I spent much of my 11-day holiday break either horizontal or wishing I was horizontal thanks to a back strain that’s still giving me fits. I took advantage of the time to get some reading done. Mleeka and I had gone to see The Golden Compass, and in anticipation of it, she purchased and read the trilogy of which that movie composes roughly one third. She was somewhat disappointed in how the movie chopped off the end of the first book and how it left out some of the back story about Dust. Having not read the books yet, I thought it was a pretty engaging movie, if it was a little slow at times (especially when Kidman was onscreen). In any case, watching the movie and hearing Mleeka talk about the books prompted me to read the books. Steinbeck they’re not, but I enjoyed the whole set. Oddly, where Mleeka found the second book to suffer from what she calls second book syndrome (wherein a second book in a set serves primarily to set up the more involved politics and relationships that drive subsequent books but are of limited interest on their own in terms of actually moving the plot along), I found it to be pretty interesting. On the whole, not a bad bunch of books for a quick read.

I had heard about an author named Zadie Smith. She made waves a few years ago with her first novel (published when she was 24, I think), and I’ve been meaning for a while to pick up some of her stuff. Her On Beauty was on my amazon wish list, and Ashley got it for me for Christmas. It was a good book, though somewhat different from what I had expected based on comparisons of her work to other authors I like. It felt a bit like a modern day take on the old comedies of manners. I don’t mean to pigeon-hole Smith here in the almost patronizing way it’ll probably come off, but the book felt a bit like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility for the 20th century (which probably isn’t terribly flattering given that I find those sorts of books tedious and dull and light). And yet it wasn’t tedious or dull or light, and in fact, there was much to appreciate. Smith writes really great dialogue, and especially argument dialogue. So the book wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was well-done enough that I decided to get her first novel, White Teeth. This I finished reading last night, and it’s the sort of book I expected based on what I had read about Smith. It was different than any of the old white guy fiction I’ve read, and it dealt with its subjects in what felt like really honest, informed ways across cultures, religions, races, genders, and ages. And it did so with wit and beauty and absurdity and sometimes sadness. On Beauty isn’t a book I’ll likely read a great many times in my life, but White Teeth I can imagine myself re-reading every few years, as I do with most of my favorites. (Uh, which is not to detract from the gift itself of the former book; had I not read that one, I might never have gotten around to reading the other.) If you happen to like reading contemporary literary fiction, this one should go on your list.

Next up I think is George R. R. Martin. I’ve never been much on sci-fi or fantasy, and I guess he’s a fantasy author. Three or four people have separately recommended him to me even knowing that I’m not much of a fantasy reader. Mleeka gobbles the stuff up, so I got her the first in his big series for Christmas, and she dug it and has since read the rest of the series that’s been published to date. She seems to validate what others have told me about him, so I’m thinking I might broaden my horizons a bit and see what I think of his books.

Just over four months ago, I finished Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and did a quick read of DeLillo’s Falling Man before taking on Pynchon’s latest, Against the Day. His very short The Crying of Lot 49 aside, this is the first of Pynchon’s book I’ve read in one go, if plodding through it over 4 months can really be considered a single go. I went through start to finish with no stamina-loss-related break, in any case. My slowness was the result primarily of a paucity of time to read for long at a stretch (that reality TV’s not gonna watch itself, you know). When you’re reading in 10- to 20-page increments, it’s hard to get through an 1,100 page book very quickly.

So, what did I think of it? I’m not sure. The first 700 or so pages were for the most part very engaging, and it’s the easiest long Pynchon I’ve read yet. Whereas GR was hard to follow a whole lot of the time, AtD was pretty manageable. The next 300 pages were harder to get through because the dominant plot line just wasn’t as interesting to me as some of the others. As Pynchon closes up the book (which he really does with more tidiness than I might have expected) in the last 85 or so pages, it’s a more fun read again, though not nearly as much so as earlier parts of the book. I guess I liked it well enough. Although it’s physically heavier, it didn’t feel as content-weighty to me as GR did. Something about it doesn’t seem as important to me as GR did, though I can’t articulate what the difference is or why GR has a feel of importance (maybe I’m swayed by its having won an award?). I’m sure my enjoyment/slogging ratio in AtD was higher than it was in GR, but GR I think is the better book.

