Last week in DC, I sat down in Kramerbooks and read a short story by Carol Anshaw in the the Best American Short Stories 2012. I liked it so much, I immediately bought her novel Carry the One. I wasn’t disappointed. This writing is rich with imagery, the characters are complex, contemporary, and believable, and the moral dilemmas thought-provoking and not easily solved. Here is the opening:
I recently came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet who was once all the rage–perhaps as much for her outrageously bohemian life as for her work–and is now thoroughly out of fashion. In my view she is neither as great as she was once thought to be or as overly romantic and out of date as she is now perceived. After all, for years, her candle burned at both ends for me and so many others. This poem feels very contemporary in its attempt to reconcile the wonders of a scientific world with the primitive undertow of our human selves:
My discovery of Vasko Popa led me to a slim book called The Golden Apple, a compilation of Serbo-Croation stories, spells, proverbs curses and riddles. According to the editors Popa was instrumental in popularizing a plain-spoken Serbo-Croatian language that unified the various dialects, and found “great joy in bringing the little-known and under-valued beauties…into the daylight.” Here are a few of my favorites:
Curses
May you count your teeth on your hand. Continue reading “Following the thread”
Forty years ago or so, I saw the Japanese film, Woman in the Dunes. It made a vivid impression on me, and the other day, I happened on the novel it was made from, by Kobo Abe. Here is a section from the opening chapters of the novel, translated by E. Dale Saunders. The man is wandering through the dunes, searching for insects:
“The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in and year out.
“Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop…
“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”
Of course the man, always unnamed, soon has ample time to reflect on all aspects of sand. I found the novel excruciating! But I still remember the beautiful black and white images of the movie.
Sometimes you come across a poem that simply seems like a statement, as if there were no poetics involved; the poet is simply stating a series of facts in a way that happens to be particularly moving. I think that these are often the most highly crafted works. Here is one by the Serbian poet, Vasco Popa:
Absolute GoalTwo Red Army men are carrying
Their dead comrade past our house
A little while ago my mother was feeding
All three with apple tart
And Vershats wine
My father advised the dead man
They should go over the roofs
And come out behind the nest of machine guns
The dead man laughed and hugged my father
And together with the other two
Chose a shortcut
I watch the Red Army men
They put their comrade in a cart
With the crooked painted letters
T o B e r l i n
Vasko Popa
translated by Anne Pennington
I had two books of poetry from the library this week, The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, and Continuum, a selection of poems by Nina Cassian. Clampitt’s collected poems was 471 dense pages, and even though I have read a number of poems of hers I like, the sheer weight of it all was overwhelming. Any poet’s collected works is bound to have hundreds of uninteresting poems. It’s so much easier to get to know a poet through their selected works. But in the case of Cassian, either I don’t like her, or I don’t like the selection. It’s so difficult to get to know a new poet, to find the right poems, to get a sense of whether their voice really interests you!
So in hopes of saving you a little time, here is a poem by a poet you may not have heard of whom I like very much: Continue reading “Poetry Monday–the problem with poetry”
This title, pieces for the left hand, is usually about piano pieces. But on one blog or another, I read about J. Robert Lennon’s book with that title, and it sounded interesting enough to check out. These little vignettes are mostly ironic, short pieces that make you smile or grimace. Here’s a typical sample:
A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publisher’s interest and spent more than a year excising material. Continue reading “Pieces for the left hand”
I realized in all the time I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve neglected to include a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. She taught at Harvard just after I left, alas, my tenure there was deadly dull as far as poets went. Probably her most well known poem is a villanelle, called One Art. She and Lowell were great letter writers and a volume of their letters came out recently. She wrote a wonderful memoir of Marianne Moore, her mentor and friend, which is available online in the Collected Prose. Bishop lived with her lover in Brazil for many years. This poem is from that time.
After more than 40 years in California, I’d forgotten what cold was really like. Waking with the heat low and the cold seeping in, going out into wind that feels like icy knives. So I chose a poem by Robert Hayden, one that I plan to memorize soon. It seems relevant to any adult who looks back on their parent with a new understanding, and manages to evoke a lot of sentiment while skirting sentimentality.
Those Winter SundaysSundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
Regular readers will remember this feature, (with a nod to Mark Doty’s blog). The sentence that caught my attention today is from a book I’m wasn’t too crazy about, called Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead. I didn’t finish the book, but for some reason I loved this little sequence.
“You ought to go to law school,” Oatsie said decisively, “You’d make a wonderful lawyer. You have beautiful hair.”
“Thank you,” Livia said. When she was old, she wanted to be like Oatsie: imperious, brusque, and given to non sequitur. Continue reading “Another exemplary sentence”
I logged onto Facebook in an idle moment yesterday, and discovered that I was a finalist in a poetry contest I’d entered months before, for Split This Rock. Ok, there were nine other finalists, and three winners, nonetheless…
The contest was judged by Mark Doty, a poet I’ve mentioned here several times. I love the brilliant transcendence of his work. Here’s a copy of the winning poem–I wrote it in reaction to the epigraph I quote at the top…it made me immediately think of things I find hard to reconcile with the concept of Nirvana:
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten
Hô Xuân Hu’o’ng
The disposable diaper
in the meadow
The morning at the DMV
The razor wire on top of the chainlink
around the concrete
around the school
For every black man in college
five behind bars
What happens to the eyes
as the argument flares
The blueprints for the gas chambers,
meticulously filed
The invasion
The story of the invasion
The story behind the story
of the invasion
The ones
who knew to profit from it
Meryl Natchez
I’d put a poem by Mark Doty here, but the contrast would be too great!
How quickly the weeks roll by! I can remember lying on my great-aunt’s chaise lounge while visiting with my mother. Maybe I was 10. I watched dust motes sift slowly down in a shaft of sun and thought life would never happen–time was standing still. But now it goes so fast it’s like the old movie image of calendar pages flashing by, dates streaming away in the wind. Which is all a prelude to a poem for Monday. I decided to use one of my own, as we finally had some rain, and in the clarity of an after-rain morning, I remembered this one. Continue reading “Poetry Monday”