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I finished my own graduation exams a year later and went to see for myself the land that had sprung this group of writers and the linden trees that lined the avenues of Krakow in their poems.

I got a job teaching English in the closest city to that would have me. Bratislava was far enough from Krakow to maintain the former’s mystique, but close enough to reveal on visits that the city was like the poems which, I presume, were like the poets. That is to say, dark and lyrical and mysterious and tortured and playful and full of shadows and light. That is to say, full of life.

Milosz died in 2004 at 94. Call me cynic, but now, with Szymborka’s death, a literary era is ending: I stammer and flounder.

- Nell Boeschenstein
“

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,

something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

- from “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

air hockey and the “shifting phantasmagoria” of Didion’s Blue Nights

Think of air hockey, of that essentially frictionless surface, of the way the smacked puck glides, ricochets, glides, ricochets again, continues on and on. Now imagine many pucks sharing the essentially frictionless surface, ricocheting, gliding, inevitably colliding, propelling one another along novel trajectories.

I ask you to think of these pucks because I’m struggling to describe Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s new memoir. Blue Nights is a book of ricochets. Instead of pucks, there are memories — memories of the house at Portuguese Bend and the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica and a pink magnolia that could be seen from a sitting room and “Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two” and Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton dinner plates and ICUs and a daughter’s depths and shallows and “quicksilver changes” and the bright-red soles of the same daughter’s wedding shoes and the “suburbia house in Brentwood” and a deep-voiced bogeyman vowing “Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.”

A phrase Didion wrote in 1979’s The White Album seems newly important here. The phrase is in this sentence:

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The phrase I care about is “shifting phantasmagoria.” I love the phrase. But let’s switch it out. Let’s oafishly replace it with “pucks” and think about the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, about the ideas with which we he have learned to freeze the air-hockey pucks which are our actual experience.

Blue Nights could have been a book about using ideas to freeze the pucks of actual experience, about scrutinizing each puck in its turn, telling its story, and never ever mentioning it again. Instead, Blue Nights is the messy splendor of lots of pucks in motion, of ricochets, of collisions, of many unhappy returns.

Blue Nights has 35 chapters. Of those 35, I’ve finished 140.

35 + 35 + 35 + 35 = 140.

The whole book. Four times since Sunday. This is not something I planned to do, but it turned out to be something I couldn’t not do.

To be strictly accurate, I have never set eyes on Blue Nights; I listened to the unabridged audiobook four times. I mention this because: 1) You’re free to judge that I haven’t read Blue Nights even once; 2) Hearing Didion’s words, instead of seeing them, may explain why I disagree with those people — including Didion herself, it seems — who mourn that the rhythm and the music is finally gone from Didion’s sentences.

Before starting Blue Nights, I came across several reviews or blog posts — I didn’t keep the links — that accused Didion of writing a cold, remote book. Those claims left me especially unprepared for some of the more quietly potent passages about her daughter’s adoption, childhood, adulthood, and premature death. This passage, I can now say after four times, wrecks me every time: 

One day after she had asked me for a Magic Marker I found her marking off an empty box into “drawers,” or areas meant for specific of these “sundries.” The “drawers” she designated were these: “Cash,” “Passport,” “My IRA,” “Jewelry,” and, finally—I find myself hardly able to tell you this—“Little Toys.”

Again, the careful printing.

The printing alone I cannot forget.

The printing alone breaks my heart.

Novelist John Banville concluded his thoughtful NYT review of Blue Nights like this:

Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

While it’s true that art can’t resurrect Didion’s daughter or Didion’s husband, I question this idea that “nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” Didion writes about a poem’s “sixteen lines that during the days and weeks immediately after John died spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling.” The poem was W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which ends like this:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Dismantle Blue Nights. Make stanzas of its paragraphs. What you find — what I find, at least — is a book that is itself a poem. A very long poem but a poem with rhythm, a poem with music, a poem of pangs, a poem of “how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here,” a poem about seizing the chance to love avidly, a poem I needed to hear four times, maybe five.

sweater weather forever

Back when I knew more than I do now about Michael Ondaatje, I would have been able to remember whether he’s a poet who took up writing novels or a novelist who made a poet of himself. Regardless, he’s both, and one of the joys of listening to him read comes from hearing how he does nothing to call attention to sentences that are themselves poems. Like this from The Cat’s Table:

I think about Mr. Fonseka at those English schools wearing his buttoned sweater to protect himself from English weather, and wonder how long he stayed there, and if he did really stay “forever.”

“
how we’d break into teams,
huddle around whomever was chosen to be qb,
how the qb would extend her left palm, flat,
into the middle of the huddle,
plant the index finger of her right hand in the center of her
palm, and then
with finger motions and whispers,
she would diagram who was to go where and when,
in order to so confuse and fool the other team
that one of us could break free
and go long.

- from “If Life Were Like Touch Football” by Julie Cadwallader-Staub.

