Euphorigami

Day 212 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I continue to find, in a brain-folding origami kind of way, what people are reading in books.

For instance, in Like Happiness, a book of poems by Michael Hettich that I am still reading, he is reading The Winter Sun, by Fanny Howe, in the poem "The Burning Door," which I should have known from the epigraph:

If a bird has a problem with its whistle,
it has to whistle to fix it.

--Fanny Howe

...But which I did not actually realize until section 9 of this long, amazing poem. So now, of course, The Winter Sun, a memoir, subtitled Notes on a Vocation, is on my wishlist.

Pause to digress, and fold brain: I have a poem called "Silver Sun," based on a painting by Arthur Dove, and published in an ekphrastic magazine called Beauty/Truth, which, with its editor, suddenly dropped off the edge of the earth. I worry about that guy.

I have a poem called "Virga," and so does Diane Lockward, in her book, What Feeds Us. They are completely different--hers is about the virga of snow, mine about the virga of rain--and this kind of coincidence, of title and topic in poems, happens frequently, no cause for alarm, only for astonishment, joy, and brain-folding.

I missed church on Sunday, staying home with my family, my son home from college for the Labor Day weekend, then going off to work, seeing the man on the bicycle who wants to read Franzen, etc., but I read the reflection later online, so I know Susan was reading A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born To Do, by Thomas Moore, a book that has been on my wishlist so long I finally took it off, figuring I'd get it at the library.

Notice how the subtitle folds the brain back to Fanny Howe...

And on the morning drive to the high school (deprived of school bus, thanks to redistricting, though one reason we moved here to central Illinois was safe, free public education and free school transportation with non-drug-using-non-drug-dealer-non-pimp school bus drivers) I pondered, in addition to opium-financed terrorism (NPR story on NATO), the fact that Helen Degen Cohen's chapbook, On a Good Day One Discovers Another Poet, is entirely about what she is reading--poetry, mainly, but also film--an intertextual, brain-folding, saddle-stapled work.

I don't think I ever stopped digressing, so now that I've got my panties brain in a bunch, it's time to return to the ongoing euphoria of blue morning glories in my own backyard.

Like Happiness

Day 207 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I am reading Like Happiness, by Michael Hettich, a wonderful surprise in the mail!  I had just featured Michael's poems at Escape Into Life, so this was a sweet gift in friendship from a man I've only ever met through his poems, which are beautiful and endlessly amazing.

I happened to be reading the poem "Housekeeping" in my back yard, as I watched the big wind wave the trees hugely, revealing over and over the blue sky between the branches.  You should read the whole poem, but the parents are doing "ordinary chores" while the children sleep, and singing, and...

...so we sing softly, across their dreaming bodies,
of happiness we haven't ever really known

but want to make possible for them, our children,


at least while they're sleeping, by singing these songs

whose words we make up as we sing, and whose melodies

we compose like the wind composes in the trees,

simply by moving our bodies.

The sweetness and innocence in Hettich's poems always amazes me, the sudden transformations into animals or trees, the frequent immersion in water.  Oh!  It's like happiness.

An excess of which I am fortunate enough to suffer.

Jeff and Lisa are soon to be reading What We Have, by Amy Boesky, an author in whose family the women tend to suffer and die from uterine cancer, and who is herself a breast cancer survivor, and the author of a remarkably uplifting memoir about it all.  Boesky will be their daughter's graduate advisor, and their own family has dealt with breast cancer, genetic vulnerability, the relentless survival of joy and hope!


And, in the Land of Coincidii, Housekeeping is one of my favorite films ever, based on the book by Marilynne Robinson, whom I admire for many reasons.

And for any of you who were worried about the Virginia Quarterly Review, here is rubble for thought at The Rumpus about it by Steve Almond, which I read thanks to a post by Nina Corwin at Facebook.  He holds the mirror up to poets & editors, and sees the complexity of it all, preserving sympathy for the men involved.