lunabee34

Our selection this month is Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu.

First, a foray back in time to some poetry I loved as a teen.

( so much Rod McKuen )

What is utterly fascinating about McKuen is that he was the most commercially successful poet of the 1960s. His collections sold millions of copies in hardback. But he's been ignored critically because, well, see my reviews. LOL He was a very accomplished composer and songwriter with many songs that became big hits for famous singers like Sinatra. He also wrote a memoir in the seventies that was apparently instrumental in changing the way that adoptees can access information about their birth parents.

Next, a little Atwood:

Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Only a handful of the stories in this collection are reprinted in Good Bones and Simple Murders, so most of the stories here are new to me, but none of the new stories really resonate with me. I think this volume is completely miss-able.



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And the children's books roundup for November:

( these posts get leaner and leaner as the books I read with Fi get longer and longer )

1. Congratulations, President-Elect Biden and Vice-President-Elect Harris!

2.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really liked this. It's a very languid book. It's beautifully written and full of lush description.

It's a mystery of sorts, and that mystery is a pleasure to watch unfold.

Despite the details of the mystery, this is a very hopeful and optimistic book for me. It's a book in which people figure out who they are and are allowed to keep their identity, even if it is not what others would have wished for them. It's a book in which the protagonist chooses to be kind with no reason to be. It's a book in which the human and the natural world are interconnected and interdependent to the mutual benefit and delight of both. It's also a book in which no doors stay closed, and I think I like that about it best.



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3.

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of poems is comprised of very short poems; the online database through which I read this book gives the word count of each poem, and most are around 126 words. The poems are written from the perspective of nature (flowers, trees), the poet (or a persona), and the divine. Themes include the grief endemic to human life, the interconnectivity of man and nature, and writing.

My favorite poem is the first, titular poem:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.



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Our selection for this month is W.D. Snodgrass's Not for Specialists.

( upcoming selections )

1.

The Earliest English Poems by Michael Alexander

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a book I had from a Brit Lit survey I took as an undergrad.

It's fine. (I do think the riddles are interesting, and I do think that there are rather more sexual innuendos in these poems than my teacher mentioned all those years ago LOL).

I have confirmed to myself I am never going to want to read "Dream of the Rood" for entertainment, so I may safely pass this on to its next home.



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2. Last month, our power bill was extremely high. It was both a significant jump from the previous month and a significant difference in energy usage from the same cycle the previous year. We had the guy come service the air conditioner immediately, and this month's bill is $70 less and in line with what I was expecting to see. Hurrah!

3. The kids' school is now also disseminating information on its website and not just via Facebook. I didn't realize this until today, but Josh had called earlier in the week to complain. #besthusband

4. We got the insurance for the new car sorted, but the people at the tag office said it "wasn't ready yet" and to come back in Sept. Which whatever. I'm just ready to put this whole damn fiasco to bed. The check cleared, so that's good. So all that's left is getting the payment for the totalled car, getting the tag, and getting a decal for uni parking for the new car.

5. Next two weeks is putting together my packet for promotion to full professor (which mostly entails collating documents and tweaking already existing documents rather than generating new ones) and writing the chapter for the Harriet Jacobs book that is due October 1. I looked back at my proposal, and I'm very pleased with past!me. LOL *crosses fingers*

Our selection for this past month was Carl Sandburg's Honey and Salt.

( upcoming selections )

The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (Repr of 1995 ed) by Steven Watson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is impeccably researched and packed to the gills with information. It's full of photographs and drawings; the margins of the pages contain quotes from the Beats' letters and conversations as well as quotes about them. They also contain a glossary of slang vocabulary from the time period. Contains several fascinating charts of the relationships among the major players and a multi-page timeline of Beat events and world events at the end.

I started rereading this because I'm trying to reread the collected Ginsberg (all one hundred and million pages of it) and got bogged down; I don't really like Ginsberg, so this is a purgative activity. Once I reread his poetry, then I can shuffle it off to elsewhere. LOL Anyway, this provides a great deal of important context for those poems, and I wish I'd read it first before even attempting to slog through the Ginsburg.

I have almost no patience for the Beats. I didn't like them when I first encountered them in the undergraduate course that required me to buy this book (and Ginsberg's collected poems and two books of Corso and a book about the women of the movement), and I don't like them now. I have no patience for the glorification of addiction and the insistence that narcotics and alcohol open some kind of conduit to Truth and Genius and Spirituality. I have zero patience with their inability to hold down jobs and their glorification of criminality. I loathe the way they treat the women in their lives, and I shudder to think how messed up their kids must have been to grow up in houses where people were always drunk and shooting up (I really feel for Burroughs's kids; the oldest, Julie, was 8-10 when he killed their mom accidentally; they were not present at the time which is a small mercy).

Yet there is something undeniably compelling about their writing and their lives, something in their yearning for something different that speaks to me. There is a power in the poetry that resonates despite my antipathy to a lot of their message.

I mostly don't like Ginsburg's poetry (although admittedly, I'm only about 200 pages into an almost 800 page collection), I like a fair amount of Corso's poetry, and I've never read the other major Beat writers (Kerouac, Burroughs).

Anyway, if you are at all interested in learning about the men (and this book focuses exclusively on the men with the exception of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs's wife, and a smidge about Carolyn Cassady) of the movement and the literary, political, and social context of the time period, this is a really good place to find what you're looking for.



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I finally finished The Making of a Poem.

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a really good overview of British and American poetry. I think it does a good job of breaking down the forms and choosing accessible poems. I don't know if Norton is still publishing this text, but I would definitely consider using it in the classroom.



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( Comments on the final chapters )

( the pantoum, the sonnet, the ballad, and blank verse with extended discussion of Tennyson's  )

Alternative Alcott by Louisa May Alcott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoy Alcott. "Hospital Sketches" is as funny as Twain (and also extremely emotionally affecting when she describes the death of a soldier she is close to).

I do not care for Showalter's intro very much. I mean, I do think biographical readings of authors are valuable, and Lord knows Alcott draws heavily from her own life for plot and character details. Much of her writing also reads like an apologia for her choices (not marrying, devoting herself to work, supporting her family, etc). But Showalter takes it waaaaaaay too far. Every time one of her characters holds a cigar, it does not mean Alcott was pining for penis. Sheesh.



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Our reading selection for this month is Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife. Can't wait to see what you all think about this collection.

Here's our upcoming selections:

( reading schedule )