Tag: Poetry

“Winter”

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Ponsot, Marie. “Winter.” Springing.New york: Alfred A Knopf, 2002. p 225.

Such a short poem and oh so seemingly uncomplicated! Don’t be fooled by its length or lack of veiled meaning. It is a snapshot of two neighbors, living side by side. Two mothers, their sons had grown up as friends. Only now the reader finds out one mother has lost her son to suicide. The other doesn’t know what to say. Isn’t that always the way? There is pain in this surviving-son’s mother’s voice as she struggles with words and sentiments. It’s elegant and emotional.

And to think I read it thinking it was going to be about winter (because I can’t wait for it to be over). That will teach me to judge a poem by its title!

Favorite line, “Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in to separate troubles” (p 225).

Reason read: April is National Poetry Month. So. There. This is the first poem of the month!

Author fact: Ponsot’s book The Bird Catcher won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1998.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Poetry Pleasers” (p 189).

January ’13 was…

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When I look back on January 2013 I have a sense of relief. All things considered this month was better than the last. In the grand scheme of things January treated me kind. No major meltdowns. No minor catastrophes to speak of. I started training for Just ‘Cause in the quiet way. Four to five miles a day and I didn’t stress about the numbers. If I didn’t make five or even four I didn’t have a hissy fit or beat myself or moi up. I cut me & myself some slack; gave us a break. I know that as the months wear on this won’t always be the case, but for now it was nice to go easy on me, myself & moi. The running was a different matter. Just as relaxed a schedule but not so easy going on. The run is a little over six weeks away and I’ve done next to nil in order to train. New Guinea has been awesome in that I’m working on speed intervals on level five. Let me repeat that. Level five. Nothing to write home about. I used to operate at level nine. Enough said. On with the books! I am pretty proud of the list.

  • Lives of the Painters, Architects and Sculptors by Giorgio Vasari ~ in honor of National Art Month way back in October. This finally completes the series!
  • Ancient Athens on 5 Drachmas a Day by Philip Matyszak ~ in honor of Female Domination Day in Greece.
  • Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray ~ in honor of January being the first month I read something from the first chapter of a Lust book. I admit I didn’t finish this one.
  • Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham ~ in honor of Maugham’s birth month. I also didn’t finish this one.
  • Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron ~ Happy new year. Read something to make me happy.
  • Idle Days in Patagonia by W. H. Hudson ~ in honor of January being the best time to visit Patagonia.
  • The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ~ in honor of Lewis birth and death month.
  • Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson ~ in honor of the month all Creatures Great and Small aired.
  • Tatiana by Dorothy Jones ~ in honor of January being the month Alaska became a state.

On audio I listened to:

  • Final Solution by Michael Chabon ~ in honor of January being Adopt a Rescued Bird month.
  • No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith ~ in honor of Female Mystery Month
  • City of Thieves by David Benioff ~ last minute add-on. This was addicting!

For the Early Review program with LibraryThing:

  • Gold Coast Madam by Rose Laws (started in Dec)
  • Her by Christa Parravani

For Fun:

  • Leave Your Sleep the poetry book for children by Natalie Merchant

Leave Your Sleep

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Merchant, Natalie. Leave Your Sleep: a Collection of Classic Children’s Poetry. New York: Frances Foster Books, 2012.

I will admit I am biased when it comes to anything Natalie Merchant puts her stamp on. Over the years Ms. Merchant has proven time and time again that she is a humanitarian and an educator. She just happens to have a beautiful voice to go with that caring heart. And having all said that, that is why I bought three copies of Leave Your Sleep. I thought it was appropriate to send one to my public library. I took the chance because there is no way of knowing if they bought it for themselves (no online catalog) but I doubt they did. I also bought a copy for my sister’s family. I don’t know if they will listen to it more than once so I have asked them to pass it along to their public library when they are finished. Do you see a pattern?
Then, of course, I bought my own copy. I will not be donating mine to any local library, though!

Leave Your Sleep is comprised of nineteen poems set to music and, in the book version, accompanied by the wonderful  illustrations of Barbara McClintock. Having the illustrations in front of me banishes my own imaginings but at the same time expands my visions, if that makes sense. For example, take The Sleepy Giant by Charles Edward Carryl. When I first heard Natalie’s musical interpretation in 2008 my mind saw an ancient old man for a giant who was decidedly, thanks to an accordion and somber drums, very very creepy. In the book version of Leave Your Sleep the 372 year old giant is a portly Victorian woman looking a bit like Winston Churchill. Not as creepy as my own imagination scared me. On the other hand the village in Vain and Careless by Robert Graves far exceeded the pictures in my head. The poem came alive in ways it hadn’t before seeing it on the printed page.

