Category: Books to Read (Page 9 of 14)

I'm very happy to be part of Savvy Verse & Wit's National Poetry Month blog tour this year. I'm going to spend the month reading celebrity poetry. If you check back to this post all month, I will be creating a master list of celebrity poets and reviewing my own books of celebrity poets.

I'll start with a recap of the books I've reviewed so far, some links to celebrity poems online, and a list of books you can buy if you decide to dive into this exciting world of celebrity profundity.

Reviews

Jim Morrison is probably the best known celebrity poet (if you don't count the lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan). Read the full review here. I said basically,

Morrison is good at noticing what's going on around him. In this book he mulls over ideas of voyeurism and participation, film studies (he was a film student), issues of power and possession, alchemy, and a few interesting comments about motherhood. The random notes included are not fully formed. They seem almost like notes for future essays.  And many of the poems seem like a string fo terse images in search of a vague mythology…

In the end, Morrison seemed to view death as a clean slate, from "Hurricane & Eclipse" where he says, "I wish clean/death would come to me" to "If Only I" where he claims "If only I could feel/me pulling back/again/& feel embraced/by reality/again/I would gladly die." Maybe it's this very state of mind that appeals to teen boys, stressed out by the fog of adolescence and living a life not yet fully in control.

Some interesting lines:

"Real poetry doesn't say anything,
it just ticks off the possibilities."

and

"I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the ground.
We want the world and we want it…
We want the world and we want it,
now,   now,   NOW!

In my inaugural celebrity poet book review post, I reviewed Jewel, Suzanne Sommers and Jimmy Steart. Read the full reviews here. I waited a long time to score the Sommers book (before eBay came along) and I love it even thought the poems are a bit thin. Example:

"No!"

I don't give you time
    Because you're a cliche
    I meet a thousand times a day.
There's no need to talk.
    I know you're handsome
    And successful
    And extremely good in bed.
But really there's nothing to say,
Only a kind of game to play.
    Only a tedious cliche
    I meet a thousand times a day.
And I always forget your name.

I really didn't enjoy Jimmy Stewart's poetry. They were indulgent and better suited for a children's book. Exceprt:

from "I'm a Movie Camera"

I'm a movie camera. Instamatic is my name.
I'm Eastman's latest model,
   Super 8's my claim to fame.
I was on a shelf in Westwood
   when an actor purchased me
And took me home to 918 in Hills the Beverly.

I finished Directing Herbert White by James Franco last week. I spent half the book thinking I had never seen a James Franco movie. I just knew him as a child-star-terror. Last week Entertainment Weekly called him out for calling The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley a “little bitch” but EW added, “Don’t worry, he was in character as James Franco.” I was also considering judgments of family members of his disastrous award-show hosting with Anne Hathaway. Apparently he’s kind of a “little bitch” himself. But then I came upon the Wizard of Oz movie poem in his book and I realized I had seen in Oz The Great and Powerful. I became discombobulated then reading the book.

Some critics believe a poet’s biography should be irrelevant when you read a poem. I am not one of those. When I see James Franco’s paintings of Seth Rogen, I want to know if they are kidding or mean-spirited or I'll have no idea about tone. Poems are written by people, people with biographies. Your poems may not be about you entirely, but they are entirely not about anybody else either.

This book is better than the run-of-the-mill celebrity poetry. He has been published in American Poetry Review and has about 5 MFA degrees (in fiction, film, art and poetry…from NYU and Columbia among other colleges) and he has studied with well-known poets). Franco has definitely given service to poetry. He played Ginsberg in Howl and Hart Crane in The Broken Tower. He’s made his own short films about various works by Frank Bidart, Stephen Dobyns, Spencer Reece and C.K. Williams.

Some of the poems about Hollywood are good (two Lindsay Lohan poems, “Los Angeles Proverb,” the James Dean poem)- but “Acting Tips” is pretty self-involved, clichéd and empty—the last line being a telling indicator: “About me.”

The poem “Seventh Grade” is very good as is the poem about the LA River. The sonnets have a good tone and “Hart Crane’s Tomb" is probably the best poem in the collection.

In his poetry that when he said to the Brooklyn Bridge

“A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momentenly, shrill shirt ballooning,”

He meant himself,
A circle on the surface of the ocean,

For a second,
And then the bottom of the sea. 

