letters and sodas: booknotes

I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by it.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” it starts, and then goes on to talk about the many kinds of blue, meanings of blue, shades of blue (lapis, ultramarine, turquoise), blue things and blue people and blue places, blue in the sense of “obscene” and in the sense of “having the blues” and also blue just in the sense of the color, how it looks, how it feels. This book is sometimes yearning, sometimes sad, sometimes sexy, always smart: it reminds me of Anne Carson (in a good way), the way it blends the personal and the scholarly or philosophical or historical, bits about the science of color and Newton’s experiments in vision, bits about about Joseph Cornell and Yves Klein, mixed with bits about fucking, about pleasure, about loss, about sorrow.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for months and months, and am glad I finally got around to it. I first read about it in a blog post by Mark Doty, one of my favorite poets; the passages he excerpted made me want to keep an eye out for it. Then Megan got a copy and read it and said I would indeed like it, so I borrowed it from her. And then it languished on my shelf for months, until I saw a sign at McNally Jackson saying that the author would be reading there, which made me decide that I should a) read the book and b) go to the reading. (Speaking of which, MP3s of Nelson reading some of her work, including some of the propositions from Bluets are online here.) So: the reading was pleasing, I bought my own copy of the book, and now I kind of want to read it again, though the rest of my TBR pile is calling to me too.

The back cover gives a better summary than I could: “‘Eunoia,’ which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter.”

This is, as you might guess, both excellent and a little tedious, though more excellent than not. This book is visually really appealing: this edition’s printed on very nice cream paper, and the “chapters” are made up of paragraph-length bits of text that look/read like prose poems. It makes for pleasing shapes, these blocks of justified text on facing pages, and how your eye catches the fact that all the words all contain the same vowel: like this:

(You can actually read the whole book on the publisher’s website, but I’m glad I found the printed version at the library!)

It’s interesting to see how different the sections feel, how the tone changes in part because of the words available to use. In the first section, for example, which uses only As, we get lots of things like: “Hassan can ____”—you can’t have “Hassan watches” or “Hassan watched” so you get “Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash — a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank” (23). As opposed to the Es, where there is no “can,” only action: “Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps” (33). It’s also lots of fun to read sentences aloud (or, if you’re reading on the train like I was, to imagine reading sentences aloud), thinking of the different sounds an A or an E can make.

Plot-wise, the book is, in part, a retelling of the Iliad—ships and war and Helen of Troy—but I found I mostly preferred reading for sound and rhythm to reading for sense, appreciating sentences as sentences rather than as strings of a plot, sentences like: “She enters the deepest sleep — the nether sphere — where sleepers delve the deepest depths” (37). (Although I must admit, the two pages about the Trojan horse were really satisfying to read as a telling of something familiar, not just as words, and there were some descriptions I really liked, like this, of armor being hit by arrows: “the steel sheen gets etched, then dented” (45).) Elsewhere are some annoyingly self-referential moments, sentences like “A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (12), or “We sneer when we detect the clever scheme — the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer, we jest. We express resentment” (32), but I was (mostly) willing to just smile at those and move on. And besides, sometimes the self-referential bits really work, like in the “I” section, where there’s this great shift from the writerly-I to something more active: from “Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script” to “Irish tinsmiths, fiddling with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin whirring drillbits. I pitch in, fixing things. I rig this winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping” (51).

The other thing I really liked about this book, aside from the obvious sense of play, is that it contains lots of list-ish passages, and lots of exciting or satisfying or new-to-me words. By page 30 I had a whole list of words I wanted to look up, which made me think about how I’m pretty sure that the last book I read did not require me to look up a single word (though it did make me look up people and concepts I wanted to learn more about), which made me think about how much I like looking up words (as I sat at my desk before the workday started with a 1980-something edition of the Chambers Dictionary I snagged from a co-worker’s old cube after she left). I looked up “skald” and “cassabanana” and “czardas” and “cadastral” and “caracal” and “avadavat.” (And listed them all on wordnik.com. Mmm, words.)

