Category Archives: Poetry

By Heart

I’m an increasingly big fan of memorizing poems, and have decided to do something I’d thought about before but never implemented: memorize one poem a week this year. (And now that I’ve said so publicly, well I’ll have to do it won’t I. Oh well, why not? This week it was “Musee des Beaux Arts” by Auden.)

I think knowing poems by heart is wonderful as a regular person (among other things, it means if you’re stuck somewhere totally boring you can recite a great poem in your head, or if you come to a split in a ski trail you can go all Robert Frost and impress your friends, and you just never know when you might wind up stranded on a freaky tropical isle, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and will need something memorized with which to entertain yourself between adventures, or console yourself during zombie terrors etcetera. Television has made me sure of that possibility.) And it’s probably essential as a writer. (How wonderful to not only have great poems even faster than “at hand” but also to internalize their rhythms and movements and mystery.)

There are lots of methods out there for memorizing poems — here’s mine. Continue reading “By Heart”

White / Arthur / Willis

Brief reviews of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White (1982), Charms Against Lightning by James Arthur (2012), and Blood Sisters of the Republic by Wendy Willis (2012).

James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies is a gorgeous book full of beautiful, difficult longing. Its artful passion is simply excellent. The poems are both explicit and humble, (“Sometimes I’m their first. / Sweet, sweet men. / I light candles, burn the best incense. / Make them think it’s some kind of temple / and it rather is.”) and the general passion and exquisite human feeling speaks through them all (“In this joyous season I know my heart won’t die / as you and the milk pods open their centers / like a first snow in its perfection of light. // Good love is like this. / Even the smell of baked bread won’t make it better, / this being out of myself for a while.”).  Continue reading “White / Arthur / Willis”

“Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo”

For this inaugural monthly Animal Poem post, a look at “Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo” by William Matthews.

It’s a gorgeous poem from his 1973 Rising and Falling collection, which is one of my “desert island” books. The immediate beauty is of course in the largest metaphor — the snow leopards “jump / down and jump up, water being / poured,” a visual image of their physicality that is reinforced, with a heavy emphasis on the endangered aspect of the snow leopard, in the last three lines of the poem (the “them” refers to his children): “I save them whatever I can keep / and I pour it from hand to hand.” But in between that introductory image and the end, man what a lot happens in this 18-line poem.Continue reading ““Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo””

Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert

A short look at: Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia  (2012), David Biespiel’s Wild Civility (2003), Laura Jensen’s Memory (1982) and Stuart Friebert’s Funeral Pie (1996).

One of the (oh so many) things that drives me nuts about statements like, “I don’t like poetry” or “I could just never get into poetry” is the underlying idea there that poetry is a single thing. It’s like saying, “I don’t like movies” or “I don’t like food.” Just because I can’t stand beets (I really can’t stand beets) doesn’t mean I’m going to write off all red foods, or all food. You could say a strawberry and a beet look sorta the same, couldn’t you? But the taste?

One of the things that struck me reading these four collections (all of which I like) is how vastly different their use of language is, what a nice spectrum of diction they represent. Friebert and Jensen all use very everyday vocabulary. In “Pocket Gopher,” Stuart Friebert writes, Continue reading “Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert”

2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read

Before the look back, a quick look forward. Coming soon (or eventually) in 2013:

  • Reviews of collections by James Arthur, Bruce Beasley, David Biespiel, Stuart Friebert, Laura Jensen, A. E. Stallings, and Wendy Willis
  • Posts about William Matthews’ and Christian Wiman’s poetry
  • The afore-mentioned monthly look at an animal poem (replacing 2012’s Months posts)
  • Some more extensive film reviews on occasion, in addition to the short ones you can always find, frequently updated, on the Film page

Now for the requisite (and for all it’s cliché to do so, enjoyable) quick look back at the reading I did this year. (I stuck the Worst in the middle, because I didn’t want to end on a low note).Continue reading “2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read”

Most Vivid Reads #5

This is the final installment of my “Most Vivid Reads” series. (See below for the full list of books).

The Book of Nightmares — Galway Kinnell

I loved this poetry collection when I read it in college, and I still do. It’s melodramatic, its images are overwrought and its underlying emotion is morbid. It talks madness, birth and death, and how mortality underlies everything, speaking alternately straight up and with a bemused chaser, and that’s exactly why I love it. It hits that youthful ‘but life leads to death, death, death’ phase we all go through (especially (?) us artsy types), but it’s such well-written morbid angst. It’s like the best part of revisiting your youthful darkness-obsessed phase, because Kinnell has such a great control of language. I don’t find it amazingly profound or deeply moving in its mysticism, which is what some claim about The Book of Nightmares. But I do love it.Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #5”

Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa and The Porcine Canticles by David Lee

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa (2008)

Yusef Komunyakaa is, as previously mentioned, one of my all-time favorite poets. He’s a very deft writer, who can amaze, and blaze images and words into your head. Or sometimes he can be just deft. This isn’t my favorite of Komunyakaa’s work, but it’s not like he’s become a terrible writer here. It is and isn’t a criticism of Warhorses to say that it’s a collection that does something together (it’s a lyric meditation on war (so of course love too), touching on conflicts historic through present-day (it was published in 2008)), but it’s not a collection of individually great poems. (The third section is the exception — “Autobiography of my Alter Ego,” Continue reading “Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed”

Most Vivid Reads #3

The first two posts in this series can be found here  and here.

Gilead — Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is a luscious read, a quiet, powerful, resonating read, the epitome of the sort of book you might find yourself refusing to read the last page of because it will be awful to have it be over. The narrator is an old man, a minister, nearing his own death and writing a letter (the book is the letter) to his young son. “My custom has always been to ponder grief,” he says partway through,

That is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself—that same good weight worries me these days.

And you will remember, and slow down to think about, his voice, I daresay, off and on for all of your days.Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #3”

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”

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”