There are also interesting poems about Brad Renfro (the tragic kid from The Client) and Heath Ledger and two sections of poems titled by lyrics from song titles from the Smith’s compilation album.

That said often Franco works with a flat vocabulary and has issues with ending his poems with a punch. Some seem to almost mean something but fail to gain any depth. In the poem “Fake” he almost reaches self-awareness. The poems are mostly very colloquial and WYSIWYG but in occasional pieces are interestingly figurative. Franco is at his best when he brings out the theatrical performance aspect in the poem.

The Rose That Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur is a different book entirely that exists for a different purpose. There are an amazing amount of prematerial in the book: a a preface, a forward and an introduction. The father’s preface is moving and the forward by Nikki Giovanni is a little hyperbolic in its attempts to give Tupac poet's cred, but she does draw out some of the importance in his song lyrics and makes a good argument about how black activists and artists are turned into thugs by the press or worse, ignored.

The book is tiny. Each page has the poem and the hand-written version on the page opposite. I had to wonder if Tupac ever intended these poems to be published. They were written in workshops and were published unedited and are mostly expressions of frustration and heartache, sounding like so much teen angst. Tupac makes use of numbers and symbols in place of words like old Price lyrics. Some poems rhyme. But he argues points on issues of race and class and the struggles of fame. He had his own celebrity obsessions with Marilyn Monroe and Vincent Van Gogh. The book is also sprinkled with publicity photos. The biggest section is of love poems which seem private and naïve. There are also political sections which deal with Nelson Mandela, the Black Panthers and the American welfare system. There are some moving mother poems.

The book goes a long way to presenting an alternate view of Tupac. He seems to be working out his life’s sufferings and joys. My favorite poem is “Pride in the Panther”

Can u c the pride in the Pantha
as she nurtures her young all alone
The seed must grow regardless
of the fact that it’s planted in stone

The final poem is absolutely haunting, a piece called “In the Event of My Demise.” There is no translation for it and you read the poem in his own handwriting. He was hoping to die for a principle. It’s a tragedy he did not.

I like that Tupac's parents are using his poems in service of young adult programs.

Links to Celebrity Poetry Online

• The Huffington Post: The Best and Worst of Celebrity Poetry
• The Huffington Post: Really Bad Love Poetry of the Stars (includes poems by Jennifer Aniston, Kate Moss and Roger "Syd" Barrett)
• Celebrity Poems by Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and Charlie Sheen
• Poems by Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, Sean Penn, Richard Grieco

Books:

• Jim Morrison – The Lords and the New Creatures; Wilderness; The American Night
• Suzanne Sommers – Touch Me!
• Leonard Niemoy – A Lifetime of Love; Warned by Love; Come Be With Me; We Are All Children Searching for Love; These Words Are For You; Will I Think of You; I Am Not Spock (there's probably more)
• Jimmy Stewart – Jimmy Stewart and His Poems
• Jewl – A Night Without Armor
• James Franco – Directing Herbert White
• Tupac Shakur – A Rose That Grew From Concrete
• Joni Mitchell – The Complete Poems and Lyrics
• Bob Dylan – Tarantula
• Viggo Mortensen - Ten Last Night
• T-Boz (singer from the group TLC) – Thoughts
•  Ashanti – Foolish/Unfoolish: Reflections on Love
• Ally Sheedy – Yesterday I Saw the Sun: Poems
• Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins) -  Blinking with Fists
• Alica Keys – Tears for Water: Poems and Lyrics 
• Sting – Shape of My Heart 
•  Jill Scott – The Moments, The Minutes, The Hours
• Antwone Fisher – Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?
• Jimmy Carter – Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems
• John Lithgow – The Poets’ Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family
• The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry: Timeless Poems by Snooki, John Boehner, Kanye West, and Other Well-Versed Celebrities

It's easy to make fun of celebrity poetry but they've committed no crime except taking advantage of their fame to publish poetry. Is that so bad? Taking up space from non-famous poets maybe but if you were famous, would you stop writing poetry? (Assuming you're a non-famous writer today). Everyone is on their own journey. Don't hate them because they love poetry. Some celebrity poets, like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell are actually very good.

I really enjoyed this book of essays by Jane Hirshfield called Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry. But I was predisposed to like it because the floating spirituality and humor of Zen Buddhism appeals to me.