This book, the first I’ve read of Keith Waldrop’s work, felt difficult, both allusive and elusive, and more abstract than the poetry I tend to prefer. It won the National Book Award for Poetry last year, but somehow I hadn’t heard of it until it caught my eye at the library, and I picked it up knowing nothing about it. The publisher’s blurb says this: “In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings,” which, along with the title, provides a way in to the work: it’s OK if this feels like bits and pieces, and it’s OK if, like Liszt’s etudes, this feels like a challenge. This was one of those books of poetry where, after reading it basically straight through over the course of a few days, I felt like I needed to put it down for a day or two, then pick it up and start over again—which is indeed what I did.

As the title says, this book is a trilogy, made of three sections of poems plus an epilogue. The first section, Shipwreck in Haven, starts with this epigraph: “I can’t swim at all, and it is dangerous to converse/with an unaccustomed Element” (Erasmus). This seemed apt: I felt immediately adrift in this section, though not necessarily in a bad way. (You can read the first part of Shipwreck in Haven here.) How do you start to navigate a text like this? I wasn’t sure. You start with a verb, “balancing,” quickly followed by the sparseness of “austere,” the tease of “Life-/less.” “I have tried to keep context from claiming you,” the poem says, and you feel, or I felt, like that’s an instruction in how to read these poems: just read, and don’t worry too much. This is sense is backed up by interviews with Waldrop: this Huffington Post article quotes a few, including one in which Waldrop says this: “What I write down is a kind of script for something that sounds. I find people often don’t read it that way. [...] I want the words to remain and if people don’t know the meaning of them I don’t think that’s as bad as losing the sound.” So: the first section of this book felt like music and mood, the contrast of inside and outside, landscapes, images. There are landscapes of porticoes, colonnades, marble benches, the “imitation of a wood” (p 21).” There are phrases that stuck with me: “What passes/in the street? Pure image” (p 12), “Nothing but fade and flourish” (p 14), and this, from page 10: “Not—the world— one of/several, as if it could be/different. Nothing. Nothing different.”

Elsewhere, there is wordplay I didn’t really pick up until my second reading: “angels of incidence, rebounding from/waves, but precisely. Reflective angels” (p 16), or the fact that, in the second section of the book, the poems are alphabetized by title, and, within the poems, the stanzas are alphabetical as well. And then there are the collaged bits, the text from other places (also sometimes alphabetized, though again, I didn’t pick up on this ’til my second reading). I am a curious kitten and tend to look things up, but in these poems there was so much that might come from elsewhere, and sometimes it was obvious, and sometimes it wasn’t, and I don’t think it mattered where certain lines came from, but sometimes I wanted to know. So now I know that “I have trekked far” is from The Great Impersonation, a spy novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and that “The action seems to be wholly mysterious, as is fitting” is from a book on Plotinus by John M Rist. There are bits of ghost stories, bits of Wagner’s autobiography, a sentence from “Love Life in Nature”. (Oh Google and Google Book Search. The first two sections of this book were originally published in 1989 and 1995, respectively, and my boyfriend and I were talking about what a different experience reading it in 1989 would be: you can tell that text like: “I was sleeping soundly, when I was roused by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick” comes from some story, or is meant to seem like it comes from some story, but unless it’s from something very famous, or you happen to be very well-read, how would you know where it was from?)

Lastly: The epilogue, “Stone Angels,” made me grin because it’s about a place I have been many times, Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, with its statues and graves and its quiet.

There is a pleasing twenty-three minute audio interview with Waldrop here, in which he talks about his methods of composition.

The Mansion of Happiness is a board game from 1843. I remember having a reproduction of it when I was a kid: I must have had that whole three-game set, but The Mansion of Happiness is the only one I have any memory of, the decorations in the corners of the board, the path from justice and piety around, the spinning teetotum instead of dice.