One thing that really hit home for me during this read was a difference in the way I appreciate certain books. Some authors or books make me wish the whole time I’m reading them that I were able to go out and write long fiction. They inspire creativity in me. Steinbeck in his best books and Richard Powers in The Time of Our Singing make me feel this way. An author like Pynchon doesn’t. I appreciate the complexity in his books, but they don’t inspire me to want to do my own creation. Both sorts of appreciation are valuable to me; too much of the former would continuously highlight my personal creative deficiencies and make me feel like crap all the time.

I’ve been pushing really hard for the last week or so to get through to the end of AtD because I’m traveling a week from today and didn’t want to have to carry that brick around with me the whole time. Now I’m off to do what I predict will be reading of a lighter style in Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. I’m also picking through Best American Nonfiction for 2007 (edited by David Foster Wallace, one of my faves). From there who knows? Maybe the book-length study of Wallace’s Infinite Jest that should arrive in 30 days or maybe another reread of the subject of that study. Maybe back for a second shot at Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Zadie Smith and Gass are on my wish list, so maybe they’ll round out my year. Or more likely I’ll punctuate hours and hours of TV with the occasional batch of poems or shorter fiction. Recommendations always welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a pretty deflating review of DeLillo’s Falling Man. Last Saturday evening, I myself fell down the last four or five of our stairs and banged my left big toe up. Whether or not it was actually broken or just cracked or had a bone bruise or whether I’m maybe just a big old wuss is a matter best left to the doctor (whom I didn’t see fit to visit, as he’d at best have just given me a splint and happily charged me $300 for it). But I did that evening find myself visiting this very blog. As Mleeka glanced over and saw what was on my screen, she asked if I was updating my Falling Man entry to include an account of my own inadvertent portrayal of that character. That wasn’t my intention, of course, but her comment so amused me that I thought I’d make a note of it.

No, this is not some abstract rumination about poetry. It’s more a brief review/advertisement for the July/August 2007 volume of the venerable publication of the same name. It’s a really good read, from cover to cover, with very few exceptions. I often find much of the poetry between the covers of the magazine to be not exactly to my taste, but there was enough of a variety of form and semi-form and humor and literary reference and ingenuity in this issue that even where things weren’t precisely to my taste, my overall judgment of this issue’s poetry was one of approval.

Particular favorites were Joan Murray’s parodies of Yeats and Hopkins, of which I’ll quote the latter in full (minus special Hopkins accent marks) until somebody tells me to take it down:

Brush and Floss: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Since your gums are not yet teething?
Teeth, all the ones you lost, you
Miss, especially those front two?
Ah! as the mouth grows older
It will earn a dental folder
Year by year, nor shed a tear
Though mounds of molars disappear;
And yet your mouth will gape in fear.
Oh the horror! child, the pain,
Though dentists jab novocaine,
Nor mouth knows, no nor gums, can say
The last laugh of tooth decay:
It is dentures man was born for,
It’s your baby teeth you mourn for.

I also really liked poems by Todd Boss, of which one, in excerpt, follows (it’s one of those annoying poems whose title is also the first line, but in this case, I forgive it):

How Smokes the Smolder

at neck, at
shoulder, that

stokes a man
as he grows

older. Nothing
rages, nothing

fumes, No one
races through

the rooms,
alarmed. How

It goes on like that for another dozen lines or so, just yanking you down the page in these staccato phrases packed with oddly laconic but visually rich description. It’s really good stuff, really different than a lot of the abstract, boring stuff I’ve read in the pages of Poetry.

I can’t help myself. Another one, in its entirety, from X.J. Kennedy (spacing screwed because I’m too lazy to make it work, though the spacing makes it better):

Blues for Oedipus

Oracle figured
You’d come a cropper,
Kingdom-killin
Mammyjammin
Poppa-bopper!

