Reading List: April 2015
The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the April 2015 issue share some books that held their interest.
Fatimah Asghar
I recently just read Ilya Kaminsky’s book Dancing in Odessa and was completely blown away by it. I heard him read at AWP last year and was moved to tears, but only recently explored his work on the page. I read the book three times—once out loud, twice by myself. The words are so delightful and easy to breeze through, but the more time that you spend with the words, the more gifts they give you. I also have been reading Hieu Minh Nguyen’s This Way to the Sugar, which is such a tender exploration of masculinity, sexuality, and family. I also have Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi on my desk, a book that I have been working up the courage to read.
At night before I go to bed I have been re-reading The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. I used to read this book a lot when I was a kid. As an adult, this book reads like poetry. There are a lot of beautiful passages concerning the idea of being real, the relationship between self, love, and existence.
As this is the BreakBeat Poets issue, I think it’s important to mention what music I have been listening to. I can’t stop listening to Mick Jenkin’s mixtape The Water[s] and Kendrick Lamar’s new album. Also, I’ve been listening to K.Raydio’s album One Drop a lot—it’s great music to write to as well as to bring into classrooms to share with my students.
Tara Betts
Recently, I’ve been interested in the constructs of speculative and science fiction featuring characters of color. One of the authors that I want to read more of is Karen Lord. I just finished her brief novel Redemption in Indigo. Its structure is similar to Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, but the female protagonist undergoes a journey that I find compelling. I’ve also been looking at Adilifu Nama’s Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, an analysis of black comic book characters. I’ve also found myself looking at anthologies like So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond.
I recently read Alicia Erian’s The Brutal Language of Love, which is interesting to me because it takes on the artful brevity that reminds me of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maude Martha, but it also tells stories in these unexpected moments that sound like the different perspectives of women talking as they’re going through their dresser drawers, sitting at a desk or a table and sipping a cup of coffee when the memories return as stories in vivid detail. Fiction writer Julia Brown suggested Attack of the Copula Spiders by Douglas Glover, which I paired with Jonathan Franklin’s Writing for Story. Both have been helpful for approaching prose. I’m daydreaming about reading Paul Beatty’s The Shuffle and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.
It is easy for me to devour poetry. Some of the collections that I’ve read recently include David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle, Danez Smith’s [insert} Boy, Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN: An American Lyric, A Hard Summation by Afaa Michael Weaver, Malachi Black’s Storm Toward Morning, Venus Thrash’s The Fateful Apple, and Bettina Judd’s patient. I’d like to soak in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov.
Mahogany L. Browne
When I am reading Patricia Smith's "Should've Been Jimi Savannah" I am my truest self. I am learning how the page bends for all women, especially black women. When Patricia's title poem speaks of the blessing of a father's naming...how she longed for "the blues-bathed monkey of a ball breaker..." I am my truest self. Reclaiming what was mine in memory, or re-memory. I am standing beside Ms. Smith. Reading poems from my journal, asking "what is at stake?" And when I am praying, I am holding Jan Beatty's "Red Sugar." I am my most honest self here too. I am finding permission to grieve and fail and shake the bones of my ghosts free. Beatty admits "I am smiling & shooting" and I smile and I point my pen, my toes, my eyes towards a different place. Away from my body it all falls. The doubt. The dismissal. The disregard. These women challenge me. These writers stamp each page with a map that leaves me trailing each poem, one by one, back into the night.
Eve L. Ewing
Of late I have been reading and mentally remixing two works exploring questions of representation in art, particularly how representations of blackness are fraught, contested, or rendered invisible. The first is a short essay series from the Boston Review, "Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde," exploring the implicit assumption that the avant-garde voice is necessarily white, and the corollary notion that a poet's voice is inherently raceless if one does not include legible racializing markers in one's work. My favorite entry in the collection comes from Dorothy Wang, who had me leaping from my seat with this assertion:
A poem without any overt ethnic or racial markers is assumed to be racially ‘unmarked.’ Little or no attention is paid to how poetic subjectivity, which overlaps with but is not limited to racial subjectivity, might inhere in a poem’s language and formal structures—in what is unsaid or unspoken at the level of ‘content’ but manifested through aesthetic (poetic) means.
