organization, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and who is the recipient of this year’s Yale Younger Poets‘ prize.
Bravo, bravo, bravo.
