As one reader said in an interview I read online about reactions to a Maggie Nelson book, “I start out a little mad at it and then am won over.” I donAs one reader said in an interview I read online about reactions to a Maggie Nelson book, “I start out a little mad at it and then am won over.” I don’t know that I was won over, necessarily, as in ‘I fell in love with the book,’ but I did fall in love with quarreling with the narrator and acknowledging my own egotism in hers, as well as my own rawness, longing, inner-friction. I’ll discuss it with cnf students tomorrow, and I’ll be curious to know how they have interacted with it (feels more like you *interact* with Bluets than you actually *read* it). There’s a hopeless and helpless falling-in-step-with-her that happens and you nod yes as she multiplies registers and puts everything in: her friend’s paralytic body, Mallarme, Wittgenstein, movies, the “sorry-assed” gravedigger, the clipped-out stuff from the magazine of life and library and she puts it all into a collage just like you taped the Seventeen magazine cut-outs onto the wall to represent the deepest part of yourself that is ineffable and to represent it with eyeshadow ads. Plus, the narrator hurts big time, and the bravado of the persona somehow better enables the hurt to come through like the paint underneath, like earlier stuff of a palimpsest. So, once I get to her bit on memory and how accessing memory maybe transforms memory (and this from a narrator who stubbornly holds onto the memory of lost love yet can’t quite remember the love, at the same time): “when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars (81),” I’m simply with her, still feeling the book self-conscious and self-indulgent and ever unfinished (a mind unsettled and resistant to unfragmenting itself) and also still *with* her. I can say the notes the book generated for me are all over the place (literally on scraps and in margins etc, and also figuratively in their topical range). The book thus worked on me like a solvent....more
This is a strange and wonderful book with very little discernible structure; I resisted the looseness of it for awhile but then came to love Morrow's This is a strange and wonderful book with very little discernible structure; I resisted the looseness of it for awhile but then came to love Morrow's mind and felt like I was sitting with her in her tent as the sand blew in and as she was letting go of any permanence in her understanding of refuge. I love most her evocation of the Egyptian desert and those who live there; she writes through a lens of love.
I love many sentence structures, like a note-taking structure on 87: “The ritual of arriving in Egypt: excavating a space in the decay of an old magnificent thing.”
And these etymological passages:
34: “And there was the joy in discovering word cores, the threads that run throughout language, as in mut, both mother and death, and dwa, dawn. Dwa is a picture of a star, a burst of light. Beside it in one common configuration is a human figure with hands raised in prayer. This was often translated into English as ‘Thank God.’ But it could not really be translated, I thought. It was too simple. The picture of a star, signifying this same word, was stamped all over temple and tomb ceilings as though it were a mantra.”
4: “Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color. The word carries the living thing concealed across millennia.”
For those who teach, pp199-200 details the making of coffee in the desert (beginning with picking the beans)– great example of slowing down a task. ...more
It's great to have another Ann Pancake book in the world. The solid and luminous prose I found in _Given Ground_ and _Strange As This Weather_ persistIt's great to have another Ann Pancake book in the world. The solid and luminous prose I found in _Given Ground_ and _Strange As This Weather_ persists here; I love the mix of long-breathing novellas mixed with the shorter stories that are one exhalation. Always layered, always with "live coal" characters, wasting time on nothing that doesn't go for the jugular. Ann especially writes the deep knowing of children with such full-body power and instinct.
Going through all my dogearing today—here, in “Sab”: “You only have room when loss lightens you.” (259)
“Mouseskull”: “I hold the skull between finger and thumb to gaze in the sockets of its eyes, stroke its nose, rub its forehead the way my horse books say horses like to be rubbed.” (76)
Opening of “Coop”: “They bunked in old chicken houses jammed with older iron beds, lumpy-ticked, stained, summers and summers of homesick child urine, then the rat and the swallow dirt all empty winter. The beds pressed so tight the girls who brought suitcases had to sleep with them, so tight Carly could shift an elbow and touch the girl beside her.”
"Create a pleasure that can stir up the world," Finney writes in the final poem in this collection, "Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Gir"Create a pleasure that can stir up the world," Finney writes in the final poem in this collection, "Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica," and it's a perfect description of this book--a pleasure to read while at the same time it deeply (and sometimes painfully) stirs up a world, both private and public, intimate and political.