The second is "Lighten Up," a graphic essay in which artist Ronald Wimberly shares an account of being asked to lighten a black character's skin tone in a Wolverine comic. The composition, visual impact, color array, and narrative pacing are all stunning, and I came away thinking about the way blackness is at a perpetual risk of being de-canonized in every artistic medium—often in very public ways, as with the seeming erasure of blackness from certain narratives of the future of hip-hop recently. With the click of a mouse, a black character simply becomes something else. Alternatively, when an artist like Kehinde Wiley asserts an indomitable blackness, that move is deemed perverse or depraved. That seems like an impasse, but it also has a certain liberatory potential. All we can do is, as avery r. young constantly admonishes, "be blk!" in our artistic production and the fullness of our lives. As if we had any other choice.
Britteney Black Rose Kapri
Ready Player One—Ernest Cline
Missing You Metropolis—Gary Jackson
All the black boys finally stopped packing switch blades—Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
Nate Marshall
The newest thing I’m reading is the poet Ladan Osman’s book The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. Her poems have struck me since I first encountered them and this book is a joy to experience. She has a playful intelligence that permeates her bending of language that reminds me of the best of Evie Shockley or Lil’ Wayne. I’m particularly fond of the poet’s narrative poems that live in childhood. They manage to often be engaging and even funny while handling subjects of the most heft. One such moment happens in the poem “Section 8” where Osman writes:
The free toys from Salvation Army are embarrassing
because we’re Muslim and anyway, Santa never comes to
houses that
don’t have chimneys and real stockings, even though you left
him
milk and cookies warmed in the microwave.
Another book I’ve recently revisited is Martín Espada’s book Imagine the Angels of Bread. I’m a huge fan of Espada and his work and these poems in particular. One thing I always admire about Espada’s poems, especially the title poem of this book, is their optimism. One of the difficult things about much so-called political or socially engaged poems is they tend to live primarily in only the trouble of the world. Espada reminds me that as a poet that I must imagine the world I want as well as tell the complicated truths of this one.
Bonus Track: In the spirit of the April issue I’ll also give a music selection. The song “Food for Thought” by hip-hop producer IKON features strong verses from Saba (a rapper I met who frequents Chicago poetry open mics), NoName Gypsy (a former youth poetry slam champion), and Malcolm London (a BreakBeat Poets contributor). In the words of NoName, “You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout my metaphors they stretch for hours.”
Michael Robbins
I am rereading all of Wallace Stevens. I am reading William Acker's version of Tao Yuanming and Burton Watson's of Hanshan. I am reading Stanley Cavell's The Senses of Walden. I have been looking at the photographs of Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. The last contemporary novel I read was Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which is as good as everyone says it is.
Jamila Woods
For when my pen feels like a Sisyphus stone:
I’ve returned to Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. This book is the perfect pick-me-up for any artist in the midst of a new stage in their practice. Fear and self-doubt are my worst enemies as an artist, but they are also the only obstacles fully in my control. In one of my favorite chapters of the book, a music student complains to a Master pianist that the music always sounds better in his head than it does coming from his fingers. The Master responds saying, “What makes you think that ever changes?” Bayles says an artist’s vision is always ahead of execution—and it should be. The space between what we dream and what gets pressed into the record holds the energy that drives us to our next project.
For when there’s a bag lady in my chest:
Like Erykah Badu said, “One a these days / all them bags / gon’ get in your way … so pack light.” There’s the age-old question about whether or not artists need to suffer to create good art. Last year, I found my sadness to be more numbing than inspiring. I realized that if I had spent half the emotional and mental energy I spent trying to cultivate romantic relationships on cultivating my art, I would have been a much more productive and happier person. In all about love: new visions, bell hooks emphasizes using love as a verb, and holding ourselves accountable to the actions we take towards ourselves and others. She defines love as, “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” By this logic, establishing a routine art practice is an act of self-love.