The Mansion of Happiness is also the name of Robin Ekiss‘s first book of poems, which I picked up at the library because the title and cover caught my eye. I like how it starts, with a first line that’s matter-of-fact but made me want to keep reading (“I was raised in the company of dolls”—in “Preface,” p 3); I also really like, later in the same poem, the image of windows that “burn with interior light/like blood oranges”: the suddenness of that simile, and the rightness of it.

Many of these poems are about childhood/motherhood/daughterhood/womanhood: personal history, family history, the idea of how the self comes from the past; there are also more broadly historical bits, like “Eight Views of the Hôtel-Dieu,”—the “oldest continually operating hospital in Paris,” according to the notes at the back of the book, which was affiliated in the 1880s with “the women’s public asylum where hysteria was first diagnosed and treated” (p 83). I like poems like “World without Birds”, which sent me off to look up what a serinette might be (an instrument to teach songs to canaries); I like the alliteration, and the bird/woman imagery, and all those great bird-y words. I also really liked “The Past Is Another Country”, maybe the start of it especially (and more canaries, too). I wasn’t crazy about most of the poems about dolls, of which there were several: not that they’re bad, they just felt like a language I don’t speak (the first line of the book excepted!).

I think my favorite poems in the book were those in the last section: poems like “Portrait of Houdini with Wife”, “The Lady Vanishes” with its old stage magic tricks and accompanying wonder, and “The Voluptuous Dancing Girls of Egypt,” about part of the 1889 Paris Exhibition: broader history, images that tell stories, imaginings of the past.

(PS: April is National Poetry Month and also National Poetry Writing Month. I’ve written a poem a day in April for a few years now, and tend to read more poetry than usual in April as well. I’ve currently got a small pile of poetry books waiting for me to read them—library books, a book borrowed, a book given to me, a book found on the sidewalk—and I’m excited to read them and unsure which one to pick up first!)

I like poems that are buildings of images; I like poems that are stories. Kristin Naca writes both those kinds of poems, and also writes lyrical poems, romantic poems, poems that play with language(s) and words. Sometimes the poems in this collection were too lyrical for me, or too language-focused, but others are just lovely, like “Speaking English Is Like” (read it here – scroll down a bit to find the link to it). (Megan was reading the book and told me to read this poem (the first one in the book) and it made me want to read more.)

Some of the poems of the book have bits of Spanish in them; others, like “Todavía No”/”Not Yet,” appear twice: once in Spanish and once in English, which makes me wonder about Naca’s writing process: whether she wrote these poems in English first then translated to Spanish, or Spanish first then translated to English, or whether she wrote the poems both in English and in Spanish, maybe going back and forth as she went. The remnants of my high school Spanish are not good enough for me to read the the poems in Spanish in their entirety without consulting their English counterparts, but I can get enough from the Spanish that I didn’t skip over them. Some lines, like this one, seem more graceful to me in Spanish: “La venas de la cala están labradas con paredes. No, piedras. No, pérdidas.” (p 3). (That one in English, two pages later, is this: “The veins of the creek encrusted with walls. No, stones. No, losing.”) But others I like better in English: “Green glows loose without its leaves,” (p 6) is delicious; “El color verde se difumina sin leaves” (p 3) seems less so.

Other poems I liked a whole lot: “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh,” with its images of rooftops and steeples and shoestores and its story of family, “Ode to Glass,” about a Pepsi bottle and memory, “Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian,” and “Las Meninas/The Maids of Honor,” which is probably my favorite poem in this volume because it’s so satisfyingly smart and conversational and visual and, well, also probably because it’s about a painting. Also: parts of “House,” a seven-section prose poem.