The book is full of blurred literalness and metaphor; it honors the body and the dreamlike nature of the narratives of lives, and it honors the intricate webbing between race, class, gender, sexuality, power, powerlessness. It's a feast of blurred and powerfully disorienting senses too--in "Men Who Give Milk I," this is an image that describes a homeless man's garbage bag of possessions:
"He reaches the end of the street, sits the bag in his arms down on the corner, gentles it, as if it is the sack of the last time he heard the high yellow & coral orange of his mother's laugh, before, when his world had a lock, a key, a ceiling, floor, a proper place for her to cup his lion-eyed face." (77)
The collection is populated with historical and political figures: Rosa Parks, the President Bushes, Condoleezza Rice, family members, unnamed men on the street and in fish markets; and it's dense in dialog with history recent and not so recent (Strom Thurmond & segregation, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War) though Finney avoids too-trodden terrain. Rosa Parks, for instance, comes freshly to life in "Red Velvet" as a careful, exact seamstress, a woman who "knows her way around velvet" (11). I love most how the book is polyphonic, with many voices chiming in through italics. One of my favorite voices is of Mayree Monroe on "a rickety porch somewhere in east Texas," a woman who "hands the sky everything in her pockets" in "My Time Up with You" when they try to move her out with the other residents to the Superdome, relocate her when the hurricane hits:
"Never give me nothing free before. Now all of a sudden/ they handing out Free! like butter or jumbo packs of Juicy/ Fruit. Sweet Redeemer, where does Mayree go when she has/ finally paid off her house and the mannish hurricane is/ thundering down?" (21)
The poems take up time and space, they stretch out.
The feeling of the inevitable turn in the book -- the vertical emotional drop -- happened for me with the title poem, "Head Off & Split," echoing the moment in the book's introduction when the speaker collects fish from the fishmonger and heads home, but in this poem late in the book, it's the speaker's head that is cut off instead of a fish's, the speaker's body that is split as she leaves again--an only daughter and a childless one--after a visit home with her parents. The violence and intimacy of this poem gets down to a bedrock truth of relationships with others and self, with one's past and future: "The skin of my/ torso is peeled back to reveal What is left What it will/ take for me to leave them behind The 803rd time" (92)....more
I'm fascinated by books that happen in a day, that give a sense of the density of lived life, all the selves we are, within a few thick hours. Noy HolI'm fascinated by books that happen in a day, that give a sense of the density of lived life, all the selves we are, within a few thick hours. Noy Holland does this in BIRD--it's a luminous book; I finished it for a second reading last evening and the petunias in the hanging basket on the porch had an extra glow--everything had an extra glow, and I was all ashes with Bird. I'm giving a lecture on layering time in narrative and am so happy I could study Holland's prose with this topic in mind.
How close she stays to the body with this main character who is a mother of 2 young kids and who is indulgent of erotic memories of a self-destructing relationship with Mickey -- the past is alive: "Bird sinks into it, a bloom of heat, so to feel it: the door swung to, the shrinking stars. A leaf falling. The way her mother spun her ruby on her finger, think of that. The way Mickey hooked his finger in her ear. Berries in the bathtub. Sweetened ferns. The sound of the chain on the asphalt road that the school bus drags behind it. Shall." (59)
"Bird misses everything at once. One thing makes her want all the others—lived or not, still she misses them. She misses lives she has never lived—days issued out of the future, hours that will never be.” (58)...more
In R’s MFA class on point of view at the last residency, he used complex pieces from Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle, William Goyen, Rick Bass; the tale rIn R’s MFA class on point of view at the last residency, he used complex pieces from Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle, William Goyen, Rick Bass; the tale requires a fluid point of view, he said, they are representing states of mind and of being. Talking about Goyen’s short fiction in particular, he compared it to the experience of (the confrontation with) a painting which hits you all at once—Goyen tries to write this way, to have you experience it all at once, a mode of experience more representative of our lives than is narrative sequence. This is impossible to achieve, of course—painting in language—but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
I also am thinking of what Clarice Lispector said about her PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H., that this novel “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.” That’s an idea I felt rising in me while reading Kay Boyle’s novella THE CRAZY HUNTER, the opening few pages of which R used in his class. What are my demands as a writer, I was thinking, with this current novel project? Whose story is it and how should it be told? What layers of perspective might need to come in? Lots of churning began, and I don’t feel that the point is even being wholly capable of meeting those demands, but just trying to answer to them, to point yourself in that direction.