Gods dished you the shit
Like you deserves —
Now your eyeballs
Danglin
From they optic nerves.

The prose in this edition is good as well. Many bemoan the space the magazine has dedicated to prose and to letters to the editor over the last couple of years, but I’ve really enjoyed this shift (if only because the poetry often escapes me). One thing I really liked the concept if not the execution of in this issue was a brief Q&A with poets about particular poems. There are a half dozen or so of these scattered throughout the issue, and I only wish the editors had selected better poems to publish and do the Q&A on. Still, the idea of an occasional Q&A interests me.

The issue includes funny story/essay things by Naeem Murr (a probably at least partially fictive memoir-type thing about life as a novelist dating a poet) and Michael Lewis (a faux diary entitled “Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants” that’s funny enough to merit a few quotes below; it’s told from the perspective of a presumably fictive Giants trainer).

I lingered outside long enough to hear Eli [Manning] say, “I’m not saying poetry will make us a better football team.” I’m saying it will make us a more meaningful football team.

Finally! I whispered to myself, a little fire! But instead of throwing punches, they just jabbered away at each other. Words, words, words. I didn’t understand all of what was said but one of the assistant coaches filled me in later. It started when Plaxico refused to rhyme or scan, and our center Shaun O’Hara called him “a narcissist who fails to grasp the artistic power of constraints.” That led all the receivers — even Shockey! — to get pissed off. They gathered into a little group in the end zone and mocked the sonnets the O-line has been working on. The O-line screamed that pentameter was the natural length of a spoken English sentence; the receivers screamed back that pentameter was for fat guys who are easily winded and that the poet in peak condition spoke hexameter, if not octameter.

The defense met to talk about their fourth-quarter collapse. One of the coaches asked Mathias what the fuck he was thinking when he just let go of Vince young. “Coach,” says Mathias, “I couldn’t help it. Just when I grabbed hold of him, a clerihew popped into my head.”…

Vince Young
Your Fu is not yet Kung
Your hop ain’t hip, your juke don’t jive
I’m gonna eat your rookie ass alive

It’s hard not to quote the whole fake diary.

One more rave before I close this out. The issue includes a set of mini-essays entitled collectively “Poets We’ve Known,” of which my favorite was a little piece by Sven Birkerts about informal joke-telling gatherings in Boston of Walcott, Heaney, and Brodsky that itself includes most of a joke that made me laugh out loud and try to re-tell it immediately to Mleeka. Then there’s a little essay by recent newsmaker Christopher Hitchens about meeting Auden’s partner shortly after Auden’s death. James Merrill’s former trainer writes to talk about what it was like to guide Merrill through his workout. The only essay I’d remove from the set is by Joseph Epstein, who laments the self-absorption of poets before going on to drop names and establish himself as part of the literary elite as he makes his way through an otherwise pleasant encomium to John Frederick Nims.

And did I mention poems by Edward Hirsch, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Wrigley?

All in all, definitely worth picking up at your local library, if your library happens to carry it, Possibly even worth $5.00 for a back issue.

On the whole, I’ve really liked what Poetry has become over the last few years. The editors seem to be trying to promote a diversity of style and content while engaging the magazine’s audience by accepting and publishing letters to the editor. The annual translation issue is always a treat, as is the annual humor issue. The editors also seem to be interested in hearing new voices. For the next two or three months, they’re considering submissions only from poets previously unpublished within their pages.

Every time a new issue comes in, I’m glad I’ve subscribed.

Just finished reading Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. A decade or so ago, I got hooked on the work of one David Foster Wallace, and in one of his essays, he mentions DeLillo as an influence. He’s also corresponded with DeLillo, who is sometimes listed as one of DFW’s literary forebears. When I learned about all this, I naturally went out and read a few books by DeLillo. First was White Noise, which was great (the kind of book you push on your friends). Then I read a couple of his other shorter books and was less than impressed. They felt sort of soap-opera-y and just didn’t interest me much. I later picked up Underworld and was captivated at once by the opening scene from a baseball game, which felt really authentic and exhilarating. Maybe halfway through that tome, I lost interest and put it down, and I sold the book when we were downsizing our library in anticipation of a move last year. I’ve since read some comments that make me want to pick it back up; maybe I didn’t give it a fair shake. Anyway, when I learned a couple of months ago that DeLillo had a new one coming out, I was interested in giving him another go, so I got Amazon to send it my way.

