Reading List: September 2016

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the September 2016 issue share some books that held their interest.

Gary Barwin
So what has recently left the ol’ nightstand bookstack? For one, these two: the mysterious allusive metaphysical dreamzones of Paul Willems’s short story/prose poem collection, The Cathedral of Mist which contrasts with the incisive perspicacity and courageous willingness to examine life as it is lived and spoke in Margaret Christakos’s essay/memoir/poetry book Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex, Bloodloss, & Selfies.

And I’ve recently reread the latest Stuart Ross, who stood outside his own book launch wearing a sign that said, “Boycott Stuart Ross Commercial Sell-out.” His A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent is certainly no sell-out but resplendent with Ross’s characteristic inventiveness, compassion, and perceptive surrealism. I also loved his recent great columns for Open Book Toronto.

I reread Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human to prepare to be writer-in-residence at a number of youth shelters. After I shared some of the poems with the youth, several took pictures with their phones so they could look them up later. We also wrote some Harjo-inspired poems. “I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear.”

Finally, three last night-reads: Michael e. Casteels’s micropress, Puddles of Sky, has been publishing some real wonders, especially the periodical, illiterature. illiterissuesixature is a delightfully creative mash-up of one-word poems. And Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry by Jonathan Ball and Ryan Fitzpatrick offers a wide range from the ever-popular category, “humorous experimental Canadian poetry,” along with short & sharp commentary. The introduction alone is worth enduring the great selections.

And because not everything is poetry, Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is a harrowing, vital, yet witty and inspiring nonfiction book which explores the history and experience of indigenous people in Canada and the U.S.

And now back to reading the new tottering pile.

Tina Boyer Brown
This summer I read two novels: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both novels are haunted. In The Farming of Bones, a young Haitian woman narrates her days and dreams through the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. This book is lovely and brutal.

To read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I avoided flipping back and forth from the family tree that precedes the novel. The town of Macondo and the Buendia family take their full shape. In the last fifty pages, Marquez illuminates the whole novel in some real book magic.

This summer, too, I was enchanted by Dylan Thomas’s “It Is the Sinner’s Dust-Tongued Bell.”

Soon, I’ll finish Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Robin Coste Lewis and Ocean Vuong are up next.

Rachel Corbett
For the past few years I’ve been overwhelmingly immersed in the poetry and prose of Rilke, as well as in biographies on him and his early mentor, Rodin, as research for my book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, which is excerpted in the September issue of Poetry. But now that I’ve finished the project I find myself taking a 180-degree turn, from reading about poetry to reading about money.

I’m currently knee-deep in Nancy Isenberg’s new book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, which has been for me a stunning reeducation of America’s origin story, and how our contemporary poverty crisis is embedded within it. It also coincides nicely with an artist book I’m in the process of editing, Manhattan Marxism, due out from Sternberg Press in early 2017. Although its author and artist, Rainer Ganahl, takes a far more irreverent approach to the topic of class in his work—like his 2013 staging of a Marx-themed fashion show, titled Comme des Marxists—it takes as its subject another microcosm of extreme wealth disparity, Manhattan.

Alfred Corn
In her memoirs Simone de Beauvoir speaks regretfully of a period when her reading was “unsystematic,” not part of any particular project. For good or ill the same has applied to my own reading habits once undergrad days were past. I dive into whatever interests me at the moment, whatever I stumble upon, whatever people send me. Why did I suddenly decide to read David Barsamian’s Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky this summer? Not sure. Of course Chomsky is one of our few remaining critical thinkers, but there is probably more to it. Though published fifteen years ago, the insights about what Chomsky terms the “state-corporate nexus” are acute and timely. And the interview format makes the absorption of thorny concepts go more smoothly.

Maybe because I had a selection of poems translated and published in Spain earlier this year, I’ve been going back to hispanophone literature. August was the eightieth anniversary of Lorca’s assassination, so I read the Ian Gibson biography of him. Which then led me to look up two of Lorca’s plays that I hadn’t read or seen: Yerma and El Publico. The latter, so far as I know, hasn’t been translated into English. No surprise, because it is his strangest—dreamlike, incantatory, disjunctive. I understand it as a frontal assault on orthodoxies (artistic, social, religious), and, like all such works, imperfect. One goal, I think, was to make same-sex orientation more plausible for his place and time. As for contemporary poetry in Spain, I read an anthology titled Desde la mar a la estepa issued by the new publisher Chamán Ediciones, one of its highlights being the work of Antonio Rodríguez Jiménez, instantly recognizable as a future classic.