Boyle’s novella has an uncertain point of view and tries to welcome in several layers of consciousness at once; it moves in and out of memories and thoughts often without tags like “Nan thought” or “Candy remembered”—often the thoughts are undercurrents of dialog, what cannot be said but what is meant. Here is part of the opening when the mother and daughter—newly returned home for the summer from school abroad—are swimming:
“Then her arms began moving and she was swimming against the pouring current, the teeth shaking in her head with cold. So the last time I did this I was fifteen, two years back, she began thinking quickly against the rushing slabs of water. I hadn’t been away yet and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what it was yet. Now I can feel everything stopping, the heart, the blood, the muscles hardening as if I were working on my way through ice and becoming ice and the land and sky congealing tight around me. But the mother standing on her big bare legs on the grass saw the sun falling on the soft short hair that mounted black against the current, and the girl’s slim arms falling and rising… ‘How is it, Nan?’ she called out. ‘Cold?’ And now her own body slumped over and broke through the sedge and the reed-sweet into the stream’s fast deep bed… ‘Warm,’ she called peacefully across the water’s rapid murmuring. ‘Just the first plunge that takes your breath off…’ The way home takes it from you and doesn’t return it, the girl was saying, because every year of youth is still there in the furniture and the rugs and the marks on the glass. There is a school of children everywhere with me here, all of them that one child I was once running along the house’s east ivy-covered wall….” (4-5).
I don’t know what to make of the novella, really. The central conflict surrounds the hunter (a hunter is a breed of horse) who goes blind—should he be shot or saved—and the most moving moments for me are the opening swim and the moments when the girl takes the hunter, Brigand, out in the middle of the night, both of them with limited sight, to train him, to try to make him calm and useful. Also the ending is quite powerful, involving her emotional father (whom the mother considers a deadbeat, a drunk, a failed artist, but yet something more as well…the mother’s emotionality is the most muted and thus the most fierce) who rallies for the horse maybe on his daughter’s behalf but also by empathy and extension—“I too am useless,” he could be thinking, “so you will put me down too, will put me out of my misery…” I love the night-walks with Nan and horse because there is a blurring of human and animal. This awareness or consciousness about what makes us human happens elsewhere too, in slight moments, like when she remembers walking with a boy in Florence: “Arm in arm they walked, watching the ground move back beneath their feet, the road slipping back and away in the shade and the light and the shade from the trees as they walked small and human-voiced and human-limbed under the high fresh springing boughs” (42).
Here is a moment from the night-walks: “First the road that first night, she thought, and after that the grass and the water, and now the trees and what’s tripping him up underfoot to say Nothing has gone, blind horse, nothing has altered. When they were though it she stopped again at the edge and drew the mayblossom branches down over his face, gently drawing them down and gently letting them brush upward like veils of some inexplicable substitute for sight. That night she took him back by the marsh where by day the yellow iris could be seen growing, and he did not falter but sought his way with her through the invisible fragrant lilies in the dark” (76). ...more
Today in Kim Kupperman's WVWC MFA residency seminar on using images to create/enhance narrative, she talked about the range of uses, from images that Today in Kim Kupperman's WVWC MFA residency seminar on using images to create/enhance narrative, she talked about the range of uses, from images that illustrate the text to those that "do something else," that is, images that associate with and energize the prose without correlating directly (the way the photos work in Sebald, for instance). The drawings in Gipe's TRAMPOLINE illustrate Dawn Jewell's story but also "do something else," or many things really: for me they depict the 15-year-old's rich interiority (and do so in keeping with her own style), they insert moments of levity or wryness right at the right time to pull the book back from being maudlin, they make you crack up and sometimes make your gut drop.
I really enjoyed the novel, and Dawn is very familiar -- she's a kid with a whole lot going on beneath the surface, but like most teenagers, she's also pretty concerned with the surface too. It matters. She's lovable and brave; she also steals stuff and hurts people and drinks too much. She's wounded by a family that's high most of the time in a community that's economically crashed up, but she also holds onto stubbornly strong strands of love throughout.
I love this bit:
32: "You walk on and on, thinking you're going deeper into the woods, deeper into the past, farther away from the bullshit of the world, and then you trip over the cable running from somebody's satellite dish, and then you see the trailer and hear the creak of the trampoline springs, and then it's oh well, welcome back."
Gipe's got a wonderful ear for dialog and a wonderful instinct for simile: 74: "Mamaw looked at me a long time, like I was a dead cow in the creek she couldn't figure out how to move." And a great sense of texture and details that unapologetically belong to Dawn's world: 87: "My nose filled with the smell of molding wood, my ears with the pinging of the cooling four-wheeler engines" and 210: "...Kingsport, flat-chested little factory town."
