“The Wind is sewing with needles of rain”: Hazel Hall’s “Two Sewing”

April 8, 2014April 7, 2014 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

Yesterday was the (of late) rare fine day here in Boston, so my son and I were able to take a long walk (without coats!). Finally, it felt a bit like spring, with the crocuses blooming in confirmation:

Crocuses are a particular favorite of mine, so I looked for a poem that mentions them. Some heavy hitters cropped up in my search: Tennyson, Browning, even Oscar Wilde. However, it was a little poem called “Two Sewing” that caught my eye. I love everything about this poem: the combination of the natural and the domestic, the subtle rhyme, the well-chosen phrases, the repetition that encodes the sound of rain on windows.

In other words, I’m delighted to have come across, quite by accident, Hazel Hall. I hadn’t heard of her before, but what I learned led me to order the edition of her collected poems that came out in 2000 (not to be had in our library system, alas).

Hazel Hall (1886-1924) used a wheelchair from childhood until her death, and she spent most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon (OSU Press is the publisher of her Collected Poems). She helped to support her family by working as a seamstress, an occupation that’s reflected in the metaphors of “Two Sewing.” You can read John Witte’s Introduction to the Collected Poems here; he writes,

Hall’s poems seem on their surfaces tidy, sometimes as strictly and gorgeously embellished as her needlework. Yet close under their surfaces we sense the seething of a restless intelligence. Beginning with the materials at hand–her limited mobility, her isolation and loneliness, her gifts with needlework and words, and her exquisite grief–Hazel Hall fashioned in the short span of her career a poetry of startling achievement and durability.

I can’t wait to read more.

You can read “Two Sewing” at Poets.org.

Literary Wives: The Zookeeper’s Wife

April 7, 2014April 7, 2014 / Carolyn O / 19 Comments

If you’re new to Literary Wives, here’s the summary: I’ll be joining bloggers Ariel, Audra, Emily, Cecilia, Kay, and Lynn as we post every other month about a different book with the word “wife” in the title. When we read these books, we have two questions in mind:

1. What does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

2. In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

This month, we’re talking about Diane Ackerman’s 2007 book The Zookeeper’s Wife. We invite you to join the discussion by commenting on our blogs (links below) or posting your own review on our shiny new Facebook page.

The Zookeeper’s Wife is the first nonfiction book we’ve read together as a group. I looked forward to reading the book for many reasons. My grandfather is a World War II veteran (Eighth Air Force), and close family friends, husband and wife, flew in the RAF and fought in the Dutch Resistance, respectively. I’ve also had the honor of meeting Holocaust survivors, thanks to the Maltz Museum of Jewish History, which is located near my hometown. Several of my high school friends’ grandparents were Holocaust survivors, too. All of which is to say that World War II feels more immediate to me than wars that, chronologically, are much closer to my own lifetime (Korea, Vietnam, even the Gulf War, which I remember seeing reports about on TV). I’m always interested to read another account of people who experienced the war.

Diane Ackerman traces the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski (the eponymous zookeeper and his wife), who ran the Warsaw Zoo before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. Like many other non-Jewish Poles, the Zabinskis risked their lives to save Jews and others hunted by the Nazis during the war; more than three hundred people passed through the zoo on their way to safety. Of all the countries affected by the Holocaust, Poland is the country with the most citizens deemed Righteous Among the Nations (non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews) by Yad Vashem. The Zabinskis were two of those citizens.

Their story deserves to be told. The pair went to great lengths to help others at the risk of not only their own lives, but the life of their young son. Guests at the Zoo often hid in plain sight; one of the Zabinskis’ strategies was to keep the Zoo and its villa pulsing with comings and goings, visitors, friends, and family all the time. The Germans even kept an arms dump on zoo grounds, yards away from the empty animal enclosures where Guests were sometimes hidden. As you can imagine, the risk of discovery was great, and the Zabinskis and their Guests survived several close calls.

The Zabinskis’ story is a fascinating tale of courage and human connection, but I’m not sure Ms. Ackerman was the right person to tell it. I think her goal was to tell the story of quiet acts of domestic heroism and tenacity (as exemplified by Antonina), and that’s why she focuses less on Jan’s work with the underground Home Army, or a straightforward telling of the Zabinskis’ activities during the war and more on the story of the zoo and its animals. Chronicling domestic heroism is an admirable goal, and certainly the book’s strongest moments are those that detail Antonina’s efforts to retain a sense of normalcy and beauty in the midst of terror, but I kept feeling that people were shortchanged in this book. I would have preferred a book about the Warsaw Zoo with a more equitable focus on its residents — permanent and Guests — or a book that chronicled the lives of women in Warsaw (maybe five or six) who saved lives from home.

