Category: Books to Read (Page 11 of 14)

When I was at Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1990s another book poets mentioned in passing was this 1978 collection of thoughts on modernism by Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry. I bought the book with the uber-boring cover seen to the left, not the more interesting version depicted below. Since Pinsky was U.S. Poet Laureate around that time, I mistakenly thought the book was going to be about the situation of poetry at that time. What Pinsky meant was the act of situating poetry in a context.

It's been a dust-magnet on my bookshelf since 1997. I've tried to read it a few times but only succeeded in using it as a sleep aid. It's dense, akin to a post-graduate lecture. I would argue it's needlessly obtuse but then there are some out there with a taste for that sort of thing.

In any case, now that I'm too broke for new books, I've taken it upon myself to read the ones mildewing on my bookshelves. This one was, as I am fond of saying, a slog
to get through and I wouldn't recommend it. But I did learn some things reading it. Pinksy illustrates the connections between ideas in Romanticism and those in Modernism and he shows how modernism works in particular styles of writing, from persona writing to  descriptive to didactic writing. In fact, I found his last chapter on discursive poetry to be the most passionate and convincing.

I also thought he did a good job at defining Modernism as "a dissatisfaction with the abstract, discursive, and conventional nature of words as a medium for the particulars of experience." He later describes a nominalist poem* as "logically impossible. Language is absolutely abstract, a web of concepts and patterns; and if one believes experience can consist of unique, ungeneralizable moments, then the gap between language and experience is absolute. But the pursuit of the goal or the effort to make the gap seem less than absolute, has produced some of the most remarkable and moving poetry…" Later, he says, "The terms of language are too human and too grandly abstract, ever to capture the impenetrably casual, fragmented life of physical things. Close as a poet may come, his poem consists of terms, not things."

I'm torn about the whole era of Modernism and its experiments in order, language and meaning. I'm also torn about its sequel of Post-Modernism (meta-writing and irony, although I was raised on it).

On one hand, I find the conversations about language and sense-making stimulating because I romanticise intellectualism and I see this kind of discussion as pure versus applied science and therefore worthwhile. On the other hand, experiments can go on a bit too long. My grade-school age niece was recently sent to the principal's office after an incident in music class. She was made to sit through a long lecture on whole and half notes. She eventually became frustrated and cried out, "We get it!"

Along those lines, my mother came to visit last week and brought a recent USA Today article on Joyce Kilmer and his poem "Trees." The article was about how every child in American was once made to memorize Joyce Kilmer's poem. Journalist Rick Hampson argues that memorization is a beneficial way to learn the mechanisms of poetry and rhetoric. But reading the article, I froze at the first famous lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree…

But of course, words fail. The Modernist knew it. You know it. I know it. Even Kilmer knew it. Turns out a few million or so elderly Americans were forced to memorize the idea.

What I can't connect with is the emotional involvement in the limits of language. I mean as a student, I like the essay. But as a matter of religion, I don't subscribe. As soon as you cross over the line and start to worry and fret about the gap between language and experience, it can only become madness.

How do we deal with language as a flawed system?

There are two things that help me deal with broken things: ceramics and Zen Buddhism. When I took my first class in pottery making years ago, I had to learn how to think in shapes. I've spent my whole life thinking in words. This was a mind-blowing change for me and by the end of it words and the business of using words ceased to be sacrosanct for me. In fact,  I started to wonder if shapes were maybe a higher, if not equal, form of thinking about being. In any case, ceramics taught me I could be spiritually satisfied to create in a wordless world.

Zen Buddhism asks me this: what exactly is it that I dislike about imperfection, beyond the fact that the thing or system is not perfect? There's a gap, but why is that cause for anxiety? Because my attempt to communicate and be understood will be imperfect? My desire for perfection is the cause of my suffering. My desire for words to be more than they are is the cause of my suffering. I cannot change the gap. I cannot have a world of perfectly-grown uniform trees either.

