Phases of the Moon

Okay, so I finally bought myself a copy of Madness, Rack and Honey, the collected lectures of Mary Ruefle out from Wave Books. Full disclosure: I haven't finished it yet. I'm not adding my voice to the wide praise and acclaim it has received from all over, including the NYT Book Review, and the Kenyon Review. Ruefle is a gift. For now, I just want to talk about the second essay in the collection, a lecture she gave on poetry and the moon.

Let's start with my own story about poems and stones--- "The moon is a stone that floats," writes Mark Strand in a chapbook titled Chicken, shadow, moon & more. I want to say that I once stumbled upon the book, that it's readily available, but, in fact, it's a tough find. I requested it through interlibrary loan for my undergrad senior thesis. If you ever chance upon it, or have time to bug your favorite librarian, I strongly urge you to get it. (And gift it to me!) So this book, like a philosophical Dr. Seuss, says, "The moon is a stone that floats." 

I'm floored by this. In Charles Simic's notebooks---all the bizarre bits of childhood and dirty bits of politics that you'd imagine in the poet's head---he wrote nearly same thing, but he wrote, "The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats." (Seriously, you should read his notebooks)(and his poems! this great collected works released this month!). It's not a secret that Simic and Strand are friends, and probably shared this image over a beer; or, the romantic in me hopes it was pen and ink letter, but I got hooked. I keep reading all these essays on poets and the moon and the surrealists and the moon, and Sappho and the moon and I'm just not satisfied. From Luna, lunatics: literally, touched by the moon. 

To circle back: Madness, Rack and Honey is a brilliant champion of the relevance, necessity and place of poetry. Ruefle's chapter on poets and the moon just smacks me over the head (in the best way) with fresh insights about modernity and poetry. After so many reductive critics, claiming that the moon is a simple archetype, a preloaded image, evocative of everything and nothing, Ruefle gives a gracious handling of the subject, ranging from personal anecdote (the foreign cab she was in when astronauts walked on the moon, the unintelligible reports on the radio) to the obvious and necessary research (the front page features after the Lunar Landing, astronaut testimonies).

And now maybe I can shut the book on poetics of the moon.

_Sarina, Bookseller

'Tis the season...

This first pick is especially important to me as we consider "shopping local" during the holidays and throughout the year. Independent bookstores appreciate your business, and so do small presses. Bender is out from Washington's own Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit publisher with offices in Port Townsend and Seattle. Small presses work hard to put out quality literature, so keep an eye out for their books!

 

Bender: New and Selected Poems by Dean Young

“...Toothpicked samples

at the farmer's market, every melon,

plum, I come undone, undone.”

Unusual, dense, funny and brilliant—these poems are full of surprises. Try one. There is beauty on every page.---Sarina

 

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

 

Fascinating essays by a quirky Brit on subjects ranging from the oddball guy next door to Stanley Kubrick, from credit card debt to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Offbeat and entertaining.---Judith

 Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Seraphina is about a young woman caught between two worlds, hiding her true identity and suppressing her amazing talent for music. Delve into this world of court intrigue, family secrets and civil unrest. Seraphina shines!---Morgaine

Rest in Peaceful Slumber Ms. Adrienne Rich.

When I was in my twenties I spent a good amount of time with my nose in a book, trying to figure out who I was and whom I might become. I would especially ferret out books about strong women--in search of meaning and purpose in their lives--in hopes of coming across instructions on how to live a more fully realized life. One woman's words made a great deal of difference to me during that process: Thank you, thank you Ms. Adrienne Rich.

I have (always) loved the titles of her volumes of poetry: from The Dream of a Common Language to A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far to An Atlas of a Difficult World. Can't you just imagine, from those, that she set about to help other women and men (!) circumnavigate the waters of the soul?

I remember when I first spied the poem Transcendental Etude--probably my favorite (from Dream ...)--I felt that I was in the exact same head space, and that made it possible for me to get more in touch with the huge forces at work in my life. "Perhaps there come times when we must take ourselves more seriously or die": those were my marching orders ... to continue to put one foot in front of the other ... daring myself to be authentically large.

The Book Store has several volumes of Ms. Rich's work available online to order. I think that I am going to take another look at her last and latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, when it comes out in paper. And if you wish you can reserve your copy now. And this is a peek into the poem that bears the title:

"Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

Later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight
I think
no poetry will serve ..."

Adrienne Rich also dealt with politics and poetry, not so much my strong suit, and yet I have admired her for that too. May you rest in peaceful slumber Ms. Rich.