Ms. Ackerman is a naturalist and poet, and while at times I found her highly detailed descriptions of locations in Warsaw and everyday life in occupied Poland immensely helpful, at other times I thought that her prose was too purple (yes, even I admit there is such a thing), distracting from the story at the center of The Zookeeper’s Wife. In one instance, especially, I found her voice New-Age-y and her questions insensitive toward her subjects’ privacy. Of her meeting with the Zabinskis’ son, Rys, she writes:

No doubt he found some of my questions odd– I hoped to learn about his mother’s scent, how she walked, her gestures, her tone of voice, how she wore her hair. To all such inquiries, he answered “average,” or “normal,” and I soon realized those were memory traces he either didn’t visit or didn’t wish to share. (312)

Memory traces? Really?

Though the book is organized in roughly chronological order, Ms. Ackerman’s narration is so choppy that it was difficult for me to remember what was happening at any particular time in the zoo. Time and again it seemed that people dropped out of the story, only to reappear near the end or not at all; sometimes it seemed the author was more interested in describing the antics of animals than the heroism of people. And very often — too often — I put the book down so I could research a name on the internet because people weren’t given enough page-time. Irena Sendler — if you haven’t heard of her, stop reading me and go look her up — appears just three times in the book, despite the fact that she was (a) an amazing heroine and (b) a Guest (person in hiding) at the zoo.

While the focus of The Zookeeper’s Wife is World War II and the events preceding it, I also felt that the book stopped too suddenly at the end of the war; we receive very little information about Jan and Antonina during the Cold War years. I would have liked to learn how they managed under a new totalitarian regime after working so effectively against another.

Ultimately, as you can probably tell, I found this to be a frustrating read. The Zookeeper’s Wife may be worth a read if you’re looking for a stepping stone into the stories of occupied Poland during World War II, or if you’re interested in early-twentieth-century zoo-keeping, or the Nazis’ interest in animal breeding (there’s a bibliography in the back of the book). I’m glad I learned about Antonina and Jan, but I wish it had been in a different format.

And now, on to the Literary Wives questions:

1. What does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

The Zookeeper’s Wife focuses on the difficulties of Antonina’s position as a wife, it’s at its best. Antonina can’t ask too many questions about Jan’s underground activities, but she tacitly accepts the danger that he places the family, just as she openly accepts Guests into their home. She maintains the facade of an ordinary housewife during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, a facade which keeps her family and Guests safe. At the same time, she does perform the tasks expected of a wife at the time — keeping the house, budgeting, teaching her son — plus those tasks concomitant with running a house full of pets — all under extreme stress. Part of being a wife, for her, is waiting to see if Jan will come home alive every day, and facing terrifying and dangerous situations on her own, in her own home. There is no safe space for her during the war.

Here’s my favorite sentence in the book: “One of the most remarkable things about Antonina was her determination to include play, animals, wonder, curiosity, marvel, and a wide blaze of innocence in a household where all dodged the ambient dangers, horrors, and uncertainties. That takes a special stripe of bravery rarely valued in wartime” (166).

2. In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

Antonina’s mental and physical toughness notwithstanding, she did defer to Jan in many respects, like a “traditional” housewife, and I found it irritating when he referred to her as “timid.” On the other hand, he acknowledged her bravery often and publicly:

“Antonina was a housewife,” he told Danka Narnish, of another Israeli paper, “she wasn’t involved in politics or war, and was timid, and yet despite that she played a major role in saving others and never once complained about the danger.” (314)

I don’t think I’d say that she defines “wife” or is herself defined by the term.

Please visit the other Literary Wives bloggers to get their takes on the book!

Emily at The Bookshelf of Emily J.

Audra at Unabridged Chick

Ariel at One Little Library

Cecilia at Only You

Kay at WhatMeRead

Lynn at Smoke and Mirrors

Introducing: The Poetry Concierge

April 6, 2014April 28, 2014 / Carolyn O / 26 Comments

Dear Readers,

Was the last time you read poetry sometime during a high school English class? Do you want to love poetry, but don’t know where to start? Are you slightly embarrassed that you can’t remember the last time you bought a book of poems?