The continuing magic is how the book is arranged. Thoughtful consideration was given to every aspect from layout to packaging. Ms. Merchant’s introduction personalizes the project and gives the poems a resonating warmth. I am guessing she thoroughly collaborated on the illustrations because the girl in Equestrienne by Rachel Field looks a lot like Natalie in her video for the song Kind and Generous.

My favorite poem in the entire collection (cd and book) remains ee cummings’s Maggie and Milly and Molly and May. It’s my childhood played out before me.

Letters to Kurt

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Erlandson, Eric. Letters to Kurt. New York: Akashic, 2012.

I was wrong about this book. I previously said I thought I could read it in a weekend. What I was really thinking was that I could read it in an hour. I was oh so wrong. Very wrong. On both accounts. Here’s how it really went: I could read it for 15-20 minutes and then had to walk away. Words blended and sentences started to sound the same. I lost my place among the pages often. Letters became redundant if I read too much. How do I describe this book accurately? Here are the words I jotted down while reading this on a Sunday morning, coffee balanced on knee, propped up in bed: Clever. Cliche. Rambling. Private. Joking. Culture. Pop. Jealousy. Sexy. Rude. And finally, a sentence. “I’m feeling left out.” Even if you were parked in front of every media outlet in the 1990s you will still miss some of the reference Erlandson makes. I wavered between thinking this was a glorified writing assignment, “write for ten minutes straight” and feeling it was an outpouring of grief and rage in the form of stream of consciousness prose. It babbles and barks. There is bite. It’s sad and strangely beautiful. But, as I said earlier it is not something to devour in one sitting. You will get indigestion, for sure. Bite small. Chew slowly. Push the book away often and everything will taste better in the end.

April ’12 was…

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April 2012 was a few days ago. Yup. Late again. I have been busy and not just with the personal stuff. There has been some Challenge related stuff going on as well. For starters, I needed to put together a plan for implementing the additional 1,698 books Book Lust To Go would add to my Lust Challenge list (damn you, Hub!). I needed to figure out a) how to evenly spread all 1,698 books out over 12 months, b) what reasons would I give to the new assortment of books and, c) find the time to organize it all. I’m not finished, but I think I’ve figured it all out. It looks like each month will have 350-400 books and I’ll be reading in honor of annual festivals and historical events, as well as national holidays. It should be pretty interesting.

But, enough about all that – Here is the list of books read for the month of April:

  • John Barleycorn by Jack London ~ read in honor of Alcohol Awareness month
  • Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser ~ read in honor of Food month
  • The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald ~ read in honor of Humor Month
  • Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier ~ read in honor of the Civil War
  • Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien ~ read to finish the series (confessional: I didn’t get through the whole thing)
  • These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder ~ read to finish the series

What else? I read The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy by David Halberstam (not scheduled) and Longitude by Dava Sobel (also not scheduled). I also read Small Fortune by Rosie Dastgir for LibraryThing and the Early Review Program. I tried to listen to an audio book while I trained for the Just ‘Cause walk but it skipped so bad I gave up and started watching Natalie videos instead.

April was National Poetry Month so I tackled the following poems:

  • “House of Blue Light” by David Kirby
  • “Ithaca” by Constantine Cavafy
  • “Happiness” by Jane Kenyon
  • “America To Me” by Henry Van Dyke
  • “Golden Retrievals” by Mark Doty
  • “Tortures” by Wislawa Szymborska
  • “Unexplorer” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • “True Love” by Wislawa Szymborska

“Unexplorer”

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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “The Unexplorer.” Collected Poems.New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1960. p 138.

I don’t know how to take this poem. Okay. So it explains why one doesn’t explore; why someone is an UN-explorer. Someone wants to know where a road goes. The answer is to the milk-man’s door. Interesting enough. Blame it all on childhood and your mother, as the therapist would say. Mom tells you something scary and it scars you for life. That would make sense if mother replied with something hideous, something deep and dark and scary. But the milk-man? Why is the milk-man someone to fear? Unless he’s daddy? I don’t get it.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Travelers’ Tale in Verse” (p 237).

“True Love”

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Szymborska, Wislawa. “True Love.” Poems New and Collected 1957 – 1997. 1998. Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2000.

