April 24, 2008
A Big Education
“A man and a woman’s relationship was always primary. Women, your own friends, were always secondary relationships when the man was not there. Because of this, there’s that whole cadre of women who don’t like women and prefer men. We had to be taught to like one another. Ms. Magazine was founded on the premise that we really have to stop complaining about one another, hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves– a typical example of what dominated people do. That is a big education.” –Toni Morrison, The Paris Review Interviews, II
April 24, 2008
Dear Joan Didion
Dear Joan Didion,
For though you are small
your look is fierce,
as blunt as your haircut,
the bare facts
to which you are
amanuensis.
Your stories write
your stories.
Pieces falling,
with rigid ease
you let them.
You will point
to the places.
They will land.
April 23, 2008
Since they stopped exclaiming
Since they stopped exclaiming
Panic at the Disco seem happier,
“panic” more ironic now
than eccentric punctuation had ever been.
Which reminds me of how
everything got better
when I turned twenty three
and stopped speaking in italics.
I would have been depressed too
if I’d worn that much eyeliner.
April 23, 2008
Listenings
Tonight my friend Jennie and I had the great pleasure of going to see Jhumpa Lahiri at Harbourfront reading from her new book The Unaccustomed Earth (recently read). It was a great event, fascinating to see these masterful stories are made by such a young and slightly nervous person– for me, they’re a bit richer for that, of this earth. She was a wonderful reader, reading from her story “Hell/Heaven”, and having heard it in her voice, I do want to go back and read it again.
I’ve written before about my feelings towards readings– that I’ve long found it difficult just to listen, and they force me to use un-exercised muscles. Though being bad at listening is certainly no desirable trait, and I always striving to become better at this, and some readers and some stories definitely make it easy. Of course it’s not all about self-improvement– I do enjoy readings. I like the idea of bookish gatherings, and they do make me feel better about the world in general– a whole room full of people who’ve shown up to be read to. It all can’t be so bad after all…
I haven’t mentioned yet that Michael Ondaatje was also reading tonight. I mightn’t have mentioned at all– I was there for Lahiri. But his reading was stunning. I’ve read Divisidero and found it not unsatisfying but baffling, and all the baffling stuff ceased to matter tonight when I heard the story in his voice. Perhaps his stories are meant to be told more than read, where they are just dissected, may fall apart, his images failing to withstand much scrutiny. But it was such a marked difference when I was listening, the kind of difference I’ve never really experienced at a reading. When I couldn’t perform dissections, refering to previous paragraphs, underlining points and pencilling question marks. Instead it was forward momentum, unstoppable, and I could only go along for the ride. The niggly problems didn’t stand out then, the bits and pieces, but they culminated into something larger, washing over me to cast a spell under which the story was perfectly reasonable. His last line took my breath away, and I don’t even mean it figuratively.
April 22, 2008
Lucky Me
(Written by a guest poet today. I think it’s brilliant, but perhaps I’m biased…)
Kaleidescopic
Explosions of Love
Reside within me when I am
(a)Round
You
April 22, 2008
Life is too short
That I’ve never read Eat Pray Love doesn’t mean I’m not amused by furious tirades against the book: lately, “Eat Pray Love Shut the Fuck Up” and “Eat Pray and look at me.” Stephanie Nolen’s blogpost: “one tiny source of levity amidst the heartbreak… the Zimbabwean flare for names.” Ivor Tossell’s, “They’re never gonna give you up Rick Astley” is brilliant. How your home library is a real estate selling point (via Stuart, though I’m not sure why he was reading The Telegraph‘s property section). Though at said paper, I came across this fascinating Doris Lessing interview. The work of the great Grace Paley surveyed (and I am excited, for I’ll be rereading her collected stories soon!): “”Art is too long, and life is too short… There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
April 22, 2008
Criticism Starts
“Criticism starts– it has to start– with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to call “imaginative literature.” And when you are in love that way, with or without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what used to be called the sublime.” –Harold Bloom, The Paris Review Interviews, II
April 20, 2008
The whole world is out of doors
Though the weekend’s weather has been nothing short of summer, I’ve felt no desire to sit out on a restaurant patio. Mostly because I’ve got case of beer in my fridge, and my own deck just outside my door– such luxury! I’ve never known this before, and we can also open up the double doors into our kitchen and the whole world is out of doors. There’s been plenty of barbeque.
This weekend I picked up Lois Lowry’s The Giver for a quarter at a yard sale. We were in the mood for a walk and got to Type Books, where I picked up The Emily Valentine Poems. I finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was amazing. I like well enough every Bronte that I’ve ever met, but the characters here were dead ringers for people I know, 150 years later. This is disturbing for my sake, but quite an astounding literary achievement and certainly qualifies as “timelessness, so far”. I am so pleased to have followed this bookish recommendation.
April 20, 2008
The Emily Valentine Poems by Zoe Whittall
I realized, from the last book of poetry I read, that I seek out paths allowing access into the poems I’m reading. I suppose this is the way one reads anything, but the paths are usually more straight-forward in fiction. With most cases (and in the case especially of the books I like to read), we’re led through the work with the author holding our hand– even as basically as the points of beginning, middle and end. In poetry, without that guidance, I find myself lost, in particular when form is unfamiliar.
In Zoe Whittall’s The Emily Valentine Poems, pop culture references led my way. I am not sure I would have bought this book at all if not for the title. Other references– musical, literary, and more television– gave me confidence that though I did not know the terrain, I could certainly find my way around all right.
But Whittall’s style represents a quandary for a reader such as I. Her poems are not poems as I was learned them, pentametre iambic or otherwise, and though I sense she is being free with form, stretching its bounds, it all makes me a bit uneasy. By all accounts it should set me free, but see, she is liable to do anything. Who knows what lies on the very next page?
As I go though, I realize it’s worth relaxing for. That the very next page possibly contains a fan letter to Judy Blume, Rayanne Graff, Axl Rose, Corey Haim? So how could I not get along here? A list poem of “Satisfying Soft Victories” (“2) Remembering and using long division”) Much of it like jottings from a notebook, and none of it boring.
I am beginning to see that with a poem you have to read it over and over. By my second and third time through this, I was comfortable enough blazing my own path. The poems more concrete with every read and, however contradictory, ever-changing.
April 20, 2008
A pleasure
“I think a young poet, or an old poet for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he’s written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t be discouraged. I mean, in the seventeenth century every educated man could turn a verse and play the lute. Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.” –Philip Larkin, The Paris Reviews Interviews, II
