“And love is love”: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Sonnet

June 16, 2016June 15, 2016 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

Like so many others, I was sick at heart after hearing about the mass murder targeting LGBT people in Orlando.

It feels that everything there is to be said has been said, and said before; I don’t have much to muster this time.

Maybe you watched the Tonys on Sunday night; I did, for a bit of good cheer and the chance to see a performance from Hamilton. If you did, you saw Lin-Manuel Miranda read a beautiful sonnet that was a tribute to his wife, to Orlando, and to love.

Here’s a lovely piece by Charlotte Runcie with an analysis of the poem, as well as its full text.

I think Hamilton, if you haven’t listened to it, might be just the thing to bring a little joy to your week, since it represents how amazing America can be—it 100% lives up to the hype. And I just finished reading Hamilton: The Revolution, which combines Lin-Manuel Miranda’s libretto with Jeremy McCarter’s account of how the production took off. Highly recommended for Hamilton fans.

A programming note: As you may have picked up on, here at Chez O we’re deep into packing for the move to our first home. I have a few posts scheduled to appear, but it’s going to take me quite a while to get back to comments and catch up on other blogs (I’m sorry to be missing out on your wonderful posts!). Everything should be back to normal in a few weeks. Thank you!

“the upswept fog bank of her hair”: J. D. McClatchy’s “Three Dreams about Elizabeth Bishop”

June 9, 2016June 1, 2016 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

Do you suppress the urge to roll your eyes whenever someone mentions “the crazy dream I had last night?” I know I do, or at least I sure hope so, since I don’t like offending people unnecessarily. Rarely are dreams of interest to anyone but the dreamers themselves (and psychoanalysts, I suppose).

The same holds true in fiction—I’ve been known to scan quickly through dream descriptions, looking for the “real” action to start—but recently I read a poem about dreams that I loved: J.D. McClatchy’s “Three Dreams about Elizabeth Bishop.”

The poem’s three sections (for the three dreams) are packed with memorable images and lines, from the description of Bishop lying in state (like Lenin) and her eyes fluttering as Robert Lowell speaks to her (while the speaker looks on as a memorial wreath) to the “upswept fog bank of her hair” to the homely sight of two mugs with last night’s gin left on a deck come morning.

This is a poem I’ll come back to.

What do you think of the poem? Are there any poems about dreams that you like?

“Three people come where no people belong any more”: Hayden Carruth’s “Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend”

June 2, 2016May 27, 2016 / Carolyn O / 9 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” emails. I don’t always love the featured poem, but I do appreciate the chance to sample the work of poets who are (let’s be honest, more often than not) unfamiliar to me. As a certified poetry pusher, I think you should sign up too!

Last week, one of the featured poems was “Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend” by Hayden Carruth, whom—and this is going to sound familiar—I don’t know much about. But now I’m on the hunt for more of his work, because anyone who titles a book of poems Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey is someone I want to know better (also, I’m going to go ahead and recommend to Leslie Knope that she pick that collection up for Ron’s birthday, for reasons I hope are obvious.)

Anyway, the poem drew me in with its intense descriptions (“Sun / on the corrugated roof is a horse treading”) of the scene: a man, woman, and child converge on an abandoned ranch. We don’t know why; “here are only / Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard.” The scene feels timeless, like something out of the nineteenth century, until the introduction of the useless binoculars, which would only reveal the desert “spiral[ing] away.” And then we learn that the three people have been drawn to this place:

Summoned

From half across the world, from snow and rock,

From chaos, they arrived a moment ago, they thought,

In perfect fortuity.

And then it gets really creepy:

There is a presence emerging here in
Sun dance and clicking metal, where the lizard blinks
With eyes whetted for extinction; then swirling
Outward again, outward and upward through the sky’s
White-hot funnel. Again and again among the dry
Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts
This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime.

I’m getting shades of Yeats there (am I the only one?), and the tone reminds me of the grim Westerns I’ve loved (like Kim Zupan’s The Ploughmen).

In a poem marked by repeated words like “summoned,” “pulsing,” “sun,” “horse,” “lizard,” the last lines arrive like a trickle of clear water:

They give him
The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.

For me, “Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend” is tantalizing, like a story with key plot points missing; the fun is filling them in.

What do you think of the poem?

P.S. Here’s the link to Big Bend National Park in Texas. Rory at Fourth Street Review visited the park not too long ago; here’s her post.

