My Ramke books were overdue at the library, so I am moving on to the Vap. My book club, a very small group of writers, just read this one, and two of us met last night to discuss it. I very much enjoyed this book, and I read it leaisurely, several times, over a period of several months. How all poetry collections ought to be read, probably.
I discovered Vap while googling another poet. I read her first as an essayist, and the first essay I read by her identified her as a mother. It's a beautiful essay, which you can read here. What I stuck with me from it, what I remembered about it before I reread it, was this passage:
"I want to ask them [contemporary women writers], not necessarily about their writing, but about their lives. How does their day go? Is their house clean? How clean? Where do they keep all their books?
Anything that helps me know anything about how to do it."
So for obvious reasons (if the reasons are not obvious, see my other blog link below) I was drawn to Vap, and I ordered her latest volume of poetry, which is described in reviews as being "about" pregnancy and childbirth, which also interested me. Most readers are somewhat wary of any writing "about" pregnancy and childbirth or motherhood. Such writing is suspect of being "sentimental." And maybe it's a fair suspicion--I'll admit that I've read and even written some pretty sappy poems about those subjects. But it seems a little unfair, however, that a poem about being pregnant or having a baby has to work so hard to prove it isn't sentimental. Sentiment is essential to both writing a good poem and being a good mother. This is leading me into a discussion of aesthetics I don't have time to complete, so I'll leave it there for now.
In any case, Vap's poems, which deal not with a run-of-the-mill pregnancy but a pregnancy in which she lost one of a set of twins, aren't sentimental. They are often quite personal, often fragmented, occasioanly, to me anyway, somewhat opaque, but no matter what they are compelling. I kept imagining them as paintings. They'd be collages, I think, somewhat impressionistic, sometimes surreal. What holds the book together, besides the narrative threads describing the pregnancy, are the moments of meticulous specificity. The poems will zoom in on a certain object in a scene--"our grape juice spilled by the dresser;" "crushing peppermints for the ice cream"--or a detail from a memory:
--she tied the bear-bells to our jeans,
called our dog for its warning smell, then sent us out to play--
(from "A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard"--Vap is also great with titles).
It's these details, I think, that save the poems from any danger of sentimentality. The collection, as I read it, seemed alive. As though the poems were being written or even lived as I read them.
Faulker's Rosary, though I still don't understand the title, was a fascinating example of a collection of poems that seemed to truly cohere. I would love to meet Sarah Vap, to get to talk to her about how she does it.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Friday, December 2, 2011
Hillman and Hass
In between a lot of other things, I have been avoiding reading and sometimes actually reading Brenda Hillman's Cascadia. I wasn't avoiding because I don't like the work, but because the work is demanding. However, the other day, spurred by my yoga teacher's urgings to commit to what you love (thanks, Kat, if you're reading this) I sat down to finish the book. I ended up reading most of Robert Hass's Sun Under Wood too, so this is my account of both books.
Although Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass are married, their poetry couldn't be more different. Well, of course it could, but it's pretty different. Here are the first six lines of Cascadia:
A left margin watches the sea floor approach
It takes 30 million years
It is the first lover
More saints for Augustine's mother
A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trail free of some sand
And here is the opening of Sun Under Wood:
Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall of apples in the rain--
they looked at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating--
Hass's writing is like comfort food to me. I can curl up with it. I know where I am in it. Reading Hillman's writing is like getting off a plane in a foreign country whose language I studied briefly in high school. I am not at all sure of myself.
Which is not to say I don't like it. Reading (well, rereading) Hass's collection didn't make me want to write like reading Hillman's did. It's just that Hillman's poetry does things I don't understand, and I'm not sure what this says about my ego, but that always makes me kind of annoyed. And even after two years, I am pretty much still a tired new mother, so it's hard for me to use A's naptime to sit down and try to figure things out.
But here are some thoughts on what I did read. In Cascadia (click here and scroll down to "Book Description" for an introduction to the book) both the commentary on writing itself and "the girl", often a girl reading something, resurface often. I especially liked the comments on writing, which seem somehow to comment on the book itself. Hillman does lots of intriguing things with page space, like placing text vertically, inserting a hand-written sentence diagram, sprinkling the margins with lighter-colored text or symbols like ///, and placing words at the tops of the pages like guide words in dictionaries. This is both the stuff I love to discover and the stuff that drives me crazy. I want to know what it means. And the truth is I feel like I haven't put enough time into the book yet, because I still don't know. But I can't read Cascadia forever. I am saving it for another time, letting it simmer.