But wouldn't such a thing be creepy?

Forget about the complexities of our inner lives, politics, and contemplating ultimate reality. Let's just deal with the frickin tree. If the word approximated the tree in any absolute way, what the hell would we need the tree for?

*Nominalism: holding that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. (Free Dictionary)

When I was at Sarah Lawrence in the mid 1990s, everyone was all agog over international poets, especially ones who had written poems about New York, like Federico Garcia Lorca. I was still trying to catch up on all my homeboys and girls and so felt I was very far behind in all things literary.

But the truth is you are never far behind where ever you are. Each is on their own path, having reading experiences precisely when they should. It's not just about what you read, it's about how you respond to what you read.

Forget about what everyone else is reading. Better still, ignore what everyone else says you should be reading. Don't ignore quality suggestions that suit your interests; these can be very valuable and life-changing. Ignore any recommendation made in the spirit of condescension. And like Gandalf says, when you're lost just follow your nose.

Years ago I made my first investment in an international anthology of poetry, The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry (1996), edited by J.D. McClatchy. I guess this is my favorite international anthology because, just like that boy in St. Louis, it was my first.

I like how the book is organized. You get a handful of poems (4-8) on a very large array of poets taken from each geographical area. You also get a half-page synopsis on each poet before you read their poems. I used this book to identify the international poets I wanted to explore further, searching for their selected works on Amazon. In some cases, only used copies were available. In other cases, their works have disappeared altogether and their books are languishing in my Amazon Wish List.

I discovered much about my taste in cultural poetries. For instance, I loved most of the Spanish/Portuguese-speaking poets, Sophia De Mello Breyner (Portugal), Eugenio De Andrade (Portugal; I was disappointed in his selected poems), Angel Gonzalez (Spain), Roberto Juarroz (Argentina) and Maria Elena Cruz Varela (Cuba). I think I liked their gritty earthiness, their almost-Catholic connections between blood and the soul, their willingness to linger over elements of the body. In totality, I didn't much like French poets (too chilly and cerebral) but I'm beginning to warm to them. I liked Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (who I'm reading now). I tended to like the Eastern European poets like Polish poets Tadeusz Rozewicz and Wisława Szymborska, Czech poet Miroslav Holub (whose selected works became one of my favorite reads this year), Serbian poet Vasko Popa, Yugoslavian poet Novica Tadic, Romanian poet Paul Celan. I didn't like any of the Russian poets.

I was mixed on Middle Eastern and African poets. I liked Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (whose book The Window I read but can't remember much about). I loved, loved, loved Taslima Nasrin (Bangladesh) and her book The Game in Reverse.  I also liked Indian poet A.K. Ramanujan.

I came to enjoy Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian poets later on in my life when I was researching Buddhist poems. But from this book I only picked out Japanese poet Ryuichi Tamura to pursue.

Overall, this anthology was good for sampling a large amount of international poets quickly.

Language for a New Century, Contemporary Poetry from The Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008), edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, a book I picked up in Santa Monica years ago, is an entirely different project. The poems are organized in subject groups (childhood poems, experimental poems, political poems, etc.). I wasn't always clear about what subjects the sections represented, even if I had a vague idea. Each section begins with personal essays by each of the editors, all of which were interesting.

Although I did enjoy the poems in the book, there were some issues. The poets were not identified by country, if a poet had multiple poems represented in the anthology they were not presented together, and the poet's biographies were all listed at the end of the book. All of this made locating my favorite poets and pursuing them further a bit of a trail. But this anthology is definitely worth reading to discover some new and exciting poets. Maybe not an  international anthology choice for newbies.

The book I recently finished, The Poetry of Our World, An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2000), edited by Jeffery Paine, might be a good starter book on international poetry like the Vintage book. This book includes many helpful historical essays at the beginning of each section, putting the poets in context with world and local events. You get far fewer samples in this book versus the Vintage anthology, but the essays are helpful.