After the gripping first three-and-a-half page chapter, the book is mostly boring for the rest of the remaining 242 pages. It lapses into the blah melodrama (meloblahma?) of some of DeLillo’s other short work, and I have a hard time caring about the main characters’ emotional ties to one another and to others around them. With the exception of the parts of the book that dramatize events from September 11 and scenes of a performance artist who flings himself from high places and assumes the position of a person caught on film falling from one of the towers, Falling Man feels like the same old stuff of his I read and disliked years ago, aloof descriptions of people behaving in ways they maybe shouldn’t. Why should I read about this kind of stuff when I can just watch Days of Our Lives and check my email at the same time on top of it?

DeLillo does take some breaks from being dull to consider some fairly interesting things. He writes of Alzheimer’s and exercises performed by some of that disease’s afflicted of trying to write down their memories, for example, and the desire of these sufferers to clutch their memories tightly contrasts nicely with the inability of the rest of us to divest ourselves of the memories and images (e.g. that of the falling man that inspires the book and its performance artist) of an event like the collapse of the Twin Towers.

There’s also much in the book of ritual and its meanings and motiviations and their relationship to particular actions. Considered in the context of destructive religious fervor, this is fairly compelling.

I found myself wishing DeLillo had found ways to flesh out these themes in more subtle and broadly engaging ways rather than doing partial character studies of people whose uninterestingness is painful and whose interactions are classic (to me, at least) bad DeLillo.

I had hoped the book would break my heart.

I’m not sorry I read Falling Man, but it wasn’t a hard enough book (it didn’t require much of a cerebral investment at all, and this from somebody who wrinkles his brow aplenty) or a baseline beautiful enough book for me to forgive its imperfections, and it puts me in some doubt as to whether I should bother re-buying Underworld. It surely makes me look forward to diving into Pynchon’s Against the Day (I read the opening section the other day and it was marvelous), which, love it or hate it or (more likely) not understand the hundredth part of it, will be one helluva ride and anything but boring.

Well, I finished Gravity’s Rainbow last night. As noted previously, this was the second half of at least my third and probably fourth attempt at getting through the book. I had the same experience with Pynchon’s V, which I got through a couple of years ago and didn’t especially enjoy but was glad to have read. Reading V was like taking yucky medicine. Reading Gravity’s Rainbow was more like dropping acid. It’s a much more fun read, but it kind of fried my brain. Now I’m off to the Pynchon wiki to see if I can get a little better oriented so that I won’t be as lost during my next reading of it (in I’d guess two years). Meanwhile, I’m taking a breather with Delillo’s so far sort of blah Falling Man before plunging into either Mason & Dixon or Against the Day.

A few weeks (months?) ago, I was reading a lot of poetry and even managed to write a couple of reviews. Then I got busy with work and life, and reading took a backseat to other things (ahem, like TV and stuffing my face with snacks). While I was traveling last week, I took a couple of books with me and managed to read most of one on a plane.

Ray in Reverse by Daniel Wallace was a perfectly pleasant book to read but was sort of ho-hum. I don’t know if bathos is quite the right word for the ending, but I felt like the ending, which I think was supposed to be poignant, wasn’t worth the rest of the book, and it was a little trite. Still, I was very comfortable with the prose style, and I decided to continue with The Watermelon King, which was a much better book. It touches on all the major Southern themes and is an engaging (if not utterly realistic — which is part of its charm) tale. I gather the first part of the book recalls Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Again the prose is very comfortable, and I thought it was a solid read. A friend had also recently read the book, and he tells me that Big Fish, which I was reluctant to read because I had already seen the movie a few years ago, is really an outstanding book, the best of the three, so I’ll plan now on getting over my reluctance and picking that up. And as of this morning, on order from Amazon is his forthcoming Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Wallace is a North Carolina author, I believe a graduate of and currently a professor at my alma mater in Chapel Hill, so his work has a particular appeal to me.

