Never Say Cicada

Day 182 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Patrick is going to be reading a lot of books, because he wanted to use his credit card and he'd come in for Walden ($3) and Daniel Quinn (which we didn't have), and we only take credit cards for $5 and up (because of the annoying charges) so I said, "Have you looked on the Select New Arrivals shelf?"

He found great stuff. Because he had wanted Quinn, I pointed out Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, for its amazing blend of philosophy and circumstances, as reported to me by Gary, Tony, and other happy readers. It is in a yet-to-read stack here in my house.

I asked if he'd read Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, because there it was, a classic we have trouble hanging onto, and, sure enough, he hadn't. He had read two Vonnegut books he liked a lot--Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle--so when he saw Jailbirds and Breakfast of Champions, he snapped those up, too!

When I asked why he wanted to read Thoreau's Walden, he said he'd seen the film Into the Wild, and wanted to see why someone would want to go into the wild. In the book by Jon Krakauer about Chris McCandless, we learn that Chris was reading Thoreau before he went on his own discovery of wilderness and self.

Odd, how a little technology hassle should lead to an armful of books. Don't worry, no one forced him. He chose them all himself and had time to change his mind. Boss was on the phone, so I couldn't use the credit card machine till he got off. (Hmm, unfortunate phrasing, perhaps.) Anyhoo, that technology glitch gave Patrick time to think it over, and he wanted the whole stack.

And now for the cicada. Billy Collins famously announced in his introduction to The Best American Poetry 2006 that he couldn't make it past the word "cicada" in a poem, even though his poem "The Student" in The Trouble with Poetry (Random House, 2005) of course has the word "cicada" in it. I always see the fondness, subtlety, and depth in Collins, as well as the humor, and actually enjoyed his snippiness in Ballistics. He has a right to be snippy; people are always sniping at him. But, as I am writing prose at the moment, I have no fear of cicadas, alive, in language, or as empty shells.

Last night, just before we surrendered to air conditioning, I was enjoying the bit of breeze coming in my window from an area with an evergreen bush and a flower bed that provide a little privacy screen in my cool, sunken office space. Suddenly something crashed against the glass window above the screen. A bat? A transformer moth? A persistent possum? No, of course it was a cicada! A Dog Day Cicada, here in the dog days of August.

Poetry + Spring Forward

Day 33 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Lauren, like several other people, was reading more than one book at a time when I first asked this question, and one of them was This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick, which is poetry. I think this is because she is a poet herself, as well as a visual artist.

We poets read lots of poetry, or we should, anyway. How else are we going to know 1) what's been written and 2) how it's done!

But, like the non-poets out there who also love poetry, I also read it for pleasure, comfort, wisdom, and delight. Poetry, which seems to have few readers during a poet's lifetime, can acquire generations of readers, as soon as we die.

But some poets are very popular during their lifetimes. Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Billy Collins.

I am reading Ballistics by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, because my dad accidentally bought a second copy of it while buying a book about cars. He needs to replace his Avalon...brake issues...probably with another Avalon...overall customer satisfaction. (It'll all work out.) He loves Billy Collins. He just forgot he already had this book, in hardcover.

So I got the paperback, just out this February!

Now, if poetry is so memorable as to become immortal, you might ask how my dad had forgotten that he already had Ballistics...and I will just say 1) my dad is sometimes an impulse buyer and that this sometimes involves gigantic flat-screen televisions and 2) people do this with mysteries all the time, and 3) my mom bought the earlier hardcover of Ballistics. She loves Billy Collins, too. Both my parents appreciate a poet who is clear, often funny, and has something to say.

So do I. I have all his other books, too, including a first edition, first printing hardcover of The Trouble with Poetry, which I found on the sale table ($4) of Border's still in the first year of its publication, which shows you 1) the fate of poetry during a poet's lifetime, even a popular one, and 2) that not even all poets like him, sometimes dismissing him as glib and lightweight because of his humor, but I always find his humor going deeper than glibness, in a book as a whole, and the humor lightening a heavy truth just long enough to carry it into mind or heart, where it lodges like a bullet the surgeons can't remove.

Not like the bullet that passes through the Queen of Hearts on the cover of both the hardcover and softcover Ballistics.

I am also reading Stepping Through Moons, by Toni L. Wilkes, and Looking for Montrose Street, by Carol Frith, two poetry chapbooks from Finishing Line Press. I will return to these in a future blog, I'm sure, because now I am reading them too quickly in voracious delight, as the poets are people I've met through print or electronic correspondence and now want to meet through their poems.

I can already say that the little boy I've met in Toni's poems "The Birthday Party-1952" and "Coming Down" just breaks my heart.

And what delight to see that Carol Frith is exploring formal poetry in Montrose Street. And I have learned that "viburnum" means "wayfaring tree."

A poetry chapbook is a slim book, often, these days, saddle-stapled, and, in the case of Finishing Line Press, tied along the spine with ribbon. The history of chapbooks links them with peddlers as they were light enough to carry in a pack or on his person with other objects for sale. They might be compared in length to chapters of a longer book, or to pamphlets carrying current news, treatises, or ephemeral information. The form survives for poetry, and, for example, with journal reprints or museum exhibit catalogs, where a single article often appears between card covers or stapled wrappers.

This is the last week to order my new chapbook, Living on the Earth, from Finishing Line Press, in its crucial advance sales period, so here's the link to the New Releases page, where you can find it if you want it. I don't think it will ever appear at Borders on the sale table, due to that saddle stapling, but it will eventually turn up at Amazon, where the link will take you back to Finishing Line. Like a little ribbon looped around the spine.

And now it's time to spring forward into your day.... Did you change your clocks?

A Widow for One Year

This was one of those odd days, full of coincidences. It is Maud Gonne's birthday, and this bit of Yeats was posted at the Writer's Almanac today, in celebration of it:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This is also on p. 513 of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year, which I finished up today, reading the Yeats verse shortly after seeing it at the Writer's Almanac. Since Yeats is quoted earlier in the book, too, I was having this folding-over deja vu feeling....and all of this happened shortly after watching Stranger Than Fiction again with my daughter, who woke up wanting to watch that movie with her breakfast today. I cried at the end, at the lovely narration.

Then I told her that I do think fiction can save our lives. I alluded again to the "news of the world" that can be found in poems, something I'd told her about earlier this year. Some of us can only do art; it is our thing to do in the world. "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." My hand writes. My mind reads and writes, all the time. It is what I have found to do. I get so tired of people who tell us to do something else, or think there is only one thing to do and we should all be doing it. "Make money" or "Social justice" or whatever it is. If you want to make money, go make it! If you are capable of enacting social justice, enact some! I will, in my quiet ways, do what I can do best. Which is not, evidently, those two things! But please don't judge or terrorize me for that.

This is a nice novel from 1998, which I am just getting around to reading now. I was busy in 1998. But I tend to read things at the right time. I mentioned here that I had started A Prayer for Owen Meany several times before reading it straight through, and I read it, not knowing its full subject matter, after revisiting the Vietnam War through a museum exhibit. Everything came together. So now I am in another John Irving phase, it appears. I read one bad review of his newest novel, the kind of review that reminds me why I don't like to read reviews. Leave him alone! Let him write. He cares about people and their happiness. He knows crap happens, and he writes about that, too. This is his form of social justice. And it's how he makes money. Let him. It's what the world keeps indicating that it wants. Then, when somebody does it, you get jealous and kick him. Or call him sentimental or predictable. Sigh...

Anyway, I like Billy Collins, too. Sue me.