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
April 20, 2008
Indie Cred
Last December I dared to request National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation from my local independent video store, and the clerk asked me if I was serious. This was his version of customer service, it happened all the time, and maybe he thought he was helping me. He probably thought he worked “in film” too, but he reminded me of Dawson’s Creek. One day in February, I asked him if he’d caught Alvin and the Chipmunks yet, just to be annoying, and he practically threw up on me. Everything I rented, he might have laughed at, but being too ironic for laughter, he’d scoff instead. Each time we came out of there, we vowed a boycott, but we always returned, since Blockbuster has had nothing in stock ever since they cut out late fees.
We’ve moved, and our new house has a branch of the same independent video store just around the corner. The difference between the two locations is astounding, in that every video we’ve been after has been in stock (incl. new releases) and that the staff aren’t mean. We’re just not used to the latter. Today we returned Juno, and as we walked away from the counter, the clerk began making strange noises. We turned around, prepared for whatever was coming, which was potentially being spat on.
“What,” we said, bracing ourselves.
“Juno,” said the clerk, in mock-dramatic tones.
“I liked it,” I said, pleading. “It was a good movie.”
The clerk cackled in an evil fashion (instead of the unevil fashion).
“Come on, what is it?” said Stuart.
“No, just everyone’s been wanting this and it’s the first one back. Thanks for bringing it back guys! And have a great day!”
Our gratitude at not being abused was almost sad.
April 18, 2008
Born that way
Have you ever know such a flare
for trousers? That girl could put out
bright lights with her eyeteeth.
But then some people are just born that way.
They come out sucking on spoons.
April 17, 2008
Kama Readings
Tonight I had the great pleasure of attending the Kama Reading Series by World Literacy Canada.
The low point of the evening was on the way there when my necklace fell off and down my dress, and my choices were to shimmy madly on the sidewalk or reach up under my skirt, both of which involved pearls emerging from between my legs, and so I went with a combination of both, imagining everyone behind me didn’t exist.
But the high point of the evening was everything else, the readers featuring three whose books I’ve enjoyed so much during the past year: Richard B. Wright (of October), Frances Itani (of Remembering the Bones) and Janice Kulyk Keefer (whose The Ladies’ Lending Library was the start of my summer last year, and led me to “At the Bay”, and then Thieves, and then to reread Bliss).
It was completely nice to listen to authors reading stories I know well. I also like hearing new stories, of course, and the jarring recognition once I finally sit down to read them myself, but this was easier, like I was hearing old yarns but in new voices. The readers all were impressive, their passages engaging, and for the first time in my life, I thoroughly enjoyed the Q&A. Mostly because no one got up, and prefaced something stupid with, “As a writer myself, I…” or some such thing. I got to ask Kulyk Keefer a question about the multiple points of view in her book. And I appreciated the writers’ responses to a request to define what to them is success; from all of them I got the sense that such a thing is elusive and that it’s always the next book ahead.
