November

It’s the last day of November already! So a very brief mention of two very nice November poems.

I love, in Rita Dove’s “November for Beginners,” that very accurate description of November’s atmosphere, “So we wait, breeding / mood, making music / of decline.” “Breeding mood”! Perfect. And I’ll even give her the exclamation points at the end, because we do, we really do, in November, promise that when spring comes we’ll act the fool, just like that. The language in Dove’s poem is lovely — listen to all those “i” sounds at the end of the first stanza — twigs, burning, in, glistening, give — even the diphthong in rain. I also really like the title. It adds a nice deeper twist to an otherwise simple(ish) poem.

Bernadette Mayer’s line about “Trying to tango remorselessly” in “Kristin’s Dream in November” also fits November’s ill-fitting weather. Dream poems are tough, primarily I don’t like them, a bit of a personal pet peeve I guess. It’s so hard to get across the multiple weirdnesses of dreams without flying off into too-gauzy territory. Also? Most dreams are really boring if you weren’t the one dreaming them. But though “I followed people but maybe / They weren’t people,” which is certainly dream-like, is not necessarily super-interesting, it’s followed by “it was ethical / To follow them over the edges of the balloons,” and that “it was ethical” is just great, what a lovely way to position the dreamer in the dream. As is “over the edges of the balloons.” That’s an image that makes perfect sense until you start to try to parse it, to determine what “edge” means with a balloon. Is it like going over the edge of a cliff, over one of those garlands of balloons? The edge of a bunch of single balloons like we used to think ships would over the edge of the world? And so on. I like the poem’s alliteration too, the “right move in relation to the movements” and the “sphere where” and the “woke like a knock.”

 

 

Most Vivid Reads #2

Happy Thanksgiving! To state the no-doubt-obvious, one of the many things I’m thankful for is great books. This is the second installment of my serial post detailing my list of Most Vivid Reads (those books that stick out the most in my mind when I think about books).

Post #1, which covered Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Doomsday Book, Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, can be found here.

To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

Two paragraphs into this novel, which is the end of the first page in the edition I have, you are IN this book. You are IN Scout’s head, you are IN this town and this world, and you are in it for the duration. And it is in you forever after reading it. The header on the blurb page says “Unequaled praise from everywhere for a unique bestseller.”Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #2”

My Most Vivid Reads – intro & #1

This is the first in what I intend to be a serial post detailing my list of what I spent forever trying to decide whether to call My Favorite Reads, or My Best Reads, or just what. I have settled on My Most Vivid Reads.

These are the books I think of when I think of books. The books I think of most often when just going about my daily life. The books the mention of which prompt me to speak in all-caps & exclamation points (“YOU HAVEN’T READ _________?! OH IT’S SO GOOD!”) Those books that live with me long after the last page is turned. (Discussed in no particular order.)

A note about what this list won’t be: it won’t be a list of books you should read. This list won’t include Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Raymond Carver’s short stories, to name just two others I think are great and that you definitely should read. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter I just didn’t love-love-love reading the way I do, say, My Ántonia. (Personal preference, since the difference isn’t in the quality of writing.) And Raymond Carver I just don’t go back to re-read with nearly the same enjoyment as I do, say, Flannery O’Connor.

I hope this list will make you blame me, Continue reading “My Most Vivid Reads – intro & #1”

Three Collections, Briefly Reviewed

Woman in the Painting by Andrew Hollander Budy, Troubled Tongues by Crystal Williams, and Things That Happen Once by Rodney Jones.

Woman in the Painting by Andrea Hollander Budy

Andrea Hollander Budy is a recent transplant to Portland from the Ozarks. I heard her read at one of the Mountain Writers series readings at the Press Club (a nice little bar in SE Portland; all the crepes and sandwiches are named after writers). This collection, full of well-made poems, is from 2006. I second Maxine Kumin’s blurb about Budy’s “impeccable conversational diction” and Stephen Dunn’s nod to her “subtly registered emotional world.”Continue reading “Three Collections, Briefly Reviewed”

Body Parts

I mentioned two creepy hand poems a few months back, Charles Simic’s “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand” and John Keats’ “This living hand…,” the latter especially a great Halloween poem, with the gothic cinematic dead hand gesturing toward the living at the end, which got me thinking about body part poems, and Halloween has me thinking about Frankenstein’s monster in all its various incarnations, which got me wondering what a Frankensteined “body of poetry” would look like…

The “Eyes:” from William Matthews: “Light bored / into his eyes but where did it go?  / Into a sea of phosphenes, / along the wet fuse of some dead  / nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t / be found.”

