New Century Reading

The Angel of History

This collection of poems by Carolyn Forche is a stunner, and one I'm sure I only scratched the surface of in reading it for the first time. Forche is writing about hard things here; the aftermath of war, including the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. She's also writing about the long, hard years postwar in places like the former Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There's so much happening in these poems--how do you recover from these atrocities, both as a person and as a community? How do you survive the memories? How long do you try and hold on to what's lost? 

The epigraph is a quote from philosopher Walter Benjamin: "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

That sets the tone for the book: 

The past is not where you left it, Svetko.
It is a ruined city, spackled with grief,
     The house, still yellow stucco with pear trees.
Empty swallow nests hang in the eaves
     woven with bits of collar and sleeve.
There is a diary open to the words cannot remain here.

A beautiful, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching book that haunts me.

Little Big Bully

A year or two ago, we had a massive polar vortex in Minnesota (feels like a million years ago during a pandemic, but really, it was only a year or two ago) that lasted a couple of weeks. While some of us whined and moaned and glared at the weather map, poet Heid Erdrich wrote a book. Makes you wonder what she's got going during the pandemic. Because if her pandemic output is as stellar as her polar vortex output, she's got a doozy coming out soon.

Erdrich illuminates various aspects of Native life and history, both on a large and on a personal scale. Her poems are imagistic and often searing. And yet they can also have humor, the kind of humor that makes me want to have a beer with her and dish on trashy horror movies. But there are hard times here too, childhood and teen abuse for being Native, brutal history that often gets shoved under the rug, ongoing catastrophes that Natives face. I would love to quote some of it, but Erdrich is using some complex formatting--beautifully so--that Typepad is not reproducing properly. So I say, read her book. Read it. It's wonderful.

Dunce

Mary Ruefle's Dunce was shortlisted for this year's Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and I can see why. I read it in one sitting. I hadn't intended to; I usually read only a few poems at a time and slowly work through a collection. But each poem delighted me and made me think, and so it was just natural to move to the next one. Ruefle has a deceptively simple writing style, and she's not afraid to be silly, make up words, occasionally use wry humor, and yet make you think.

Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.

I loved it. I can't wait to read more of her work.

Citizen

Wow. What took me so long to read this book? 

If poetry intimidates you, maybe this is a starting place, where you can learn about systemic racism and about different types of poetry as well. Many of the pieces here are prose poems, almost like miniature essays. Which does not make them less powerful. Far from it. 

Poet Rankine details her own experiences with being racially profiled, even by people who considered themselves her friend. She intersperses those stories with a detailed analysis of the years-long racism Serena Williams faced in her tennis career as well as Zinedine Zidane's 2006 World Cup scandal. None of this is easy reading, and that's exactly why we should be reading it. It's not hard because it's poetry, it's hard because it's a devastatingly clear account of deeply embedded racism:

"Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. Because you will spend the next two hours around the round table that makes conversing easier, you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room."

And there are thoughtful, thought-provoking statements too: "The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence."

And simply beauty: "The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you."

As if these aren't enough reasons to read the book, it also has several full-color illustrations, works of art that set off the text. 

Towards the end, there's a page of several lines starting "In Memory of" and it's filled with names known for senseless deaths at the hands of the police: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Jamar Clark, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile. The last one is the final one in my edition, but I thought I'd read somewhere that in subsequent editions, that page would be updated with the additional names of people who had lost their lives this way since the last edition. Presumably, George Floyd is being added to the manuscript.

 

Kyrie

Hello, friends! Seems like forever since I posted here. I have been reading, although with a very ADHD approach--thanks, coronavirus, for destroying my already short attention span. I just haven't felt like blogging.

Until I finished this book. Kyrie is a slim volume of sonnets that tell stories from the 1918 flu pandemic. Timely, yes? Well, it was originally published in 1995, so maybe prescient is the better word. It's a lovely, heartbreaking, breathtaking read. The sonnet form works beautifully here, not least because Voigt is so talented that most of the time, you wouldn't necessarily notice the form. Each poem is spare, short, and conveys immense historical, and yet personal, stories of the pandemic. Given that WWI was drawing to a close then, it's not surprising that that appears as well. 

"Dogs, all kinds of dogs--signals
are their job, they cock their heads,
their backs bristle, even house dogs
wake up and circle the wool rug.
Outside, the vacant yard: then,
within minutes something eats the sun."

Wow.

"I told him not to move, they'd said don't move.
The weeks of fewer cases were a tease,

a winter thaw that froze back up worse
than before, backswing of a scythe, we filled

the gym, cots and pallets on the floor.
And many now in uniform--I could spot

who'd been gassed, their buttons were tarnished green--
and many of them were missing parts, like him.

Did I say the nurses were wearing masks?
My last day she put him next to me,

sweet little nurse but not enough of her
to go around she said don't let him move.

You tell me, was it prayer or luck kept
me from being that boy reaching for water?"

Feels like it could have been written last week, in many ways. If you're looking for pandemic-appropriate reading, this is a fantastic book. I've been reading a few poems from it every morning, and I'm going back to the beginning and starting all over again. For some reason, it's providing some comfort in these bleak days. Much the way the opening of Mrs. Dalloway does, set in 1923 in a vibrant, lively--recovered, recovering--London.