As I don’t have a copy of Big Fish yet but am still in a reading mood, I picked Gravity’s Rainbow back up the other night. I’ve started it a few times over the last decade and have never managed to finish it. I had the same experience with Pynchon’s V and finally got through it a few years ago (which is what provoked me to try Gravity’s Rainbow again. A year or two ago, I read maybe 650 of the 775 pages of my copy but then had to put it down for a long time because work and other things got in the way. Sometime last year, I picked it up again and decided to start from scratch, and I got 550 pages in before life got in the way again. This week, I decided to start from that point again rather than from the beginning in hopes of making it to the end. It’s not an easy book, but my interruptions these last two times haven’t been because of a lack of interest. It’s a very good and engaging book. I think I’ll finish it in the next couple of weeks (it’s rather more slow-going than Daniel Wallace’s books), and the next time I read it, I’ll do so with a reader’s guide so that I understand more than 2% of the historical and literary references.

I started rereading Gravity’s Rainbow a few months ago because Pynchon had a new book (Against the Day) forthcoming, and I wanted to get through his older stuff before trying that one. After GR, I’ve got Mason & Dixon still to plow through (it’s another one I got through a hundred or two pages of a few years ago and put down — lots of people have this experience with Pynchon, I’ve learned). To spur myself on, I did go ahead and order Against the Day this morning (Amazon had it in hardback for $7, a savings of $28, so I couldn’t resist).

I’ve also got Delillo’s newest (Falling Man) ordered, along with a book of poems published by a small press the aforementioned friend runs.

All of these purchases are made with “free” money courtesy of my Amazon credit card. It turns out that I’ve spent enough money lately on things like computers and playgrounds for Lennie and business trips that I had $125 in rewards coming to me. Spending money hand over fist has never been so fun.

I’ve been reading the Poetry Foundation blog lately. I wish dearly that they had an RSS feed of the postings so that I could have them delivered to my feed reader rather than having to remember to go out and fetch them, but the posts have been engaging enough so far that I’m remembering to fetch. One that struck a particular chord with me today with the reading I attended this weekend in mind is The Reading, by Kwame Dawes. It describes very well some of what I experienced as an audience member at the reading this weekend and is a good piece for anybody interested in reading his or her own work to take in.

As part of a recent book-buying spree, I purchased the (recent) new and selected poems of two poets: Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations and Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect. Wrigley I had been referred to a year or two ago by a friend, and after initially being not terribly impressed with his work, I later warmed to it, at least as manifest in his book Lives of the Animals. So he was something of a known quantity. Equi I had never heard of until reading about her new collection I forget where — linked from a link off a blog I’ve recently begun following, I believe. She’s described as being influenced by the New York school, so I should have known to expect what I got (which sounds less flattering than I really mean it to sound).

I’m about halfway through Equi’s book (all the way through the new work and into the selected) now and needed a break. The poems are all very accessible, so my needing a break isn’t a matter of having trouble reading them because they’re difficult. If anything, they tend to be lighter than what I’m really aching for these days. Some of the poems are very funny. Take the following:

Perversely Patriotic

Terrorism has ruined
S & M for me.

Now it just seems
like watching
the news.

It’s a laugh-out-loud and pretty biting observation, and I like it a lot, but its lack of heft makes it hard for me to do more than read it a few times, say “oh,” and move on. The observation is memorable but the poetry is not.