Helen Vendler does the first section on English poetry. I could have done without the inclusion of the U.S. poets who were already familiar to me. As for "international," Vendler includes Philip Larkin (England), Seamus Heaney (Ireland) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) who many English-speaking readers may also already be familiar with.

Each geographical section reviews about five poets, although many of the sections have a catch-all chapter at the end with other poets worth pursuing. Carolyn Forché edits the Latin American section.  I was already familiar with Neruda and Octavio Paz (both who I love) but I came away wanting to look more into Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), César Vallejo (Peru) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil). 

Joseph Brodsky, Sven Birkerts, and Edward Hirsch edit the European section. They were able to break me into famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I also enjoyed more of Romanian Paul Celan. I loved Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's poem "The Power of Taste."

Kwame Anthony Appiah edits the African section. This was a mixed bag for me, although I did love Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka's poem "Telephone Conversation." I'm trying to figure out what I feel about African poets. They tend to be understandably political and I wonder if something is getting lost in the translations.

For me the Asian section falls apart with too many editors and only one poet selected from each major area: India (still love A.K. Ramanujan), Middle East (one poet for its entirety!), Southeast Asia, China and Japan (liked the Shuntaro Tainkawa poems). Regardless of the dearth of poets represented by country, all the essays (by area) were very illuminating.

The poets picked here are fewer but are the most famous and established of contemporary poets in their countries.

Against Forgetting: 20^th Century Poetry of Witness is an old standby, with over 700 pages of protest and witness. This is literally the textbook on protest and witness poetry but it can also serve as an international anthology.

It’s organized by categories of country and political atrocity: Armenian Genocide poems, World War I and II poems, Soviet Union revolution and repression poems, Spanish Civil War poems, Holocaust poems, repression in Eastern and Central Europe poems, dictatorship in the Mediterranean poems, Indio-Pakistani War poems, Middle East War poems, repression and revolution in Latin America poems, American civil rights and liberties poems, Korean and Vietnam War poems, African apartheid poems, and democracy in China poems.

So the international anthology you may want to read will depend on your personal taste for amount of poets represented (pick the Vintage book), background information (pick Poetry of our World),  quality poems from some new and undiscovered poets (pick Language for a New Century) or poetry about political persecution by country or international area (pick Against Forgetting).

Last week I finished Impertinent Voices, Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women's Poetry, a book a found mucking around on Amazon.com. This is a very academic book, more about feminist theory than about poetic strategy. And definitely a book describing things as they were during the second wave of feminism. This book was published back in 1991, back when the media was saying young girls were in some kind of backlash against feminism (this was actually a Time Magazine cover story). This was before Riot Grrls and Bust Magazine and Bitch Magazine made third wave feminism relevant. So as a third waver myself, there were aspects of this book I found to be outdated. For instance, back when second wave was in its full throes, feminists felt that men still controlled the meanings of language and culture cues. Third wave feminists feel we have made inroads in this area (thanks to groundwork done by the second wavers, of course) and we feel more in control of our own labels, language and meanings. One example: women today would never think to describe a woman who is assertive or angry or pushing boundaries as "impertinent" because we don't accept that what she is doing is rude or inappropriate by definition. She is telling it like it is. Screw impertinence.

That generation-gap aside, this book did some good things for me. This book opened me up (finally!) to Sylvia Plath. There are about three chapters devoted to her struggles and strategies in this book. If you have trouble connecting with Plath, as I have over the years, this book might help.

The book also has chapters devoted to Adrienne Rich, H.D., and Audrey Lorde.

Months and months ago I received this catalog in the mail and haven't had time to discuss it. I love getting these catalogs. They're full of free sample poems from new poets and I actually do buy books from them. I've tagged the following poets and books for checking out:

Daisy Fried's Women's Poetry (gritty poem here about women's poetry mashed-up with car parts), Denise Duhamel's Blowout (I always love her frank poems), Laura Read's Instructions for My Mother's Funeral (seems poingnant to me now that my Aunt Merle has just passed away), Paisley Rekdal's book Animal Eye looks good (she does a poem about the movie The Fly called "Intimacy").