Friends, I’m here to help. I’m your new poetry concierge! (Should I trademark that?)

Yes, this April — and for the rest of the life of this blog, I hope — I’ll be available to lead you to the sweet springs of verse, where you may sip or swill to your heart’s content.

Here’s how to help your new Poetry Concierge help you:

Send me an email [rosemaryandreadingglasses (at) gmail (dot) com] with your name as you’d like it to appear, a link to your blog if you’d like, and answers (as specific as possible) to the following questions:

1. When you read fiction, who’s your go-to author?

2. If you read nonfiction, which subjects are most likely to interest you? (cultural history, science, biography, memoir, survival stories?)

3. If you were stuck on a desert island for a week, which five books would you bring to keep you entertained?

4. If you were on a five-year mission to Mars, which five books would you bring to keep you sane?

5. What kinds of questions are most likely to keep you up at night? (death, the nature of love, politics, environmental issues, meaning of life, end of the world, justice and injustice, etc?)

6. If you’ve read poetry before, what have you liked? What have you disliked?

7. Would you like your name and/or blog to be published on Rosemary and Reading Glasses along with your recommendation?

I’ll read your answers and come up with a poet, a poem, or even a book for you to try out (maybe even more than one!).

Within a week or two (if you haven’t heard from me by then, comment on ye olde blog) I’ll publish your answers to the questionnaire, and my recommendation, on Rosemary and Reading Glasses (with your name removed, if you so choose). If you want to report back on what you think of my choice, all the better!

[UPDATE: The volume of responses is more than I expected — hooray! — so it’s possible your recommendation may be delayed beyond two weeks. If you have a poetry emergency, though (proposal, wedding, retirement, etc), please be sure to tell me!]

Poetry Concierge posts won’t appear on any set schedule, but I’d love to make a few recommendations soon, in honor of National Poetry Month, so bring on those questionnaires!

Yours in verse,
Carolyn the Poetry Concierge

What Larks!: Dickens Re-evaluated

April 2, 2014March 31, 2014 / Carolyn O / 21 Comments

My fourteen-year-old self is going to think I’m Madame DeFarge. And not just because I learned how to knit a few years ago. No, it’s more the face-of-evil-betrayal thing.

I liked Great Expectations.

Horror of horrors: it appears that Mr. Dickens and I have come to an understanding.

I last read Great Expectations in the ninth grade — fifteen years ago, give or take. The following year brought A Tale of Two Cities, which I will never read again thanks to truly irritating Lucie Mannette and her golden thread, and then I had a long break from Dickens until Hard Times popped up in a graduate seminar six or seven years ago, a break punctuated only by sporadic forays into David Copperfield.

Before this reading of Great Expectations, my major Dickensian complaints consisted of: Dickens’s long-windedness, his lack of subtlety, the tidy way that characters prove related to one another. Seriously. It felt like reading a nineteenth-century version of Crash sometimes.

Honestly, I put Great Expectations on my Classics Club list not from any noble intention to re-evaluate my own notoriously long-lived literary grudges (see: Steinbeck, Faulkner), but because at the time I thought I might like to read Havisham (still haven’t gotten around to it), and I like to read literary reimaginings with the original text firmly in mind. (Why I wanted to read Havisham is a story for another post.) When I decided was peer pressured into participating into the Classics Club Spin selection, I popped Great Expectations onto the spin list in position number 20, dead last, never thinking for a moment that it would really be picked.

I suppose I’ll be taking 5% chances more seriously from now on.

Great Expectations is Dickens’s penultimate completed novel, and though my edition clocks in at 484 pages (excluding notes and introduction), it’s one of the shortest of Dickens’s novels (which may halfway explain my change of heart). Unrequited love, the pursuit of wealth and status, the plight of the poor, and the nature of guilt are themes traced through the novel.

On the bleak marshes of Kent, Pip, a young orphan, has no expectations at all when the novel begins, except perhaps a slap upside the head from his sister, or a kind word from her blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery (the pair are raising him). A chance encounter with a runaway convict causes Pip no end of fright and guilt, until those emotions are eventually crowded out by his love for and anxiety over Estella, the cold and contemptuous ward of the ghastly Ms. Havisham. Notified one day that a mysterious benefactor wishes Pip to become a gentleman, Pip leaves his home, Joe, and Estella behind, setting out for London and the issuance of his “great expectations.” Once there, however, the new wealth that confers upon Pip the status of gentleman also separates him from the people he loves, and, often, the best parts of himself. Great Expectations is largely concerned with the forces, both internal and external, that shape Pip’s character.