According to its back cover, Hass's book, dedicated "to Brenda," "finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy." I think that's a bit over the top, but the poems do seem full of love, both love for their subjects and sometimes about love, although none of them are really quite love poems. They are detailed, conversational, insightful. A couple of times in the book, Hass includes "Notes" on a preceding poem as a new poem itself. I liked this move. As someone trying to once again write poems, it reminded me of all the choices you have when writing, what to include or not to include. And it seems to be at least one similarity between the two collections--both commenting on writing itself in the writing.
I was just reading an essay by the poet Matthew Zapruder in which he says that when he teaches beginning poets, he tells them, "without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty" (the essay is from the fall 2011 American Poet). I would definitely agree with him. Reading those words made me think of what I was planning on writing about Hass and Hillman, and I considered whether the problem with Hillman is a lack of clarity. On some level, for me, I think it is, but I don't feel like the poems are trying to hide something as much as they demand more study. It is, in fact, study I am hoping to do as a job kind of soon. However, as a non-academic, right now, I can't do it. The implications of that fact--and I do think it is a fact, I don't think I'm just being lazy, although that's a possibility, or maybe desire plays into it too--could be the subject for a whole different post. But my shelves are calling, and Amelia is still sleeping, so I am moving on to the next book.
Although Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass are married, their poetry couldn't be more different. Well, of course it could, but it's pretty different. Here are the first six lines of Cascadia:
A left margin watches the sea floor approach
It takes 30 million years
It is the first lover
More saints for Augustine's mother
A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trail free of some sand
And here is the opening of Sun Under Wood:
Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall of apples in the rain--
they looked at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating--
Hass's writing is like comfort food to me. I can curl up with it. I know where I am in it. Reading Hillman's writing is like getting off a plane in a foreign country whose language I studied briefly in high school. I am not at all sure of myself.
Which is not to say I don't like it. Reading (well, rereading) Hass's collection didn't make me want to write like reading Hillman's did. It's just that Hillman's poetry does things I don't understand, and I'm not sure what this says about my ego, but that always makes me kind of annoyed. And even after two years, I am pretty much still a tired new mother, so it's hard for me to use A's naptime to sit down and try to figure things out.
But here are some thoughts on what I did read. In Cascadia (click here and scroll down to "Book Description" for an introduction to the book) both the commentary on writing itself and "the girl", often a girl reading something, resurface often. I especially liked the comments on writing, which seem somehow to comment on the book itself. Hillman does lots of intriguing things with page space, like placing text vertically, inserting a hand-written sentence diagram, sprinkling the margins with lighter-colored text or symbols like ///, and placing words at the tops of the pages like guide words in dictionaries. This is both the stuff I love to discover and the stuff that drives me crazy. I want to know what it means. And the truth is I feel like I haven't put enough time into the book yet, because I still don't know. But I can't read Cascadia forever. I am saving it for another time, letting it simmer.
According to its back cover, Hass's book, dedicated "to Brenda," "finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy." I think that's a bit over the top, but the poems do seem full of love, both love for their subjects and sometimes about love, although none of them are really quite love poems. They are detailed, conversational, insightful. A couple of times in the book, Hass includes "Notes" on a preceding poem as a new poem itself. I liked this move. As someone trying to once again write poems, it reminded me of all the choices you have when writing, what to include or not to include. And it seems to be at least one similarity between the two collections--both commenting on writing itself in the writing.
I was just reading an essay by the poet Matthew Zapruder in which he says that when he teaches beginning poets, he tells them, "without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty" (the essay is from the fall 2011 American Poet). I would definitely agree with him. Reading those words made me think of what I was planning on writing about Hass and Hillman, and I considered whether the problem with Hillman is a lack of clarity. On some level, for me, I think it is, but I don't feel like the poems are trying to hide something as much as they demand more study. It is, in fact, study I am hoping to do as a job kind of soon. However, as a non-academic, right now, I can't do it. The implications of that fact--and I do think it is a fact, I don't think I'm just being lazy, although that's a possibility, or maybe desire plays into it too--could be the subject for a whole different post. But my shelves are calling, and Amelia is still sleeping, so I am moving on to the next book.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
What I've Been Doing
I tried with the Brenda Hillman. I really did. The thing is, when you read poetry after you put a certain toddler down for a nap, at 1 PM, you want ease. AndCascadia is not easy. I will try again, I promise.
In the meantime have been reading a lot of Bin Ramke, which counts nothing toward my goal of reading all the books on my shelf, because these are library books. I read a book by Sarah Vap: 2 thumbs up. And I have been studying for the GRE subject test in Literature, during which I memorized a lot of useless facts, but also remembered how much I like John Donne, and Spenser. Who knew.