Following up on Clarence Major’s selected poems from a year ago (From Now On: New and Selected Poems 1970–2015) and his new volume of short stories (Chicago Heat and Other Stories), I went back to a critical book he published many years ago titled The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work (1974) to get some perspective and found it revealing both for the writers he discusses (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, others) and for his own aims. Though not opposed to fiction that incorporates political perspectives, he argues that these must not develop at the cost of artistic values; and he is critical of any automatic recourse to victimhood. Because the essays date back more than forty years, millennial readers won’t recognize the names of some of the authors discussed, which is in line with a fact I’ve observed before. African-American authors can usually count on a lot of fanfare when they first appear. But then, as time passes, enthusiasm and support dry up, all the coverage and praise then going to newer figures. Granted, the same is generally true of all identity categories, but it seems particularly acute in the case of Black writers. Given the settled value, why ignore them merely because a new kid shows up on the block?

For several years I’ve been working on a translation of the Duino Elegies, now nearing completion. So I was very interested in Rachel Corbett’s article I read in an early copy of the September Poetry. It reflects on the creative association between Rilke and Rodin, a key phase in the poet’s development. There has been, in Wales and elsewhere, a recent Dylan Thomas revival and celebration. A new edition of his poetry has been issued with an introduction by Paul Muldoon, which I’ve read, agreeing with Muldoon that the standard critical estimate of Thomas has to be revised upward. This year also saw a new edition of Bunting edited by Don Share under the title The Poems of Basil Bunting. We’ve had earlier such volumes, but Share’s is a critical edition with an informative introduction, some hitherto unpublished texts and drafts, plus variorum and scholarly annotations—first-rate work of scholarship, sensitively produced. As for recent new poetry books, I’d like to recommend Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974–2004; James Byrne’s Everything Broken Up Dances; a selection of Emmanuel Moses’s poems translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker under the title Preludes and Fugues; Troy Jollimore’s Syllabus of Errors; Robert Archambeau’s Kafka Sutra; John McCullough’s Spacecraft; a selection of poems by the Iranian poet Seyed Morteza Hamidzadeh translated from the Persian and published under the title Exile Me; and The Lighthouse Above the Graveyard: A Surrealist Séance, by John Thomas Allen and Allen Gullette.

Tarfia Faizullah
I read pretty randomly and broadly. Here’s a haphazard and incomplete selection of a few good stories-inside-stories I was moved by while I was on the road, on the deck, or posted up on my couch:

Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

“You would not know where I was from/if I didn’t keep reminding you.” Vievee writes in the poem “Anti-Pastoral,” reminding me that we live in many overlapping and distinct worlds at once. Every time I return to her prismatic poems, such astonishing feats of thought language, I learn something irrevocably transforming and new.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

I’ve been reading this book at least every year since my childhood. I learn something new each time. This time, it was daring oneself to expand and deepen beyond one’s boundaries so that we may learn love is not just a favor we expect or a longing we feel, but also a gift of responsibility, not obligation, towards others. “There is such a thing as a tesseract,” claims Mrs. Whatsit, and many years later, I’m in whole-hearted agreement.

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton

I recently deactivated Facebook for a month, but still had residual unscratched curiosities about the lives of others. Sexton’s letters were the perfect appeasement and are chock full of delights: elegantly articulated jabs at James Dickey, wise words of encouragement to young writers (“What I mean is this—believe in what you love”), candidly heart-breaking vulnerabilities (“It must be a diff world…to believe instead of longing to…”), and metaphysical ruminations on process (“and you see, ‘inside’ is the place where poems come from”). Real talk.

Zilka Joseph
The Hybrid Muse, A Transnational Poetics, and Poetry and Its Others are groundbreaking books by Jahan Ramazani that I return to, time and time again. His knowledge of global literature, his insights into what he calls “transnational” poetry, and his discussion of complex worlds that writers of colonized nations and of the diaspora inhabit, is invaluable. He argues how cross-cultural references to history and tradition are vital to a rich and living world literature, and continues to address the “persistent imbalance in the American academy’s understanding of world Anglophone literature” (Michael North), and in the understanding of the literature of diaspora in America.