The novel’s narration is an older (and perhaps wiser) Pip, who looks on his childhood self’s foibles and his adolescent self’s willful errors with an uncompromisingly honest eye. His narration is wry, emotional, often funny. Pip meets a typical cast of Dickensian characters on his road: Jagger, the unscrupulous, clever, perpetually hand-washing lawyer; Joe, the gentle blacksmith, unfailingly tender-hearted, too convinced of his own unworthiness to correct Pip’s faults; Mr. Wopsle, the ridiculous cleric-turned-actor; Miss Havisham, withering and decaying in her own bitter memories.

And Wemmick, my favorite character in the novel. Wemmick is, I think, Dickens’s embodiment of modernity and practicality. While tender-hearted and thoughtful at home, caring for his deaf father (“The Aged Parent”) and sneaking his arm around proper Miss Skiffins’s waist, Wemmick transforms into an entirely different creature at Jaggers’s office, where he works as a clerk. He remonstrates with clients, ignores their tears, and carries out his duties without any regard to the suffering around him. It’s as if he shuts down his emotions as a form of self-preservation; otherwise, how could he bear what he sees every day? I suspect that this is Dickens’s commentary on the kind of person one must become to survive in — though not change — the modern world.

I know I didn’t appreciate Wemmick fifteen years ago because he came as a total surprise to me. What I also failed to see as a fourteen-year-old was Dickens’s marvelous sense of humor — abundantly evident in caricature studies, if you will, but here particularly in bleak, black humor. The novel’s second paragraph, after Pip explains the origin of his name in the first, is an extended joke. Pip explains how he derived a sense of his parents’ characters and his siblings’ physical attitudes from their tombstones:

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine,—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

The tragic death of five infant boys transmuted into the image of children born with trousers on, relaxed and jaunty — how strange, how macabre, how childishly innocent!

Take, then, the next paragraph:

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

Pip introduces us to his child-self at the moment of self-realization, at the moment when he places himself within the context of his surroundings. And we learn what remains, for most of the novel, Pip’s defining characteristic: fearfulness. As a child, Pip fears his sister and her abuse, fears for his own safety once he’s met the convict, fears Estella’s coldness, fears becoming trapped in his provincial town with a respectable profession. Later he fears what people will think of him if acts a certain way; he even fears the boy he hires to be his valet. And of course he fears losing Estella, and fears that his convict will not forget him.

Though Pip-the-narrator never excuses his own (sometimes deplorable) behavior, in the background Dickens always seems to be saying, “consider the circumstances!”; take, for example, the paragraph I have just cited. Dickens emphasizes that Pip’s parents and brothers are dead; the churchyard overgrown with nettles suggests that the church (or religion) will be of little help to Pip (and indeed religion plays little role in the story); and the bleakness of the physical environment suggests that even nature will not be a comfort to Pip. Great Expectations provoked more marginalia for me than any other book this year — just look at the layering of adjectives that describe Pip’s surroundings: raw, bleak, overgrown, dark, flat, low, leaden, distant, savage. A fearsome environment for a “small bundle of shivers.”

Here’s part of Dickens’s description of the convict: “A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars.” Textbook “good” writing — all action verbs — but the convict is the object of the actions; all these things have happened to him. What wonder then that he wants to become a man of action, to make things happen himself? What wonder then that he acts savagely to instill fear in a mere child?

(The characters for whom Dickens reserves real contempt are those who lack circumstances dire enough to mitigate their behavior: the second convict, Pip’s sister, the pompous bully Pumblechook, Herbert’s non-maternal mother.)

I’ve rambled on and only covered the first two pages of the novel — as you might imagine, the rest provoked plenty of commentary in the margins. I couldn’t help but think, as I read, that I must be missing things that would be obvious to people who specialize in Victorian literature (hi, Joanna!), people I’ve regarded with incredulity for years because they make a regular habit of reading Dickens. I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to remake Wemmick’s acquaintance, and Joe Gargery’s, and I plan on reading Great Expectations again.

But don’t count on me reading Tale of Two Cities anytime soon.

