Reading List: Jane Mead, Dorianne Laux, Michael Dumanis

As thesis time gets closer, I've been reading more poetry, as well as writing more.

See my post below for highly understated fawning over Dorianne Laux. Her newer one is Facts about the Moon, but I'm reading What We Carry.

Also reading Michael Dumanis, My Soviet Union -- really original; good stuff.

And Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World. Some of it's really amazing. I don't think her more recent stuff is as powerful, although she's honed her craft to perfection. But I like poetry with urgency and "teeth."

Reading List: Kim Addonizio and Cate Marvin

It's taken me awhile to find poets who are kind of doing the same thing that I'm trying to do, only doing it better (and selling books :)

Successful hometown poet Kim Addonizio, in her latest volume What Is This Thing Called Love, and Cate Marvin, another hometown poet with a critically acclaimed sophomore effort, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, are such ladies. I will sit at their feet and take notes (not literally, of course, lest I unwittingly lift something ;)

Reading List - Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times

I found this book at Barnes & Noble tonight. As a customer mentions in his Amazon review, the title and cover art may turn some people off, and he does have a point; the suicidal-looking high school girl on the black and white cover does make it seem, in combination with the title, like a narrative of a psychiatric disorder -- something poetry has had enough difficulty in distinguishing itself from...
And other reviews accused the editor of selecting poetry for "the lowest common denominator" -- i.e. that the average person would be touched by (oh, the horror! ;) And we wonder why the average person doesn't read poetry anymore, with these kinds of attitudes abounding.
The book is actually a British import, which explains, I guess, both the somber look and feel and the bravado of the publisher to actually try to market poetry to the masses... and with success, it appears... The book is a bestseller over there. Good for it.
I've been reading through it and I find the selection quite meaty... maybe not in an academic sense but in a visceral sense, which is really closer to the point of it all, at least, in my opinion.

Reading List: Last Thoughts on "Green Squall"

I just read the last six poems in Jay Hopler's Green Squall and all but maybe one of these ended the collection on a strong note. In fact, everything I liked about this book (and very little of what I thought made it overall uneven) is here in these last poems.
My favorite poem in the book is the next-to-last, which, if I were a proper poet, I would refer to as the "penultimate" poem, since, if one is a proper poet, everything that is next to last in any group of things is referred to by this term, which, though admittedly useful, I find somewhat irksome and therefore refuse to use just now.
So, anyway, the next-to-last poem :)
It's called "A Book of Common Days" and is grouped in seven parts, spanning three pages. I think this poem also suits my stirrings of early Spring Fever state of mind. (See my other blog for a happy rant on this year's early start to Daylight Savings Time.)

These are my favorite lines, from parts four and five:

When the good and the violent are sleeping
When the city moon looks out on the streets

When the soul lies down in that grass
When spring comes back

When Judas writes the history of solitude
When I was young and miserable and pretty

When the green field comes off like a lid
When it prays --

I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul.

P.S. The new Yale Series book is coming out next month, but I'm wondering if I should run out and buy it the minute it hits the stores, having been exploring the world of DIY and small-small press poets in the blogosphere lately, and struggling to re-think my all-or-nothing attitude toward publishing. Struggling.

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.

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.