This book is a dense, philosophical meditation and is difficult in its own way. I would not recommend it to beginners.

Hirshfield's studies more advanced topics of poetry, such as the nature of attention and concentration (an essay I found hard to concentrate on), a detailed study of her own translations of Japanese poets, what originality really means. She discusses economy, quietness, writing as experiencing, words as probes, the poet as a complicated being, the life of words on paper and via sound, the spiritual path of the writer.

Some concise balanced summaries on the history and trends of modernism and post-modernism can be found in various places as well as mediations on the tensions between formalists and conceptualists.

Her study on the issues of translations was particularly interesting. She studies the cultural gaps between Japanese and American poetics and her strategies to cover those gaps.

My job as a consultant to ICANN is to help post translated materials to their web site in various languages. As I was reading Hirshfields chapter on translation, this ICANN video was published about how difficult (but absolutely necessary) translation work can be. ICANN is a good example of translation's necessity. As decisions about Internet functionality and governance are made, stakeholders from around the world need to have access to understanding how those decisions are being made.

If only readers could see themselves as "stakeholders" in both social and spiritual world events and see poems as "documents" providing valuable information, as important as a statement of intent, action plan, treaty or memorandum of understanding.

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe: this was both an worthwhile and frustrating read. I would describe it as meditative, fractured scholarship because it's not organized in the classical sense. By design it's more scattered, anecdotal. That I didn’t mind. It was a poem-like weaving of scholarship on Dickinson’s mindset according to Susan Howe, what she was reading, what intellectual ideals she was exposed to, focusing heavily on Calvanism, Robert Browning, and Shakespeare.

I most enjoyed Howe’s sometimes cryptic scholarship. What I didn't enjoy after a time were the corpulent quotations, sometimes given without any context.

In the end, it felt as much like this was a private correspondence as it was some unfinished and messy intellectualism. Not accessible but not entirely a bad thing.

For Christmas I received this book of poems, I Could Chew on This and Other Poems by Dogs from my friend Julie. I assuming the book would be a silly parody of nonsensical dog poems. However, Francesco Marciuliano shows he has a mastery of that very meter of poetry that works to elicit a laugh. Call it doggerel (I couldn't resist), call them limericks, whatever…it takes skill. As some say about poetry, it can't be taught. As even more say about being funny, it really can't be taught.

All successful jokes and funny stories involve "comedic timing," which is another way of saying a finely tuned sense of the meter of the language. Bad jokes usually choke for lack of such timing.

 I loved these very funny dog poems. If you prefer cat poems you might read instead his poems found in the book I Could Pee on This.

Last week I also enjoyed The Late Show, poems by David Trinidad. Yes, because I love pop culture and poems about old movie stars and movies. Yes, because there's an amazing poem about Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Yes, because I collect Cher dolls and so appreciated his poem about how the cut-throat, back-stabbing world of poetry coincides with his passion for collecting Barbie dolls and accessories. Yes, because there was a surprising Sonny Bono mention in the book.

But also because I just started reading Frank O'Hara's collected poems and biography and Trinidad is reminding me of O'Hara in style (and not just because he's also a gay, pop-culture loving poet).

And also because the book has a crown of sonnets and I love those (ever since Joan Larkin turned me on to them and the ones called  "the blackout sonnets" in her own book A Long Sound). And also because the poems are varied, some simple and short, some complicated and long. The lipstick-color collage is amazing. The movie-title poems are amazing, too. The book also deals with memory and childhood, toys, and the meanness of the poetry world. You get name-brand toy dropping and name-dropping of the regular ole literary kind.

While I was working at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I would occassionally come across copies of a book by Maurice Kenny called Connotations all around campus. Last week I finally finished one of the multiple copies found in my own office.

The poems in the book are primarily about Kenny's father but also stories farther back into his ancestry, stories of his childhood and how his experiences then concern him now as he faces a future idea of his death.

The first section contains musings on paintings of male nudes. I found this section to be a bit repetitive and vague.

The poems in the second section are much more particular and literal vs. figurative (we leave that to the first section…pun intended.). I didn’t really love these poems either at first but they have stuck with me. They depict his complicated relationship with his father and they work to give you a cumulative sort of rendering of his father that is strong in the sum of its parts (which are the individual poems).

