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Books in August 2010
Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf $27.95), edited by Alexander Neubauer, presents transcriptions of conversations between twenty-three poets, already famous or on their way there, and Pearl London. Beginning Fall of 1970 at the New School in New York, poets were invited to bring a poem in progress to London’s class for discussion. Students were provided copies of drafts in advance and the discussion was on, touching on the piece submitted and the poet’s previously published work. Ms. London’s fluid interviewing skills, her clear understanding both of the poetry and artistic process, and questions from her bright and involved students drew the poets out in most rewarding ways. Take, for an example of the initial discomfort and subsequent ease, this from Derek Walcott, who earlier said he couldn’t stay the whole class period. "If you want me to stay, I will. When I was asked to do this, about this succession of drafts, I thought, Really, I don’t want to show how I proceed through a poem. And then I thought, Really, honestly, this might be interesting…. It’s not meant as an example of how to write, or how you get a poem. I’m just trying to go into an operation; it’s open-heart surgery and you’re all looking." Among the poets included in this refreshing, revealing collection of twenty-six conversations are Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, June Jordan, Li-Young Lee, James Merrill, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Simic.
Angina Days: Selected Poems by Günter Eich (Princeton $24.95) is a bracing and welcome gathering of work by the post-WW II German poet (1907-1972), who though well known in his home country has been little recognized here. Presented in a bilingual edition with English versions by the well respected translator Michael Hofmann, this selection of 80 poems includes many translated for the first time, most from Eich’s later writing. The volume begins with a helpful and compelling introduction by Hofmann, who places Eich at the forefront of those German writers who sought to reclaim their native tongue after its debasement by the Third Reich. His plain-spoken poems are typically brief and powerfully evocative. Writes Hofmann, "Where for Rilke... the poet’s imperative had been to praise, for Eich it was to unsettle, disturb, provoke, rile." Yet the poems are a pleasure to read, not only for their crispness, but also for their humble often wry tone. Here is his poem "Understanding" --
Everyone knows
there is no such place as Mexico.
When I opened the kitchen cupboard
I found the truth
obscured
by labels on tins.
The rice grains
are resting after the centuries.
Outside
the wind goes on on its way.
Monkey Lightning (Tupelo $16.95) is Martha Zweig’s third full-length collection of sharply original, startlingly shapely poetry. Mind and music join seamlessly in her poems, the vigor of each not just a complement to but a vehicle for the other. And the journey they take their reader on can be exhilarating, unnerving, beautiful, and unsettling. Power, desire, mortality – these are the topics she filters through her honed, unusual descriptions of the daily world. Her tone can be both light and dark – humor bubbles through, and a fearless gaze takes in inevitable (and evitable) pain. Heather McHugh has suggested that Zweig is a cross between Gerard Manley Hopkins and Flannery O’Connor, and we would concur. These marvelous, tumbling lines begin her poem "Untenable" -- "Wet cat, long-haired tail aloft & parted in fronds, / squeezes in doorwise out of the rain, & just so I was born, / slick, quick & slipped (once) through the twice- / in-a-lifetime only // chink-in-things some nicety struck between not- / being & being, to this: ah! – / the ungodly side, where the food is. / Warm bodies here rub the warm body I’ve got. I’m amazed."
All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby (Pittsburgh $14.95) is an embarrassment of linguistic riches. Ms. Hamby’s style is deliciously exhausting; her often comic poems are as dense, and move as fluidly, as a grand flock of starlings in flight. "All night I watch the worst movies—musicals of the Nazi blitz, / Zapruder films of my own assassination, the armada / battles between the hideous face of my Aunt Priscilla and my / young, beautiful mother." Seemingly nothing escapes inclusion in a Hamby poem, and none of it wasted. Her affection for noir movies (her addiction to?) thrives here -- "a kind of tantric / doom in the form of a mobster’s moll, heart like a piece of hollow / wood. Poor Burt takes the rap for her, those damned marigold / eyes." Literary references abound. She has a sonnet, for instance, titled "Desdemona Resuscitated by Sir John Falstaff, EMT." And much of the much-ness that flows from her oh so interesting mind flows into poems of formal constraint, as in the series of sonnets which accepts the abecedarian conceit, with the first and last letters of each line proceeding in alphabetical order. Her poems are rich in thought and feeling, and are entertaining too, to the point of delirious fatigue.
