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October 12
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Jenna
gave
to:
Erosion (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)
by Jorie Graham
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Jenna said:
"Jorie's poetry is much more sensual than I initially gave it credit for being, yet she simultaneously possesses the strongest intellectual backbone of almost any living poet, certainly any living American woman poet. The poem "Salmon" in t...more
Jorie's poetry is much more sensual than I initially gave it credit for being, yet she simultaneously possesses the strongest intellectual backbone of almost any living poet, certainly any living American woman poet. The poem "Salmon" in this collection is a modern masterpiece....less
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October 09
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Jenna
is currently reading:
Captain Lavender (Library Binding)
by Medbh McGuckian
bookshelves:
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Jenna said:
"On a sonic level, these poems are prosodically beautiful, caressing your ears like the sound of rustling leaves or flowing water. The line breaks are authoritatively placed in a way that respects the taut-muscled autonomy of each individual line, an...more
On a sonic level, these poems are prosodically beautiful, caressing your ears like the sound of rustling leaves or flowing water. The line breaks are authoritatively placed in a way that respects the taut-muscled autonomy of each individual line, and the sentences are syntactically complex in a way that does not starve or insult the reader's intelligence. These are poems that really *sound* like poetry.
Through Google, I learned that the first half of the book concerns the death of the poet's father, while the second half revolves around the poet's experiences teaching political prisoners. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't think I would ever have been able to figure this out from the poems themselves; these poems are, by and large, opaque in a way that can be quite frustrating. It's almost as though they were written in a code that was only intended to be fully understood by the poet herself and a select group of her intimates. Frankly, I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Furthermore, McGuckian has an Ashberian tendency to seem to get carried away by the complexity of her own metaphors, as in the following example: "I feel warmth coming from you/as clouds working up the sky/seen through warm clouds/that are cold at the base." A metaphor like that seems overly convoluted to me, without much payoff in the way of increased comprehension. This may just be a matter of personal preference, but I crave more epiphanies, more rapturous thunderclaps of insight that speak lucidly to my intellect as well as to my ear. I want to read poems that will make wiser, that will teach me general truths about love or death or humanity, and it can be difficult to extract such general truths from poems as stubbornly cryptic and psychologically idiosyncratic as these.
But I like the rare moments in which McGuckian's poems get self-referential, fragmentedly elucidating the nature of her own personal aesthetic: beautifully, she speaks of longing for a book that "makes a plaster cast of the moon," a book that "rubs out of the frail moon a strong one." Coyly, she asserts that what "a poetess" does is "speak...with [her audience's:] consciousness/and not with words." And, indeed, for better or worse, a re-interpretation of the relationship between words and meaning seems to be at the heart of McGuckian's poetry....less
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August 16
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Jenna
gave
to:
Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)
by Anna Akhmatova
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Jenna said:
"I'm moving this book to the "read" shelf because I've decided not to make any more efforts to finish it. I've read the whole book except the lengthy "Poem Without a Hero" at the end, and this translation is just so choppy and stu...more
I'm moving this book to the "read" shelf because I've decided not to make any more efforts to finish it. I've read the whole book except the lengthy "Poem Without a Hero" at the end, and this translation is just so choppy and stuttering and opaque that I can't force myself to finish it. Some of the short poems at the beginning of the collection, slight and untitled love lyrics, seem to have translated very well: they have buoyancy and freshness and flow, and the sudden leaps of thought are exhilarating (e.g., "Because your lips are yours/I forgive their cruel joke.../O, tomorrow you will come/On the first sledge-ride of winter."). I can't say the same for the later, longer poems that plod along as they zealously try to make some important point. This is the second time I've had bad luck in trying to read a book of translated Russian poetry; perhaps Russian is a more difficult language to translate into English than most? And while I admire Anna for being a survivor, it also seems to me that the more zealous and confident she became in her conviction that she was meant to speak on behalf of all her suffering countrymen, the more narrow and constricted her poetry became as well. I.e., as she ossified into the role of national spokesperson, she seemed to allow herself fewer of the freedoms and tangential digressions and hints of true PERSONALity that made her earlier poetry so much more engaging....less
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June 14
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Jenna
gave
to:
Propertius, Elegies (Loeb Classical Library No. 18)
by Sextus Aurelius Propertius
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
Jenna said:
"I'll be honest: I only read the first two volumes of this book in their entirety, then skimmed the last two volumes. My current interest is in love poetry, not poetry about the greatness of Caesar, etc., after all. While it seems that this is the ...more
