National Poetry Month Recommendation: Marianne Moore

Here's something you can't say of many Modernist poets: in 1968, Marianne Moore threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. (Take that, Skipwith Cannell!) I understand it was a big, sweeping curve that just nicked the outside of the plate, and that Mel Stottlemyre asked her for some pointers later that evening.

She also suggested the names Intelligent Whale and Utopian Turtletop to Ford Motor Company. They went with Edsel.

(Both of those stories sound like elaborate hoaxes. I sort of wish they were, and I'd thought of them.)

A fine article on Moore is here.

Here's a poem called "To A Giraffe":

If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and desirable

to be literal—detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent—does it mean that

one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall?—

of which the giraffe is the best example—
the unconversational* animal.

When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable

that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional

since less conversational*
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.

     After all
   consolations of the metaphysical
   can be profound. In Homer, existence

   is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
   "the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual."

(Pardon the font change. It was the only way I could get the line breaks and spaces right.)

And this is "A Jelly-Fish":

Visible, invisible,
  a fluctuating charm
an amber-tinctured amethyst
  inhabits it, your arm
approaches and it opens
  and it closes; you had meant
to catch it and it quivers;
  you abandon your intent.

I'll let Moore's work speak for itself. Honestly, I don't know what I could say that would be worthy.

* My thanks to the eagle-eyed and (I assume) Marianne Moore fancying J.C.P, who caught my mistaken transcription. I had had "unconventional" and "conventional" in place of "unconversational" and "conversational".

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Robert Hayden

It's the last day of National Poetry Month. I must admit I'm sad to see it go. I've been enjoying finding favorite poems and poets and sharing them.

I'll give you a few today. And use the comments fields to recommend your own. I'll drop them all in a final post.

I attended a lecture by A. Van Jordan (recent Guggenheim fellow, which I mentioned earlier) last July, and he introduced me to the work of Robert Hayden. Jordan discussed the poem "American Journal." Here's a selection, but you can follow the link on the title to read the entire thing:

here among them  the americans  this baffling
multi people  extremes and variegations  their
noise  restlessness  their almost frightening
energy  how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved
adapting their varied pigmentations  white black
red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering
distinctions by which they live by which they
justify their cruelties to one another

and later:

america  as much a problem in metaphysics as
it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our
galaxy  an organism that changes even as i
examine it  fact and fantasy never twice the
same  so many variables

I like this voice he's using. There's a level at which this is a poem about the African-American experience. (Hayden was African-American, born in 1913 in Detroit, and started having his work collected in the '60s.) Hayden was given to depression, near-sighted, spent much of his life in books. He was an outsider, a member of no movement. So there's another level as well. The voice in the poem is his own: the observer, unaffiliated to any organized human endeavor. And unaffiliated as he is, he can see the cracks in the paint, and the whole of the painting, and report on both.

(We don't have a copy of his Collected Poems in right now, but we can get it. Call us to place an order at 1.800.335.READ or 206.634.3400. We do have some of his work in The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, though.)

Some Words from Nick: Masterworks from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq

28 April 07
Saturday morning

What the world needs now is for the greatest living authors to use clear, gorgeous language and the highest literary artistry to open the eyes of us Westerners to the realities of the worlds we’ve invaded.

Well, three powerhouse authors have stepped up to the plate.

Judging that Mohsid Hamid’s razor-sharp The Reluctant Fundamentalist is opening at No. 6 on The New York Times bestseller list gives the sense that maybe a few Americans out there are interested in outside opinions. It’s about a bright, cocky young Pakistani scholar who graduates from Princeton and lands a high-flying, cutthroat New York job just before 9/11 changes the world and his life.

This classy little thriller is an homage to one of literature’s unique masterpieces, Albert Camus’s The Fall. Like Camus, Hamid has his narrator speak directly to the reader, inviting him into a personal conversation which gets out of hand. And he’s not the only one echoing Camus these days.

Like Camus, Yasmina Khadra is an Algerian who’s gone to France to create his literary masterpieces. Like Camus, he’s politically and morally compassionate and fiercely objective, with an existential value on freedom from tyranny.

