Chain Reading

I don't know why I have The Collected Poems of Henry Reed on my shelves.

Possibly because of its five Lessons of War, of which you are certainly familiar with Naming of Parts and possibly also with Judging of Distances and Movement of Bodies and Unarmed Combat and Returning of Issue. All of these pieces combine military technicalities of language with emotional sensual commentary in intriguing/attractive style.

Not completely sure why Naming of Parts is so much more famous than the other four parts, but for my part, I blame the japonica. Look at it. How could one not.

Apart from a fascination with Verona, a great deal about houses and fields, woods, gardens and walls and encounters with overwrought exhausting literary figures such as Tristan & Iseult, Antigone and Philoctetes, we have The Auction Sale in this collection from Henry Reed. His reviewer calls it his “most ambitious exploration of the landscape of desire.” For my part, I call it one of those things that stick to your heart.

I am very much annoyed to find that the version of Ariel I have been reading is the 1965 version put together by her husband, Ted Hughes – who both added and subtracted a bunch to her original sketch of the manuscript. The real thing, her intended version, which is not this version, was republished in 2004. Oh well.

What did I think of the collection? Diamond-hard, caustic, over-wrought, hectic. Exhausting. Obscure. Obscure personal code, one thought, frequently. Everything desperate and tense, and zero-sum. And distinctive, distinctive as hell. The ones that best suited me, and which I keep going back to, are the more accessible, less hectic ones, like The Moon and the Yew Tree, The Rival and The Bee Meeting. In all, a collection to go back to, more than more than once.

Much interesting about Rilke’s attitude to God at this period. In paraphrase: - You are not where or what I have thought you to be. I create you. You need me as much as I need you. And oh, what will you do when I am gone? You are my heir, my protégé.

He writes, and this strikes one as signature:

*I feel it now: there’s power in me to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. my looking ripens things and they come toward me, to meet and be met.*

I read it as rather thin and disappointing. Its appeal very intellectual. One is constantly presented with broad literal (if that is not a contradiction in terms) abstractions - love, blindness, peace, wretchedness, loneliness, silence. As a reader you are asked to do a great deal of filling-in (fill in lonely, loving, wretched sensation here), but not in a bracing challenging way, just in wearying draining sort of way, at the end of the day.

Much spiritual shorthand, requiring the sort of brainwork that would be (one can easily tell) easier and more joyful and much more resonant were one in the proper spiritual place.

Which one isn’t at the moment, but, oh well.

I've been reading Sharon Olds' Strike Sparks – selected poems from 1980-2002. If you've been reading Sylvia Plath (as I have), you should definitely read Sharon Olds next, if only to rest your brain and unkink it a bit after all that mental squinting. Another confessional poet, just as diamond hard, but far less allusive and with much much less of that fevered thick Amazon rainforest with so much bright and brilliant going on that in the end you just want a blindfold.

Everything you read about Olds talks about how she uses frank, direct, sometimes shocking language etc in dealing with the body and with sexuality. I dont know, I think those must have been pretty old people writing those reviews. Shes not so much shocking as just very capable and disinclined to take long cuts where a short one will do. She tells a very very good story, a lot of her work is like snapping micro-fiction. Killer images - …your/eyes filling with a terrible liquid like/balls of mercury from a broken thermometer/skidding on the floor. I love her linebreaks – I love the way she constantly breaks on the and and and but and all those really bad words to break on. And the way they really work.

She's good on family, really good on family, and does what poets are maybe meant to do, which is make you look again at your own experiences, look at them in carefulness, in a picky, dissatisfied, but good sort of way.

So go read some Olds.

I have been trying to get through cummings' Collected Poems 1922-1938 for a while now. I have owned it since 1996 (I see from the flyleaf) and have dipped into and out of it over the years as the fancy took me. This is most definitely the way to handle a collection this size, and possibly just to handle e e cummings. I have managed to get rather tired of him over the past couple of weeks, I must say – a lot of magic, a great deal, and lines and lines to kill and die for, but slipperiness too, and some nearly Ogden Nash-ish facileness sometimes. He seems to be schizophrenic about women – sometimes he gets into an insolent unpleasant channeling-Henry-Miller mode; at other times he's a lyrical courtly cross between Orpheus and Sir Galahad, just gallant and plain enchanting. And boy does he love spring. That weird punctuation thing he has has always vaguely irritated me, and now it frankly enrages me. What's so damn meaningful about not putting a space between parentheses and the letters immediately preceding and following them, I ask you? All that said, when I edit my Best Poems Ever, he will definitely have more than one in that collection. Final word – he's cool, but in small, select doses.

Hm. This was a disappointment to a diehard Annie Dillard fan like me. At best, a few oddly graceful moments, at worst, plain tedious. Very few of these entries have any charm or appeal for me. The exceptions were the section on Emergency Care and Crisis Intervention, which is innately arresting because it is matter-of-fact instructional language applied to life and death, to the imminently dying; and a Pastoral from writing by Max Picard at the end of the book. And this, from a Van Gogh letter:

*I love much, so very much, the effect Of yellow leaves against tree trunks. This is not a thing that I have sought, But it has come across my path and I have seized it.*

Read something else by Dillard -- any of her prose works, for choice.

More good stuff for beginning poets and also good stuff for more experienced poets to go back and be reminded of. The first two sections deal with Subjects for Writing and The Poet’s Craft. The first takes you through several broad categories of subject (family, death, grief, eroticism, dark secrets, poetry of place etc) and the second through technicalities such as image, metaphor, line-breaks, rhythm, meter and different forms. Actual poems illustrate each bit and each part also has a writing exercise designed to help you implement what you have just learned. I haven’t actually sat down to do any of the exercises yet, but can imagine doing so at some point (although perhaps not in as ordered a fashion as presented). My favorite chapter is the last - only a few pages long - on Revision. Very interesting topic. Also, many handy hints and resources for writer’s block, getting published and work-shopping your stuff. Denser than the other how-to poetry manuals I’ve been reviewing lately, but also worth the read.

Selected Poems by Denise Levertov. This edition has a preface by Robert Creeley and was edited by Paul Lacey. Lacey divides her poems into three phases – the first, when she was just Levertov (the Ache of Marriage and the Green Snake period, heh); the second, when she became politically conscious and the third, when she turned towards religion and got busy converting to Catholicism. I had a great time with the collection until about page 152, at which point everything becomes a sort of ekphrasis centered around Julian of Norwich and Rilke, and rather tiresome and way too intense if you are not into that sort of thing. But there's a great deal of everything in the best possible way before that – about family, marriage, friends, womanhood, love & dreams, and all those other good things poets write about. She reminds me a lot of Annie Dillard – trenchant and questioning and ever-conscious of the pain of being human. Her magical turns of phrase exhilarate and sicken you with envy as much as Dillards do. Also had a good time examining her linebreaks -- check them out! Definitely worth the read.

No-one can go wrong with Mary Oliver. I read this right after reading her "A Poetry Handbook" at a point when I knew little or nothing about meter. I'm not one of those fortunate types who feel called to write in meter so this was not hugely useful to me from a writing perspective, but it was hugely informative from a reading perspective. It gave me the basic tools to form a baseline reasonable opinion and appreciation of others' attempts to write in meter. I happen at this time to be thinking about taking the plunge into writing meter and will definitely dust this one off and go through it again. Highly recommended.

This cover picture for this book says it all -- down to earth, workmanlike & practical -- Applied Poetry 101. It covers the basics any poetry apprentice should be familiar with. Very readable, with much simple time-tested advice. Highly recommended.