I'll be honest: I only read the first two volumes of this book in their entirety, then skimmed the last two volumes. My current interest is in love poetry, not poetry about the greatness of Caesar, etc., after all. While it seems that this is the most scholarly/well-researched translation out there, I was rather disappointed by the fact that it doesn't read like poetry at all. This translation is a prose translation -- a fact that needn't necessarily have been a limitation (there *is* such a thing as prose poetry, after all) except that it was. Despite the wide gulf between Latin original and English translation, some of these poems still shine -- particularly the narrative poems, the poems that vividly recount neurotic dreams, and the hilariously chest-thumping poems that proclaim "One girl is not enough" ("The worship of Venus has never been hard work for me... Often a girl has discovered that I can do my duty all night through, and if perchance with an unkind look she called a halt, cold sweat would run down my brow."). Propertius's technically skilled compositions (Just imagine writing a long, colloquial-sounding poem entirely in end-stopped couplets, for starters!) convey ideas about romantic love that have become so entrenched in Western culture that they seem a bit trite now -- through no fault of Propertius's own, of course. Arguably, the mythological allusions come on a bit too heavy at times (even for a mythology buff like me), but I still think Propertius is a poet worth being familiar with. In the future, I'll stick to looser but more lyrical translations, though....less
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May 06
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Jenna
gave
to:
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Paperback)
by Anne Carson
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
Jenna said:
"* to what extent does TBOTH succeed as a book-length piece of fiction? I had difficulty sympathizing with the protagonist, who seemed to love her spouse for no other reason than his alleged "beauty." The character for whom I felt the most...more
* to what extent does TBOTH succeed as a book-length piece of fiction? I had difficulty sympathizing with the protagonist, who seemed to love her spouse for no other reason than his alleged "beauty." The character for whom I felt the most sympathy was Ray, and I felt that he was under-utilized. But perhaps I'm not supposed to approach this work the way one approaches a novel -- Achilles is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in all of fiction, but that doesn't make "The Iliad" a bad book. And Carson strongly hints that the fictional aspect of this book should be approached as allegory, with various characters representing Sorrow, Mercy, a Ray of Light, etc. Which brings us to...
* how well does this book work as an essay, with the characters functioning as allegorical symbols to further the essayist's argument? I'll need to postpone answering this question until I feel I have a better grasp of what Carson's argument *is*. How can a person be both dishonest and beautiful, if beauty=truth? Is Carson arguing that this paradox can be resolved only if we take into account the *subjective* nature of beauty, a subjectivity symbolized here by romantic love? What are the consequences of this?
In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf started a dubious tradition: implying that straightforward logical argumentation is an inherently "masculine" mode of expression, Woolf encouraged female essayists to couch their thoughts in meandering fictional narrative structures, rather than old-school "A implies B"-style argumentation. Since Carson had a point to make, I almost wish she'd just written a straightforward essay rather than furthering this Woolfian tradition. As it is, I fear some of her points were lost on me, and I don't feel very illuminated.
* how well does this book work as poetry? For me, some lines are hits, others misses ("He could fill structures of/threat with a light like the earliest olive oil" and "abandon themselves/like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God" are a couple of my less favorite effusions, and the phrase "droplets of luminous sin" is not my cup of tea, either). I feel she's at her best when she's using her left brain (analytical, incisive, pithy) rather than her right (self-consciously "poetic")....less
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Jenna
gave
to:
Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan (Wesleyan Poetry in Translation)
by Vladimir Holan
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my rating:
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read in May, 2008
Jenna said:
"My first exposure to Holan's poetry occurred via the Jarmila and Ian Milner translation of the simple-yet-beautiful poem "She Asked You" (incidentally, I greatly prefer the Milner translation to the C. G. Hanzlicek translation; it's so much...more
My first exposure to Holan's poetry occurred via the Jarmila and Ian Milner translation of the simple-yet-beautiful poem "She Asked You" (incidentally, I greatly prefer the Milner translation to the C. G. Hanzlicek translation; it's so much more colloquial and hard-hitting). Many of Holan's short poems try to condense so much meaning into such a small space that the reader comes away feeling simply baffled (e.g., "Knowledge isn't vision. But it's repeated./That's one of the reasons we die..."). But a few of the short poems are stunningly effective; my favorite is "Snow" (another poem whose Milner translation is, IMHO, superior to the Hanzlicek translation -- Since I'm unfamiliar with the Czech language, I am judging the translations on their virtues as free-standing poems here).
The longer narrative poems demonstrate Holan's talent for evoking the piteous existences of poor people living in wartime; by scattering just a few memorably bizarre, so-weird-that-they-must-be-true scraps of dialogue on the page, Holan brings his subjects to life without ever compromising his air of naturalistic authenticity or descending into mawkishness -- a formidable accomplishment, considering that his subjects include suicidal grandfathers and penniless-but-purehearted virgins. Even better are his fierce philosophical poems, like "To the Enemies" and "Death of a Poet" (the latter invites comparison to Guillaume Apollinaire's "Zone" and Yehuda Amichai's "Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela," two other 20th-century kunstlerromans-in-verse that drift somnabulistically among referring to the protagonist as "he," "I," and "you"). A poet who should be better-known than he is....less
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Jenna
gave
to:
Collected Sonnets (Paperback)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
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my rating:
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read in March, 2008
Jenna said:
"If you like Edna St. Vincent Millay, you're fine by me.
