I reread Ongoingness today. It is such a lovely little book. It is a reflection on writing, time, and memory and forgetfulness. On the surface Manguso writes about her obsessively keeping a diary for 25 years. While doing so ,she talks about what it means to exist in time “with each recollection, the memory of it further degrades.” And that we forget, or perhaps not notice, the vast majority of the life we live. No matter how hard we try to document each moment. Well worth reading multiple times.
The Needle’s Eye has been on my list of possible choices for RFB for several years, because I wanted to have someone to talk to about it. I have read at it off and on over the years. I started over a couple of days ago; I finished reading it today. The label the publisher gave it is essay/poetry. I can go along with that since it is a hybrid of the two. The “essay” parts are poetic, while the poems often provide examples/commentary on the “essay” parts. I would say it is one long poem made up of essayistic sections and verse. All of it connected in an associative melding of tropes and imagistic repetition.
. Howe uses the two boys in the Boston marathon bombings, Sts.Francis and Clare, various film makers, and her own life to talk about the creation of reality through memory, story (fairy tales), history, legend, and personal narrative. I will read it again (it is short 120 pages) before RFB meets in August. I can see reading it again years from now. She ends the book with a quote from St. Francis—What we are looking for is what is looking.
Here are some other quotes from the book: “We keep adapting to whatever we ourselves invented.”
“I think black-and-white film is closer to personal memory than it is to our dreams.”
“Suffering is actually jewel, precious and personal. Some might even say that it holds up the heavens with its radiance.”
“To the human brain, a hallucination is the exact same thing as seeing the world just as it is.”
Around 5 years ago I was lucky enough to attend a week long seminar in teaching poetry put on by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. (Thanks again to the Ann Richards Foundation for the airfare). While there we were brought to the Poetry Foundation’s poetry Library. They have the largest collection of poetry anywhere, housing over 30,000 volumes of poetry. It was overwhelming, especially because we were only there for about an hour. I browsed the upstairs shelves pulling one book after another, and reading a poem or two, then writing down the title and author if I was struck for some reason during my quick evaluation. One of the books I found on the shelves was Nelly Sachs’ Glowing Enigma. I added it to my list of books I wanted to read, then pulled another book off the shelf. The following Christmas, Lisa gave me most of the books on the list that I made in Chicago.
A few days ago, while cleaning off my book shelves, I found Glowing Enigma again. This time I read the whole poem. It is a beautiful book, strange and enigmatic (surprise! from the title). Sachs was a friend of Paul Celan, the Romanian poet who survived Auschwitz and wrote hermitic poems that are difficult to glean meaning from (at least for me), but are always worth the effort. Sachs is similar to Celan in that aspect. I am glad I found Glowing Enigma again. It was a beautiful book, filled with strangely lovely poems (or sections of a longer poem, what would you call those?) Here is one example:
We have been purging our books. No easy task, we read voraciously and widely and have for decades. One advantage of going through the shelves slowly is I find books I have forgotten about. For example: Tristan Tzara’s “First Poems” translated from the Romanian. I must have bought it in the late 70’s/ early 80’s when I was obsessed with Rimbaud, Artaud, Apollinaire and the French Surrealists. $2.50, probably at Garner & Smith Books on the Drag across from the HRC. I read it again today. It was just okay. The Approximate Man is still one of my favorite long poems. But First poems lack the magic of Tzara’s images in his later work.
I finished “Riding with Rilke, reflections on Motorcycles and Books” by Ted Bishop today. We have recently read “American Rambler” in RFB, which was a book-length essay about a man’s hike from Washington D.C. to New York City, where along the way the author reflected on American history and current politics. So, when I ran across “Riding with Rilke” at Half-Price Books, I was open to another travelogue essay/reflection.
“Riding with Rilke” is structured around the author’s solo motorcycle trip from Edmonton to Austin, then back again. Along the way he talks about motorcycles, mainly Ducati and BMW, learning to ride, the landscape, and writers, mainly Modernist. For me, it started off with too much talk about motorcycles and the difference in small design elements make toward the performance and ride of the bike. But then I have no background in this, so it makes sense that I would not be as interested. Once he starts his reflections on books with a section on Virginia Woolf, I shifted gears and began to enjoy the book better. Bishop is a Modernist scholar, and much of his talk on books revolves around doing archival work at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
Bishop wrote the book when he was recovering from an almost deadly motorcycle accident. Overall, I really enjoyed the book.
I finished Mary Oliver’s “New and Selected Poems, Volume One” today. I found it at Half-Priced Books a couple of weeks ago, and finally got around to reading it. I have not read Oliver beyond her two big hits: “The Summer Day,” and “Wild Geese.” And to be honest I found many of the poems in the book to be more interesting, which of course means nothing other than my differing tastes. Among the poems I liked, and would recommend, are: (no specific order) Entering the Kingdom, Farm Country, Acid, and Lilies. Oliver has a strong sense of rural natures as a source of meaning and metaphor. She talks a lot about the importance being aware in, and of, the world. Overall a pleasant and easy to access poet.
I have been writing poetry since I was fifteen. There were proto-moments earlier where I wrote and enjoyed writing, but those were mainly assignments for school. For almost the last 50 years I have considered myself a poet. Over the last few years, I have submitted some of my work to various lit magazines in a sporadic and random manner. I have even had some accepted for publication. And I appreciate their efforts. I am not making any claims toward the quality of my poetry. Some days I think I am writing pretty well, but when I read it again days, weeks, or even years later, I think: my writing is pretty crappy. Lately I have been leaning more toward the crap judgement. I am not looking for any affirmation from others, because I know that doesn’t really mean anything more than my own opinion of my work. Yet, one must have some confidence in one’s ability to create in order to continue, and that confidence has to come from somewhere whether from others comments, or one’s own arrogance. The last few days, weeks, I have asked myself why I continue to write after all this time. Why do I take the time to work over a poem, to shape it into something I think is a poem. Then I post it to social media, and on my own blog. I get a handful of responses indicating that someone, somewhere read it. For a few seconds, I bask in some stranger’s positivity. I do appreciate those who read my work, whether or not they comment. However, I wonder why I bother. Especially since I am currently in a downward spiral as far as my own opinion of what I write. I have gone through this cycle before, and have always shrugged off the doubt eventually and continued on. I normally say I write because I have to write, but I think it is more accurate to say I write because I write. It is simply something I do. I am not sure what I would do if I didn’t write. Drink more than I already do, become more bitter than I already am? Perhaps. I don’t think I will find out, because I have confidence I will continue to write (good or bad), as I have for almost 50 years.
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