The poem “Strange Love” about his sisters reconciliation with her father during a Christmas exchange of presents is indicative of the section's theme:

“His protection beat scars/on her legs and arms.”

The poem “Complicated” does this as well:

His knife drew blood/that his hand wiped off.”

Kenny struggles to understand his father who both protects and harms in visceral ways. You can take the whole of this book as a metaphor for the struggles many have dealing with parents who also harm on their way to help.

It was not just good for clearing the palate, but after taking the intense and challenging Modern Poetry MOOC online class last fall, it was good for me to go back to the beginning and read Kim Addonizio’s new book on poetry craft this holiday break. Ordinary Genius is intended for beginners; it's a book for Addonizio's students. But clearing your mind of everything you know is not only good for Zen Buddhist practitioners; it’s good for experienced poets, too.

But going back to the beginning is not only an intellectual challenge, allowing yourself to become an open vessel is also a spiritual challenge. Restarting is actually hard, just as hard as keeping up with the most difficult, esoteric essays in poetry theory. It’s difficult because you constantly fight the urge to say I know this already.

 I like how Addonizio teaches by forcing her students to read poems. This book is full of recommendations for individual poems and I made of list of the ones I need to look up.

Then, after many I known this already moments, I found something I needed to hear in the last ten pages. You find messages for yourself in places you least expect. Don't forsake beginning again.

As sort of an anecdote for the hard, experimental poems in the American and Modern Poetry MOOC, I refreshed my palate with some genre forms. Along the Chisholm Trail by George Rhodes is an self-published book that has won quite a few indie awards last year. It's a big book of 131 pages, half of them are cowboy poetry based on the Chisholm Trail, half are miscellaneous poems about aging in modern times.

At first I expected this book to be somewhat reactionary as cowboy poetry can sometimes be. But Rhoades is a former journalist and teacher. His point of view was balanced and his poems on cowboy mythology somewhat grounded in reality. In some poems like "The Cowboy Way," he even questions modern ideas about cowboy self reliance.

I was particularly interested in his book because I'm working on my own set of cattle trail poems.  Rhodes uses a consistent ballad form that might not appeal to everyone but his rhymes were pleasant and interesting and his endings had force to them.  But strangely, the poems petered out a bit toward the end and the last poem, as a final poem, was a definite flatliner.

After the Hunt is the first book of poems I've read by poetry colleague Devin McGuire who I met last year while he was promoting an anthology from Encirle Publications.  His more slender book of 30 pages is full of 1970s and 80s references that hit right at my age. The book deals with the themes of struggle: struggle in surviving loved ones, struggle in relationships, stuggle in weather, the struggle of waste and wastedness.

My favorite poem was "How to Kill a Fish" and in fact I really gravitated to the poems that mentioned fishing or hunting (although I am not a fisherman or hunter) even briefly. Hopefully we will continue to see more fish and game poems in forthcoming collections.

Recently finished  American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language edited by Rankine and Spahr. And although the title is meaningless and uncreative (typical language poetry like), the book was an interesting but difficult study of 10 female language poets and their relationship, sometime antagonistic or conflicted relationship, to lyric poetry. Each section includes sample poems by the poet, their artistic statement (such as they believe in that…some did more than others) and a long essay explicating their work and contributions to poetic thought. The poets included are:

• Rae Armantrout *
• Mei-Mei Breissenbrugge
• Lucie Brock-Broido
• Jorie Graham
• Barbara Guest *
• Lyn Hejinian *
• Brenda Hillman
• Susan Howe *
• Ann Lauterback
• Harryette Mullen

The essays deal with (mind) turns in poems, using space, associations, broken questions, mind failings, betweeness, abstractions, shifting syntax, fragmentation and the fallacies of reason, the typical things language poets grapple with.

The poets with asterisks are ones that were included in a recent MOOC (massive online open course) I participated in this fall, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. I almost wish I had waited to read the book until after I had taken the course. I don't think I would have found it as slow-going. The MOOC discusses many of these topics but in a way more succinct and user-friendly way.

However, even without the class, my favorite sections were those on Jorie Graham who is more conflicted than dismissive of the lyric and Harryette Mullen who covers language poetry from a perspective of race and privileged literacies and whose poems felt the most young, modern and pop-culture inclusive.