Ere-Voice by Carl Rakosi (New Directions $9.95) This is the original 1971 volume, technically out of print, but made available (while they last) by the publisher David R. Godine. We’re so glad he does. Rakosi’s biography is fascinating -- he was born in Germany in 1903, his parents separated when he was one year old, and he came to the United States with his stepmother when he was seven. He grew up in poverty but was quite bright, entering college at 17. Most of his life he was a social worker, with professional stints also as a psychologist and an English teacher. His gruff, witty, direct, and tender poems shine with commitment, intelligence, and compassionate energy. He was influenced by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and went on to have a strong influence on the Beat poets. The humaneness, social passion, and occasional, loving appearances by his granddaughters give this book a soulful quality that’s hard to match. Rakosi died at age 100 in 2004. The six-poem sequence here, “The Ulcers,” closes with an achingly sweet picture of old age that begins -- "The day is long. / The girl technicians chat / and laugh about their dates / as if there were no unknown / pensioner on the X-ray table." This is an intense, lovely collection, offering the confluence of craft and heart, a strength of American poetry of the era.
Three transcriptions of talks presented in The Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lectures on the Teaching of Poetry Series are newly arrived. Each comes as a large, slender paperback for $14.95, published by the Bancroft Library at the University of California --
Early in A History of My Befuddlement, Philip Levine takes a turn, “what I have to give you is not the history of my own teaching, but the ongoing history of what I have been taught...." Levine proceeds to offer a lucid, charming, contentious and educational talk. He recalls his teachers, Lowell, Berryman, Yvor Winters, and others -- some of them fondly and others not fondly at all. Levine’s delightfully forthright nature shows -- "People often ask me how Lowell taught, and now that his protector and my friend Elizabeth Hardwick has died, I can answer quite simply: badly."
Carl Phillips, in Poetry, Love, and Mercy, discusses the contrary nature of the lyric poem; how the subject of the poem is often loved even as the poet is aware of the subject’s mortality -- "I’m made to see the world more intensely, my love for it deepens, even as my sorrow does." By way of example, Phillips lovingly presents poems written by Laura Jensen and Juan Ramon Jimenez, and gives particularly close, intelligent readings of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and Brigit Pegeen Kelly.
You who’ve seen Brenda Hillman read at our store, and/or elsewhere, know that she possesses a truly electric combination of intellect and intuition in her poetry and her thinking about poetry. In this series she offers Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems, a talk in which she seeks to “present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing.” She discusses four contemporary poems that might be considered challenging, in order "that what might have evoked a hostile response can move [the reader] to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure." Her talk is straight forward, peppered with humor, and opens several doors for the understanding and appreciation of recent poetry.
Our pick for this year’s beach-read (hey, it’s still August) is Canadian writer Susan Holbrook’s Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House $14.95). We first became aware of her often smartly funny work when Nomados published her chapbook Good Egg, Bad Seed. Happily for the reader, that "either/or" piece is included in this volume ("You have a way with animals or squirrels smell your fear and attack. You think the words ‘plethora’ and ‘penultimate’ might as well be used as long as they’re there or you feel it’s best to just leave them be, like hotel shower caps."). On occasion in this tartly rich and varied collection she "pilfers" from other texts. One piece titled "Constance Rooke, Author of The Clear Path: A Guide to Writing English Essays, and Home-Inspection Consultant Brad LaBute Converse, with Rude Interruptions by Walt Whitman" is exactly that, closing, "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! / The S-trap should be upgraded to a P-trap. / The topic of this paragraph is love." The book’s title comes from the closing prose poem, "Nursery," a touching, humorous, decidedly unusual list (more like a flowing) of thoughts while nursing, its form the repeated words "left" and "right" -- "Left: You spit up to make room for more, like the Romans. Right: I wipe grains of sweat from your brow, as if you were a doctor delivering a baby." Ms. Holbrook’s writing is a vitamin-filled, gin-spiked tonic.
Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako (University of California $19.95) brings a healthy selection of the terrific modernist Japanese poet into English. Translator Jeffrey Angles’s introduction places the World War II survivor Tada (born in 1930) into historical context. She was an avid reader, and her early work, influenced by French poetry, is filled with Symbolist sensibilities that then blossom into the surreal -- "dreams survive the ruptures that come again and again / and the roses will embellish my bones." The pieces here include retellings of Egyptian myths, free-verse poems, and perhaps most distinctly, generous selections of her remarkable tanka. According to Angles, Tada’s facility with, and attention to, classical forms distinguished her from most Japanese poets of her generation. Her tanka beautifully fuse the form’s concision with modern subjects and tone. We offer you two of them --
the hot water in
the abandoned kettle
slowly cools
still carrying the resentment
of colder water
...
putting on a pair
of round clear glasses
I see someone
wearing a pair of
round clear glasses
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