Just below the eyes, the nose, placed smack in the middle, and hard to take seriously even if you’re not talking about a stitched-together monster. Continue reading “Body Parts”

October

I love the month of October. I love the high-blue-beautiful-sky days and the slower, lower, gray sky days. October is really the only month of fall we get in the Northwest — after that it’s pretty much just rainy winter. October, when we get our brief glimpse of trees turning colors. October, with its way of reveling in transition. October, cold at night but still mild enough during the day to affect whatever you were planning on doing not at all. October, still with some thin sun left for us.

“October” is a not-uncommon poem title. “October” by Bill Berkson has a nice take on the manifold nature of the month. I like the just slightly surreal quality of the images, they’re just slightly turned from dead-on (“warm / and loving like a death grip on a willing knee” and “snow bleeds softly from her shoes,” etc.).

And Jacob Polley’s “October” has a beautiful distinction between a day time blue sky contrasted with that “bluer home-time dark.” It’s a lovely meditation Continue reading “October”

September

September: Autumn (“and gathering swallows twitter in the skies”), time for school again (or for skipping school (“We / thin gin”) or for staying home sick (like “little Peggy Ann McKay”)), for remembering September 11th (“the photograph halted them in life”), time for apple picking (“the scent of apples: I am drowsing off”) and for dinner dates with apple pie (“there are very huge stars, man”), for watching harvest moons (“As a beautiful friend / Who remembers”) . . .

Reading across Komunyakaa’s “Changes; or…”

“Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” is a two-columned jazz poem by Yusef Komunyakaa (from the New Poems section of 1994’s Neon Vernacular) that, like a great piece of jazz music, I get something more out of with every reading.

On the left side of the page, Mary and Eva Mae, friends from childhood, are “talking B-flat blues” in the kitchen, catching up on the (cheating) men and (loose) women they used to know. Meanwhile on the right, Mary’s grandson, “just dragged in / From God only knows where,” and “Nice as a new piece / of silk,”  is thinking about jazz, all kinds of jazz from Philly Joe Jones to Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus to John Coltrane, and memory, and black culture, and the way thoughts move between them. The poems starts with an “A-one, two, three” of men’s names, “Joe, Gus, Sham . . . ” putting us in music territory from the start.Continue reading “Reading across Komunyakaa’s “Changes; or…””

Bishopian

Elizabeth Bishop is the most important poetry god.

The most important in my personal pantheon, I mean.

And more generally, I don’t think you can love poetry and not love Elizabeth Bishop.

I’ve touched on most of my other major gods in this blog before (Mark Doty, Yusef Komunyakaa, and the most recent addition, Larry Levis), but haven’t said much yet about her. One must tread lightly when analyzing one’s gods, after all. But I’ve been writing Poetry Dork posts for exactly a year now, so it’s about time I paid Bishop some attention here.

Doty, Komunyakaa, Levis, and Bishop are poets who “are it” for me. They do what poetry is supposed to do, what I want it to do. They write poems that are and do what poems are and do when they are at their best.Continue reading “Bishopian”

August

August is kind of an odd month, summer ending, a little melancholy, a little heavy feeling, (especially if it’s an afternoon when you’re listening to the Assassination of Jesse James soundtrack and Antony & the Johnsons, and even when the weather isn’t ungodly hot). August is vacation month, although “No One Goes to Paris In August,” where “Nobody has time like this” and days grow “Late with shade, low, low, long.”

On an August afternoon you might sport a “floppy existential sky-blue hat” and say to your woman, “Woman, I got the blues” and “Sweet Mercy, I worship / the curvature of your ass” and “For us there’s no reason the scorpion / has to become our faith healer.” (“Woman, I Got The Blues” by Yusef Komunyakaa, in Copacetic and his collecteds.) Or on an August afternoon you might sit down for a long, and hi-larious, yarn like David Lee’s “The Tree” (in Day’s Work and A Legacy of Shadows .)

Late August can also be “a pressure drop, / rain, a sob in the body,” and it’s a good time, they say, to plant iris,  or just to sit in the backyard, where “Nothing is endless but the sky. / The flies come back, and the afternoon / Teeters a bit on its green edges,/ then settles like dead weight / Next to our memories.”