A final aside, Dear Readers, for those who’ve read Milton and those who are considering the plunge: here are the last lines of Volume I, as Pip is about to embark upon his “great expectations”:

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

Compare these passages, from Paradise Lost, Book XII:

from the other hill
To their fixed station all in bright array
The cherubim descended, on the ground
Gliding meteorous as evening mist
Ris’n from a river o’er the marish glides
And gathers ground fast at the laborer’s heel
Homeward returning.

and

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way

See what Dickens did there? Pip may be off to find his great expectations, but Paradise is behind him. And then, we must ask, what kind of paradise was it?

Double the Fun: Shepherds and Nymphs and Elizabethan Poets, Oh My!

April 1, 2014April 2, 2014 / Carolyn O / 11 Comments

Happy National Poetry Month!

To celebrate, here are two poems that together form a little poetic conversation. Nothing says spring like four-hundred-year-old pastoral poetry, right?

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
Sir Walter Ralegh

Source: Wikimedia Commons

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee, and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb,
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,
To wayward winter reckoning yields,
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,
The Coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee, and be thy love.

An Interview with Helen Oyeyemi, Author of Boy, Snow, Bird

March 28, 2014March 28, 2014 / Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Yesterday I reviewed Helen Oyeyemi’s marvelous (in every sense of the word) new novel, Boy, Snow, Bird. Ms. Oyeyemi graciously agreed to be interviewed via email.

How would you describe the inception of Boy, Snow, Bird? What was the writing process like?

Helen Oyeyemi
(c) Piotr Cieplak

HO: the idea of writing a wicked stepmother story had been in my mind ever since i’d read Barbara Comyns’ novel, The Juniper Tree, which is a retelling of the fairy tale of the same title from the perspective of the wicked stepmother (poor, poor woman – i mean the wicked stepmother, not Comyns…Comyns’ narrative voice is so wonderfully eldritch, a mix of light and grit in proportions that only she can master.) it took me some time to get into Boy’s voice – perhaps i was worried about the difficulties she was going to have in terms of trying not to do harm when she’d been harmed herself.

Much of the novel takes place in a small town in Massachusetts. Was there a particular reason for this choice? Did you visit the area to get a sense of the landscape, or conduct other kinds of research for the novel?

HO: i have a dear friend who lives in boston; we drove up to worcester after i’d finished writing the book so i could see how completely imaginary the small town near worcester in my book is. massachusetts is linked to emily dickinson and louisa may alcott in my mind, so i think of it as a place where my kind of woman can flourish: a good place to send Boy to, i think.

Boy, Snow, Bird is in part an adaptation of the Snow White fairy tale. Did other contemporary retellings of folktales and fairy stories inform your writing?

HO: Anne Sexton’s take on Snow White, in her collection, Transformations, affected the way that i read snow white – that image at the end of the poem, the wicked queen dancing herself to death in red hot shoes. for me Anne Sexton’s retelling exposes a notion that’s woven into the story: where there are two beautiful women, one must pay a price – a price for both women’s beauty, perhaps. most of the characters in my own retelling are wise to this notion, and don’t accept it.

Boy, Snow, Bird confronts — always with grace — difficult issues of race, gender, family, and aesthetics. What’s one question you hope readers ask as they come away from the novel?

HO: i hope a reader leaves the story wondering how to get better at seeing other people, or at least seeing through our own halls of mirrors.

As readers may know, you’re a prolific writer, with five novels and two plays to your credit already. What’s next on your writing horizon?

HO: o dear…your guess is as good as mine. but i’m looking forward to it, whatever it is.

My thanks again to Ms. Oyeyemi for her time and her thoughtful answers.

“with one hand under our head / and with the other in a mound of planets”: Zbigniew Herbert’s “I Would Like to Describe”

March 25, 2014March 25, 2014 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

This weekend I finished reading Diane Ackerman’s book The Zookeeper’s Wife, which I’ll be reviewing for the Literary Wives group on April 7 (it’s a quick read, so there’s still plenty of time to hop aboard if you’d like to join the discussion). The book is full of interesting facts; for example, during World War II, the Polish underground movement managed to keep students in high school and college (which had been outlawed for Poles by Nazi decree) — and even grant degrees — through a system of “floating” classrooms.

