95 Books for 2013, Part 16 (to 153): 1500s, 1800s, Contemporary, Permanent, Slavery, Conspiracy, Words and Birds

I’ve let so much time lapse, it’s a bit of scramble to reconstruct the order of what I read.

142. Astrophel and Stella by Philip Sidney (1580s), from sonnet 34
     

     Come, let me write. “And to what end?” To ease
     A burthen’d heart. “How can words ease, which are
     The glasses of thy daily vexing care?”
     Oft cruel fights well pictur’d forth do please.
     “Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?”
     Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.

     They are fascinating sonnets, some of the first in English. Some, the meaning I missed by a mile. Some transfer well. The process of transposing them into a new sense is still underway.

143. illiterature: issue iii (Puddles of Sky, 2013)
     It’s in an edition of 100 copies. If you’re interested in visual poetry, minimalist poetry or want more from: Nelson Ball, Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Judith Copithorne, jwcurry, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, David Fujino, Geof Huth, anatol knotek, Nicholas Papaxanthos, Aram Saroyan, Gerry Shikatani, Sandra Stephenson, George Swede & Mark Truscott, well, then you know what you have to do.
144. How to Get Over Yourself by Susie Petersiel Berg (Piquant Press, 2013)
     The book varies in tone, such as the light comic touch such as Ransom Note for My Bad Poetry” which is a list poem of all the ways poetry “should be” “Get rid of the word ‘I’. Excise all references to love” until most of the way through the list poem is “Scrap all list poems.”
     There are other poems about poems, and a series of cancer poems, which at the rate of cancer spreading through people will become more standard than love poems I suppose. p. 51 is one done particularly tight,

     Welcome Back to Cancerland
     — after Rabbis Phyllis and Michael Sommer
     The word oncologist mde my heart fall through my knees.
     The word relpase is the like the word collapse.
     The definition of ‘good’ is a Talmudic one.
     Believe that prayer is prayer.
     The routines are the same.
     Things you wanted not to remember.
     Up here on 5E, you live moment by moment.
     Amazed at how fast and slow it all seems to go.
     It feels like the last time, like the times before.
     But it’s not.
     Dear cells, please proceed with your healing.
     You can never beg too many blessings.

     I wasn’t so chuffed about one thread running though, one of these head-hopping works where the modern writer enters the mind of a historical woman, in this case the book pursuing the notion of woman as muse in order to upend the idea as simplification and diminishing of the woman. She doesn’t seem to enter into the heads to expand each person into her own alternate history story, only restate the thesis.
     I admire the defiance but the refusal doesn’t go far enough, keeps a holding pattern that maintains victimness instead of just moving past somehow to another strength or a sense of relationship left. That may be the axion of poems must always be written in the perennial present working against that momentum.
     The text addresses other unhealthy relationships to various ends such as “Lighting matches” which is an eloquent slow description of burning old letter such as p. 43 which I rather like for its religious twistedness of the Lord is the My Shepherd,

     Addiction Psalm
     You are my addiction, I must not want,
     you talk of crisp sheets
     of me against the window
     you between my legs.
     You lead along broken roads;
     though I walk through the valley of the shadow of jealousy,
     in m mind you are with me
     my hands and lips are on you
     I prepare the room
     with wine and music
     I anoint you with my tongue
     my mouth overflows.
     Surely if I find just the right way
     I can make you follow me in all the days of my life
     and you will dwell with me here forever.

     Beautifully done. They seem like necessary poems to be out there and find people where they are at.
     Some of the book feels like raw, fresh young work overall but that said, it’s a very marked up book now with underlined wow lines and stanzas and checkmarked, glad-I-read-that poems.

145. Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (2007, Wilfred Laurier U Press). Meditative but tighter than later books, here’s a sample of Walking Away.
     

     Walking Away
     what does it mean to walk away from everything
     reeds so still along the riverbank
     like the eyes’ motion held back against the heart
     the water is a binding of one day to another
     but never the day you live in at the moment
     I walk and the hills are straining
     in the stamens of asters held away from the wind
     walking among spruce trees that fence in
     a private light around each piece of dust
     around each dandelion seed shaped like a casket
     worn down by children inhaling sorrow
     from inside its plush interior
     wandering away from everything
     passing the miles from hand to hand
     the wings of sparrows hide in the cheekbones of deer
     when my footsteps are heard in the brush

     There’s a touch of the mystical fanciful but still the images are grounded in the specific. The ragged right margin is a Cole’s note of the poem while the front end of the lines just convey further forward.

146. Learning to Ride by Susan McMaster (Quarry Press, 1994)
     A quick read about learning to ride a horse. Most is literal description and observing the difference in behavior of young vs. experienced horses. It is a worthwhile read of building relationships between horse and human.
     Some forays into lessons for the human, such as p. 26 on doing up a horse’s mane, Braiding

     everyone is clumsy,
     everyone must learn
     patience, and how to comb
     out the ravels of blame.
     The only real tangle
     is to not forgive yoruself.
     All else can be woven
     into the skein.