Now, I don't dispute the critics who say that Millay was a limited poet; I don't entirely disagree with those who say that Millay's "Look at what a bad girl I am! Look, look: I'm naugh...more
If you like Edna St. Vincent Millay, you're fine by me.
Now, I don't dispute the critics who say that Millay was a limited poet; I don't entirely disagree with those who say that Millay's "Look at what a bad girl I am! Look, look: I'm naughty, I love sex and I love talking about sex (as well as nature and, occasionally, world affairs), and I don't care what people say about me!" posturing has a limiting effect on her poetry, such that many of her poems end up saying virtually the same thing as one another. It's similar to how Ashbery's poetry is able to say more than O'Hara's, because Ashbery relies on an autobiographical persona less than O'Hara did. I don't dispute that all this is true; nonetheless, I think Millay is redeemed by her technical proficiency and her clever condensations of big meanings into elegant little turns-of-phrase. Not only is her message sympathetic and compelling, but she speaks it with impeccable eloquence. She is the sort of person who would have taken top marks in the sort of rhetoric classes they used to teach at British boys' schools, the ones that required a solid grounding in Greek and Latin.
Millay's most memorable poems are, I think, the very early love sonnets ("I shall forget you presently, my dear," "I, being born a woman and distressed," etc.), but some of the more mature and polished "Fatal Interview" sonnets are also lovable; even the political sonnets, despite the plenitude of abstract nouns they contain ("mercy," "honor," "allegiance," etc.), manage to save themselves from badness through their rhetorical strength and picturesque wordings ("The barking of a fox has bought us all....Peter warms him in the servants' hall")....less
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January 28
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Jenna
gave
to:
The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai, Newly Revised and Expanded edition (Literature of the Middle East)
by Yehuda Amichai
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my rating:
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read in January, 2008
Jenna said:
"Perfect poems concerning sex, love, war, family, nation, and the other essentials. Profound, lucidly written, and rife with complex, sensuous metaphors that really *catch*. I aspire to write poems like these some day.
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December 15, 2007
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Jenna
gave
to:
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Paperback)
by John Ashbery (Goodreads author!)
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my rating:
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read in December, 2007
Jenna said:
"My favorite poem in this book so far is "Lithuanian Dance Band," possibly because the voice in it reminds me of the voice of Ashbery's poet-friend Frank O'Hara, whom I love; however, there are many more echoes of T. S. Eliot than of Frank O...more
My favorite poem in this book so far is "Lithuanian Dance Band," possibly because the voice in it reminds me of the voice of Ashbery's poet-friend Frank O'Hara, whom I love; however, there are many more echoes of T. S. Eliot than of Frank O'Hara in this book, as far as my untrained ear can make out.
I think most people would argue that Ashbery is a greater poet than O'Hara, but my heart prefers O'Hara nonetheless. O'Hara maintained a certain persona throughout much of his poetry: the persona of the sometimes-saucy, sometimes-sentimental New York City party boy. Many of O'Hara's poems are written in the voice of this persona, a persona that the reader who is a hopeless romantic can easily relate to; this adds an element of heartwarming familiarity to O'Hara's poetry, but it also limits his versatility somewhat. In contrast, Ashbery doesn't have a heavily autobiographical persona on which he relies, and, as a result, Ashbery's poetry is infinitely versatile. However, being full of plural pronouns as it is, Ashbery's poetry also strikes me as being much less personal than O'Hara's; rarely, if ever, when I'm reading Ashbery do I get the feeling that I am talking to a much-beloved old friend. This is why, in the end, the emotional part of me prefers O'Hara. I still like to read Ashbery, though, because it gets my cerebral juices flowing, and because it contains beautiful lines like these:
"We struggle two souls out of work for it's a long way back to
The summation meanwhile we live in it 'gradually getting used to'
Everything and this overrides living and is superimposed on it
As when a wounded jackal is tied to the waterhole the lion does come...
"If there were sex in friendship this would be the place to have it right here on this floor
With bells ringing and the loud music pealing...
"Yet you are meant to be alone at least part of the time
You must be in order to work and yet it always seems so unnatural
As though seeing people were intrinsic to life which it just might be
And then somehow the loneliness is more real and more human
You know not just the scarecrow but the whole landscape
And the crows peacefully pecking where the harrow has passed"...less
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December 02, 2007
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New comment on Mina's review of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
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Hey, the new issue of TIME lists (among many other top ten lists) "the top ten websites of the year," with goodreads among them!
