Poetry Month

It turns out I'll be celebrating National Poetry Month by catching up on my reviewing for Escape Into Life. The first review up in April is of Karen Weyant's book Avoiding the Rapture, which I loved from the start, thanks to its title and cover...and reading her work over many years!! I will probably be avoiding the Rapture for as long as I can.

Today it's been snowing on my yellow tulips, my white bleeding heart (tiny but already blooming!), and the various blossoming trees outside my workplace and on my route to and from. I might be a little grumpy about this, making it another Cranky Doodle Day in the blog, as well as the Hump of the Week. It's only Wednesday, but it feels like a Friday, and I'm doing laundry, so it feels like a Monday. Clearly, it's April, the cruelest month.

I am, almost an afterthought, writing a poem a day. It's something I do every year, providing the prompts at an internet site I participate in. This year, I almost forgot, distracted by too many personal things. Now, it is its usual absolute joy, and I am grateful.

Did I mention that clematis leaves have appeared on a trellis?! That daffodils I forgot I planted continue to surprise me by blooming, lately in the snow? That soon, possibly, my backyard will be overtaken by white anemone, coneflower, and oregano. It just keeps happening. Again, I am grateful. Maybe this year, in August, I will again read a book of poems a day outside on the glider. I don't know what will happen next. But I am grateful to have a baby in my life. She has found her foot!

Books & Bookmarks

Sometimes, just to give a little order to the ongoing chaos, I like to align the colors of my books-in-progress and their bookmarks. I just finished Dear Ann, by Bobbie Ann Mason, a sort of rewriting one's personal history through the imagination kind of novel. When I took a picture of it with my phone next to the Reveal the Teal bookmark, I learned how to use QR codes. 

Now I'm reading Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan, with a hand-made bookmark from a friend who understands my relentless book-acquisition habits. Her clever bookmarks for members of our book club show what would be on our t-shirts! Mine says, "One does not stop buying books beause there is no more shelf space." So true. But at least my book buying is affordable (ongoing library used book sale) and often includes book donating at the end! 

My kids were just here, doing another round of getting rid of stuff (recycling, donating, or tossing games, puzzles, clothes, shoes, memorabilia, past school/art work), and they almost sold a loft bed contraption with bookshelves in it that would have disrupted my world! Fortunately, I have a little time...

During their stay, I stopped writing & posting my chalkboard poems. But (by getting up earlier than my kids) I kept writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month. As the poems continue to roll out, the rejections continue to dribble in. Likewise, the weather--a glorious week of warmth and sunshine while they were here, and now a return to chilly, wet weather with dribbling rain. Up so early to take our son to the airport, and now sadness will descend.

My nonfiction reading, slow going due to its devastating topic, is Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, by Alexa Hagerty, automatically renewed via interlibrary loan. Its bookmark is wisdom by Confucious: "Respect others and others will respect you." Hope that's true!

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

I love it when I read a book at exactly the right time (for me)! For me, it was exactly the right time to read Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney. I've been wanting to read it since it first came out, and though I did read the hardback, the paperback has just come out, and Kathleen Rooney will be presenting it, via Surprise Bookshelf series, at the American Writers Museum in Chicago today, at 5:30 p.m.! Wooee! I recently (St. Patrick's Day) visited the American Writers Museum, and it's wonderful. Kathleen Rooney and her husband, Martin Seay, also a novelist, are coming to our town in August to read from their work at the library. I'm sure I will read Martin Seay's book, The Mirror Thief, at exactly the right time (before he comes to town), too!

Also, it's National Poetry Month, and Lillian Boxfish is a poet and an ad writer, the highest paid woman in advertising in America! She is based on the real highest-paid woman in advertising of her day, Margaret Fishback, who was powerful and respected and well paid before the era of Mad Men, to give us some perspective. But it was still the era of having to leave work if you got pregnant, as there was no maternity leave and employers did not hold jobs for women who had babies or men who went to war. To give it further perspective.

This is an utterly charming book. The end papers of my hardback edition show a map of where Lillian walked. As a child, Lillian was inspired by another career woman, her aunt Sadie, a nurse at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City in the early 1900s, which is crucial here due to the flu epidemic of 1918. And Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name from that hospital/saint! She's a favorite poet of mine. On with poetry month!

Above the Dreamless Dead

I was wowed to discover the book Above the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics, edited by Chris Duffy, in our own public library! What a powerful book. Contemporary cartoonists "adapt" (interpret, illustrate) poems from the Great War, whether by the actual Trench Poets (poets who really served in the trenches) or others connected to that war. I reviewed it over at Escape Into Life, and should review more poetry books there this month, National Poetry Month, but I am a fast/slow reader of poetry. Even if I whiz through a book on first read, like eating M&Ms, I then slow down and go poem by poem, taking notes, savoring, mulling....um, to pursue the original simile, sucking off the candy coating to get to the chocolate. No, that doesn't apply at all to most poetry I read! Never mind.