     The images are scraperboard by Robert Verrall. Easily frameable illustrations.

147. Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau (The Muses Company, 2013)
     I can’t say even as a cultural anthropologist I can get much traction in mommy or daddy poems. One chapter is found poetry off Stay at Home Mom message boards and the community of acronyms. Without the index prefacing the chapter I would have been as well reading Swahili. It was the most thumbed page.
     p. 78

     Re: work-life
     post by wow on Jan 10, 2012 7:51pm
     WOHM
     if you SAH or even WAH go ahead + post it
     but never introduce yourself as WOHM let them
     get to know you first see what a great M you are how you can
     craft bake volunteer at school like
     the rest of them you can throw a mean birthday pary
     they’ll know of course they smell you
     guilt + last night’s takeout
     some will judge you
     for processed lunch hours logged at day
     care just ignore it your
     looking bad is what makes them good

     The other chapters are pregnancy and child poems. One that’s not very representative, but I did like, was p. 87 with its brief sketch.

     business
     i.
     sunrise a quick
     kiss at the airport
     i drive into the dropped jaw of morning.

148. Fire Watcher by Vivian Demuth (Guernica, 2013)
     The typesetting is a bit odd and distracting with widely kerned all caps of her name and the title on top the of facing pages too close to the body of text. This one is an autobiographical book which has notes citing the news stories are real, the context of living in a forest fire watchtower is actual. It bills itself as ecopoetry.
     One poem “Wilderness Climb’s, A Woman’s Climb” is remixing the jargon of filling out the forms of Human Rights forms of discrimination (and being dismissed unheard) and a rock climbing narrative. There’s some description of grouse and snipe, sparrow chick and wolves. A lot are from the perspective of grabbing emotive moments of sun and isolation to cast across the long geologic future. One with particular intense energy is a prose poem from p. 48

     Chicken Creek Area from Copton Ridge
     To sit writing impressionistic lines on the electromagnetic stage of copper-iron rocks on a muted summer says is to confess creeks, but not chickens hiding in verbs of vermillion pack-trails, or lighter deciduous adverbs that leak dark urgencies of a territory carved by straight lines, not of ochre strokes bandaging blue hills with hidden roads at a bearish horizon below long vowels of light interrupted by muddy nouns sliding on grey shores o sky, not sobbing onto sentences of forest sculpting a play of designs — an umber Native burial ground, for example, that is not hungry for silver phrases from glossy archives.

     I like it being firmly grounded with two anchors, one to the specifics of this space out doors in this landscape, and the other aware of being inside a wordscape in a sort of self-awareness without being self-conscious. it rolls and hooks forward in a playful sort of way dwelling in the act of writing without having to do a hero’s journey. There’s a lot of ecstatic energy through the book. The easier path is to be sullen in poetry. I appreciate her risking the “Rufous” route, p. 45,

     There’s a hummingbird
                  in my throat
     I can’t stop
                sipping
                 the sparkling wine
     of her buzz

149. Game Plan by Karla Doyle (Ellora’s Cave, 2012)
     And on a completely different note, a page turner novel. It covers a lot of ground, from trying to understand other people’s psychology, the ex-husband who insists he is husband, full stop. The ghosts of past people who stand between people and interpreting on old patterns. And plain fun and bits of banter quick as1930s movies,

     A hint of ink on his finely shaped chest peeked out at her. Tattooed men ranked highly in her personal fantasy time. Bad, meet worse. She was so toast.
     “I like these shoes. Sexy.”
     And things just got toastier. “Not your size, sorry.”
     “I prefer them on you.” He winked and swiped one finger across the high-gloss, hooker-red polish on her big toe. “You have very pretty feet. Nice toes.”
     “Thank you, I grew them myself.” She hadn’t flexed her flirt muscle in years, but it sprang into action. Pheromones and adrenaline rushed her system.

150. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (1908) was a fun romp. It starts in a park where a soapboxing poet/anarchist finds another poet stepping out of the crowd to debate him,
     

     Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two events.
     “It may well be,” he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, “it may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms.
     […] said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s mere vomiting.”
     […] For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory’s forehead.
     “You don’t expect me,” he said, “to revolutionise society on this lawn?”
     Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
     “No, I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.”
     Gregory’s big bull’s eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion, and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
     “Don’t you think, then,” he said in a dangerous voice, “that I am serious about my anarchism?”
     “I beg your pardon?” said Syme.
     “Am I not serious about my anarchism?” cried Gregory, with knotted fists.
     “My dear fellow!” said Syme, and strolled away.

     And after that there is car chase, pony chase, secret underground bunkers of anarchist, a police sting. And much lush language and descriptions of characters and absurdity. Political and social commentary and regular pips of wit such as “Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear?” or “Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
     I inhaled it entirely quickly.

