There’s reading and there’s reading. Much of the year I’m teaching and I’m reading what I’m teaching or I’m reading what I need to read to teach what I’m reading. It goes like that.
But in the summer I read. And this past summer I sat on the screened-in porch of my little crackerbox house in the country and read Celan. I had Felstiner beside me and Celan in front of me. I had a notebook and a pen and sweet summer breezes. And I read slowly and closely, trying to take in everything this great poet had to teach me, and I got only so far in the summer. So I keep reading–for urgency, for compression, for the amount of work a single word can do. (I don’t read German, but having both English and German allowed me entrance, brief and imperfect, to the power of the words.) Devastated by the loss of his parents at the hands of the Nazis, and struggling to make meaning in spite of that, Celan wrote poems unrelenting in their power and beauty. I’m a beginner. I will go on reading. I hope I will learn.
Sally Dawidoff
Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies, translated by Jeffrey Yang (Graywolf Press, 2012)
Every year for twenty years, Liu Xiaobo, the blacklisted Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote a memorial offering to those who were killed in Tiananmen Square on 6/4/89. His haunted poems may haunt you: “Remember those black-haired dead souls / who hold up the white-haired mothers. . . If my eyes are plucked out, I’ll use my eye sockets to stare at you / If my body’s eaten away, I’ll use my scent to embrace you” (2005). Jeffrey Yang tells us that, throughout the process of translating the nearly 100 pages of poems in this collection, he was unable to communicate with Liu; the poet is serving a long prison term for co-writing a manifesto calling for democratic reforms. Liu writes out of anguish, refusal, and outrage. From his luminous introductory essay to June Fourth Elegies: “The living should really shut their mouths and let the graves speak.”
Elisabeth Frost
Catherine Barnett, Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012)
One of the most beautiful & innovative books of poetry I’ve read in the last few years.
David Groff
Aaron Smith, Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
Aaron’s book is a bold and uncompromising confrontation with the body and its dangers, from the perspective of a gay male poet. In poems too urgent to take refuge in the decorousness that defuses many poems about desire, he writes with wit, smarts, and heart about the connections that all of us (queer or less queer) attempt to make using the precious and problematic vessels of our selves.
I like reading about evolution (I studied biology in college), and I am researching connections and inspirations for my second book, entitled “Stay This Easy Way Down.” The subtitle of Stott’s book is “The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough.” Often a poem can be or feel like “one tiny creature,” and as poets, we know what importance this “tininess” holds. We inhabit an exterior world which needs to be reconciled with our interior world in order for us to grow and progress. Parallel developments occur but are often visible only when we look back. Writing a poem is a way for me to inhabit the present–since I feel sometimes the past can mock the present, and the future is an emptiness because time does not inhabit it yet.
Stephen Massimilla
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
A Village Life defines a real departure form Glück’s earlier work. Composed in long, lucid lines, it is more open, more ample than anything she has written before. The themes—aging, lost youth, a marriage heading south, the vulnerability of children, etc.—are not new to Glück. But the geographical unity is novel: All the poems are set in an imaginary village, where the tensions between the valences of rivers and of mountains, thought and action, the ideal and the real, illusion and “truth” are realized in evocatively suspended meditations. These reflections shed light not only on the spaces between the stages of life, but between human compassion and the indifference of nature, including, sometimes, human nature. One of the many questions the book raises for me is what it could mean to postulate “omniscience” in a narrative or ontological sense. In a social village full of childhood memories, grown-up problems, and confrontations with the self, what can it mean to speak of the “savagery” of the natural order or backdrop? Isn’t our conceptualization of time and indifference in itself a moral, human, and even judgmental act?
The poems are alive with a wit, spontaneity and freshness of form I so admire. As a young mother with no free time, Browne re-conceived of writing as a collaboration with language and happenings that came her way, and she composed in short bursts. There is found language from her children, the voting polls, a Russian novel; sonnets that are amulets; and my favorites, love sonnets to the light.
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