The poem "Getting Down With the Mofos" by Elton Glaser was some sing-songy childlike language/ars poetica poetry. Alicia Suskin Ostriker's poem "Fire" is a great fire and brimstone piece. And I liked these lines from Jan Beatty's poem, "Visitation at Gogama:"

I saw my birth father young and alive,
he stepped out of a brown house with a white
sign on the side: WILD BILL (his nickname)
in big block letters. I saw him the way he was
before he made me.

Back in 2004, Timberline Press, a handpress of books published by Clarence Wolfshohl, produced a book of my hauku (co-written by Julie Wiskirchen). Clarence also designed four zinc-cuts illustrations in the book. 

So I was delighted to see news that Clarence and his friend Mark Vinz are putting out a new handmade book on the El Grito del Lobo Press. In Harm's Way are their dueling poems about quite different childhoods, Clarence's in San Antonio, Texas, and Mark's in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The poems almost read like little short stories narratives about doctors and childhood scabs, theology with a kid POV, teachers, grandparents, baseball and baseball cards, movies, food, learning to drive and a marvelous marble poems ("the one that rolled away") by Mark Vinz. Never knowing Clarence Wolfshohl grew up in Texas, I was pleasantly drawn to his poems that reflected a similar childhood to my early years in New Mexico, his talk of horned toads (we called them horney toads and tried to move a family of them out to the humid Missouri climate in 1977 where they all tragically died), his mention of caliche (who knows caliche outside of the southwest?) and Tex Ritter (my Dad loved "Blood on the Saddle" much more than I did hearing it decades later). I loved Clarence's poem about western idols, "Gunfight at the RKO Corral." I also loved his poem about Mexican food, "Starched in the Barrio." His poem "Under the Bridge" was also a good reflection on childhood imagination appreciating those who came before, petroglyphs under a bridge that:

amazed us, not as archaeologists
first led to Lascaux, but as a wandering tribe
alert we were not the first in this territory.

I also thought Clarence's graphic rabbit-hunting poem, "The Last Hunt," was somewhat chilling. Mark and Clarence both had strong learning to drive poems to end the book, Mark's description of his transcendent love for bumper cars:

All that mattered was racing toward
some car-free outer lane, where I
could circle, endlessly, lost to myself
and the road–all those years and miles
I was suddenly certain were coming.

This letterpress, hand-bound book also has two serigraph illustrations in the middle of the book depicting the poets as young innocents. To order, send $20.00 (postage paid) to:

Clarence Wolfshohl
6281 Red Bud
Fulton, Missouri 65251

Make checks payable to Clarence Wolfshohl. As Mark Vinz says in the introduction, (just like a Norwegian Minnesotan), this collection is "Quite the deal!"

My job at the Institute for American Indian Arts is set to end in a few weeks. I've been filling in as the Faculty Assistant until the school picked a full-time replacement. Mr. Big Bang and I will be moving in two months to parts as yet unknown. I figured I better peruse their library real quick to read those IAIA writers I've been meaning to read.

Linda Hogan's name came to me from one of my podcast explorations. She's an IAIA alum. From the library I chose her 1993 collection The Book of Medicines. Her poems in this book are flowing, meandering myths and stories, lots of fishermen and birth poems. The first poem, "The History of Red," covers the "wet mask of birth…already wounded/stolen and burned/beyond…how life stands up in this skin…This life in the fire. I love it./I want it,/this life." "Return: Buffalo" begins "One man made a ladder/of stacked-up yellow bones/to climb the dead/toward his own salvation./He wanted/light and fire, wanted/to reach and be close to his god."