I’m 125 pages into Yasmina Khadra’s new one, a riveting, anxiety-inducing portrait of Iraq told by a kid from a remote Iraq village, The Sirens of Baghdad. Within those first pages, I’ve watched a gentle, emotional young guy forced to go through the trauma of driving an injured friend to the medical clinic past a military stop-point. I’ve been jolted through an all-too-common daily invasive house search, and forced to face the unpleasant, brutal reality of digging out neighbors from an explosion. Three not-too-unusual events. The narrator is just an ordinary young guy who’s not a resistance fighter, not a statistic, just roughed up a bit by the Americans, degraded a bit, nothing broken.

But now he’s been pushed over the edge, and I’m afraid to see where all this is leading. What delivers the final blow is a factor I would never have considered in a million years, a cultural chasm I didn’t even know existed. And it’s decisive, irreversible, and life-destroying.

Besides all that, the book’s got breathtaking writing. Set-ups so cleverly introduced you’re constantly surprised that you already know exactly what you need to know to understand a scene. His ability to disguise plot points and introduce them without a ripple has hit me later with an emotional wallop over and over.

I call the author Yasmina Khadra. That’s his wife’s name. His real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul. Since he was an officer in the Algerian military, his writings were subject to censorship, so he used her name to get his first novels printed and has kept it ever since. He now writes from France, just like his Algerian forebear, Albert Camus, to whom Khadra bears a growing resemblance.

Frankly, I wasn’t too crazy about the first Khadra book I read. I encountered his short novel, The Swallows Of Kabul, right on the tail of Khaled Hosseini’s history-making, David Lean-like production, The Kite Runner, and Khadra’s unpleasant little book has such an overwhelming downer ending that, well, I sorta hated it. I’ve come to respect it more later, with mixed feelings.

It was the second novel I read by Khadra that blew me out of the water. The Attack is about an Arab surgeon in Israel, a doctor so dedicated that when a man on the operating table spits in his face, he goes on operating. The novel begins when the good doctor is summoned to the hospital to find out that the wife he adores has been killed in a terrorist bombing. Horrible enough, but to make matters nightmarish: she was the terrorist.

How could the woman he loved have committed an act he abhors? You’ll want to go with this grieving man as he flings caution to the wind and goes recklessly in search of the answer he can’t live without knowing – what made his wife do this thing?
That would be riches enough, but there’s a long-awaited book about to hit the stores on May 22. We’ve been waiting years for this one. Everyone knows it’s going to be big, but no one dreamed it would be this good. How could the guy who wrote The Kite Runner do it again? Well, believe me, he has. He’s already proved the impossible once, that a novel about a friendship in Afghanistan could remain 130 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

Well, his second achievement, A Thousand Splendid Suns is every bit as powerful as his first. I’m telling you, once his plot gets hold of you, don’t read it in public. You’ll be humiliated. You gasp and make noises. It's like being tied to a runaway truck and dragged over some serious potholes and rocks. Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it hurts. I came out of it battered, exhilarated, and crying. Hoo boy, this one really takes the gloves off.

With the detachment of Chekhov writing “Peasants” or “In the Ravine,” in a straightforward, simple style, objective and horrifying in his depiction of life’s simple brutalities, Hosseini takes you into the powerless, unpredictable world of two female characters, Mariam and Laila. Okay, I’m only a man, but these two characters seem so realistic to me, I can’t believe they were created by a male writer. There’s a tender little throwaway scene with a baby that seems like nothing a man would take the time to include, and it becomes a scene so powerful that no one can fail to mention it when discussing the book. The writing is driven, as was his earlier novel, by Hosseini’s passionate love of his country. His deep-hearted commitment to Afghanistan drives the story as much as his respect and admiration for the unsung heroism of the least heroic of characters, in this case, an illegitimate, uneducated woman like Mariam.

No first novel has a right to sell like Hosseini’s first novel. No second novel can possibly be as good as Hosseini’s second novel.

Hasn’t someone told Hosseini the rules?

So many good ones, so dang little time.

Speaking of time, it’s time to get back to The Sirens Of Baghdad. What a feeling to find myself in a master writer’s hands, in a remote Iraq village, far from any Western eyes, and to watch the smoke and fighting slowly coming closer and closer…

Nation Poetry Month Suggested Reading

Robert Pinsky offers a strong, spirited defense of difficult poetry here.

And Steve, a fellow shelver, recommends reading this poem by Paul Violi, "Appeal to the Grammarians".