I couldn’t help but think of Natalie Merchant singing “Jealousy” when I read this poem for the first time. It sounds spiteful and catty. It could have been written by someone sitting alone on prom night or someone with no one to kiss on New Year’s Eve. That wallflower with the mad-enough-to-spit-nails attitude. It’s sad and snarly. The echo of longing for a relationship is loud and resonating and clear and yet, the poem speaks of true love being a farce, a joke, something he or she cannot possibly believe in.

As an aside…I have been struggling with what to say at my cousin’s burial. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the guy. It’s the love that has me livid. I’m thinking if I had been a little less loving while he was alive this wouldn’t hurt so much NOW. There is truth to not believing in love.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Polish Poetry and Prose” (p 188).

“Tortures”

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Szymborska, Wislawa. “Tortures.” Poems New and Collected 1957 – 1997. 1998. Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2000.

This was a difficult poem to read because the first few times I read it literally, I imagined feeling specific tortures inflicted on a body: whippings, bones being broken, knuckles being popped…To me it was an admonishment – society changes but our methods of torture remain the same. It’s the mantra “nothing has changed” that haunts the entire tone of the poem. There is a sense of violence behind every word.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Polish Poems and Prose” (p 188).

“Golden Retrievals”

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Doty, Mark. “Golden Retrievals.” Sweet Machine: Poems. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.

This is such a great poem to read out loud. Read it to a child in a really funny voice and watch him laugh with his imagination running wild. It’s not hard to see the golden retriever waiting for the ball to be thrown, eyes watching his master anxiously. Short attention span: the breeze, another animal, his owner’s distracted mood. Everything captivates and yet, he’s still waiting to play fetch. Love it.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Great Dogs in Fiction” (p 105).

“America To Me”

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Van Dyke, Henry. “America To Me. ” The Poems of Henry Van Dyke. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911. p 167 – 168.

“America To Me” is begging to be set to music. In my mind it has all the makings of a really great patriotic song, complete with cheerful verse and enthusiastic chorus. It is the perfect post-9/11 anthem; a rally of sorts. It’s simple in its message: a traveling individual has grown tired of the Old Country. He (or she) has seen enough of France, Italy and England. It is simply time to go home, back to young America. After all, as Van Dyke has quoted Frank Baum, “there is no place like home.”

Favorite line, “I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea…” (p 168).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Travelers Tales in Verse” (p 237). Read in April for poetry month.

“Happiness”

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Kenyon, Jane. “Happiness.” Otherwise New & Selected Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1997.

I have been listening to Natalie Merchant a lot lately. No. I take that back. I have been watching her more. Every night while I walk the training miles and miles on my treadmill I watch old video clips; those Quick!NatalieMerchantIsOnTelevision moments. Anytime she was on VH1 or Mtv promoting a song someone pressed the record button and I benefited from their fast fingers. Last night I watched Natalie explain the meaning behind her song “Kind and Generous.” (Some people call it the Thank You Song.) She explained it as “simple and to the point. Everyone knows what I am talking about.”
I feel that way about Jane Kenyon’s poetry. Kenyon has a way of expressing herself through her poetry in the most natural of ways. Her language is simple, to the point, and everyone knows what she is talking about.
In “Happiness” the message is just as clear. Happiness can find you whether you expect it to or want it to. Happiness can startle you out of an otherwise typical moment. Happiness should not be taken for granted or ignored.

Author Fact: When I first found out Jane Kenyon died before her 50th birthday I instantly thought it must have been cancer. Indeed, she died of leukemia in April 1995 at the age of 47.

Book Trivia: Jane Kenyon was in the process of editing Otherwise New and Selected Poems when she passed away. It was published a few months after her death.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Poetry Pleasers” (p 189).

“House of Blue Light”

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Kirby, David. “The House of Blue Light.” The House of Blue Light. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. pp 26-29.

“The House of Blue Light” reads like a short story. We’re talking really, really short, but a story with characters and a plot all the same. It starts off with dad at the gym. I’m guessing he’s in his 40s, maybe early 50s. He’s watching Little Richard on tv. Inexplicably he gets emotional about the music he hears. I say inexplicably because personally, I cannot understand Little Richard for the life of me. Anyway, when describing the incident to his wife she tells him, “your just emotional because your son is going off to college.” His emotions make him think about other situations where he has broken down and lost his compusure. He imagines a house of blue light where good times are had. A place where all his memories are kept.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen Sink Poetry” (p 138).

Up Country

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Kumin, Maxine. Up Country: Poems of New England. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972.