~Jan
the bad poet
aka book seller at UBS

The Age of Wisdom, by William Makepeace Thackeray

A Poetry Break

So, you heard that W.S. Merwin was named the U.S. poet laureate, right? I'm pretty excited about this because it is so very well deserved. Every time I pick up his Pulitzer Prize winner, The Shadow of Sirius, while I'm hanging around the poetry section I read a different poem and with every poem, I am floored. I am not a poetry person. I love the idea of it, I love pretending I know who is who in poetry and what they are all about. But poetry is hard for me. It takes a lot of concentration and focus. It requires me to think real hard, outside of the box, and imagine.

All of this is to say that I connect with Merwin's poems and that surprises me and makes me happy. I think that you might be able to, as well.

Can we just sit and read one together?
**
**
Note

Remember how the naked soul
comes to language and at once knows
loss and distance and believing

then for a time it will not
run with its old freedom
like a light innocent of measure
but will hearken to how
one story becomes another
and will try to tell where
they have emerged from
and where they are heading
as though they were its own legend
running before the words and beyond them
naked and never looking back

through the noise of questions

--W.S. Merwin, Shadow of Sirius
**
**

Any interpretations of this poem are welcome in the comments.

--Anna, Events

!Viva Poetry!

Five or six months ago a UW committee dreamed up the idea of an anthology of poems for their annual Common Book for incoming freshman—and they started with this poem: Philip Levine's What Work is.

"You know what work is—if you're old
enough to read this, you know what
work is, although you may not do it."

It's the perfect 'gateway poem' for non-poetry-readers, not to mention the anxious future job-seekers of America, which today's college students have become. The unriddling process of reading the poem allows us to experience the extra punch of the last line (I won't tell you, but, yes, it has to do with work).

This isn't the only way to write a good poem, as the other selections do their utmost to show. There's the dreamy romance and brutality of Mahmoud Darwish's Rita & the Gun, which begins and ends with:

"Between Rita & my eyes is a gun."

In this poem you can't exit with some life-changing insight--you're trapped in a fluid, circular universe saturated with an almost unworldly emotion. Darwish is a favorite of mine, a Palestinian who bore witness to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until his death in 2008. He vacillates between rabble-rousing political poems in his earlier years to the wistful soul-searching of the last decade.

Lynn Emanuel's The Politics of Narrative : Why I am a Poet is another provocative alternative, wavering between prose poem and manifesto.

"And I write for people, like myself, who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where somebody spends pages and pages on some fat book where everything including the draperies, which happened to be burnt orange, are described, and further, are some metaphor for something. And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the average reader likes ideas."

Whoa. What I like about this grotesque, funny diatribe is it reminds us to ask what we actually want out of a story, movie, poem, book: the conventional sameness with beginning, middle, and end or a visceral, instantaneous thrill or the pure, bald ideas themselves? It also manages to put some pressure on those who dismiss poetry over and over again before they read it, while giving a nod to those who do. Emanuel describes poetry readers this way:

"They pull their own weight."

In fact the whole collection is a solid defense of the genre. The perfect summation comes from UW Professor/Poet Richard Kenney, quoted in the introduction:

"People like poetry like people like music: nobody doesn't. If some think they don't, they just haven't listened to the right thing."

Touche. Yes, I'm happy all the freshman will be reading this, and their families and some other curious folk. It's not just about poetry, but about refusing to be cowed by what is challenging, unusual and smart.

- Tera

Another's Civil War

Taking the briefest of breaks from my Lincoln reading, before taking on the newest full biography, A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White Jr. (to be released January 13th,) I turned to Walt Whitman tonight, and his experience of the War, it's devastation's and losses, personal and public.   A new book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, tells not only of the great poet, but of his family, and in particular two younger brothers who fought in the war.  It is a valuable story, and well told by Roper.

Like most American families, Whitman's was deeply effected by their experience of the War.  Unlike most American families though, the Whitman family had a genius among them.  While the letters, largely unknown to me before, exchanged between the brothers and with their mother and reproduced here, are poignant and very interesting, it is of course to Walt and his poems that one turns to find their experiences, and the experience of our people, memorialized in unforgettable verse.

And Walt Whitman's own experience, nursing and caring for, and genuinely coming to love the soldiers he met in the army hospitals he visited every day, as detailed in an earlier and wonderful book, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, by Roy Morris Jr., produced in Whitman, our greatest poet, some of his greatest, and most heartfelt work.

So tonight I find myself reading and rereading Whitman's poems.  And one poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," haunts me as I see our soldiers again in war; young, older, even my age, and for the most part never seen but in a formal photograph, in uniform, in the paper when they die.  Here is Whitman's poem:

A Sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunk about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step -- and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third -- a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you -- I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he again lies.  

Remembering Phyllis McGinley... More Snowbound Reading

Do you remember the American poet Phyllis McGinley?  No less a poet than W. H. Auden wrote a foreword to her collected poems.  She's gone out of print, as the saying goes, but that is no reflection on her.  Do please search out her books.  She is a consistent delight.