It's a good book to talk about; it's a book that provokes. There are times when the book looks out at you with some defensiveness and suspicion, like that which is often aimed toward folks who live outside of this specific Appalachian context (a gaze that I also feel in Scott McClanahan's work, which I admire, and in the work of other contemporary Appalachian writers, including myself, frankly), but that aspect only makes this novel even more important to the conversation about what is Appalachian literature, to whom does it speak, with whom does it reverberate....more
This book took my imagination off the beaten path, as Kevin’s work always does. In these travel essays he writes about the hungers and curiosities andThis book took my imagination off the beaten path, as Kevin’s work always does. In these travel essays he writes about the hungers and curiosities and questions and heartbreaks that send us traveling, each segment of each essay so incredibly well observed and so deeply felt—like this moment in “Waiting for the Bombs” about travel to Laos: “I feel like my bed is sitting on the strings of a gigantic, prepared piano. Every monastery its own ensemble, playing together, but each on its own, playing alone. The whole is not a concert, but not a cacophony either. Every monastery plays and pauses, and plays again. The rhythm, the spatial effects, are like peepers in spring or crickets in fall. Mysterious, organic polyphonies” (27).
Kevin often drops you in the middle of a culture and in the middle of words and place names that you must scramble to understand by context, in much the way real travel does. The streets in these essays wind around in the barely sketched world map in your head and he fills in parts of the map with fine cross-hatching, lots of sensory detail. The essays are full of deep looking, always ready to challenge the “agreed-on world,” offering insights into the use of a camera, living with images of encountered suffering, the authority attributed to ancient things, the study of structures—so many wondrous structures!—like the family compounds in Bali with teak posts and thatched roofs and “a kind of casual clarity, nothing crowded, nothing too close or closed, everything distinct” (182).
He writes of old Corsica, a place where “a kiss mattered, a glance, sweet words or hard words. It all mattered”—and mentions how this “felt gravity” may have been the attraction to the writers who traveled there (141); this is a feeling I have as I go to KO’s essays—I go to a world where things matter, glibness gets no air time. But neither does he take himself too seriously: he’s “just a guy”; in seeking out the origins of a Khmer goddess he meets in a gallery in DC, he writes: “I’m just the guy still trying to respond to a thousand-year-old smile, myself caught in an oddball web of associations here at my desk” (155).
My favorite theme in these essays is the relationship between familiarity and strangeness, so beautifully articulated in “A House Fitting”: “The best travel estranges in just this way—insists our worlds are made up. Which is not to say arbitrary. Different worlds don’t cancel each other out, don’t make it all relative and meaningless. Everything human speaks. But sometimes at home the world speaks in a drone, the familiar drowns out the strangeness of our own choices.” (166)
Art, too, estranges, and Kevin’s “Colors” may be my favorite of the batch; this one cracks open to the writer’s life and heartbreaks, and also to the healing power of art—well, art’s power to heal but also to unnerve, destabilize, renew, arrest. Reading this one last night, I experienced one of those rare moments of gratitude for the smartphone at my side on the arm of the couch because it enabled me to take a peek at Goya’s “Goat” and all of the other many paintings noted in this essay, though when I did pull up the image I found that I felt as if I’d already seen it through the beautiful prose.
