February 16, 2008
David Orr has written a truly lovely review of Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, last month’s PBC selection. I think he captures the strengths, flaws, and spirit of Harvey’s book perfectly. This is truly the kind of review a writer would murder another writer for, or some other dastardly deed.
January 22, 2008
According to this New York Times article, the recent transcription of Robert Frost’s Notebooks is being contested by two critics.
Apparently, the editor of the notebooks couldn’t read Frost’s handwriting correctly, and one critic found over 100 errors in his work. The editor assumed that Frost was misspelling some words intentionally and let the misspellings stand. The critics dispute the readings and insist that Frost was correctly spelling different words.
So, was Frost a bad speller or is the editor a bad decipher-er? Discuss amongst yourselves.
Coming soon… The Attack of the Illegible Handwriting!
January 14, 2008
I just started reading Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia, and I am already in love with it. Paglia is just one of those personalities that you love and hate, like the smart and pretty best friend who gets all the attention, and you want to just despise her, but you can’t. Because she’s pretty and brilliant. Whenever I read Paglia’s prose, I’m prone to fits of envy and laughing.
Here are two examples.
From the introduction: “During the past quarter century, humanistic principles and honest practical criticism could reliably more be found among low-paid adjuncts faithfully teaching service courses at community colleges than among the vain, showy professoriat of the elite schools.”
As a former adjunct wage slave and someone who probably will never rise to the level of professoriat… Amen!
And from her explication of “Daddy,” which I flipped to first, naturally: “If Plath has no literary successors, she certainly has her peers — but they are in popular music. I nominate Sylvia Plath as the first female rocker. … The nihilistic wipeout of the last line of “Daddy” is also in the fractious rock spirit: it parallels the smashing or burning of guitars by the Yardbirds, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the peak of expressiveness being a destruction of the instrument — in the case of the poet herself.”
I mean, can’t you imagine it? Plath on a stage, burning her guitar? I’m sure I’ll be quoting liberally from this book in the next few weeks. So, if I start mentioning Freudian phallic imagery and sadomasochism, you know now why.
Post Script: I typed in Google Images “Rockstar Poet” to find a picture to go along with this, and found this website. I also found this site, when typing in Camille Paglia.
I give up. No pictures for this post.
December 1, 2007
The New York Times released its list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. From this list, I’ve read one book. Maybe I’m a little behind.
Out of the 100 books listed, 4 were poetry. Since I’ve only read the mega-best seller on the list, I can’t truly complain. But it would be nice to see more than 4% poetry.
Here are the poetry books that they highlighted, with links to their New York Times reviews.
THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998. By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles.
NEXT LIFE. By Rae Armantrout.
SELECTED POEMS. By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh.
TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005. By Robert Hass.
Looks like I need to do some book shopping, as if I needed an excuse.
October 27, 2007
…you should run to the bookstore to buy Donald Revell’s book, The Art of Attention. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I picked this up at the Twin Cities Book Festival, a lollapalooza of local presses. I thought it looked interesting. I just finished the first section and I am floored by how good it is.
In this book, Revell examines the lyric eye, probably the most important quality of a modern poet. He contrasts the poetry of cleverness or wit against the poetry of rapture and focus, favoring the later. In Revell’s view, a poem is a tangible product of our fierce attention to the world, rather than our shaping of the world. We don’t invent the world when we write, we notice it in its glory. The poetry of attention as he calls is it is intimate, peaceful, unagressive and watchful. As he says, “the poet reads the world with writing.”
This is pretty revelatory writing. I find myself underlining every third sentence. When I read it back now to isolate a few quotes, his sentences are so intertwined that I cannot excerpt it to give a good representation of its breadth and depth. Needless to say, if you write poetry or want to write poetry, this is the book to read.
July 10, 2007
I’ve traveled relatively extensively, because my mother is in the travel business and travel is valued in our family. I’ve been to several countries around the world, but I have never been to a country quite like Jamaica. Jamaica’s history is very interesting. They were colonized by both Spain and England and used as a significant port in the slave trade. In addition to the African, indigenous, and European people who have made homes in Jamaica, Chinese and Indian people have also immigrated there.
Jamaica has only recently emerged from colonial rule, having achieved their independence from England in the 1960s. Once independent, the country struggled with violence and poverty. Now, they have emerged as a developing nation, connected to their history and their many cultures.
When I arrived in Montego Bay, the resort arranged a transfer to the small village of Whitehouse, 90 minutes away. As we drove through Montego Bay, I was immediately struck by the level of poverty in the city. We drove by tin shanties and, to me the most heartbreaking, dilapidated schools. However, as we started driving through the mountains outside of Montego Bay, I noticed that there were more comfortable buildings and structures.
This drive reminded me of how fortunate I am. I realized, in a way that I had not before, what it means to be a colonized country. The more I learned about Jamaica and their culture, the more this realization hit home. This poverty and struggle is a direct result of their centuries-long colonization by England. Even their unofficial language, patois, is a direct result of colonization and slavery. Slaves created a language that is combination of Swahili, English, Spanish, and French as a way to communicate with each other in a way that the plantation owners could not understand. After this trip, I understood post-colonial theory in a new way, having seen the results of colonialism.