One of those students was Zbigniew Herbert, who went on to become one of Poland’s most famous post-war poets. For many years he refused to submit his work to state-sanctioned venues, and was throughout his adult life an opponent of communism and censorship. His work has been translated by, among others, Czeslaw Milosz.

His poem “I would like to describe” expands on the poet’s frustration at his own inability to summon just the right word or words to describe emotion. While bemoaning the inadequacies of metaphor, the speaker nonetheless conjures up some beautiful examples. “I would like to describe courage / without dragging behind me a dusty lion” (l. 12-13) is one of my favorites.

I confess that I didn’t know much about Herbert before I researched this week’s post, but now I’m going to go off and get my hands on a copy of his selected poems.

Who’s a poet you’d like to learn more about?

Review: On Such a Full Sea, by Chang-rae Lee

March 20, 2014March 14, 2014 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

I wanted so much to love this book so much.

(Yes, I meant that both ways). I’ve read two of Chang-rae Lee’s other novels, A Gesture Life and Native Speaker, and came away amazed that a writer could approach brutality with such gorgeous prose — without once letting the reader escape from the cruel reality of history. And one of the best books I’ve read in the last three years is another instance of a “literary” writer venturing into the realm of speculative fiction — Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I hoped On Such a Full Sea would become another great entry in the genre. The title comes from Shakespeare, after all.

Alas, ’twas not to be. Pretty much everything I feel about this novel has been better expressed by the grande dame of speculative fiction herself, Ursula K. Le Guin, in this pitch-perfect review for the Guardian.

The novel is framed as a quest narrative: a young woman named Fan leaves her (relatively) safe home to find her beau, Reg, who’s been spirited away to a mysterious lab thanks to a genetic quirk that makes him impervious to ‘C’ — a group of diseases that virtually everyone eventually succumbs to (cancer, unless I’m misreading, and I don’t think I am). Fan and Reg live in B-mor, a future Baltimore stripped of its former residents and converted into a city, built in the novel’s past, for Asian immigrants and their descendants to live and work in — a sort of hive for producing high-quality food for Charters (for these think The Hunger Games‘s Capital, without the outrageous get-ups), towns where the rich competitively and conspicuously consume income derived from white-collar type employment. Between these centers of production and consumption lie “the counties,” where there is loose governmental structure, if any, and survival is never a safe bet.

Fan sets off into the counties, of course, with almost no preparation, preparing to rely on her wits and her physical strength (she’s a fish-minder, and an incredibly strong swimmer, despite her small size) as she searches for Reg.

The novel is narrated in the first-person plural by an amorphous group of B-More citizens, who somehow have access to what goes on during Fan’s journey, and to what goes on in her head. It’s a technique that works well when describing life in B-Mor, and what little we get of this new world’s history, but it’s incredibly off-putting when it turns to Fan. And Fan herself remains a cipher, with very little personality to hold on to. She’s quiet, single-minded, quick-thinking, but somehow cold, not life-like.

As you can probably tell, On Such a Full Sea reads like a contemporary American liberal fantasy of what the world will come to if global warming goes unchecked and economic inequality isn’t ameliorated. That would be all well and good — one of the functions of science fiction, after all, is to critique the present world — but Mr. Lee doesn’t attend to the conventions of the genre (in particular, cohesive world-building), with detrimental results.

Here’s an example. Commodities in the novel are simultaneously difficult to acquire and unreasonably available. At one point Fan is offered a carton of soy milk, and then another, and while it’s impressive that her counties host has access to comestibles, at the same time it seems impossible that a world that can’t repair roads is still producing single-serving soy milk containers. As Ms. Le Guin writes,

Neglect of such literal, rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused, even legitimised, as literary licence. Because the author is known as a literary writer, he will probably be granted the licence he takes. But social science fiction is granted no such irresponsibility, and a novel about a future society under intense political control is social science fiction. Like Cormac McCarthy and others, Lee uses essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially. As a result, his imagined world carries little weight of reality. The whole system is too self-contradictory to serve as warning or satire, even if towards the end of the book the narrator begins to suspect its insubstantiality.

Exactly. So very disappointing.

However, Mr. Lee’s prose is still gorgeous as ever, and (again, as Ms. Le Guin points out) he embellishes standard tropes and themes with creative details and few unexpected plot twists. I suspect that we’ll be enjoying Mr. Lee’s contemporary fiction again soon.

