Reading List Update

I've been reading Crush and Green Squall simultaneously... along with other stuff, so it's been slow-going on the poetry front, which isn't a bad thing. Poetry is sipping material, and not really made to be consumed by the truckload. (Or maybe that attitude is just what's wrong with the state of poetry today -- or, more likely, what's wrong with the state of me as a reader...)
In any case, Crush is the stronger of the two, more even in tone (the tone being devastated, but in a frantic, urgent way that never sinks into melodrama.) Beauty and violence seem comfortable together in Siken's poems. I read in an interview with him that he's gotten some of that violence out of his system with this one, so it will be interesting to see where he goes next time.
I can't say quite the same for Green Squall on the narrowly-avoiding-melodrama front (there are several instances of head-on collision), although Hopler doesn't aspire to the same sort of urgency in tone; in fact, his subject is largely entropy, so maybe I'm talking apples and oranges. His strength is in language and wordplay, and there are a handful of near-perfect poems, including the title one and the central long poem, where you can understand exactly why Gluck chose him. I'll definitely look for his next book as well.
What I'm really excited about now is that I just got a collection of Paul Celan with English and German versions side by side (not that I read German, but do have enough vague sense of it for purposes of comparison, or to get a feel for the translator's style of translation.) I stumbled onto some mention of him on a literary blog and have wanted this for several weeks and now that I've been scratching the surface (it's a nice big volume), I'm even more excited. This is stuff to sink your teeth into.
Yay. Because I need inspiration. Less than a year now until the first draft of my thesis is due, and I want to throw everything out and start from scratch. Except a few things I grudgingly still think are probably decent, if only they were written in a different style :) And I kind of like what I've written in the last two months, only since I've started getting freaked out about the deadline. I hope I can just stay freaked out about it all year.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle

My new favorite beer: Éphémère by Unibroue in Quebec

Yes, it's light and refreshing. I like it that way. Probably, my tastes in beer are not analogous to my tastes in poetry.

Text Message Novel...

... published in Finland, according to this news bulletin in Poet & Writers online.

I don't know if this will catch on, but it's an interesting idea -- especially in the Finnish language, which isn't known for its simplicity.

You Write What You Read

So Alexander Chee, in this BookSense article, quotes his former professor, Annie Dillard, as saying.

So right now, I'm reading two of the latest Yale Series of Younger Poets winners. Well, they just happen to have been chosen for an award which some of us still under 40 would not decline if offered (to say the least) but Louise Gluck, the current series editor, has my kinda taste in poetry, the kind that she finds living up to Emily Dickinson's definition of poetry a bit more than does some of today's pretty, well-behaved verse:

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

Speaking of milestones/ deadlines, I just read this quote from Virginia Woolf, from a letter or journal:

"There's no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."

At 33, I'm not sure if I should take heart from that or despair, but I guess if I could write like Virginia Woolf, I'd be willing to wait another seven years, at least.

The titles I'm reading now are Jay Hopler's Green Squall and Richard Siken's Crush.