Nina McConigley’s brave and poignant book of short stories Cowboys and East Indians is about immigrant life and identity. It is a necessary book because it focuses “on the not-often mentioned” immigrant experiences, and examines unflinchingly the issues that arise from displacement and loneliness. McConigley delves into the lives of ordinary people, and writes sensitively about them and the complexity of the human condition. We are reminded of difficult issues such as how people of different races and ethnicities are perceived and treated both in the country of origin and in the adopted country.

Other books I read recently (or re-read) and enjoyed (and/or argued with) are: W.S. Merwin’s Migration, Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, Vijay Seshadri’s 3 Sections, Laura Kasischke’s Infinitesimals (Space, In Chains is another favorite), Sarah Messer’s Dress Made of Mice, Saleem Peeradina’s Final Cut, Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Margaret Noodin’s Weweni, Lorna Goodison’s Supplying Salt and Light, Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, Jeff Kass’s Knuckleheads, Desiree Cooper’s Know The Mother, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home. Two books still on my list to read are Amit Majmudar’s Dothead and Adil Jussawala’s Trying to Say Goodbye.

Clark Moore
There’s no getting around my obsession this summer with Adam Fitzgerald’s poem “Time After Time.” The poem is a riff on Cyndi Lauper’s hit single from the 80s, made famous for its haunting, lovelorn sentimentality, and killer hooks. Fitzgerald abstracts on these elements, integrating lyrical and rhythmic themes from the original, with farther-reaching tangents and surrealities of his own design. I love the suspended tension between Fitzgerald’s novelties and Lauper’s more familiar comforts. Of course Fitzgerald’s poem is unmistakably his own. With a voice both lucid and dry in its ecstasy, its brilliance is that of reflection—as if from a paradisiacal time before time, which we’re still able to experience within the novelty of our own.

Another of my favorite pieces this summer is an essay by Genese Grill from The Georgia Review, “Almandal Grimoire: The Book as Magical Object.” The article is an incredibly smart and impassioned defense of the book as aesthetic object, and argues for its timeless relevance in the face of encroaching obsolescence. Grill warns against the despair of treating books as if they are separate from the physical world, celebrating instead “the vital relationship between the book’s body, the ideas contained within it, and the world outside.” Hopefully she’ll forgive me for having read it online.

Pascale Petit
The collection I had to bring to Cumbria for my residency in the Lake District is Alice Oswald’s Falling Awake. I kept reading “Dunt” out loud when it appeared in Poetry London years ago, and rushed to buy “Tithonus” in pamphlet form the moment I heard it on the radio. As if these are not enough, “Swan” is simply a masterpiece. Who is as good as her? I reckon it might be a number of outstanding poets making their debut now.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds leaps from war poem to confession in one line, plumbing the depths of what it is to be human in sumptuous and acrobatic language. I’ll be buying all his books. Although Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s first collection, Doe Songs, isn’t out and not yet snapped up by a publisher, I predict it will be a stunner, having had the pleasure of a preview while mentoring her. I’m impatiently awaiting second volumes by five other debut poets: any tasters I can find by Natalie Diaz, Liz Berry, Sarah Howe, Andrew McMillan, and Niall Campbell are instantly savored, kept to show to students and reread at leisure.

The collection I reread most last year was Mark Doty’s Deep Lane. I’d heard him read “King of Fire Island,” which features a stag, one of my favorite creatures, and was thrilled that it was even better than I remembered when it came out on the page. And the gem “Little Mammoth” makes me stop and sit immersed in the after-effect—this is his best book yet!

I don’t think Selima Hill is well-known in America but she should be. Her two latest, Jutland and The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence, are among her best. She’s an out-and-out original and ought to have won every major prize by now. Finally, I must include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. It’s haunted me all year, and should be on every poetry syllabus.