An Interview with Hailey Leithauser, Author of Swoop

March 19, 2014March 18, 2014 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

On Monday I reviewed Hailey Leithauser’s award-winning debut collection, Swoop. Ms. Leithauser graciously agreed to be interviewed via email.

Your biographical note on The Poetry Foundation’s website indicates that you started writing again after a ten-year break. What precipitated your (triumphant) return to poetry?

Hailey Leithauser
Photo by Sandra Beasley

HL: Actually it was more like a twenty year break. I can actually point to a specific moment when I began writing again; I was on a lunch break from work, at the National Gallery standing in front of Van Gogh’s Pieta, of all things, when a poem about the painting began streaming in front of my eyes. But those tickles in the brain had really been building for several months. My mother had died that spring, and I think that overwhelming pain had shaken things loose. Also I was about to receive her inheritance which would enable me to retire, at least for a few years. I knew I wanted to use that time to write again, so my subconscious had been gearing up.

How did Swoop come together as a collection?

HL: Swoop started when my brother sent me a palindrome, and said it looked like a line from one of my poems. I agreed and I loved the idea of the music inherent in a palindrome so I started writing them and putting them into poems, and really very quickly, in maybe three years, I had a book length collection. At first when I gathered them up I didn’t see any other unifying theme, but as I read them together I saw the idea of excess, a celebration of excess, both in emotion and in linguistic play, seemed to be framing the manuscript.

When reading Swoop I noticed often that the effect of a particular poem was amplified by its predecessor — and “Zen Heaven” is such a powerful closing poem. How did you go about ordering the poems in Swoop?

HL: I wish I could take credit for that, but when I first tried organizing the book it was terrible, truly, truly awful. I had all the poems clumped together, all of the curtal sonnets next to each other, all of the Grandiloquent Dictionary poems together, the four poems “Scythe,” “Guillotine,” “Brass Knuckles,” and “Crowbar” in one string. One of my co-winners from the Discovery Prize, James Arthur, was in town for AWP and I gave it to him for critique. He wrote me a few days later to say he loved the poems but it was like eating a pizza with all the pepperoni on one slice, all the mushrooms on another. So then I broke up all the poems, sort of scattershot, and I showed that version to Sandra Beasley. She told me I was right to break them up, but now it was too random and so she did the very difficult job of ordering the book. I made a few changes here and there to that version, but I stuck pretty close to her basic framework. Honestly, without their help, I can’t imagine that the people at the Poetry Foundation would have chosen Swoop.

The poems in Swoop are exuberantly musical — do you listen to music while writing? Who or what are your musical influences, and who are your favorite “musical” poets?

HL: I’ve been asked this before and the truth is I would be much too distracted it I had music on while I wrote. My favorite kind of music is blues, but I don’t see that reflected in my writing. Unless you would consider bird song to be music. I do like listening to that when I’m working in the back yard.

As far as musical poets, there are so many! Off the top of my head, I love Seidel, Stallings, Szymborska, Brooks, Ryan, and Beeder. And Stevie Smith, Terrence Hayes, Estes, Boss, Kevin Young, Videlock. I’ve recently gotten into Gjertrud Schnackenberg and would like to read through all of her work. And I enjoyed Carol Light’s first book, “Heaven from Steam.”

Some of your poems refer to the Grandiloquent Dictionary, and all of them showcase a rich and dynamic vocabulary. What are some of your favorite resources for discovering new words?

HL: I used to be a reference librarian and own a fairly decent selection of dictionaries and thesauri, and whenever I see books on interesting and archaic words I snap them up. I bought one this fall, “The Word Museum,” that gave me the word “SNOUTFAIR” (handsome) that I put right into a poem. I recently wrote two poems about the Renaissance characters Tom o’ Bedlam and his counterpart, Mad Maudlin, and for those poems I read through a few online dictionaries of Elizabethan slang.

After the success of Swoop, what’s next on the writing horizon?

HL: I’m in between the second and third drafts of a new book, The Cannibal’s Song,, and hoping to have it ready to show to Graywolf this summer. Now that I’ve done with palindromes, my new obsession is acrostics so there are quite a few of them in Cannibal. And about a third of it is poems that pre-date Swoop. Some of these poems first appeared in magazines ten years ago so I’m excited about finally finding a home for them.

My thanks again to Ms. Leithauser for her time and generous answers. You can read more about Swoop, and purchase the book directly from Graywolf Press, here.