The poems in this collection that I like best are the ones that intertwine the speaker’s voice with another voice, with quotes and descriptions from other writers: I like the layers of those poems, the interplay of voices and places and times, how now slips into then or vice versa. Like “Posthumous Man,” (ignore the terrible formatting on that page!) which starts with the line, “I hate the world,” the narrator saying it, which would perhaps be off-putting, too much angst (p 18). But then that line shows up again as a quotation from a letter by Keats, who is also (along with the narrator, I guess) the “posthumous man” of the title, and suddenly, I like the whole poem a lot more, how it moves from the narrator’s disappointments to Keats’s disappointments and back again, how it contains both the domestic and the wild, how satisfying its form is. Other poems I like for the same reasons: “Horse Madness”, with bits of Virgil, “1st My Children,” about Shaker gift drawings (oh man I am a sucker for poems about visual art), “Stranging,” with bits of Cabeza de Vaca and bits of Edward Taylor (this might be my favorite poem in the whole book), and “One Willow”, with bits of Paracelsus and others.

Which isn’t to say that the poems that don’t include other voices aren’t often pleasing. I like the specificity of them, how full of the natural world they are: the names of plants (wake-robin, hedge apple, tulip-poplar, jewelweed) and of animals (grackles, wrens), the way a coyote looks in a field in winter. I like, too, the stories some of them tell, like “Old Man Throwing a Ball” and “On Parlance” (about an ambulance at the next-door neighbor’s house) and the title poem, too.

This book is full, pleasingly so: marginal notes alongside the text, the poems themselves full of quotes from letters and memoirs, both Darwin’s and those of his friends and family. (Padel herself is Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter.) I like the places in this book, the sense of place, whether city or country—the description of Darwin’s father’s estate in “The Miser”, the dark streets and slip-passages in “The Efficacy of Prayer”, the rooms in Christ’s College, Cambridge, as described in the first part of “The Coddington Microscope”.

The poems in the second section of the book, about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, are wonderfully full of nature, of the tropics, of the sea: “The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets,” a poem called “Plankton” starts, and there’s Darwin, over his bout of seasickness, studying plankton and pteropods. A page later he’s on land, and full of wonder: “Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes” captures so much enthusiasm, so much interest. A page after that and he’s in the tropical forest, the “churchy breathing dark” of it, the suddenness of rain, all the new plants: “Leaves of all textures that a leaf/could be: palm, fluff, prickle, matte and plume;/bobbled, shaggy plush. A thousand shades/of ochre, silver, emerald, smoky brass” (pp 32-33). I think this section’s my favorite, the sheer exuberance of it.

Later, there’s London: smog, soot, noise, “the river’s cindery flush/whipped to meringue by the wind” (p 51), chimpanzees at the zoo, a great/funny poem based on Darwin’s famous list of the pros and cons of marriage, the excitement of Darwin’s thought—the way he worked through what he saw and learned on the Beagle voyage—excellent, often, but none of it quite matches the second section for delight.

Letters to a Stranger starts with the quiet dream-like images of “Waking Up”: “curls of dark grass,” “a lake of dark petals” (p 5). The poems continue full of quiet, full of dreams and death. There are some exquisite bits early in the book, like “a few perfect flakes of snow/When the season is just breaking./They strike the water and are nothing at all” (p 14), but I wasn’t too interested in these poems at first. The blank verse felt overly mannered, the subjects too dreary. But as I kept reading there kept on being more to like: the meter started to feel like grace, like just enough rather than too much, and there kept on being gorgeous images, turns of phrase. I’m not sure how much it’s that the book really does get better as it progresses, and how much it was me becoming immersed in James’s voice and tone, seeing his work’s facets differently.

I like the poems with literary or classical references, “The Moonstone,” for instance, or “Jason,” with its golden images, the wonderful line, “I learn the lion color of these hills,” (p 20), or the fairy-tale-ness/un-fairy-tale-ness of “Frog.” Later, “Two Aunts,” with its images of the narrator’s odd prairie forebears, (“sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk”) (p 67) is odd and wonderful, and I like bits of poems like “Wild Cherries,” lines like “June fastens everything in a silk repose./Lilacs have dropped their stars with little effort” (p 47), or “Peonies,” which says, of the flowers: “They are arranging themselves in a green jar/And shatter like expensive glass/Over an inch of cold tapwater” (p 62).

