Projectile Synchronicity

Day 49 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Paulette is reading Break of Day by Colette, and it is just now, as I compose, the break of day. There was a full moon last night, and life is beautiful.

A young man on spring break, soon to graduate with a wildlife biologist degree and a poetry habit, is now reading Charles Olson, who believed that poetry was a "high energy construct," poets taking energy from various sources and projecting it onto the page via thought, breath, heart, words...."projective verse."

(My hidden stand-up self cannot help but imagine projectile versifying.)

(That's why it's a hidden self.)

But now I must confess to some 1) impulse buying based on 2) synchronicity. Susan commented here earlier on synchronicity, cool coincidences, Carl Jung.

I was reading Midwest Eclogue by David Baker (see earlier entry), the poem "Melancholy Man," and the note on it at the back of the book referring to Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Having written recently on melancholy, I was struck by that coincidence and then further stricken by the desire to read the Burton book. Fortunately 1) I was home and thus nowhere near a bookstore and 2) when I accessed the Babbitt's search page, we didn't have it.

But I came into work yesterday, to do my lovely how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make-a-living-as-a-poet job of typing books into the store database, and there it was, newly discarded by a library, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, in the All-English translation (no more Latin) edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith. You know what happened next.

One of my jobs during how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make-a-living-as-an-actress stage of my life was to work in Special Collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago. They have a fabulous Floyd Dell collection, so I learned a lot about him there. That's when I realized Edna St. Vincent Millay had also worked as an actress in Chicago, before heading off to Greenwich Village. And, yes, behind me on the bookshelf is the huge biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford, Christmas gift from my mom and dad back in 2001, deeply enjoyed. My mother introduced me to "Renascence," Millay's long passionate poem about coming back to life, as a verse reader on the high school speech team, and I've been in love with her ever since. Likewise, Emily Dickinson. Their fat biographies sit side by side, in fact, a fine coincidence in my random organizational system based on love.

Midwest Eclogue

Day 44 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

I am now reading Midwest Eclogue by David Baker, because I went to hear him read last night and marveled at his poems. An eclogue is a pastoral or bucolic poem or set of poems, and I had encountered the eclogue in poetic tradition in works by Virgil and Spenser, and in music in works by Lizst and Stravinsky, so while the word doesn't come up that often, the form persists.

My mother will be reading his newest book, Never-Ending Birds, and then we will trade! The title of this one came from his daughter, Kate, he told us, and we learned other things about this delightful girl, now a young woman, in his poems and patter. What a wonderful reader he is, and what a joy and relief to attend a reading where the poet reads his poems well, reads them as they are written, with thought and restrained emotion, punctuation and line breaks that help convey both natural speech and artful selection and arrangement. These are poems that say something and can be uttered!

Baker is a gardener, so I look forward to poems of fine observation of nature and flowers, and other information. Already, in "Hyper," I have learned more about ADHD and, in "Cardiognosis," more about the structure of the heart and the history of knowledge about it. I am doing the thing I do with poetry books--skip around and read individual poems--and then I will go back and read the book straight through as a whole. I will do this in the summer, in the back yard, when I am not reading other things simultaneously, and when various wildflowers and perennials are blooming all around me.

The cover of this book attracted me and looked very familiar. Some of us had lingered in the gallery to chat after the reading, and David said the cover came from an illustration he found in The Gardens of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr. "I have that book!" I said. And I have it now in front of me, so I can tell you that the flower and insect painting is by Maria Sibylla Merian, and is from Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam, a set of hand-colored engravings. David said it appealed to him in presenting, as if from nature, things that could not really happen in nature--different colored blooms on this same plant, and this particular gathering of insects in time. (Are those the caterpillar stages of the butterflies hovering?! For someone who does not believe in linear time anymore, this makes perfect sense to me!)

This book, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, also shows us paintings of flowers by Martin Johnson Heade, who traveled to Brazil to see hummingbirds, and paintings of women and flowers by Winslow Homer, one of my favorites. Of course I had to ask the poet if he'd read A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, and he hadn't yet, but had the book and would be assigning it as a special project for his students.

So here's a guy whose work I want to know better. I had read many individual poems in journals, and the brief teaching essay in the current issue of Spoon River Poetry Review, but I do so look forward to reading all his books. Another little intersection is Jane Hirshfield, whose blurb, "Beautiful, inventive, learned, musical, and wise" appears on the front cover of Midwest Eclogue, hovering there like a tiny italicized moth. I have several of her books, too.

A few more connections to mention here:

Also in the audience was Kathryn, who will have a poetry chapbook, Turtles All the Way Down, coming out from Finishing Line Press sometime soon. She has degrees in biology and English, and pointed out that some plants do have different-colored blooms in nature. I am hoping Lorel will comment on her back yard experiments with art and flowers, and maybe some of you have seen the nature sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy?

And maybe Mary will comment on the insects in the painting? And/or Lauren, a poet and a painter of insects, who was reading This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick in an earlier entry here, and was also reading Journal of Jules Renard and The Red Book by Carl Jung when I first asked the "What are you reading?" question at Facebook.

Melancholy Baby

Day 43 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Today, and since last night, I am feeling a little melancholy. The spring itself is joyous--the sunshine, temps in the 60s, birds and animals out, dogs barking at the new smells, etc.--but perhaps the shift to the new season, or the energy it takes to shift, creates this other, poignant mood.

So I'll tell you that Beth is reading "Ode on Melancholy" by John Keats, and two other poems with a strain of melancholy in them, for a poetry discussion tonight. Her discussion group is also reading T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and that's melancholy with its yellow fog and whispering women, doubts and regrets, mermaids singing. So is Walt Whitman's "Facing West from California's Shores," even with its "very pleased and joyous moment," as it's about traveling the world and not finding, or quite remembering, what one set out to discover.

And melancholy is one of those mixed emotions, isn't it? The sadness is dominant, but the sweetness is underlying. I think of Abraham Lincoln's melancholy. 2009 was a big Lincoln year, especially here in Illinois, and I am still halfway through Team of Rivals, which I want to finish 1) before the movie comes out and 2) before I start The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by the poet Daniel Mark Epstein, whose book Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington I very much enjoyed. I'm also a loyal reader of Epstein's poetry because he's a Kenyon College alum, like me!

Some years ago, I had my Lincoln College students read an excerpt from Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk. I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin speak, and she does like that more open term, melancholy, to describe Lincoln's famous sadness. She prefers it to the clinical-sounding "depression." The discussion of the medications of the time in the Shenk book and Atlantic excerpt fascinated my college students, as several of them were also medicated on our more modern drugs; in Lincoln's day getting treated for ailments might add lead poisoning to the list of troubles!

Biographies and memoirs are particularly good at exploring strains of sadness in our lives. Paulette is now reading Hermione Lee's thick biography of Edith Wharton. I have been reading it, too, slowly, and my bookmark in it is in roughly the same spot as my bookmark in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey--that is, about a quarter of the way through each. I can report that one summer, reading a number of things at the same time, I made it all the way through Cynthia Griffin Wolff's thick biography of Emily Dickinson. I think what happens is that I encounter a rough spot in someone else's life...and just can't get past it...but I must, as I am reading to learn how to be human.

And Michael and Kay, who sometimes read the same book at the same time, took up Half Broke Horses, a "true-life novel," by Jeanette Walls, after reading her memoir The Glass Castle.

Tonight I'll be attending a poetry reading by David Baker, who is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. It's poetry, so I imagine I'll encounter a bit of melancholy there...but perhaps in the way that blues music relieves by giving voice to the blues...