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Brooks Haxton

In January I attended a lecture by Brooks Haxton. During the lecture, Brooks was thorough, intelligent, funny, but just a little distracted. That was because as he was lecturing, his son was competing in a poker tournament. And doing well. He ran off at the end of the lecture to check on his son's status.

Let's just say Dad had reason to be happy when the last flop fell.

This floors me: Brooks Haxton has a book that features a blurb by Eudora Welty. Seriously. The Eudora Welty. This Eudora Welty:



She said:

"The poems in Brooks Haxton's Traveling Company are extraordinary. I value their beauty and their strength, one by one, and their accumulating power to move their reader's own responding imagination. It is a pleasure to recommend this fine book."

Another writer who praised Haxton is Walker Percy. He said of the book Dominion:

"These are extraordinary poems, strikingly original, rich, comic, and beautiful in the use of language."

The authors of one of my favorite collections of short stories, and one of my favorite novels (last archived post on this page) both called Brooks Haxton's work extraordinary.

I think that this is the literary equivalent of having Samuel L. Jackson tell you he thinks you are a total bad-ass. And then having Bruce Lee concur.

This is a poem called "I Am" from Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms:

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. Psalm 40

The fog I call the world is not a cloud of atoms
only, but a cloud of feelings, and ideas. I mind
my little bumps. I grieve. I think about non-being.
All I do is what my flesh can do, yet everything
my flesh can do feels strange. I am the swelling
of a salt sea onto an armature of chalk, the calm
of a tidal pool where brain cells live, the wind,
the lightning storm where thought flares into thought.
I taste damp sparks inside my tongue. If sayings
gather under the name of Faith, or Art, I let them
when they let me let them, and my mind clears.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Bill Holm

Here's another for today. Bill Holm is a Minnesota poet. I dig him. (Of the three books that come up when you search our stock, only Playing the Black Piano and Eccentric Islands are the Bill Holm being recommended here. The other Bill Holm is good, too.)

He writes confidently about music, art, life's tragedy and promise—and he can be pretty funny, too.

Here's the opening stanza of "Playing Hadyn for the Angel of Death":

The piano tells things to your hands
you never let yourself hear from others:
Calm down, do your work, laugh,
love reason more, your mask less.
God exists, though not as church said.
To understand this language, you must
sometimes patiently play the same
piece over and over for years, then
when you expect nothing, the music
lets go its wisdom.


And this from "My Old Friend AT&T Writes Me A Personal Letter":

"Dear Mr. Holm,
Post office box one-eighty-seven may
be a terrific place to live, but for you—
it's more than just a home.
It's also a place to do serious business..."
Dear Company,
How well you understand
my needs—my life—
how every night we light
tiny candles to dine
on a roast sparrow (nowhere
for leftovers, you know),
drink a small young burgundy
(no space here for a wine to grow
old and big) then lie down
on our narrow bed for a little love.


Both of these poems are in Playing the Black Piano.

National Poetry Month Recommendation: Christian Hawkey

Here's another recommendation from Jacob, who wrote about Zbigniew Herbert earlier this month—and is the man who can do this.

The Book of Funnels
Christian Hawkey

"Mein Gott, nothing can be said less of The Book of Funnels than it set in me a new and profound hope in the future of contemporary poetry. Within you will find nothing of posturing, overwrought mechanics, or worse still, poems that turn a blind eye to language & metaphor which has been the bailiwick of contemporary poetry to date. Here, instead, is the work of a young poet that goes unabashedly & playfully into his phonetics & semantics to come out with a shining vicissitude."


Here are the opening lines of a poem called "Goya's Grotesquerie":

I don't know the story of his last days
but they ended, as always, in walls,

& what are "they" but so many palms
lining the dictator's long drive—

he's in the Yellow Room
smoothing his glass moustache,

he's sipping Lapsang souchong
& feeding a piece of cuttlebone

to a caged nightingale—tired bird.

Dog of the Week

We were very lucky to get a picture of Daisy, our dog of the week. Daisy is very busy. She has a job.

She works with Delta Society Pet Partners program as a therapy dog. So, she's clearly a very important dog.

But she took a moment to let me photograph her anyway. Thanks, Daisy. (And that's a very good sit, by the way.)

Good girl, Daisy.