So, I am still here, and reading, and Cascadia, I will write about you soon. Wait and see.
In the meantime have been reading a lot of Bin Ramke, which counts nothing toward my goal of reading all the books on my shelf, because these are library books. I read a book by Sarah Vap: 2 thumbs up. And I have been studying for the GRE subject test in Literature, during which I memorized a lot of useless facts, but also remembered how much I like John Donne, and Spenser. Who knew.
So, I am still here, and reading, and Cascadia, I will write about you soon. Wait and see.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
Author: Alice Walker
Title: Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
Year Published: 1979
Thoughts and Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): Concerned with love, civil rights, and the African American female experience, this is Alice Walker's third book of poems. Walker is best known as a fiction writer, and I like her fiction more than her poetry. This book was a pretty quick read for me (despite how long it took me to actually sit down and write about it). It was the opposite experience of reading Oni Buchanan: almost all story, little sound. Although the poems present compelling stories and characters, and even compelling arguments, some of them just seemed jotted down, not particularly artful. On the up side, the poems are easy to understand, with ample explanation of context, some even with footnotes, but my favorites were the ones that held something back and made me wonder. (And I realize that in the Buchanan book, I wanted more story and to wonder less. I am a picky reader.)
I read an essay on Walker, though, that I liked very much, and it made me appreciate her poetry a bit more. In "Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker," Ruth Weston summarizes the collection by noting that "Walker writes about black women with the authority of the universal female experience, an experience made complex and contradictory by the phenomenon of love," and asserts that the collection is "her answer to Adrienne Rich's call to action in her 1972 essay "When We Dead Awaken": a call not only for women writers to express anger at their victimization by men, but also a call for women to stop permitting the abuse, to take responsibility for their lives, to exchange the imposition of pain for what Rich calls the self-actuated 'birth-pains [of] bearing ourselves'" (25). Considering the poems in the context of feminist writing made me value them more as pieces of honest or authentic female speech (which is not to say I think they are autobiographical; I don't), but at the same time, I just wasn't ever enthralled by the poems' language.
Favorites: "January 10, 1973"
"Now That the Book Is Finished"
(Here is a link for this poem; scroll down if you don't want to read the essay)
"Even As I Hold You"
Questions: It's for myself: While I was writing this post, reading essays about Walker, and finding links to the poems, I realized how touching some of her writing really is, and I liked it much more. Was I missing something? Am I a snobby sound poet? I would really like to read some of Walker's essays on writing. I will put that on my long reading list.
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: These poems are full of feeling and something that I think can only be called truth. I loved the moments when a certain line or image catapulted me into a new part of my imagination; I just wish there had been more of those moments.
Title: Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
Year Published: 1979
Thoughts and Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): Concerned with love, civil rights, and the African American female experience, this is Alice Walker's third book of poems. Walker is best known as a fiction writer, and I like her fiction more than her poetry. This book was a pretty quick read for me (despite how long it took me to actually sit down and write about it). It was the opposite experience of reading Oni Buchanan: almost all story, little sound. Although the poems present compelling stories and characters, and even compelling arguments, some of them just seemed jotted down, not particularly artful. On the up side, the poems are easy to understand, with ample explanation of context, some even with footnotes, but my favorites were the ones that held something back and made me wonder. (And I realize that in the Buchanan book, I wanted more story and to wonder less. I am a picky reader.)
I read an essay on Walker, though, that I liked very much, and it made me appreciate her poetry a bit more. In "Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker," Ruth Weston summarizes the collection by noting that "Walker writes about black women with the authority of the universal female experience, an experience made complex and contradictory by the phenomenon of love," and asserts that the collection is "her answer to Adrienne Rich's call to action in her 1972 essay "When We Dead Awaken": a call not only for women writers to express anger at their victimization by men, but also a call for women to stop permitting the abuse, to take responsibility for their lives, to exchange the imposition of pain for what Rich calls the self-actuated 'birth-pains [of] bearing ourselves'" (25). Considering the poems in the context of feminist writing made me value them more as pieces of honest or authentic female speech (which is not to say I think they are autobiographical; I don't), but at the same time, I just wasn't ever enthralled by the poems' language.
Favorites: "January 10, 1973"
"Now That the Book Is Finished"
(Here is a link for this poem; scroll down if you don't want to read the essay)
"Even As I Hold You"
Questions: It's for myself: While I was writing this post, reading essays about Walker, and finding links to the poems, I realized how touching some of her writing really is, and I liked it much more. Was I missing something? Am I a snobby sound poet? I would really like to read some of Walker's essays on writing. I will put that on my long reading list.
