…that i haven’t written very much about women on here. i assure you, it has nothing to do with my stance on women who write and everything to do with what i’ve been reading lately. also, i don’t write about everything i read on here, sometimes because what i read doesn’t inspire me to write anything about it (this doesn’t necessarily mean that it didn’t inspire me — best case scenario is that a book inspires me to do the worthwhile kind of writing, as in, making stuff up), other times because a book i read is bad or very bad but doesn’t need me trashing it because it’s not like anyone risks picking it up by accident and the critics don’t need correcting because they never even heard of it. but then there have been books that have inspired me that i don’t feel qualified to write about and they were all poetry and that was why i didn’t feel qualified to write about them.
that’s a stupid feeling for me to have. i mean, i’ve got degrees and shit. i took the workshops. (please note i’m being sarcastic here.) but poetry is a weird club, and i have not been extended a membership offer, so while my take on poetry is as unofficial and idiosyncratic as my take on fiction, i can’t say that i would be able to hold it down if anybody came at me like i can with fiction (seriously, with fiction i will destroy you; i want to), especially because they all read, or seem to read, capital c criticism and quote adorno and shit. except now it’s benjamin, i think. i’m old enough to remember when it was derrida.
the flarfists are a good example. i actually like a lot of the poetry. but the presentation (this is so bad. isn’t this bad? don’t you hate it? don’t criticize it; it’s supposed to be bad) and especially the reaction to actual criticism (a weird combination of clannish passive aggression and political correctness) (that last is especially ironic given the poetry itself) make it so i don’t feel like engaging with it. the same is true with “conceptual writing” (with the exception of christian bok), which tends to admit it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but continues to print on.
and i know these folks are good with the google, so now i’m fucked.
indeed
then there was one time i saw this west coast poet read in philly and i thought how weird it is how politically “righteous” many west coast poets are when the west coast lifestyle totally precludes living politically righteously and how a 1-1 teaching load for 6 figures at a state school at constant risk of funding cuts doesn’t seem to jive with the sloganeering i’m hearing (here i should mention that i really like a lot of their writing), and i tried to engage with the poet, and he mumbled some incoherent stuff and we were interrupted by the woman next to me who, no joke, wanted to tell me she was a lesbian, as though this would shock me in philly in 2009, or as though she should be congratulated.
anyway, so yeah, so i haven’t been engaging with poetry here, and this has totally kept the woman count down, because i’ve been reading a lot of women poets and probably 8 out of 10 of my favorite living poets are women.
so pat me on the back goddammit!
for example, a couple months ago i was totally blown away by cate marvin‘s fragment of the head of a queen. but that’s pretty much all i can tell you. i read it twice. it blew me away, every poem did, both times.
but!
last week i read sarah manguso‘s hard to admit and harder to escape, and now i will talk about it.
this is cheating a little because the pieces in this book are presented as stories. they aren’t stories, but this is how they are presented, i think because they are also presented with books of stories by dave eggers and deb olin unferth.
sarah manguso is one of the 8 out of 10 i mentioned. i read her first two books long ago, at least on the scale of her career, and the only reason i’ve held off on hard to admit… so long is because when i really get to liking someone’s work, i like to hold off on that someone’s recent work a little because god only knows how long it will be until i get something new from that person, and i will reread the old stuff and also read a little bit of the new stuff at a time to tide me over.
for example, i’ve had the new brian evenson collection on my desk since pretty much the day it came out, but i’ve only read one of the stories. that way i know that whenever i must read a brand new evenson story i can do it, and when i just want to read some evenson, i’ll pick up one of the other collections.
with the manguso, i wasn’t able to stop and read it all in one sitting. this was because all of the pieces were very small, and also because it was engaging. in the end, it helped me to finally be able to explain what it is i like so much about her work.
there’s a piece in the collection (titled, i guess, “59″) that describes her (manguso, i guess, when she was very young, though since she calls these “stories” it is not necessarily right of me to assume it’s her) sneaking into woods that she was forbidden by her parents to explore and finding it beautiful. to commemorate it, she writes the date and time, as well as “Light. Trees” on an index card and hides it. The piece ends:
The card is long since lost, but I remember the approximate date, early June 1982, and I remember what the card looked like. From this memory I can recall the scene in the woods vividly.
firstly, the prose (here and throughout the collection) is so clean it’s practically like taking a bath, especially after all the shit i’ve been reading lately.
but that far into the collection, that wasn’t what struck me about the passage. what struck me was that it describes exactly what i want writing to do. let me get proscriptive: it describes exactly what writing should do.
taken out of context and isolated like that, it might seem pretty obvious, but it only seems obvious, because it’s not often done, and god only knows what most folks are trying to do with their sentences.
nabokov is probably my all time favorite writer. that dude could make you recall the scene in the woods vividly, even if you weren’t there, even if the scene in the woods was not physically possible. but you know what gets on my nerves about nabokov? all the talk about synesthesia. not from him but about his. synesthesia, that is. i don’t care one bit what color he saw letters in. people who think it had anything to do with literature are tone deaf, because good writing is inherently synesthetic. it’s just a bunch of letters standing in for the whole world, and it should make good readers synesthetic too (this is another reason why books will never go away — the objects themselves can be so pleasing to all six senses) (and if you’ve never tasted a book don’t talk to me).
i should be able to smell a visual description and hear word arrangements and feel ideology and i did when i read hard to admit and harder to forget.
joe wenderoth claimed letters to wendy’s wasn’t a book of poetry.
whatever.
also i finished fragment of the head of a queen last month and although there were some poems that i wasn’t that into, i thought that most of the poems blew me the fuck away.
if you can find it (used on amazon or somewhere) zirconia by chelsea minnis is totally worth picking up.