Author: Carolyn O

“We get our danger from the lord”

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One of the best side effects of this little project is learning a little about those poets whose names I’ve come across time and again but whose work I’ve never read. Case in point: Heather McHugh.  I want to run out to the bookstore and buy all of her books right now, but I won’t, because, you know, responsible-saving-for-house-and-H’s-summer-wardrobe/adult-life stuff.

[If, however, you wanted to run out to a bookstore and buy her books, and you happen to live in Metro Boston, I highly recommend Newtonville Books. It’s owned by my friends Mary and Jaime (full disclosure) and they are wonderful people who love writers and readers — a love that shows in their well-appointed store.]

Anyway, back to Heather McHugh. I’m reading “Etymological Dirge” this week, a short, smart poem that melds etymology (as you might expect) and emotion. I’m a sucker for word origins, despite my barely-there Latin and Greek, and this poem is just deliciously brilliant. Go ahead and give it a read here.

“so sweet / and so cold”

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I know it will seem like cheating, since this poem is so short, but I’ve always wanted to really know William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just To Say” — and I’ve never made it past the first two lines. I’m hoping to learn it well enough that all my notes, in future, will have the same apologetic, wistful clarity.

“in signs / We would smooth out like imprints on a bed”

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This week I found myself unprepared with a new poem to memorize, so I turned to The Poetry Foundation’s website for a fresh read. I found there a profile of Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and I loved the few poems available on the site to read.  I chose “Signs” to memorize (length, always length, alas). It’s sharp, unexpected, and fast — wheeling from palm-reading to a formation of geese to an airplane crash to a “housefly’s panicked scribbling on the air” without time for the reader to catch a breath.

“Signs” appeared in the June 1974 issue of Poetry.

“Dios padre sus miles de mundos / mece sin ruido” // ” God the father his thousands of worlds / rocks without sound”

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Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, so you’d think her poems would be easy to find, since, you, know, she’s pretty darn awesome.

Not so.

I comb bookshelves on a fairly regular basis, and in, say, the ten years that I’ve been on the lookout for one of her books, I’ve never found one.

But the interwebs is a blessing, despite its many flaws, and on Powells.com I found a true gem: a third printing of a 1957 volume of Mistral’s poetry translated by Langston Hughes. THE Langston Hughes. Doubly awesome.

The book’s shortcoming is that it doesn’t include the poems in the original Spanish, but after ten years, I’ll take it. Of course, those ten years took most of my fluency in Spanish with them, but c’est la vie. Sorry. Es la vida. If you’d like a side-by-side translation, you might check out Ursula K. LeGuin’s newer edition, also on Powell’s.

These past few weeks we’ve been watching our son make an speedy transition from babydom into boyhood, and I’m feeling a little nostalgic, so out of the many lovely poems in this volume, I’m learning “Cradle Song” or “Meciendo” in Spanish, which means “rocking.” It’s sweet without becoming treacly, and, as you’d expect, it’s quite rhythmic and repetitive. Underneath the poem runs a current of power and tragedy, which presages, I think, Mistral’s later, dark work. “Meciendo” comes from her early volume Desolacion.

I’m going to try to learn the poem in Spanish. As far as I can tell, Hughes’s translation is less literal than Le Guin’s, but each has its own advantages. I might try my own translation — I’ll post an update next week.

“The flash across the gap of being”

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Howard Nemerov is a poet whose work I’d like to know better. He’s the favorite poet of one of my poetry-inclined uncles, and when I took the time to flip through The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, I was amazed by the versatility, the breadth, the sheer variety of his work. It’s meaty poetry, the kind that requires many days of reading and re-reading to achieve an understanding.

It was difficult to choose a poem to memorize, since so many in even this small collection are appealing, but I landed on “Moment” for its length (just fifteen lines) and the way the simplicity of the title underscores the complexity of the thought within the poem, which juxtaposes some dozen images with the repeated word “now.” What begins with “Now” and a “starflake” crescendoes to “the mind of God” and the inevitable “now.”  The poem is one sentence, and I found the moments when I needed to take a breath underscored the “nowness” as well. And I’m a sucker for good linebreaks, if you couldn’t tell, and here’s one for the ages: “And now is quiet in the tomb as now / Explodes inside the sun, and it is now” (10-11).

What a mind at work. I’ll be back for more.

“wylde for to hold”

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Who so list to hount, I knowe where is an hynde,
But as for me, helas, I may no more:
The vayne travaill hath weried so sore
I ame of theim that farthest commeth behinde.
Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore,
Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore,
Sins in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.
Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte,
As well as I may spend his tyme in vain;
And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte:
Noli me tangere, for Caesars I ame;
And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame.

I first read Thomas Wyatt’s poetry in college, and had the singular, wonderful experience of listening to the mellifluous voice of my English-born Renaissance literature professor read this sonnet, a translation from Petrarch.  Wyatt (1503-1542) was rumored to be Anne Boleyn’s lover, though he managed to escape execution for the supposed offense, and often this poem is read as a wistful forgoing of her companionship.

The poem’s form never interferes with its meaning, and, I think, makes this one of the most pleasing sonnets to read aloud. I’ve reproduced it here with something close to its original spelling, and I’ve tried to make the punctuation as unobtrusive as possible (you’ll find different punctuation in almost every published version of the sonnet).