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: These poems are full of feeling and something that I think can only be called truth. I loved the moments when a certain line or image catapulted me into a new part of my imagination; I just wish there had been more of those moments.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Oni Buchanan's What Animal
Author: Oni Buchanan
Title: What Animal
Year Published: 2003
Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): This is Buchanan's first book, winner of the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Series, a series that was recently shadowed by scandal, or at least the charge of it. I won't get into that here--if you're interested, you can google it. From what I know of Buchanan's work and the work of other authors published in the series, it focuses primarily on poetry that at least edges on the experimental or postmodern. Buchanan's collection fits; the poems are not particularly narrative, although a story or stories of pain or abuse seem to haunt the collection. The poems are extremely attentive to sound, full of phrases like "all the sand grains sorted through a sifter" (6) and--well, really, you can just open to any random page to find lines packed full of alliteration and slant rhymes--my favorite kind of rhymes.
Time Spent Reading: About 2 weeks, in the evenings
Favorites: I love the sounds in the poems in general, but my favorites are the poems in which I can grasp some kind of story. Several of the poems are from the point of view of an animal ("The Only Yak in Batesville, VA") and these I liked for their humor, the way the titles signaled the animal speaker, and their uniqueness. I just like the idea. "The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon" is another one of my favorites, about a guinea pig who sees a green balloon, falls in love with it, but pops it. Only that paraphrase makes it sound corny, but it's not at all--it's tragic, poignant, and elegant.
Questions: Some of the poems were so unattached to any kind of grounded narrative or speaker that I felt lost. I would like to know how other people interpret or process these poems. Also, this is Oni Buchanan's biography. Could she be any more accomplished? Sheesh.
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: What stayed with me is the sound; the lines are tight, consonant-rich, and fun to read aloud. This is the kind of book that makes me feel like it's hiding its secrets, though, and that’s a turnoff for me—but I only read it once. Guinea pig poem—-beautiful.
Title: What Animal
Year Published: 2003
Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): This is Buchanan's first book, winner of the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Series, a series that was recently shadowed by scandal, or at least the charge of it. I won't get into that here--if you're interested, you can google it. From what I know of Buchanan's work and the work of other authors published in the series, it focuses primarily on poetry that at least edges on the experimental or postmodern. Buchanan's collection fits; the poems are not particularly narrative, although a story or stories of pain or abuse seem to haunt the collection. The poems are extremely attentive to sound, full of phrases like "all the sand grains sorted through a sifter" (6) and--well, really, you can just open to any random page to find lines packed full of alliteration and slant rhymes--my favorite kind of rhymes.
Time Spent Reading: About 2 weeks, in the evenings
Favorites: I love the sounds in the poems in general, but my favorites are the poems in which I can grasp some kind of story. Several of the poems are from the point of view of an animal ("The Only Yak in Batesville, VA") and these I liked for their humor, the way the titles signaled the animal speaker, and their uniqueness. I just like the idea. "The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon" is another one of my favorites, about a guinea pig who sees a green balloon, falls in love with it, but pops it. Only that paraphrase makes it sound corny, but it's not at all--it's tragic, poignant, and elegant.
Questions: Some of the poems were so unattached to any kind of grounded narrative or speaker that I felt lost. I would like to know how other people interpret or process these poems. Also, this is Oni Buchanan's biography. Could she be any more accomplished? Sheesh.
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: What stayed with me is the sound; the lines are tight, consonant-rich, and fun to read aloud. This is the kind of book that makes me feel like it's hiding its secrets, though, and that’s a turnoff for me—but I only read it once. Guinea pig poem—-beautiful.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The Student and the Teacher
As I have mulled over this new project the last couple of weeks, I have been asking myself what a blog about the poems I am reading would be about. In other words, what would I say about these books and poems? This is really a question about purpose. Answering it gave me some insight into one reason that I don't really do a whole lot of poetry reading on my own, and the answer is school.
I don't mean school in the way people usually talk about poetry and school, as in "I wanted to read poems my own way but school taught me that there's only one right answer and thus snuffed my creative spirit." Sure, I probably took a few classes like that, and I certainly have a fear of discussing poems in the context of Grand Literary Theory, but overall most schooling I have taken part in, both as a teacher and a student, has increased my sense of creativity and trust in my own interpretations. What I mean by school is that for 26 out of the 33 years of my life, I have been in school. For some of those years I was the teacher, but for most of them I was the student. I was being told what to read and when, and being directed in my responses to the books and poems as well.
