Very Like A Whale

Here’s a Paul Guest review of Sarah Manguso’s Siste Viator, which is the other collection I am reading for NaPoReMo. I don’t think I disagree with anything Paul says, although not quite sure what coherent thing I could say myself about this collection.

Strong. Clever. Individual. Corner of the eye. Brilliantly coherent (sometimes). Sweet. Endearing. Mad. Completely personal. 

Definitely worth reading.

First, a terrible loser with NaPoWriMo this year, then an even worse loser with NaPoReMo this year. Although I have actually been reading the two collections I said I would read in June, just not writing about them.

Here, just a couple of lines about Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissm Means To Me.  So much of today’s poetry offerings focus on the look and feel of the grain of dust on top of the grain of coffee — real micro-stuff. And yes, I know, from the particular to the general, to the universe through the detail, etc, but one doesn’t realize how much one is squinting and frowning at all the detail and the micro-ness — how much squinting becomes a fact of reading poetry. That is, until one reads poetry that is much wider and bigger — (not sure I should not say, more generous, more unafraid), such as Hoagland’s work in this volume.

Which doesn’t mean he launches off into orbits of abstraction and airy formlessness that make you squint even more. On the contrary.

Just found this interview with him online, where he says:

There was a time when I looked at a scene and saw a man and a woman kissing. Now I am aware that the man has a credit card in his pocket and that just behind the woman a beer commercial is on the tv, interrupting war coverage

Well, yes — engaged poetry, a topic I have bleated on about here in some detail in the past. Here and here and here, for example.

Hoagland doesn’t abandon detail, he employs it to convey a wider spectrum of vision.

i’m telling you it’s not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you

Grandmother, by Valzhyna Mort

Hat tip: Andrew Shields’ daily poem project.

I’ve been, not writing, but worrying at two pieces over the past few days. One is called blood and the other is called on Jupiter. The first one seems to be about a murder and the second seems to be decrying the power of words.

Which is pretty much all I have to say about either of them for the moment because coming up in just one day is…..vacation time!

Meanwhile, am reading Grace Paley’s Begin Again (Collected Poems) and really liking it. Rather mad and hectic in a great Stevie Smith ee cummings deadpan cartwheel razorblade sort of way. I feel I know what she means and am interested in it and like how she says it most of the time, which I realize is not such a frequent happy coincidence with me, after all, and so I’ll just celebrate it for a bit longer, if that’s all right.

The women let the tide go out
              which will return    which will return
  the sand   the salt   the fat drowned babies
  The men ran furiously
              along the banks of the estuary
  screaming
              Come back you fucking sea
  right now
              right now

                                         -Grace Paley

This one is just too aching: Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree by Sarah Lindsay. (Hat tip: Steve Schroeder.)

Incredibly (it seems to me now I consider it) I am only just beginning to really look at poems with an eye to what I like about them. Me. It’s like I had to give myself permission, or something.

And this is one of them. A poem like a craggy tree in black silhouette against a bright drought sky in a hot dry wind.  A poem that has dark emerald bones.

Check out this great review of Julie Carter’s pseudophakia. And get yourself a copy, if you haven’t already.

Reading four things in snatches tonight and last night:

Dark Under Kiganda Stars by Lilah Hegnauer
Book of My Nights by Li Young Lee
Collected Poems, Jane Kenyon
Paradise Lost, John Milton

Have not read much of either Lee or Kenyon before - just the odd piece here and there. But I liked what I read, which is why I went to the trouble of ordering whole collections.

I think I’m having a bad night because the Li Young Lee is not striking me well at all – feeling him thin and trying too hard and soooo abstract. In an airy Rilke-esque, Khalil Gibran-esque here is great wisdom sort of way that makes my head hurt. Lots of talk of night and dark and thirst and home and love and truth and almost no pictures. Jane Kenyon is solider, much more texture and more to actually grasp, clever and craftsmanlike, whimsical. But not exciting. The one that unsettles and puts me on edge in a good way is the Lilah Hegnauer, whom I’d never heard of. A young Catholic volunteer from Minnesota teaching school in rural Uganda writes poems about her experience – trying to walk in her students’ shoes; puzzling over social practices she cannot accept; caring about and feeling what is joyful and difficult for them. Milton is cool as ever, at least some of the time, and he’s playing an anchoring North Star sort of role between the other three. (I’m not reading Paradise Lost all over again, by the way - the horror! I hear you say  – I just got my own copy in the mail so am going through it and scribbling on all the best bits while I still remember where they are. I’m still totally a Lucifer fan.)

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

                                  Percy Bysshe Shelley, To the Moon

CAIN. Ah! didst thou tempt my mother?

LUCIFER. I tempt none,
Save with the truth: was not the Tree, the Tree
Of Knowledge? and was not the Tree of Life
Still fruitful? Did I bid her pluck them not?
Did I plant things prohibited within
The reach of beings innocent, and curious
By their own innocence?

Cain: A Mystery, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Act I, Scene i

Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips
Porous to murder.

                                         Robert Bly, The Eel in the Cave

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it, and be known.

                                                       - David Wagoner, Lost

When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.

Stephen Dunn, A Secret Life

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde,
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Childe :
And I reply’d, My Lord

George Herbert

He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain,
limping and looped in it.

- Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (l.975-6).

Richard Epstein is at it again. Too funny.

And, “Why are you red
In this milky blue?”
I said.
“Why sun-colored,
As if awake
In the midst of sleep?”

…………………Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull.

………………………………………………………Ash Wednesday

Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.

…………………………..The Pulley

Trying out metrical reading on A Sound Blog. The stuff I find I really want to read is not BV at all (yay for anapests and Annabel Lee and The Destruction of Sennacherib!) so here’s a compromise – Marvell (in IT, thanks, Harry), because Marvell is mostly fun (he’s the one with the lady raving over entrails in a cave. With horrid care, no less.)

I’m mulling over a passage in heroic couplets (thanks, Harry) - from Pope’s Essay on Criticism - that I may record and put up later. Or not.  

I have to say that some of that old BV stuff (Milton, Keats, Shelley, anyone?) is seriously unenthralling. At the moment.