At EIL, we are celebrating National Poetry Month with poems about poetry! Be sure to read the current solo feature by Christine Klocek-Lim, who has another poem in a mini-anthology coming up next week with other EIL poets.

And I hope I do a better job here in April, keeping up with my own blog posts on poetry, reading, and random coincidii. It looks like I missed March entirely.

Call Me By Your Name

I still haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book. My mother had a movie-tie-in paperback copy. Now I will be very interested to see how all the internal musing manifests in the film. I jotted down this snippet of dialogue between Elio and Marzia about readers:

     "People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don't always like who they are."

     "Do you hide you who are?"

     "Sometimes. Don't you."

     "Do I? I suppose."

I guess it's mainly the comment on readers as hiders that interests me. Are they? Are you? She is afraid of revealing that she likes reading. Why? Not all readers are hiders, surely. I do think some (many) are introverts and armchair travelers. It's like Emily Dickinson's poem, "I never saw a moor."

It's National Poetry Month, and 1) I am again writing a poem a day 2) as a blogger have recommitted to at least one blog entry per week devoted to poetry. I committed and then failed, dropping into woe over Parkland and snow, marched for our lives in snow....but here I am again, now about to quote more from Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman, this time about poetry.

They are in a restaurant after a bookstore reading. A late arriving guest proposes a toast: "But if the job of poetry, like that of wine, is to make us see double, then I propose another toast until we've drunk enough to see the world with four eyes--and, if we're not careful, with eight."

Then Elio muses on his favorite poem from the reading, the San Clemente poem, and how it connects to his life: "As we ambled down an emptied labyrinth of sparely lit streets, I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us--how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same. One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this. That was the poet's lesson, I presume."

I connected strongly with this, that "one could even grow old and not learn a thing but this." I feel I have been learning it.

Lost and Found in Translation

Day 56 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project.

Two charming and serious young men, and perfect strangers to me, are reading books I helped them find yesterday at Babbitt’s.

One was interested in Russian poetry, so we came up with the Collected Poems of Boris Pasternak, the Doctor Zhivago guy. In fact, one of the books we found was of all the poems included in that novel, but the other book, of course, has everything.

We also looked for the poems of Anna Akhmatova, who has a poem called “Boris Pasternak,” but we didn’t have her at the store. I have a copy of the Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, with facing-page Russian originals. I don’t read or speak Russian, but there is something nice about seeing the shapes there, the letters, the lines, the stanzas, the resemblances.

I also have Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems, which contains her Akhmatova translations, also published separately as Twenty Poems. It is fascinating to compare translations, and to mull over the act itself. I have read Jane Hirshfield’s comments on translation in The Ink Dark Moon and Nine Gates, and heard several theories on it over the years. Ezra Pound did loose translations of Chinese poets, and Robert Bly also favored the freer style of translation. “The poet as translator lives with a paradox,” says Stanley Kunitz, a poet and a translator of poetry. “His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination.”

Here is the opening paragraph of Kunitz’s Note on the Translations of the Akhmatova poems:

“Pasternak was once rebuked by a pedant who came to his door bearing a long list of the poet’s mistakes in translating Hamlet. The complaint was greeted with laughter and a shrug: ‘What difference does it make? Shakespeare and I—we’re both geniuses, aren’t we?’ As if to justify his arrogance, Pasternak’s Hamlet is today considered one of the glories of Russian literature.”

The other young man found The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann on his own (I did not note the translator) but also wanted some Barthes, so I located for him a book of interviews in our general literary criticism section. We had The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, Roland Barthes, translated by Linda Coverdale. (It was a darn good deal I see from checking prices, used and new, at Amazon Marketplace!)

I try not to press charming young men about the reasons for what they do, especially in spring, and especially as a shopgirl old enough to be their mother, but they had that studious look about them that suggested this was important stuff to be reading while studying comparative literature or being an English major in college. That is a pretty pedestrian exercise of the free imagination (on my part) in our two-university town. To get a little wilder, I can imagine they are going to write poems between the lines of Pasternak, or re-enact the Barthes interviews in a gallery installation, or read and chain-smoke on the quad while the tulips continue to open up, or that they are both geniuses along the lines of Shakespeare and Pasternak, but that is as far as I am going to go today, this 6th day of National Poetry Month and 56th day of the book blog project, Musings on What We Read and Why.