Right now, and for the past year and a half, I have not been in school at all. No one has been telling me to read anything, and I haven't been reading it. Also, I have been focusing most of my energy on a little project called Raising a Human Being. Until recently, this project left little time for repose of any kind, much less reading poetry (which I don't find relaxing anyway--stimulating, yes, at best even invigorating--but not relaxing). Lately, though, I have had more time and space in my life--which brings us to this blog.
To return to the question that began this post, then, what will I say about the books and poems I write about here? Would I write reviews? Would I write essays? Neither of these ideas appealed to me. My primary purpose is to read these poems, not to create polished or publishable (beyond the blog, that is) writing about them. At the same time, I want to write something about each book I read, not only to keep myself focused and motivated but also to help me remember what it is I have read.
So, ever the teacher, I created a little form for myself, a set of questions and comments I plan to complete about every book I read. My hope is that this form will keep me interested in each book and to help me to retain what I have read. I will likely tweak these questions as I go along, but here is what I have so far.
Author:
Title:
Year Published:
Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc):
Time Spent Reading:
Favorites:
Questions:
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less:
What do you think? Suggestions are welcome. And I made myself read the first book before I was even allowed to create this blog, so stay tuned for the first book soon!
I don't mean school in the way people usually talk about poetry and school, as in "I wanted to read poems my own way but school taught me that there's only one right answer and thus snuffed my creative spirit." Sure, I probably took a few classes like that, and I certainly have a fear of discussing poems in the context of Grand Literary Theory, but overall most schooling I have taken part in, both as a teacher and a student, has increased my sense of creativity and trust in my own interpretations. What I mean by school is that for 26 out of the 33 years of my life, I have been in school. For some of those years I was the teacher, but for most of them I was the student. I was being told what to read and when, and being directed in my responses to the books and poems as well.
Right now, and for the past year and a half, I have not been in school at all. No one has been telling me to read anything, and I haven't been reading it. Also, I have been focusing most of my energy on a little project called Raising a Human Being. Until recently, this project left little time for repose of any kind, much less reading poetry (which I don't find relaxing anyway--stimulating, yes, at best even invigorating--but not relaxing). Lately, though, I have had more time and space in my life--which brings us to this blog.
To return to the question that began this post, then, what will I say about the books and poems I write about here? Would I write reviews? Would I write essays? Neither of these ideas appealed to me. My primary purpose is to read these poems, not to create polished or publishable (beyond the blog, that is) writing about them. At the same time, I want to write something about each book I read, not only to keep myself focused and motivated but also to help me remember what it is I have read.
So, ever the teacher, I created a little form for myself, a set of questions and comments I plan to complete about every book I read. My hope is that this form will keep me interested in each book and to help me to retain what I have read. I will likely tweak these questions as I go along, but here is what I have so far.
Author:
Title:
Year Published:
Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc):
Time Spent Reading:
Favorites:
Questions:
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less:
What do you think? Suggestions are welcome. And I made myself read the first book before I was even allowed to create this blog, so stay tuned for the first book soon!
It's Me Against These Poems
Poets read poetry. It's a fact. Every teacher I have had, every published poet I have spoken to, every poetry-related person I have gotten the chance to meet has said the same thing: good poets read, and they read a lot.
I am, among other things, a poet; that is to say, I write poems. I want to write more poems, and I want to teach poetry. Lately, a little fact has been buzzing around my consciousness, a tiny fly, but impossible to ignore: I don't read a whole lot of poetry. In fact, I have shelves and shelves of poetry collections that I haven't read. Some of these books have been around for years, and most of them haven't been read. Sure, I have flipped through them, read a few poems here and there, and read a few of them in full. But for the post part: unread.
Is this because poetry is hard to read? It is because I don't like reading poetry? It is because I am lazy? Is it because I don't have enough time to read these books? This blog is an exploration in finding out.
I am, among other things, a poet; that is to say, I write poems. I want to write more poems, and I want to teach poetry. Lately, a little fact has been buzzing around my consciousness, a tiny fly, but impossible to ignore: I don't read a whole lot of poetry. In fact, I have shelves and shelves of poetry collections that I haven't read. Some of these books have been around for years, and most of them haven't been read. Sure, I have flipped through them, read a few poems here and there, and read a few of them in full. But for the post part: unread.
Is this because poetry is hard to read? It is because I don't like reading poetry? It is because I am lazy? Is it because I don't have enough time to read these books? This blog is an exploration in finding out.
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