"Harvesters of Night and Water" has the great line: "fire flashes from the gun/like a flower that blooms/madness/and is gone." And Ilove the opening of "Crossings," where "there is a place at the center of the earth/where one ocean dissolves inside the other/in a black and holy love."

The other side thematically repeats throughout the book: across a river, the sea bottom, the dangerous side, "in the land of the terrible other." Her poems read like incantations with the repeated verb formations of "it is" and "it has been." Her titles are spartan: "Skin," "Salt," "Bear Fat," Tracking," "Milk." Although all of this produces a calm, spiritual feel to the work, it also has a distancing effect.

My favorite poems where in the second section, "Tear" about torn femaleness and survival, "Chambered Nautilus" which is still mythy but more personal and dramatic with lines like "because everything that lived had radiance/like the curve of water and shell/of whatever animal/still inside/that has brought me here" and the poem "Drum" about hearing from the womb. The poem "Partings" has a great ending,

It is true our lives
will betray us in the end
but life knows where it is going,
so does water,
so does blood,
and the full and endless dance of space.

James Thomas Stevens is teaching currently in the Creative Writing department of IAIA. He gave me a copy of this book, Bulle/Chimére (2006) a few weeks ago and it felt serendipitous because I had just heard Sherwin Bitsui praise him on one of my poetry podcasts. In this book, Stevens displays a quiet particularity as he dissects the fragility of a new love affair. The poems are fantastically grounded yet infused with the scientific (and the French). The book is full of juicy words like "orblets of echo" and he plays on themes of the vulnerable bubble and the strange illusory nature of the "love artifact." I loved how he handles the physicality of love: with lines like the "stillness of your palms." Love becomes an abstraction but never loses the very corporeal experience of sex and of the touristic, alien place where the poems transpire.

His stanza and page breaks also serve the poems not only with moments of silence but give the poems scientific, almost Roman balance.  The poems are brief, spartan and controlled with lines like this from the poem "Lac de Laffrey" where "Goats walk backwards/down the streets of Cholonge/and the tinkling returns to the bell" which is so particular in place. A line later in the poem zeroes down to love's fatal break, "Cupid/loses his bow/out the backseat window." The title sets of poems dissect the alternative meanings of Bulle and Chimére within the context of the relationship and its personalities, "Chimére I" stating, "I have stood at the confluence of two improbably rivers, the roaring and the meandering." By the time we read the poem "Thames," the lovers are in trouble, "And I am reminded that there is always a rabbit./Some frightened fancy fleeing zigzag before us." The lovers are "Flight-denied/and tethered to trees." In "St. James Lake" the heart has turned into "the frightened flocks we carry…How idyllic, how monstrous/the responsibility for these many birds." Every page is full of this symbolic surface tension and always startled by touch, all working to serve the very last line of the book. With it's ornate reasoning, these poems remind me of Anne Carson and I loved it.

I wanted to like the selected poems of N. Scott Momaday (founding faculty member of IAIA), Again the Far Morning (2011) more than I actually did, especially since everyone loves his novel, House Made of Dawn, and my husband told me he talks like George Takei. But honestly, it felt like required reading. There were many poems that didn't connect with me, although the book is rich in forms: iambic pentameter poems, rhyme schemes, ballads, quatrains, tercets, couplets, free verse, prose poems and list poems, all of which Momaday handles well. His poem "Colors of Night" reminded me of Hogan's "History of Red" and Natalie Diaz's "The Red Blues." There were also a few poems in here I did love, mostly the Zen-like pieces similar to this four-line poem, "The Gift"

Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous;
Enough praise, enough rope.

This feels ominously like where I exist today in this world of supporting poets. I love the inset of watercolors overwritten with poems. I loved "Prayer for Words" ending in a stanza that felt typical of his work: "I am the rattle or mortality./I could tell of the splintered sun. I could/Articulate the night sky, and I had words."One of my favorite prose pieces was #3 in "The Threads of Odyssey" about a homestead falling into ruin…"I want with all my heart to save it….for it is one of the homes of my spirit."