This Day

Here's a thing about me: I start every day with a little focused reading, and that includes both classic and contemporary poetry. Over the past year or so, I've read several collections of contemporary poetry this way. But on Sundays, I turned from whatever collection I was currently reading to This Day by Wendell Berry. 

I don't think you have to be religious to appreciate Berry's work. Even to someone not religious like me, there was a lovely ritual about reading these Sabbath poems every Sunday. Berry is concerned with the state of the soul, but he's also very concerned with the state of the world. It's very accessible poetry, written in spare, thoughtful language. Much of its genius lies in its spareness. Just look how much is included in this short poem:

This is the flood road,
the broken way the water
passes when the sky bursts
and hell breaks loose
in this crease at the hills' feet
as the rain gathers and plunges
in its never-ending search
for the world's floor. And here
by night the spider weaves
her fragile work by touch
in the dark to shine by day.

There are so many gems like this in This Day. It's a collection I will return to again and again.

Shout

Shout is a young-adult memoir in poetry. That's, like, a category unto itself. When author Anderson was 13, she was raped by someone she knew and trusted. Obviously that had an enormous impact on her life, as did being part of a highly dysfunctional yet, in their own way, loving family. Through a series of short poems, she explores all those difficult landscapes that ultimately led her to become a renowned writer who travels the world, trying to get sexual abuse and assault out into the open--and not just women who have been assaulted. 

It's a brave, thoughtful book, covering not just the troubled childhood and teen years, but the aftermath of being a forthright speaker on these topics (cancelled appearances, schools skitterish about having her talk because "we don't have a problem with sexual assault here," even as she's talking to students at those schools who tell her heartbreaking stories that indicate the exact opposite).

There's no question Anderson can write. But I didn't feel like all of the poems worked. Some simply seemed like prose pieces with arbitrary line breaks. When they do work, they're often stunning:

"Poor kids get snatched by the real world
at seven, eight, nine years old, dragged
onto the front porch of adulthood, forced
to figure it out on their own
rarely making old bones,
a few will live to see their grandchildren chewed
up by the same machinery
then buried in cardboard boxes
I wanted a coffin made of wood
from trees not yet planted
my appetite for time was growing"

Wow. And then this, which I saw on a poster in a teen space at a local library, and which sent me looking for the book:

"too many grown-ups tell kids to follow
their dreams
like that's going to get them somewhere
Auntie Laurie says follow your nightmares instead
cuz when you figure out what's eating you alive
you can slay it"

Quibbles aside, overall this is powerful and moving, and really needs to reach the young adult audience wherever it can.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

This is what I spent Thanksgiving weekend reading, and it could not have been a better choice. I hadn't read Ross Gay's work before, but I'll definitely read more going forward. In this collection, he explores the theme of gratitude from various angles, including through the lens of loss, and the lens of having gotten through hard things. He often uses short lines with interesting, thought-provoking line breaks, inviting the reader to take their time and think--and feel--what he's talking about.

He's also not afraid of writing long poems, with several running multiple pages and often telling a story, or having a turning point midway that changes your perspective.

It's hard to choose a favorite, but if I had to, the title poem would probably be the one: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. It reminded me of the lovely Anne Sexton poem, Live. 

Good Bones

Everyone should read this book. Everyone.

I was introduced to Maggie Smith when the title poem of this collection went viral after the 2016 election. You can read it here: Poetry Foundation. Why it took me so long to finally read the entire collection, I have no idea. But definitely better late than never.

Smith writes movingly of the troubled times we live in and what it's like to parent and to even exist in them. Her language is deceptively simple, with clean, clear images that paint vivid pictures. The book opens with a poem called "Weep Up," a phrase her young daughter used to mean "wake up," and ends with a poem about rain on New Year's Eve, and in between are lifetimes. 

I went through this book several times, trying to find short quotes to show the beauty and truth in it, but honestly? Just read the book. That's the better approach.

Deaf Republic

Holy cow, this book. Even if you think you don't read poetry, try this one. Just try it. The poet, born in the former Soviet Union and now a US citizen, uses very straightforward, spare, prose-like poems, and he tells a story. In fact, it's almost like a script; he provides a cast of characters up front.

In this story, he tells of a fictional Eastern European town called Vasenka. The town is occupied at some unknown time. There's a protest, and during the protest, soldiers kill a deaf boy. As a result, the entire town becomes deaf. The townspeople communicate with their own form of sign language as some continue to fight back, while others accept the status quo. More and more people die; all the while, Momma Galya runs a subversive puppet show that frequently leads to the death of soldiers.

For all its spare, simple language, there's a lot going on here, and a lot that's all too relevant to life in the U.S. these days. As Kaminsky says in one of the later poems:

"Our country has surrendered.

Years later, some will say none of this happened; the shops were open, we were happy and went to see puppet shows in the park."

And, even more ominously,

"Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man's driver's license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. 

It is a peaceful country."

Read this book.