The Great Library Rundown, Part 3: Afternoon Reads

May 31, 2016May 22, 2016 / Carolyn O / 18 Comments

Today for your consideration, Dear Readers: two books you can read in an afternoon.

First is Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, a book of short meditations on her love for Italian. A few years ago, the writer acclaimed for books including The Interpreter of Maladies and The Lowland moved to Italy and committed to reading and writing exclusively in Italian, which she had started learning in her twenties (and which is, by the way, her third language). Ms. Lahiri wrote the book in Italian, and the original is presented side-by-side with Ann Goldstein’s translation into English (if that names sounds familiar, it might be because she also translates Elena Ferrante’s work).

I loved reading this (and it was fun to dip into the Italian to look for phrases to puzzle out, or just to whisper all those delightful consonants), not only for the language, but also for its consideration of isolation, belonging, effort, mastery, and passion. Highly recommended.

Next is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo, edited and with notes by esteemed Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger. Drawn from the Kalevala, a Finnish epic, the tragic tale follows Kullervo, one of the inspirations for The Silmarillion‘s Túrin Turambar. Here’s the summary from the publisher:

Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and who tries three times to kill him when still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and guarded by the magical powers of the black dog, Musti. When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruelest of fates.

It’s a rather grim tale, and I think that if you’re not a Tolkien die-hard, this book isn’t for you, since the story itself is not fully fleshed out. The explanatory material is quite interesting, though, and it put the Kalevala on my to-read list.

Have you read any afternoon-long books recently?

The Great Library Rundown, Part 2: Beach Reads

May 24, 2016May 22, 2016 / Carolyn O / 28 Comments

I don’t know about you, but my stack of books to take to the beach generally weighs more than my four-year-old. I’ve recently read three library books with beach potential; June approaches, so let’s assess, shall we?

Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes

Yes, I know I might be the last person on the continent to have read this tearjerker (soon to be a feature film), but then again, there was still a waitlist for it at my local library.

Synopsis: Louisa, a quirky young woman from a working-class family, gets a last-ditch job as a companion for Will, a young businessman and adventurer paralyzed in a car accident. When Louisa finds out Will’s plans for physician-assisted suicide, she determines to prove to him that life is still worth living, and in the process, she opens up her own horizons.

The good: I liked that Lou comes from a working-class family, and that the book doesn’t attempt to skate over the difficulties of job loss and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Lou and her sister Treena, a brilliant single mom, have an interesting relationship, combative and loving at the same time.

The not-so-good: I thought the pacing was off and the changes in perspective were annoying. I wish there’d been more balance in the depiction of life as a quadriplegic; Will is pretty damn miserable—despite his enormous financial advantages—but certainly not all quadriplegics feel the same way (there’s an attempt to show this through a fictitious message board, but why not introduce another character?).

Verdict: Depends entirely on your taste for tearjerkers.

Maestra, by L.S. Hilton

Judith Rashleigh is an assistant at a London auction house who becomes embroiled in intrigue after she’s unjustly fired from her job and ends up on the French Riviera, trying to pass as one of the rich and carefree. Sex and murder and art fraud shenanigans ensue.

[Sidebar here: Whoever did the marketing on this book is very good—from the cover to the deliberate comparisons to Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl, they’ve tried very hard to make this a hit. Oh, and the book already has two planned sequels and a movie deal. Le sigh.]

The good: This book had so much potential—there’s one good twist, the bits about art and appraisal are fascinating (I wished the book had stayed more focused on the art world), and somewhere there’s some good material relating to young women’s righteous rage at being undervalued at work and treated like sex objects all the time.

The bad: Well, let’s see: there’s fat-shaming (lots of it), gratuitous name-dropping of designer labels (this gets worse as the book goes on), unconvincing plot maneuvers, repetitive, humorless sex scenes that try too hard to shock readers . . . I could go on.

The verdict: Leave it at the library.

Eligible, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Synopsis: In this modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice, the Bennet sisters are natives of Cincinnati. Liz and Jane, both approaching 40, are home from New York to care for their dad after his heart attack when they meet Chip Bingley (former contestant on a Bachelor-type show) and his haughty neurosurgeon friend, Darcy. You can take it from there, folks.