She was born in 1905 in Ontario, Oregon and died in 1978, in New York City.  In between she married, moved to the then new "suburbs," raised children and wrote some of the best light verse of the last century.

Herewith, a Christmas favorite from 1948.

What Every Woman Knows

When Little boys are able

  To comprehend the flaws

In their December fable

  And part with Santa Claus,

Although I do not think they grieve,

How burningly they disbelieve!

They cannot wait, they cannot rest

For knowledge nibbling at the breast.

They cannot rest, they cannot wait

To set conniving parents straight.

Branding that comrade as a dunce

Who trusts the saint they trusted once,

With rude guffaw and facial spasm

They publish their iconoclasm,

And find particularly shocking

The thought of hanging up a stocking.

But little girls (no blinder

  When faced by mortal fact)

Are cleverer and kinder

  And brimming full of tact.

The knowingness of little girls

Is hidden underneath their curls.

Obligingly, since parents fancy

The season's tinsel necromancy,

They take some pains to make pretense

Of duped and eager innocence.

Agnostics born but Bernhardts bred,

They hang the stocking by the bed,

Make plans, and pleasure their begetters

By writing Santa lengthy letters.

Only too well aware the fruit

Is shinier plunder, richer loot.

For little boys are rancorous

  When robbed of any myth,

And spiteful and cantankerous

  To all their kin and kith.

But little girls can draw conclusions

And profit from their lost illusions.

And Yet More Snowbound Reading

The lovely poem"The Snowman" by Wallace Stevens contributed by KW below, I'm inspired to suggest two more poems appropriate, in their very different ways, to our current weather conditions. (Both are a little long for this blog, so I've linked them to the full text off site.)

"A Country Boy in Winter" is by Sarah Orne Jewett, the author of The Country of Pointed Firs and other classic tales of rough, 19th Century rural New England.



"A City Winter" by Frank O'Hara offers a very different, very 20th Century take on the present season. The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara were published in a handsome new edition back in February of this year.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

By Thomas Campion

Now winters nights enlarge

The Number of their hours,

And clouds their storm discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze,

And cups o'erflow with wine;

Let well-tuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense

With lovers' long discourse;

Much speech hath some defense,

Though beauty no remorse.

All do not all things well;

Some measures comely tread,

Some knotted riddles tell,

Some poems smoothly read.

The summer hath his joys

And winter his delights;

Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,

They shorten tedious nights.

My Annual (Library of America, etc.) Orgy

Every year, not unlike Christmas, our Employee Shopping Days roll around again (thank you management,) and, while I always intend to use this opportunity to buy edifying books for widows and orphans, I instead indulge myself in an orgy of entirely selfish consumerism.  True, I bought a single title, as a token to assuage my guilt, for my partner: Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, by E. Patrick Johnson, but everything else was for me.

And, as I do every year, my first priority is always to add to my collection of the complete Library of America.  I've been collecting this series since they started publication, many years ago.  Every year they publish four or five new titles, so I have to get those too.  Doesn't matter if I like the authors.  Doesn't matter if I will ever read the individual volumes.  Gotta have 'em.  I look at it as an investment.  (These books are the only material goods specifically mentioned in my will -- no lie.)

If you don't know the series, Library of America publishes the classics of American literature and history in an ongoing project to preserve, promote and, I suppose, defend our cultural heritage.  It is an admirable undertaking and done superbly well.  The books are beautifully made, of durable materials, and meant to "last a lifetime."  They will certainly outlast me (thus the provision in my will.)  As a collector, they are my pride & joy.

As a reader, some years are better for me than others, the worst being the year I had to buy Kerouac, Alcott, and Lovecraft.  Very little joy there, I can tell you.  But I did my duty.

This year has been (for the most part) happier:

Collected Stories and Other Writings, by Katherine Anne Porter.

This goes to the top of my night-stand reading pile as soon as I

finish with my reading for my Christmas Readings this year.

Collected Poems: 1956 - 1987, by John Ashbery.  A favorite of my dear friend Richard, himself a poet, and someone to

whom I will now be forced to pay more serious attention.

 

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, by Philip K. Dick.  This purchased reluctantly and soon to be added to my shelf

of LIAM acquired "more in sorrow..." titles.

I'm disappointed not to be able to add the second volume

of A. J. Liebling to my collection, as, for some unknown

reason, it seems never to have arrived, either at the bookstore or with the

distributors, despite a September publication date.

Finally, (although tomorrow is another Shopping day, as Scarlett might say nowadays,) I rounded out my selection with a beautiful remainder about the great director Jean Renoir, and two handsome volumes of essays by George Orwell: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, and All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both compiled by George Packer and attractively produced.

Santa has already been better to me than I deserve.