There were also cultural pieces I liked. In "Division" he says "The scales upon which/We seek a balance measure only a divide" and "The Modesty of Relics" is a succinct admonition to archaeologists,

How just wilt be my silence when
You look upon my hair and bone
Reflect upon my grace and then
Subvert my meaning to your own.

There's also a poem in memory of John Merrick, the Elephant Man which seems significant to me only because of an art tour I attended last year near Santa Fe. I met a woman who referenced her husbands writings on local history. When I asked him what he typically worked on, he deprecatingly stated he was primarily a playwright. I responded with a uncontrollably disappointed "oh." Later I find out he wrote the play The Elephant Man." During our conversation he name-dropped Momaday as a friend of his, a factoid that did impress the poet-fucker in me.

"Winter Arcs" feels like a good writing poem. "The Dead of Winter" is a good ghost poem. His "Notebook" blurs reminded me of Theodore Roethke's similar pieces in On Poetry and Craft, my favorite one being the very New Mexico description: "The village. The smell of piñon and juniper smoke. A black storm descending into the canyon. Pasole simmering. All is well."

Another favorite was the last poem, "The Rolling" which talks about words before meaning, words "not yet in our keeping." We don't have to slip into meaninglessness when confronted with the difficulty of naming. What is "beyond the mind's reach" can still be honorable.

Arthur Sze is a professor emeritus at IAIA. I've only seen him come by once or twice for a visit. From the library I picked out two of his books, The Ginkgo Light (2009) and The Willow Wind (1972), translations from Chinese poems. Ginkgo Light is full of East/West fusion, between Chinese history and New Mexico desert. Early poems "Chrysalis" and "Crisscross" are typical of how Sze gently strings together glimpses of things in collages or abstract puzzle pieces of a whole. From "The Gift,"

The pieces of life stay pieces
at the end; no one restores papyrus

once it has erupted into flame;
but before  agapanthus blooms,

before the body scorches, razes
consciousness, you have time

to puzzle, sway, lurch, binge,
skip, doodle, whine, incandesce.

The past and present co-mingle in atmospheres of small actions. In the title poem, "each hour teems" and "love has no near or far" which shows how the collage congeals when I read the line as "love has no fear." Cool trick there. Sze pastes together juxtapositions of beauty and violence. He observes without comment and the comment lies in his choices. The poem "Power Line" shows the fusion of East/West: "a woman lays in an imperfection before/she completes her Teec Nos Pos weaving;/a sous-chef slices ginger, scallions,/anticipates placing a wet towel over dumplings." "Departures and Arrivals" is one of my favorite poems here and ends with "how we thirst and renew our thirst in each other." The second poem of "Completion" is beautiful in its brief tricking lines, "when is joy/kindling to greater joy?"

The Willow Wind by Sze is half translations of Chinese poets Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Li Yu, Tu Mu, Li Shang-yin, Wang Han, Liu Tsung-yuan and Yen Chen. The second half are original poems by Sze. I read the book in one sitting. In his own poems, he makes frequent use of the forward slant character "/" and I wasn't sure if he was depicting dichotomies or using the character as a kind of separator. The poem "Bird / Call" is indicative:

the circle of the sun
is clear
and I dare to
touch the rim
with my / distant hand.

It is interesting to see how Sze is influenced by the Chinese poems at the beginning of the book. I liked "Pacifia" with lines like "these stones are impenetrable. They open/only from the core, like seeds;/then the weight becomes magical,/medicinal, and green," and the poem "Be the Death of Me" about heroin, "Sliding Away" about death and the final poem, again seeming to connect me to New Mexico like spaces:

A singer with eyes of sand they said–
the western wind
                                    sweeps me home,

and I am carrying you, my desert,
in my hands.