The good: Part of the fun of reading this was, for me, guessing how Ms. Sittenfeld would update Austen’s plot points for twenty-first-century readers (CrossFit makes an appearance, for example). Liz and Jane are pitch-perfect, I loved the choice of Cincinnati as setting, and I think the Bennets’ socioeconmic status makes sense. And the last chapter is a-mazing.

The not-so-good: I think the attempts to highlight race and LGBTQ issues were a good idea, but not taken far enough. There’s quite a bit of silliness at the end, which I could have done without.

Also, I’m a transplanted Ohioan, and good lord did this make me miss Graeter’s and Skyline.

The verdict: Not destined to be a classic, and not Curtis Sittenfeld’s best (I think the consensus points to American Wife), but 100% beachworthy.

What’s on your beach reading list this summer?

“in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May”: Karen Volkman’s “May”

May 19, 2016May 18, 2016 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

A couple years ago, I reviewed Hailey Leithauser’s Swoop, a collection that plays with language so exuberantly that I found myself grinning over many of the poems.

I felt that same sense of exuberance–though tilted toward the macabre, I think–when I read Karen Volkman’s “May.”

In the poem’s couplets, “the old saw wind” dressed in May’s finery (“gaud gown and ruby reckoning”) “[s]ays, dance that skeletal startle the way I might.” In couplets the wind directs a kind of dance (“you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes, / you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone”) that’s more about evoking a sense of atmosphere through words that punch than about describing actual movement.

For me the poem captures those brief days in May when all the trees are blooming pink and white, but already on the cusp of discarding those petals—just waiting for the right breeze.

It’s a tricky poem, though; what do you think of it?

The Great Library Rundown, Part 1: Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End

May 17, 2016May 16, 2016 / Carolyn O / 11 Comments

Though I generally don’t use my local library as often as I feel I should, over the last few months I’ve read a steady stream of library books, which I’ll be opining on in batches. Chez O is about to see some very busy weeks, so longer review posts will appear sporadically, I’m afraid.

Let’s sally forth, shall we?

In March I checked out two books I’ve had my eye on for quite a while: Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You and Katie Roiphe’s study of writers meeting their deaths, The Violet Hour. Both were on hold, so I had to return them before I could do a proper write-up, but here’s a short glimpse of each.

What Belongs to You is narrated by an American teacher living in Bulgaria, who finds himself drawn to Mitko, a beguiling and needy hustler. In long sentences and paragraphs (sometimes pages long), Mr. Greenwell reveals the narrator’s troubled Southern childhood, his attempts to control his desire for risk, his confessional impulses. The prose is precise and rather cool, I would say, for a book so concerned with lust and longing, but the contrast between subject and style works to draw the reader into the kinds of worlds we might ordinarily look past, to overcome our resistance to deeply examining uncomfortable emotions like fear, shame, and pity. It’s a remarkable, timely, and difficult novel, well worth reading.

Here’s a passage I particularly liked, from later in the novel when the narrator and his mother have traveled by train in a compartment with another woman and a small boy:

Making poems is a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.

I’m fascinated with death—not in a Hot Topic skull necklace kind of way, I mean, but about its practical realties and existential murkiness—and so this book was right up my alley. Ms. Roiphe, herself the survivor of a near-fatal childhood illness, conducted research (including interviews with relatives, friends, and caregivers) on how writers approached their own looming ends. You’ll find chapters on Susan Sontag, Freud, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and John Updike (and a conversation with James Salter at the end of the book); each is utterly different and completely absorbing. As soon as I finished it, I put The Violet Hour on my (imaginary) wish list. Intellectual, unflinching, ferocious questioning. Here are a few lines I noted:

In even the worst deaths, observed closely, there is a great burst of life.

*

Time in the hospital is strange; it just hangs there, with no progression of the sun, no night, even, in all that fluorescence, in the nurses ducking in at three in the morning, in tests, and medications, and blood pressure takings.

*

[about James Salter] In some larger sense, of course, the thing I want from him is delusional. I want him to tell me what it means to come close to death. He flew fighter planes in Korea. He writes more radiant sentences than any writer alive. He seems from his fiction to see ends in beginnings, loss before the fact. From these unrelated details, I have somehow concocted a fantasy that he has made peace with death, seen it up close, knows its surface. I have a further implausible fantasy that he can or wants to share this knowledge with me and put it into words.

P.S. for Ripley: Happy birthday; no bildungsroman today!

Rosemary and Reading Glasses

Reads Worth Remembering