I’ve left North America only twice and at one time I was smug with a line I read somewhere about a woman who “traveled acquisitively” – I can’t remember where I read it. In truth, I’m often afraid of leaving my comfortable nest and so I can hide behind a kind of blue-collar frame of mind, thinking myself to be someone resistant to feeling the need to acquire the world. In KO’s traveling, there is no hint of acquisition, only porousness, none of the silly travel-for-good-writing-material impulse you sense sometimes in nonfiction writing workshops (“make a pitch to National Geographic so you can get a paid ride to Uganda and have stuff to write about because the world is ours to have, to bound around in and to mine for material” – that kind of thing). As a traveler, KO is one among—in his essays travel seems to me a way of living and being willing always to be changed and humbled into wisdom, kept available for surprise, whether that surprise presents itself in the dance of the Legong or, back home, in the daily walks through the neighboring graveyard with one’s companion and dogs. ...more
What’s so remarkable to me upon rereading this book (it’s been about 9 years since my first reading) is that I remember so little of it. All I remembeWhat’s so remarkable to me upon rereading this book (it’s been about 9 years since my first reading) is that I remember so little of it. All I remember is the haunting feeling it evoked. I find this book a miracle so it’s quite possible that I needed to let it sit and to come back again when I was more ready to receive it. In the interim years, I’ve read and loved Gilead and, to a slightly lesser degree, Home, and now the new third book in this trilogy Lila is waiting for me by my desk—and when I can, I read all the reviews and interviews and articles coming out of New York appraising Robinson and the new Lila (the NYT article “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson” was wonderful). But since Housekeeping is assigned reading for our upcoming MFA residency, I thought I would reread it before moving on to Lila; also my friend Devon recently remarked that this first novel has a better balance of the human story with the biblical exegesis/reimagining than the heavily Calvinist Gilead books, and I do think she’s right, as much as I love the deeply ponderous and complicated sermons of Ames in Gilead. In Housekeeping, the work Robinson does with the Genesis Deluge and Noah and Noah’s wife and the waters with so many people in them like the lake in Fingerbone, does adhere more closely to the flesh, mainly because the young and wraithlike Ruthie finds echoes in that Genesis narrative in a much more harrowing way than John Ames the dying minister reflects on scripture. The Calvinist worldview is here and palpitating in Fingerbone too, but is more lived into in this first novel maybe. I don’t know—all of her fiction feels like miracle to me, and I’m deeply grateful for it.
Two remarkable passages, though I could have typed up something from any page:
152-3 [at the point when Ruthie goes to the island with Sylvie and a kind of transfiguration does happen in her…] “For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
214-15: “Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly—My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning.” ...more
I finished this early this morning and feel such gratitude for it, such a brief book, nearly a novella; regret is hanging over my desk like something I finished this early this morning and feel such gratitude for it, such a brief book, nearly a novella; regret is hanging over my desk like something heavy and wet -- the book is focused by and made spare by regret and loss and a sense of "what if it happened this way," and the imaginative what-if section is so incredibly moving and real you can't let the people go and neither can the narrator as he speculates about the events leading up to a murder. The novel's form is unique, moving from first person and confessional into a roving omniscience and back again to the single rememberer. The beautiful passages are too many to type out; many have the quality of interrogating the nature of memory: "And was the bed of violets huge only because the child who once a year knocked on the back door and asked for permission to pick them was so small?" (130). I recently read James Lord's A GIACOMETTI PORTRAIT that details the making of the writer's portrait and contains all sorts of beautiful ideas about art-making, and I can see how the spirit of Giacometti infuses this book -- through the sculpture "The Palace at 4 am" (a skeletal dreamlike house) that informs the imagery throughout (I think the sculpture triggered the book when Maxwell saw it at the MOMA). The image of the boys walking on the beams of the unfinished house -- reminiscent of the Palace -- enmeshes your heart in simultaneous feelings of possibility, dream, loneliness, and the vulnerability of the young human being--the child is an "acrobat on the high wire. And with no net to catch him if he falls" (133)....more
The most thoughtful book I’ve read in some time, a highly introspective memoir that is about so many, many things, especially language and its relatioThe most thoughtful book I’ve read in some time, a highly introspective memoir that is about so many, many things, especially language and its relationship to self. Hoffman emigrates from Poland to Canada at age 13 and her insights speak into the life of anyone who has experienced a fundamental life-rupture after which there is no unity possible, but only a new composite self – she speaks to the way that it’s possible for us to say “I am here now” in a new experience, after we have lost ourselves for awhile. A beautiful book. Some moments I loved:
“It is a sunny fall afternoon and I’m engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—picking chestnuts. I’m playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I’m holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me.” (41-2)
198-9 “No matter what happens to me, I think, there will always be this. There will always be landscapes, and I’ll always have the liberty to breathe them in, the wherewithal to contemplate them. I’ll always have the freedom of my insignificance. Even this empty road throbs with the silence of my own experience. I need not be so afraid.” (reminds me of Etty Hillesum)
About becoming an artist, a musician, but true for any artist: “One’s fingers can become boneless conduits only if they’ve been made very strong first.” 70