The flap copy of this book calls it “a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator,” and says it’s “not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle,” all of which sounds promising—though really, it was the cover that caught my eye when I saw this book on a table in McNally Jackson sometime over the winter. (It’s a print by Hiroshige: “Mannen Bridge, Fukagawa.”)

I like (some of) the journal-ish prose-ish poems best, the clear and solid images of them. Elsewhere, I feel like there’s often this over-the-top-ness to McGrath’s phrasing, something show-off-ish, a pulling back from the beautiful or “poetic” image: but I like the beauty more. In one poem, for example, he describes the plantar fascia as the “inverted hammock/on which the body rests its burden”— a pleasing image—then follows it with “like a red-faced tourist/in the shadow/of a coconut palm” (“Ode to the Plantar Fascia,” p 8). Bashō and his poems come up a few times in the first of the seven notebooks, and I like McGrath best when he’s seeing the world in a Bashō-esque way: luminous images. In poems like “January 17,” there’s play and playfulness, but also a willingness to let the image sit: “Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields,” or “pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons” (pp 10-11). This whole poem is great, full of growing things (strawberries, eggplants, snapdragons) and the details of place, the changing landscape of South Florida, bits like this:

From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettuce—the very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for sale— (p 14)

I love some of McGrath’s descriptions of the everyday, like the bit in “Dahlias” where the narrator talks about “Life in the surface of things, artifactual energy, layer upon layer, room after room,” and then: “Shoes piled in a basket by the door. Umbrellas, a lunchbox, a brown paper shopping bag, the familiar loops of its handles, arc of the string like the curve of the skater’s trajectory and the steam from the cooling towers blown west” (p 40). Also satisfying: the poems that describe the landscape as seen from airplane windows, the forms of the earth and the forms of the things people have built on it, and “April 26,” the funny and sweet conversational tone of it: kids and a playground and ivy on stone walls. In the “Dawn Notebook” section, there are many haiku, some of which are too funny/gimmicky, but some of which have grace, like the last bit of “Night Mist” and all of “August.” Toward the end of the book, “Eclogue,” which juxtaposes Hiroshige and Miami, is great, and so is “Hiroshige,” a few pages later. (Read both here.)

Most of these poems center on, or circle around, the speaker’s mother. “I maul her into memory,” the first poem says, but warns us, too, that “no story is true” (p 3). There is strain and violence, violence against the speaker’s mother, and then her responding violence against the world. I think my favorite of these poems is “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas,” which is ballsy and funny, a way to capture an outsize figure, super from the first phrases: “After my mother won independence in 1836,/she dysfunctioned as her own nation,” then continuing with twists and perfect turns of phrase (p 5). I like “A Fact Which Occurred in America” lots, too, the blending of the personal—the fifth grade teacher who “kept saying We lost, we lost” about the Civil War, the boy kissing another boy in the trees behind the playground—with larger cultural histories, and with the struggle between those who have power and those who don’t (and how that struggle can end up pitting those without power against each other, too) (p 14). “Parthenogenesis” is another pleasing poem, with its blend of Homer and beauty pageants, its juxtaposition of “omen-eyed” Cassandra and Miss New Jersey (p 22). The six sections of “Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent” are excellent, too, and not just ’cause I’m often a sucker for poems about paintings: I love the clear images of these, the imagined thoughts of artist and model, the way that these poems, like others in the collection, play with power dynamics: here is the artist fixing his model in paint; here is his model, walking away. The collection’s final poems, all of which involve difficult love, are satisfying, poignant without melodrama: I liked “We Exult in Your Pain,” and “The Enemy,” and “Naming the End,” and “Love the Shattered Thing.” (I liked this whole collection much more, on re-reading it, than I did after reading it for the first time. Maybe I over-poetried in April, and needed the break of reading a novel and a few issues of The New Yorker as breathing-space, before more poems.)