How to use this Page

I finished reading My Poets by Maureen McLane. You are probably tired by now of hearing me saw how much I love this book. This will be the last time – for today

I’ve been trying to put together into coherent thoughts what I like about the book so much and was going to post last night but all I managed to do was sit and stare into space thinking about parts of the book I liked and then flipping through the pages rereading favorite bits.

McLane writes about “her” poets with a passion and enthusiasm that is contagious and fun. McLane does not use academic jargon. She clearly loves poetry and writing about it and she wants you to love poetry and the poets she writes about too. Into the mix she brings personal memoir, relating moments of her life to the poetry she discusses. There is subtle play between the criticism, poetry, and memoir elements so that one can glimpse not only how her life experience affects how she reads poetry but also how poetry also creates a frame for looking at her life.

And her language, oh! McLane is a published poet and one can tell by her prose writing in this book. She doesn’t write in paragraphs, she writes in stanzas. Oh they look like paragraphs on the page but they have a lyrical poetic rhythm. She changes up her style too. In the chapter called “My Elizabeth Bishop/(My Gertrude Stein)” she writes the whole thing in a Stenien manner.

In a chapter called “My Translated, an Abecedary,” she lists poets she has read in translation and the translators who brought them to her. So we have “My Akhmatova is Judith Hemschemeyer” and “My Beowulf is Seamus Heaney.” But one must pay attention because she slips in some interesting and suggestive things like ‘My Anne Carson is Anne Carson.” And “My Pushkin does not exist.” And “My Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan.” One can ponder on the list and what it says about translation a very long time.

McLane also includes two centos in the book. A cento is a poem composed of lines taken from other poems. I must admit I was so busy trying to recognize the lines and/or looking up who they were from that I had a hard time following the poem itself. I don’t recall running across a cento before. It makes for interesting reading and the two she includes are crafted so well that they have their own tone and poetic coherence.

Another delight of this book is the things McLane says about her poets and their poems. Things like:

Everybody likes Elizabeth Bishop because she is nice.
Elizabeth Bishop will not cut off your nuts or bare her vagina.

And:

My Wallace Stevens is an insurgent inchling in the bristling forest and a stolid giant rolling metaphysical rhymes down the mountain.

And:

But she [Marianne Moore] is the stealth weapon of American poetry, with a ferocity and a lacerating intelligence few poets have matched. She has a capacity for a Swiftian savage indignation, and for a courtly feline bitchiness one finds more regularly in Saint-Simon and Proust.

Are you beginning to see why I liked this book so much?

My TBR list of poetry has grown enormously from reading this book, not only the from the poets McLane goes into depth about in each chapter, but the poets in her translated list and the poets in her centos and the poets she quotes and mentions in passing.

I initially borrowed the book from the library because I wasn’t sure if it would be any good. I loved it so much I had to buy my own copy. It is one I know I will go back to again and again.

It’s been a wonderful Bookman birthday day today. The cake came out so good and it couldn’t have been simpler. It is basically a single-layer chocolate cake with some cherries in it topped with a can of cherry pie filling and then drizzled with chocolate. What could be easier? And because of the cherries we can pretend that it is nutritious!

I began reading My Poets by Maureen McLane today and very quickly became friends with this book.

The first chapter is short and is a “Proem in the form of a Q&A” Here is a sample:

Why do you read poetry?
I caught this morning morning’s minion.

Why do you read poetry?
Batter my heart.

Why to you read poetry?
I have wasted my life.

Other questions include what is the first poem you remember, why poetry, and why do you write poetry? Here are a couple answers to the last question:

Why do you write poetry?
My purpose here is to advance into
the sense of the weather.

Why do you write poetry?
I sing to use the Waiting.

As if that weren’t marvelous enough, chapter two muses about the word “kankedort” which apparently only appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. From there we move to a chapter called “My Impasses” in which McLane talks about two poetry classes she took as a college freshman in 1985, one of them taught by Helen Vendler. She talks about reading poetry and reading poetry, good readings and bad readings, about finding a way into a poem and being stuck on the outside even though you badly want to understand. And she talks about how, years later, a poem that was so confusing and impossible originally can suddenly open up and let you in and mean so much. It is a really wonderful chapter that I might have to reread and write about because she says so much that is true.

And then chapter four. Oh, I had to stop myself in the middle of it so I wouldn’t rush to the end because it is so utterly fun. Chapter four is called “My Elizabeth Bishop / (My Gertrude Stein)” and it is written in the style of Stein. For her undergraduate thesis McLane decided she was going to write about Stein but Stein resisted her and a gift from a mentor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems turned out to be a wonderful discovery and saved her thesis from disaster. I must give you a taste of the chapter so here is how it begins:

My Elizabeth Bishop begins with Gertrude Stein.
This is not usual.
Bishop is unusual but not in the way Stein is unusual.
I was not used to Gertrude Stein and found I could not get used
    to Stein though I tried.
I was struggling to find a topic for my undergraduate thesis.
This seemed the most important thing in the world.
Whatever is the world to you is the most important thing to
    you.
I would be making myself in this thing.
I was always making myself or being made.
This was unavoidable.
I was planning on being made by Gertrude Stein but she was not
    cooperating.
She was operating on another plane a fractured cubist grid I
    could not make out.

And it appears to go on like this for entire 27 pages of the chapter.

I suppose this kind of book might not be for everyone, but oh, I have a little crush on it at the moment and hope that we manage to be best friends by the final page.

Just when I think I have got my book juggling act under control I suddenly find more books being slipped into the mix. Who is doing this? It can’t be me, can it? I’m sure it isn’t. I am sure there are evil book gnomes at my house, I can hear their gleeful evil laughter as they scurry back into the shadows after leaving yet another good book for me to read. As for the library books that keep arriving for me, I think the evil book gnomes have hacked into my library’s computer system and are manipulating the hold request queue so the books I thought I wouldn’t get for months suddenly all start coming to me at the same time. Stupid evil book gnomes.

Nonetheless, the growing pile is composed of books I am really excited to read. One book I actually bought, pre-ordered two months ago. That book is The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It has many of the same characters in it as Shadow of the Wind and supposedly includes threads from that book as well as Angel’s Game. It is only 278 pages so relatively short. I also received a copy from the publisher that will become a blog giveaway soon.

I thought China Mieville’s YA book Railsea would be the first book of his I ended up reading. I also thought I wouldn’t get my turn for it until September at the earliest. After finishing Clash of Kings I decided I wanted to read Mieville now and began The City and the City. So far it is delightfully strange. And of course I just received notice from the library that my turn for Railsea is now and not in September. It has people in line for it behind me so I can’t dilly-dally.

A book that I just got from the library that I am especially excited to read is My Poets by Maureen McLane. It is being called a book of “experimental criticism” and is part criticism part personal memoir – a hybrid sort of book – about McLanes’s life and poets that have been important to her for various reasons. It sounds so delicious and I have high expectations. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.

Arriving in the mail is a biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World by Benjamin Moser. I’ve been wanting to read Lispector for ages and know nothing about her. I assumed she was American but then caught on that she wasn’t. So I thought maybe she was French and wrote books like those of Maguerite Duras. But it turns out she is Brazilian and wrote in Portuguese. Oxford University Press is the publisher of the biography and they also sent some excerpts of her novels. However, I requested The Hour of the Star from the library, a novella, so I can have more than a sample.

Of course these books are in addition to all the books I am already in the middle of. Looking at my outstanding library requests it also appears it will shortly be my turn for A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. Yikes! I am going to need another vacation with several long plane rides in order to get through all these. How are your own book piles doing? Do you also seem to have an infestation of evil book gnomes?