271: “If all neurosis is a form of repression, then surely, the denial of suffering, and of helplessness, is also a form of neurosis. Surely, all our attempts to escape sorrow twist themselves into the specific, acrid pain of self-suppression. And if that is so, then a culture that insists on cheerfulness and staying in control is a culture that—in one of those ironies that prevails in the unruly realm of the inner life—propagates its own kind of pain. “Perhaps perversely, I sometimes wish for that older kind of suffering—the capacity and the time for a patient listening to the winds of love and hate that can blow you like a reed, for that long descent into yourself in which you touch bottom and recognize the poor, two-forked creature that we all are.” ...more
I first read this gorgeous slender book on a plane headed to Boston and it filled me with readiness to go to the museum and try to practice this kind I first read this gorgeous slender book on a plane headed to Boston and it filled me with readiness to go to the museum and try to practice this kind of deep seeing. The book is like a hymn to seeing and describing, to uncovering depths of the thing made. I used it in conjunction with Doty's book THE ART OF DESCRIPTION for a graduate seminar on the topic of description; OYSTERS is relevant to this topic on 2 levels – his wonderful example of ekphrastic description of the paintings, and the art of of still life itself as analogous to the writer’s art of description, an art that ultimately reveals/yields the interior of the seer: “description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”
Also this:
47: “A painting of asparagus… Exactitude, yes, but don’t these images offer us more than a mirroring report on the world? What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”
A quiet, gently sparkling book; the cloister of Sister John and the internal nature of the narrative (this nun struggling with the realization that heA quiet, gently sparkling book; the cloister of Sister John and the internal nature of the narrative (this nun struggling with the realization that her "kaleidoscope" of spiritual visions come from epilepsy) make me feel somewhat claustrophobic, but also make moments of scene and exchange and breaking-in from the outer world wonderfully startling, as if her way of seeing affects your own and you find yourself listening and watching much more intently. The italicized sections from her life before the convent feel contrived at times, and I don't always experience the muted emotional movements, but overall the book is beautiful in its spareness....more
Her voice blows me away -- she's on a spectrum between Flannery O'Connor and Mary Gordon for characterization, darkness, comedy, the interior of womenHer voice blows me away -- she's on a spectrum between Flannery O'Connor and Mary Gordon for characterization, darkness, comedy, the interior of women living in the 70s (that's the Gordon likeness, that interiority, especially in "Still Life with Fruit" about an artist giving birth -- thanks, Karen McElmurray, for that recommendation). "Still Life" and "The Ugliest Pilgrim" (a story about a scarred girl going to a faith healer to get a pretty face, which was made into a musical - !) and "Burning the Bed" (about a daughter caregiving for a dying father in a claustrophobic house) were my favorites.
I love her precision and metaphors:
"his left hand drops cards evenly and in rhythm. Like a turtle, laying eggs" (14)
"I put Flick's paper in my pocketbook and there, inside, on a round mirror, my face is waiting in ambush for me." (31)
"Wanda unpinned her bun and the hair fell below her shoulders and tickled her spine. It was the color, she thought, of harmless brown garden snakes." (135)
She also delves into dream and the fantastic in this book -- marvelously strange. I might not give 5 stars to every story, but I couldn't resist giving the book as a whole 5 stars -- this woman needs to be read!...more
There is a really quick pulse to this book, coming from a broken heart that is scrambling with all the hilarity and grit and narrative and lyricism toThere is a really quick pulse to this book, coming from a broken heart that is scrambling with all the hilarity and grit and narrative and lyricism to get this story down. I admire the bravery – I sometimes feel the prose is too fast, or depends too fiercely on the power of a moment without really drawing the full context of that moment so the reader can enter in; at those points I hear a false note (the kind of false note I feel in my _own_ work when I hit tweak that lyrically-charged prose that touches on too private a love or pain and shuts the reader out for a minute – but just for a minute – so I spent a lot of time quarreling with and admiring this book). I’m also intrigued by the form – the short chapters and repetition (sometimes with the feel of a litany, sometimes with the feel of straight-up OCD talk – and one of the characters happens to be OCD), and also the subtitle “a biography of a place.”
Here are some great lines from a section about his grandma, Ruby, who took photos of the dead at wakes so frequently that Rite Aid eventually refused to develop them: “And even now, years later, I wish I had pictures of all the faces I once knew. I wish I had pictures of Ruby and quilts, Nathan and teddy bear sweatshirts, groans and moans and radio preachers” (31).
Her language is very ordinary and carries in it a very subtle surprise, especially when it does its delicate wondering about the character of Mary, giHer language is very ordinary and carries in it a very subtle surprise, especially when it does its delicate wondering about the character of Mary, giving her a halo of ordinariness. Interesting how nonspecific much of the language is -- but the unspecifics are well placed so that they're open but not vague, like that line in Bishop's "Fish," in the midst of such incredible specificity, when she describes the fishes eyes: "It was more like the tipping/ of an object toward the light." Like the last stanza in Howe's, well the whole poem really:
Annunciation
Even if I don't see it again--nor ever feel it I know it is--and that if once it hailed me it ever does--
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn't--I was blinded like that--and swam in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so specifically myself I thought I'd die from being loved like that.