151. Slow Lightning by Eduardo C Corral (Yale University Press, 2013)
     All the surrealness and stickiness and wanting to be along for the ride of the book but quite a different creature with working in a deep symbolic language that doesn’t surface in the same way that Chesterton eventually does making his allegory more plain, after a fashion. But Corral dips also into the same bank of religious allusion but takes it a different direction. For example, p 22 in Self-Portrait With Tumbling and Lasso, “An apple/ in my mouth. I know/ what Eve/ didn’t know: a serpent/ is a fruit eaten to the core”. At that point I can go home happy.
     The phrase that sold the book came in the last three lines the last part of “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, p. 4-5

     The deer passes me.
          I lower my head,
     stick out my tongue
          to taste
     the honey smeared
          on its hind leg.
     In the field’s centre
          I crouch near
     a boulder engraved
          with a number
     and stare at a gazelle’s
          blue ghost,
     the rain falling though it.

     Anyone who can make that image is welcome to show me more. In Watermark “Too poor to afford lilies,/she walked down the aisle carrying a glass of milk.” The unexpectedness of the image dazzles. The sense of non-arbitrariness compels. Even the useof pun is observant, apt and touching, p. 35, “Dólar/ store cologne”.
     Caballero, p. 45-47 has an intensity to it that likens the poem to one of grief of a parent, although there’s no indication that it is. “Once a year/ he eats a spoonful of dirt/from his father’s grave”…

           he polishes his boots.
     Rosa salvaje. Corazón salvaje. The inner-
               most part of a castle
                       is the keep. Andale, pues

     .
     ;   When I ride him at night I call out
     ;   ;   the name of his first horse.

152. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats (1893, 1902).
     Well, I pecked away until I finished it. That’s almost as much as can be said. They seem like really good stories but why did Yeats just give the Coles Notes brush to so many. If you collect tales, the upshot isn’t the thing is it? One of them, Dreams that Have no Moral runs out to 13 pages and has some detail of a combination of Cinderella and Jack and the beanstalk. He says, p. 40, “I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago.” So he aims not to embellish but he pared much, and spends time saying the Scottish take their fairy tales to brutal ends of enemies with the other world while the Irish embrace stories to comic ends, the fairies are friends, and it all being more of a continuum. He interjects often such as p. 43, “I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and the supernatural very clearly”
153. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, by Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813-1897.
     This was an intense read. Her hardships and the hardships of slavery are detailed. It took me a couple years to get through it. Tough but worthwhile going for some parts.
     “There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury” she says and luckily for human history, history hasn’t buried her autobiography. It peeks into the U.S. and corrects some of my sense of North vs. South and the “free lands” which she herself expected to be much more free of bias against complexion than she found it to be. The notion of race is complex and it is presented often that black people are black. Her own children were to her slave master/ really mentally unwell abusive dude, and her daughter light as to pass. Her kids were bought but not freed as promised. The idea of free vs owned was nebulous with people as chattel being re-stolen. She lived 7 years in a slot of earth under a shack to not be discovered, and years more looking at ways to escape to be free, and to free her children.
     She related conversations overheard or news passed such as what was said at the funeral of her aunt who had 6 miscarriages and 2 children who died in infancy while she was nanny to her slave master’s children.

     Mrs. Flint had rendered her poor foster-sister childless, apparently without any compunction; and with cruel selfishness had ruined her health by years of incessant, unrequited toil, and broken rest. But now she became very sentimental. I suppose she thought it would be a beautiful illustration of the attachment existing between slaveholder and slave, if the body of her old worn-out servant was buried at her feet. She sent for the clergyman and asked if he had any objection to burying aunt Nancy in the doctor’s family burial place. No colored person had ever been allowed interment in the white people’s burying-ground, and the minister knew that all the deceased of our family reposed together in the old graveyard of the slaves. He therefore replied, “I have no objection to complying with your wish; but perhaps aunt Nancy’s mother may have some choice as to where her remains shall be deposited.”
     Page 222
     It had never occurred to Mrs. Flint that slaves could have any feelings. When my grandmother was consulted, she at once said she wanted Nancy to lie with all the rest of her family, and where her own old body would be buried. Mrs. Flint graciously complied with her wish, though she said it was painful to her to have Nancy buried away from her. She might have added with touching pathos, “I was so long used to sleep with her lying near me, on the entry floor.”
     My uncle Phillip asked permission to bury his sister at his own expense; and slaveholders are always ready to grant such favors to slaves and their relatives. The arrangements were very plain, but perfectly respectable. She was buried on the Sabbath, and Mrs. Flint’s minister read the funeral service. There was a large concourse of colored people, bond and free, and a few white persons who had always been friendly to our family. Dr. Flint’s carriage was in the procession; and when the body was deposited in its humble resting place, the mistress dropped a tear, and returned to her carriage, probably thinking she had performed her duty nobly.

I don’t know if that’s it for 2013 or if I’ll get a few more finished up. Probably a couple. There are 3 days after all.