There is no doubt Kumin knows New England and knows it well. Her poetry reflects the deep woods and country living that is so typical of life in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Her style of writing is plain and straightforward, without complicated phrasings or over the top descriptors. Every line is a perfect image as clear as day. Reading Kumin’s poetry is a breath of fresh air literally and figuratively. Nearly everything she writes about the reader is able to relate to if they know living in the country. For example, if you are a dog owner and your beloved pooch has ever wrestled with a skunk then you know how impossible it is to get ride of that smell. Kumin writes, after many attempts to clean her dog, “skunk is still plain as a train announcement” (p 4). Exactly.

ps~ if you want to read this, try to find the copy illustrated by Barbara Swan. Her artistry is beautiful and compliments Kumin well.

Book Trivia: Up Country won Kumin a Pulitzer for poetry in 1973.

Author Fact: Kumin has experience with New England living. She is rumored to live in New Hampshire.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Prose By Poets” (p 194). In this case this is poetry by poets.

August ’11 was…

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Why is it that when the days and long and the weather is nice we gravitate towards “chick lit” and “beach reads” and other torpor-inducing dribble? I’m being harsh. Not to the authors but to myself. It seems like this summer had me submerged in silly. See for yourself.  These are the books I had within my reach. First, what I predicted I would read:

  • Daughters of Fortune by Isabel Allende. Allende’s birth month is in August so reading this made sense. Read in three days.
  • While I was Out by Sue Miller. Something I picked up while I was on the island. Read in two days.
  • Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Got extremely bored with this.
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Read in one day and scared the bejeezus out of me.
  • Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer. I’m still reeling from this one. Only because in it I recognized a relationship I wrecked. Hard to read about yourself sometimes. It got to me – so much so that I plan a “confessional” blog about it on the other site. Just need to drum up the courage to write it…

Now for the books I didn’t plan to read yet picked up along the way:

  • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan. Read in a few days. This was decent. I just wish it wasn’t all about finding a fine man and getting laid…
  • Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. I’m thrilled this was on the Challenge list simple because it made me go back to Natalie’s version of “Land of Nod” and really listen to it. Beautiful.
  • The Moffats by Eleanor Estes. I read this one during Hurricane Irene -only a few hours. I needed something simple to keep me company while I filled water bottles and worried about the ginormous maple outside my picture window.
  • Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. Probably my least favorite book of the bunch simply because I couldn’t understand the morality of the heroine of the story. The scene where Becky lies on her resume about speaking Finnish made me cringe. I was embarrassed for her.

I was able to snag one book for LibraryThing’s Early Review program: Call Me When You Land by Michael Schiavone. This had the potential to be something special. I really liked the storyline. It was the basic character development that had me reaching for more.

So. That was August. Not really impressive. No nonfiction. Nothing to set the house on fire. Maybe September will see something special.

A Child’s Garden of Verses

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Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson. A Child’s Garden of Verses. Boulder: Shambhala, 1979.

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those books that remained as a constant in my house growing up. Somehow, side by side with unlikely titles such as Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and The World According to Garp by John Irving there A Child’s Garden of Verses sat. It had a permanent place on the shelf and never moved. As a child (I was ten when my 1979 edition was published) it was the illustrations by Charles Robinson that really captured my imagination. Simple illustrations like the title one for “Pirate Story” or more complicated ones like the one for “Garden Days.” I don’t know how I resisted the urge to fill the black and white line drawings with color.
When Natalie Merchant chose “The Land of Nod” as a poem to set to music for her newest album, Leave Your Sleep, it was if the simple verse took flight. Suddenly the poem spread glorious wings and soared with great majesty. It became lush and alive. It made me wish she had taken the entire collection of poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses and set them to music.
Like Natalie’sLeave Your Sleep, A Child’s Garden of Verses is the epitome of poetry for and about children. The imagination of a child grows wild and free among the pages. Hopes and fears are expressed as only children can. The sense of wonder and innocence resonates as reminders to all adults about how the world once was.

Point of amusement: just as I was drawn to the illustrations of Charles Robinson so were the publishers of A Child’s Garden of Verses. The back cover, usually reserved for praise for the author or an abstract about the text, sings the praises of illustrator Charles Robinson and ignore Robert Louis Stevenson completely.

Author Fact opinion: Stevenson and wife Fanny had one of the most romantic courtships I have ever read.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the introduction (pix). Nancy Pearl is confessing herself to be a “readaholic” and remembering the stories read to her as a young child.