--
Much unsentimental stuff about loss, motherhood, the soul: "My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was." ("Before the Fire")
My first Howe book, a gift from kg, and now I move on to WHAT THE LIVING DO... (thank you, kg)....more
"Right now I'm getting ready to turn my longing into contentment. Getting ready to be lovely someday, very very lovely." ("There's Not Time Like the Pr"Right now I'm getting ready to turn my longing into contentment. Getting ready to be lovely someday, very very lovely." ("There's Not Time Like the Present")
"Whatever you resist, persists, said everyone famously." ("Bank On It")
"I am here to say the plainest thing." ("Covenant")
I am new to lyric poetry for the most part, though CD Wright can take me into this terrain sometimes where narrative doesn't hold sway and it's just emotion and atmosphere, incredibly precise lines that do somehow evoke a feeling when several of them string together. A book like this leaves me thinking, 'Now, how did that feeling come into being after that poem?' I loved sitting with Samyn's book on a Sunday morning, finishing almost in one sitting and then wanting to talk with her about it. Hope I get to....more
Today I am made a little different in my vision by this book, scrambling to prepare to discuss the second half with my students. Purpura gets too elusToday I am made a little different in my vision by this book, scrambling to prepare to discuss the second half with my students. Purpura gets too elusive and cerebral for me at times and I frown while reading, thinking she’s trying to force the emotion of a juxtaposition on us, but then… something does open… I am moved -- kind of moved to a different place and I wonder, Now how did that happen when I was so often getting frustrated by the overwrought or self-conscious sentences? Mysterious. Typed out several sentences to examine with my class (see below) -- not sure I'll use the book again, but I consider my mind blown and I feel lucky to be talking with my students about these pages today:
“The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute now.” (69)
“And all this I call fall, I call late afternoon, will come back, will come hauling its wedge of cold fear, its unbidden relief, oh who can know which, some long summer hour when lines of road tar loosen in heat, a boy sits idly peeling a stick, and wood wasps drill slow, perfect circles in eaves.” (74)
“But I wanted distance to unscroll my sight, for the grasses’ bright tips to draw my eye out, far, to that jittery open.” (77)
“There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.” (80-81)
“The hole was deep, and the blood hadn’t slipped in runnels all over but dried black at the rim.” (121)
“All the specimens: a loud carbuncle in the plaster, on the back of a neck, like a scream.” (128) ...more
I love this "Art of" series by Graywolf. Used this book for a "Description" lecture, in conjunction with Doty's beautiful STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND I love this "Art of" series by Graywolf. Used this book for a "Description" lecture, in conjunction with Doty's beautiful STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON -- lots of resonance between the two, especially on the point that description reveals, above all, the inner life of the speaker, her vision of the world....more
Cole Freeman is a wonderfully textured character: a nursing home aide that tenderly cares for the elderly while stealing from them and selling drugs oCole Freeman is a wonderfully textured character: a nursing home aide that tenderly cares for the elderly while stealing from them and selling drugs on the side; abandoned by his mom; raised by his grandparents in the fire of his granddad's harsh sermons. Cole's hunger and restlessness drive the book with a really solid throb: "What do I have? he thought. Pain pills, stashed cash, and jewelry he'd stolen from old doddering ladies. A stack of postcards. And a thousand useless Bible verses" (78).
There's a wonderful strand about speaking in the book: Cole stutters, his grandfather preached fire and brimstone, Cole and his mother hardly speak, the people either speak out against the mining practices of Heritage or keep silent. One of my favorite scenes shows Cole speaking out, and there's an energy among all these strands: "It was almost like being in church, the people encouraging him, 'That's right, tell him!' and he wondered if this was what his grandfather had experienced, if this was what the anointing felt like, a voice running through him, a feeling of wholeness" (256).
The book shows the gritty courage of people (and their pain) in the face of mountaintop-removal mining without forcing a flat heroic characterization. A beautiful read that left me nodding at, Cole, "Yes, yes that's what you need to do." And I don't think it necessarily spoils the ending to say that it reminded me of Alyosha kissing the ground in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, the mystical surrender, but of course Cole's ground is the gutted ground of coal mine country....more
So beautiful & unique with a cast of circus characters that come out of the shadows of the expected and into the light, presenting something wholly suSo beautiful & unique with a cast of circus characters that come out of the shadows of the expected and into the light, presenting something wholly surprising. It is not often we are surprised, and this book is a wonderful surprise.