John Shoptaw
I like reading bird books, partly because I like learning truths about poems. Now you may be thinking, poetic truth is of an entirely different order from factual truth. Cortez, Balboa? Whatever. But there are poems in which a belief about some worldly thing is central to their argument. Take Stevens’s “Of Mere Being”:

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

But what does Stevens mean here? Paul Mariani in The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens writes that in his last poem Stevens reached a place “where one knows that it is not reason that makes us happy or unhappy.” Mariani tells many truths in his fine biography, but this reading is not one of them. “You know then” sends us back to the previous tercet, which tells us “it” refers to the bird’s song. If a songbird means or feels anything, it has nothing to do with us, and should not, then, prompt our own feelings or meanings, as in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (“Too happy in thine happiness...”). Who knows?  Well, Jennifer Ackerman for one, who in The Genius of Birds notes that a singing bird is rewarded with “feel-good chemicals such as dopamine and opioids.... It’s as if his own singing turns him on.” Given the recent genomic research that singing birds and humans have in common “more than fifty genes that flick on and off,” Ackerman knows that it is indeed reasonable to feel happy or unhappy from a bird song or a bird poem.

R.A. Villanueva
Still have yet to find a better characterization of—or, rationalization for—my frenetic reading habits than this short reflection by Morgan Parker:

When I write, I overwhelm myself: The TV’s on in the background playing a movie or a reality show, I’m listening to music, I’m texting five friends, the window’s open and I’m eavesdropping on the conversations and arguments on my Bed-Stuy street below, the coffee table is stacked with books—art books, poetry collections, essays. Because I don’t know what stimulus will jumpstart a poem, which voice or atmosphere will turn me on, I douse myself in all of them at once. I’m endlessly curious (read: nosy), and approach my writing as an ethnographer: observing the behaviors, languages, impulses, and rituals of other people and myself. I take furious notes wherever I am, recording observations and thoughts. I hoard and collect. That’s how I compose poems—getting full on everything … The poem’s energy comes from outside stimuli, allowing its own voice to be thrust up to the surface.

It’s her verbs that get me: “overwhelm,” “jumpstart,” “douse,” “hoard,” “collect,” in particular. I recognize finding comfort in simultaneity, trusting the thrill of warping around a multiverse I’ve made.

Jump to now. Being in the U.K. brings the chance and challenge to live apart from home’s familiar venues, presses, circles. And so in that spirit, here’s a sampling of what’s moved me in recent months:

No Traveller Returns—Vahni Capildeo (this is her first book; her newest, Measures of Expatriation, is likewise sensational)

Faber New Poets 16—Rachel Curzon

The Wild Gods—Malene Engelund

Matric Rage—Genna Gardini and the myth of this is that we’re all in this together—Nick Mulgrew (two collections from the ever-daring uHlanga Press, based in South Africa)

White Whale—Victoria Kennefick

Chick—Hannah Lowe

Titanic—Bridget Minamore and A Silence You Can Carry—Hibaq Osman (two chapbooks from Out-Spoken Press, a ferociously independent publishing house that’s also behind one of the best live reading series in London).

Spending mornings at the Saison Poetry Library and nights watching the wild brilliance of poetry collectives like Burn After Reading, Spit the Atom, and Octavia rumble around London. Also bold, phenomenal: Barbican Young Poets, whose latest anthologies from 2013-14, 2015, and 2016 should be required reading.

I’ve been lucky enough to sit with a few new manuscripts as they take shape. Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall, Toni Stuart’s Krotoa-Eva's Suite, and Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus are polyvocal, epic, each tangling with inheritance, myth-making, and the thresholds of history.

Penguin Modern Poets 1 (If I’m Scared We Can’t Win)—Emily Berry, Anne Carson, Sophie Collins

New-Generation African Poets series, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (the chapbooks in these sets are amazing and The Color of James Brown’s Scream by Kayo Chingonyi, Asmarani by Safia Elhillo, Ordinary Heaven by Ladan Osman, and Our Men Do Not Belong To Us by Warsan Shire burn exceptionally bright)

Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets—Don Paterson

Lastly, I’ve been reading and re-reading Bhanu Kapil’s Goddard College commencement address posted in August, especially its valedictory turns toward a blessing. Perhaps to share in her faith that “cycles of dormancy and expression are weirdly nutritive” and to reassure myself that, yes, so often “failure itself becomes a site of possibility: an aperture for chance.”