I would strongly recommend a trip to Jamaica. I think it is so important to support developing countries with tourism, which is often the main industry in countries like Jamaica. Also, the country is beautiful, verdant mountains and plains, surrounded by miles of coast line and the turquoise blue sea. Finally, the people are kind, friendly, and joyful in contrast to our harried American personality.
May 20, 2007
Whenever there’s a new movement in writing, the establishment gets scared. Actually, whenever there’s a new movement in human community, the establishment gets scared, but let’s stick with writing for now. I’ve just read an article that sounds like the dying battle cry for “the old way of doing things” in journalism and writing.
This article from the LA Times is infuriating. The author, Richard Schickel, attacks the rise in literary blogging, specifically book reviewing online. I believe this is in response to an article from a few weeks ago on the rise of book review blogs. He says that a rise to a democratic reviewing of books will lead to the degradation of quality in book reviewing as an art. He claims that book reviewers need to be educated in literary history, criticism, and the author’s oeuvre of work. He picks specifically on a reviewing blogger who is also a car parts salesman.
Now, I agree that book reviewers should be knowledgeable and educated. But just because the book reviewer doesn’t publish in the New York Times, doesn’t mean that he or she is uneducated in the literary arts. I would like to remind the author of the scores of writer who must work another job to support their art. (Hmmm, the author of 9 to 5 Poet and the spouse of a fledgling book reviewer is a little biased in this regard.) Most people who get undergraduate and graduate degrees in English do not necessarily walk off into the sunset to write beautiful reviews for famous newspapers. We teach at community colleges, work at retail emporiums, and are no less dedicated to the literary arts than someone who has more opportunities.
When Mr. Schickel writes lines like, “a purely ‘democratic literary landscape’ is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight,” he seems just a bit elitist, which is his whole point. But is this truly an elitism of quality or of social standing?
May 6, 2007
Another great article for evening reading, this time from the New York Times.
This article claims that the traditional newspaper book review section is dying a slow death. And it seems to be true, from the evidence they provide. Large national newspapers are decreasing and collapsing their book review sections. The trend could be a shame, since regional reviewers tend to critique regional writers. However, all is not a loss.
According to the article, literary and book reviewing blogs are growing. They claim to “democratize” the book review process, making it accessible to the common reader. The article lists several popular and well-established book reviewing sites, including Book Slut, Emerging Writers Network, and The Syntax of Things.
I am one of those anachronistic bloggers who still like the traditional newspaper book review, albeit delivered to my gmail inbox on Sundays. I feel that there’s a bit of a romantic notion to the old-school book review. They tend to be written by experts, people who have studied the art of critique. Certainly, I have romanticized the people involved, as well. What a life, to hold the book industry in the palm of your hand, able to decimate it (or inflate it) in one swoop of your pen.
Yet, I can see the benefits of putting literary criticism on the web, especially since many people feel that they aren’t good at critiquing literature. By making criticism accessible to discussion on the web, we are broadening the base of informed literary critics. We are creating a new culture of book love and book awareness, even if we’re staring at our laptops instead of getting our fingertips stained with ink.
February 10, 2007
For me, the lyric I entails the use of the I in an autobiographical, almost confessional sense. I think of the way I teach the poem
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, when I think of the lyric I. In our literature book, there is a quote by Plath stating that the poem is about a girl who had an Electra complex and learned that her father was a Nazi, which complicated matters. Beneath that, the editors provide a brief biographical background on Plath’s family. Otto Plath, her father, was never a Nazi, though he was German.Then, there’s the lyric eye. For me, this encapsulates the use of I in a pseudo-biographical sense or a completely fictional sense. For instance, the work of
Ai or Patricia Smith. Both of these women use the persona and multiple persona in their books to illuminate an experience for the reader that they have never had. They capture the scariness in the daily world, the horror and the terror. (Dogfaceboy, for her Poetry Thursday offering, entitled “Enough” does this really well, too.) While it is pretty clear that the I in these poems is not the author, they are using the I to create true experience, in an emotional sense.Then, of course, there is the blurry lines between all of this. As readers and writers, we have to decide where we fall on this sticky subject. Many, and most, believe that
playing with journalistic truth is the right and the duty of poets. Not everyone believes that, however. Ted Kooser, our poet laureate, writes about this issue:“Perhaps I am hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps I should accept
the possibility that what the poet says happened really didn’t
happen at all, but I’m going to have to make a painful adjustment
in the way I read poetry and honor poets. I grew up believing
a lyric poet was a person who wrote down his or her observations,
taken from life. I have always trusted the “I” of Walt Whitman as
he dresses the wounds of fallen soldiers; I trust Mary Oliver to tell
me what birds she saw as she walked through a marsh; I trust
Stanley Kunitz when he describes two snakes entwined in a tree.”
While I often use the lyric I and the lyric eye interchangeably in my work, but I have to acknowledge the truth in Kooser’s statements. I do believe, deep down, in the I as author perspective in poetry, due to its rich history in our literature.
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