I love the book's structure, especially the compressed, almost ethereal and oftentimes mournful sections that follow one person or set of people (Trainman, Tentmen, 24-Hour Man, Even the Cats). For me, these sections layer in a whole other emotional register -- a timeless one -- in a forward-moving narrative that is already a complex mix of tenderness, comedy, harshness, grief.
It's a huge, huge cast, dizzying really. So many characters stand out, most especially Alberta and her neighbor Marge Johnson who Alberta introduces to the circus train, Marge bringing with her one "plug-in" (though Alberta discourages plug-ins for the tiny train rooms): a glowing, spinning globe from her lousy husband who wanted to "give her the world." From one of the italicized sections, written by Marge's pen: "When we roll, the train sways top-heavy side-to-side, and the globe spins as if the rails actually crisscross the tiny sphere, as if the moving train drives the globe in circles... When I sleep it spins on. When we stop and I leave my room to walk in the trainyard, I see it glowing from way off, calling out to me, a yellow beacon steering me home" (122). Marge finds a kind of home here, like many of the characters ("I am one of them"), including the narrator who is investigating this thing called home and whether or not it can get in your bones -- there's a restlessness in the book for sure, and the question of home keeps spinning long after the book is over: it just propels you deeper into the question....more
I’ve just finished it, during the first marvelous snow storm of the year, and the power is flickering, so the book closes, for me, with a feeling of uI’ve just finished it, during the first marvelous snow storm of the year, and the power is flickering, so the book closes, for me, with a feeling of urgency, heft, an ache in my stomach. This is a book you savor, written in short lyrical sections that are at once spare, suggestive and so multi-layered; the dialog especially reads slowly in my mind, as if I am right there on Symi looking out at the water, in between bites of cheese and rough bread, listening, along with the characters, for all that's unsaid beneath speech – it is the careful “held-back” speech between travelers, at the start of the story anyway, the kind of speech that shows some comfort taken in others’ unfamiliarity with you: the distance allows some freedom to speak your sad truths but to keep private about them at the same time.
How does Kevin achieve this intimacy, not only among characters who are travelers, strangers to each other, but also with the reader who is a stranger among these private and wounded people? Perhaps by manifesting on the page so thickly and beautifully their longing for connection, each short chapter coming into being like one of Myles' photos in the dark room revealing another dimension of that longing. From one of the italicized sections in Myles' voice: "I watched slow smiles pass from face to face, I saw again how people care and find each other, if not forever, for awhile" (128). Yes, there is a sense, too, of the ephemeral nature of connection.
I do love the structure, the short roving pieces – both restless and meditative, whether in Myles’ first-person sections or in the more omniscient third person sections that follow these hungry people—hunger pervades and, many times in the book, is satisfied, and other times not. The meditative feel comes, partly, from Myles’ reflections on photography as he works on his photo book The Lesser Dodecanese. Here is a gorgeous passage from a section from Myles that drew me close to him, because everything is careful with Myles, deliberate, resonant with an old place:
“Photos rise up out of reality, things forever fixed. The photograph may yellow or rot, but the world within it lies in a dumb trance from which there is no waking. That moment and eternity pull together. And yet, tourists arrange their photos in albums, in stories, and read their guidebooks, ‘for context,’ ‘the historical context,’ to keep creeping eternity from dissolving their stories altogether, into a kind of rapture. They guard carefully against the very thing that called to them, set them traveling to begin with. But not me, no not me, I wanted the rapture, I wanted it bad” (30).
Having just finished, I am, of course, savoring the ending especially. I won’t say whether it ends in devastation or not – I won’t spoil it – what’s strange is that, for me, it almost didn’t matter how it ended -- the facts of the events of the ending -- maybe because of how the book speaks to grief and the way we have to live side by side with it, no matter what. It’s always mixed: “Maybe all our losses are sown with hope. We wander in the wreckage, not quite believing it, something in us faithful to what we had before. Still yearning” (188). Stories of grief always, I suppose, unlock your own grief and get you to consider it, its thinness or thickness, its authenticity, its fadedness… I looked up from the book and thought: ‘What is this evening ache that has come upon me? In my stomach and my limbs?’ It was something wrought by this book and the way it reaches in. A beautiful book, Kevin. ...more
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