Something I noticed on this reading: At line 11, the speaker’s note that the “hynde” wears a diamond collar indicating Caesar’s ownership begins with “And” — it’s almost an afterthought. The exhausting chase makes the hunt impossible, not Caesar’s prior claim.

On Unattributed Jacket Copy

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To my mind, a book’s jacket copy should include a description of the book’s contents, a brief biography of the author, and perhaps a few words of (illuminating) praise from a respectable critic.

Blurbs sell books, and so several reviewers’ laudatory words are often to be found on the covers of books both excellent and ordinary. At least we may read the book and decide for ourselves if we will trust the reviewers’ recommendations again. But unattributed jacket copy is a different beast. Here is an example of praise beyond fulsome:

In [the book] she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible–an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader’s spine.

So reads the end of the jacket blurb on Louise Gluck’s The Seven Ages. I cannot think that the word “mimetic” draws in potential readers; perhaps the writer felt confident enough that Gluck’s much deserved renown as Poet Laureate and eight previously published volumes of poetry would be quite enough to ensure sales.

Such writing, however, makes me want to take cover under my desk and hope that copies of Auerbach do not find me there, and that my friends and relatives don’t believe that this is the kind of drivel that too much graduate school forces one to produce.

I liked Gluck’s collection very much, especially “Youth,” “Grace,” and “Mitosis.”  I appreciated the poems about the speaker’s sister, especially after reading Tell the Wolves I’m Home, with its focus on the relationship between the two sisters. However, at no point during my reading did I feel sparks in the vicinity of my spine, let alone flames.

A modest proposal: signed jacket copy.

“a thread of her devising”

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Charlotte’s Web may be the book I’m most looking forward to reading with my small son. I remember my mother reading it to me, and in particular the calm, gracious way she delivered Charlotte’s classic “Salutations.”

[Actually, in many ways, my mother reminds me of Charlotte: inventive and resourceful, especially when protecting the people she loves; ready to sacrifice for her children; and possessed of a remarkable facility with language.]

E.B. White, who wrote Charlotte’s Web, and Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, is also the White in Strunk & White, whose Elements of Style is a perennial classic, the pronouncements of which I fear my writing never lives up to.

It should come as no surprise, then, that White is gifted writer in many genres. “Once More to the Lake” is a particular favorite of mine, an essay that neatly encapsulates the tension between childhood and adulthood, memory and the present. His letters are kind and witty (read a wonderful example at Letters of Note), and I’d like to find a volume of them the next time I’m haunting a used bookstore.

A used bookstore is where I found a paperback edition (1983, I believe) of Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. Someone wrote a lovely inscription on the title page that refers to White’s death in 1985:

To dear B–,

In memory of the era that ended during our ’85 visit. How sad- but he will live in our memories & his words will continue to entertain and bind us!

With much love,  K, [unclear name here] & S*

It’s a delightful book; open to any page and there’s something to amuse or interest. This week I’l be memorizing the poem “Natural History,” addressed to White’s wife, Katharine. It’s a short, delicate poem in which the speaker compares himself to a spider, attached to the point of his leaving (his wife) by a silken strand, to aid in his returning. If I were to teach the poem, it would make a lovely pairing with Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

*I’ve redacted the names of the recipient and the gift-givers to protect their privacy, whomever they may be.

In Which Steven Seagal and All About Eve Appear in the Same Paragraph

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When I was fifteen, I climbed a mountain with my father and younger brother and sister.

I assure you that this was not my idea.

I was relieved to reach the summit, but much distressed by the unpleasantness of the descent, the heat and bother and bugs and rocks. The unpleasantness was much exacerbated by my absent sense of balance and deep-seated fear of falling, which also precludes me from enjoying roller coasters, ladders, deck stairs, and broken dining room chairs. And at the end of it all, the gift shop was closed, and so it was sans-T-shirt that I proclaimed, with bad grace, my triumph over the mountain and physical exertion.

That mountain was Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, the most-climbed mountain in the world, and the backdrop to the first essay in David Rakoff’s perfectly tuned collection entitled Fraud. Mr. Rakoff, who died last year, was a satirist and contributor to This American Life on NPR, and I’m sorry to say that he did not appear on my radar until last week, when my friend A. brought Fraud over to have a dramatic reading of an essay on Steven Seagal at a New Age center. My friend assumed, correctly, that my husband would find it vastly amusing, and indeed, he did (as did I). However, the reading also led to plans for a Seagal movie marathon, so I wasn’t sure how indebted I was feeling toward A. Until I opened up the book (he accidentally left it behind) and found the epigraph:

You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent. –Addison De Witt

Anyone who begins a book by nodding to All About Eve has earned my love and admiration. Seagal marathon forgiven. I’ll be returning the book before I have a chance to finish the essays, but I’ll come back to it, soon, I hope.

“velvet between the tiles”

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I came to Adrienne Rich  (1929-2012) through her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which I leafed through while I was researching my (still, predictably, unfinished) dissertation. Her sharp, sometimes angry voice snared me, and I’m happy to be hooked.

This week I’m learning “She” from Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. “She” is dated 1988. It’s a poem about barriers, collection, cleaning, about the dirtiness and dust that accumulates around us and in us. I like that the poem asks the reader to bring the title (she) back into the poem when a new sentence begins; to me, it feels as if Rich is asking the reader to be, in a small way, a co-writer of the poem, to realize it fully in the reading.

You can purchase the collection here.