Other poems use accessible language but seem neither to mean much nor to be especially artful, and I find these puzzling. For example (excerpted from “1 + 1 = 3″):

Heard
enough
of your silence

Gold
fisheyes
in aquarium glasses

Lightgeist
iceberg
blackboard and cigarette

River
runs
through a bullet

The stanzas each contain lines of one, one, and three words, so she’s imposing structure on her poem. It’s interesting as wordplay in some cases (”lightgeist”) but seems a flirtation with the cliche in others, and I just don’t understand what Equi is doing here or why she or her editors think some of this stuff should get past the editorial chopping block. She’s by her own admission influenced by the New York school and by Eastern forms, and those influences are certainly in evidence within these poems. It’s distinctly possible that my lack of particular interest in the sorts of poetry that influence her colors my reception of her work. In any case, there are enough little “oh, neat” moments that I’ll go back to her book soon, but I predict that I’ll find very little among the pages memorable as poetry. But then, I warmed to Wrigley on a second reading, so perhaps I shouldn’t write her off so quickly.

I read the new poems (about 20 of them) in Wrigley’s new book in one sitting tonight and was bummed when I flipped ahead to see that only a few were left. As I wrote in an earlier review, he writes smoothly and elegantly of rustic things, and he does so in such a way that I feel as if I’ve experienced the thing when in fact I haven’t. As someone who has trouble getting drawn into movies and TV, much less stories and poems, I think it’s quite a gift for someone to write in such an evocative way.

Almost without exception, all of the new poems in Wrigley’s work are satisfying to me. They tell me stories while helping me to think about more abstract things. He writes about the World Trade Center attacks, of forging a river, of the war, of peace, of a couple of disturbing encounters. For all of his seriousness and peacefulness and quiet philosophy, he also tells a funny joke. The poem I’ll quote in its entirety and hope the copyright police will figure is fair use within the context of a review (if not, I’ll cease and desist, etc.) particularly resonated with me, and while it’s not the richest of the poems in the book, it is I think certainly a lovely one:

For One Who Prays For Me

I do not wish to hurt her, who loves me
and who asks for me only every blossom and more,

but in fact, when I say God I mean the wind
and the clouds that are its angels;

I mean the sea and its enormous restraint,
all its fish and krill just the luster of a heavenly gown.

And while it is true there are days when I think
something more must be in the wind than air, still I believe

the afterlife is dirt, but sweet, and heaven’s coming back
in the lewd, bewhiskered tongue of an iris.

Wrigley’s assessment is a little more new-agey than I’m personally willing to go in a literal sense, but boy does he say it nicely. There’s such placidity in those lines, and understated but oddly strong imagery. The phrasing is smooth, the diction entirely within reach. It’s good writing that I can hardly wait to read more of. It’s something to aspire to.

When I was in college, I did four of my five semesters toward a minor in creative writing with Michael McFee. As part of my recent renewed interest in poetry, I’ve been rereading his poetry collections, and over Christmas, I was given a copy of his recent collection of essays, entitled The Napkin Manuscripts. I read the book while on a business trip to California, and it reminded me of how dear my time studying poems in Chapel Hill was to me. It helped to kindle in me a renewed interest in writing, probably because many of the anecdotes were familiar to me already, because I felt transported back to that period of creativity. One of the essays in the book inspired me to organize what turned out to be a two-person poetry reading I previously announced. It’s a good book that came at a good time for me. The Napkin Manuscripts contains essays about being a southerner, and a southern poet, and having a sense of home; essays about belles lettres and the life poetic; essays about other poets; and the transcript of a conversation between McFee and fellow poet and friend Michael Chitwood held at a conference honoring McFee and his work. It really is a good read.

I’ve visited with McFee a few times since leaving college, once at a reading he hosted at an Asheville book store and once or twice on visits to Chapel Hill, but visits have been few and far between. So imagine my pleasure when I got the following announcement in an email today:

Michael McFee will be at Carpe Librum on Saturday, March 17 at 2:00 pm. A well known author and poet, he is a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of their Creative Writing program.

The book he will be reading from and signing is The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview. Doris Betts did the Foreword.

He has seven or eight poetry collections to his credit and I am not sure how many more books.

Don’t drink green beer, come to Carpe Librum on St. Patrick’s Day.

Provided my impending son doesn’t gum up the works by making a late appearance, I’ll be there for sure. McFee’s a great reader and a very personable guy, and it’s sure to be an engaging event.