Garrison Keillor read this poem on Wednesday’s episode of “The Writer’s Almanac.” I nodded when I heard the words “plant the index finger of her right hand in the center of her / palm, and then / with finger motions and whispers.” Because yes: That’s just how it was. And I’d forgotten.

This post is going slowly. I keep interrupting my typing to sketch passing routes.

Go long. And I do.

The feel of fingertip on palm whips me back to 1983, to the big yard behind our house, to the flakey-crispy overused yellow Nerf that somehow still holds a spiral when I fling it toward the spot where Timmy is about to be. It’s not guesswork. We planned it all out.

ieatstorieslikegrapes: T.S. Eliot  ============= For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.                So how should I presume? Click for high-res photo

ieatstorieslikegrapes:

T.S. Eliot 

=============

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

(this post was reblogged from hugohouse)
“
It sounds childish to say, but one thing I like about poems is that you are allowed to stare at them, and think about them, for as long as you like. In this sense, they resemble slow movies, or portraits, or nudes, or most of what we think of as art: poems give you permission to pay attention to a degree that would be rude or embarrassing face to face with, for example, a person.

- Lorin Stein

This really got to me. If I can figure out why, I’ll come back and explain.

(via Andrew Sullivan’s latest A Poem For Sunday post, which featured “Church Going” by Philip Larkin)

“
When she left, Scott-Heron seemed briefly at a loss, then he said, “We should listen to some music.” He put on a song of his from years ago called “Racetrack in France,” which is about a festival he played in the seventies. “I don’t feel as comfortable playing something of somebody else’s,” he said shyly. “I can’t say how the good parts got put together.

- from “New York Is Killing Me,” Alec Wilkinson’s New Yorker profile of Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

Go read it. To the end. In the context of the entire profile, the last paragraph is uncommonly effective.

The social life of marginalia - Bobulate

austinkleon:

Great article by Liz on one of my favorite subjects. (I mean, what is this, other than marginalia out of control…) This bit:

When a consumer encounters marginalia in a used book, it has the potential to change one’s perception of a book’s value. Cathy Marshall, a Microsoft researcher, found that university students evaluated textbooks before purchasing so that they can bring home the book with the smartest notes.

Reminded me of Andrei Codrescu on the Kindle:

I don’t know about you, but I always hated underlined passages in used books. They derail my private enjoyment….When somebody offers perception of what’s important, something moronic, usually…And this thing on my Kindle…something called view popular highlights, which will tell you how many morons have underlined before so that not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station.

Of course, if the people making the marks mean something to you, reading a marked-up book can be a wonderful experience.

===============

From “Marginalia” by Billy Collins:

Yet the one I think of most often,

the one that dangles from me like a locket,

was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

I borrowed from the local library

one slow, hot summer.

I was just beginning high school then,

reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,

and I cannot tell you

how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears

and next to them, written in soft pencil-

by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

whom I would never meet-

“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Free, legal audio of Collins reading it here.

- David Quigg, 4/28/2011

(this post was reblogged from austinkleon)

meeting the college kid who became my grandfather

My mom’s dad was named Maurice Kelley. He died in 1996. This was before any of us had heard of Google. So there’s something almost magical for me about what happened when we tried using Google Books to search for the words my grandfather left behind during his scholarly career.

The thrill is that we found more than scholarship. We found, for example, a 1921 book called University anthology, with several poems by a University of Oklahoma sophomore named Maurice W. Kelley. And that’s him, younger than any of us ever knew him, doing something that I, at least, never knew he did.

I don’t claim to be able to judge the poems on their merits, and that’s not really what this post is about. But here’s one:

AT EVENING

Her silhouet was black against the pane.

Made dully golden by the candle light.

She let her fingers wander, falling as they might

And sang a song that I would hear again.

Each modulation was unconscious art

So soft and pleasing like the mellow rays.

Fled from my brain were thoughts of bitter days

And a calm and peaceful quiet filled my heart.

And another:

“CITY”

The tawdriness of all that cheap array

Brought back a longing for his home once more.

The carts on pavement at the break of day

Made a rattle like a dead man’s throat before

The fleeing soul is gone. The distant roar

Of engines coming in, the newsboy’s call,

The drab cold room with splintery unclothed floor

Contrasted to a peaceful farm in fall

Made him rise from a cold hard bed and curse it all.

WHY ISN'T JOHN DARNIELLE OUR POET LAUREATE?

lazybookreviews:

On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time
I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared
And I began to talk to myself almost immediately
Not being used to being the only person there

The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it
But I drank it all…

And wouldn’t it be cool if, in my total ignorance of who John Darnielle is, I were to Google his name and find that there’s a YouTube video of him singing this very song with Tobias Wolff on occasional background vocals? Sure. That’ll happen.

(this post was reblogged from lazybookreviews)
“
I was imagining someone in a subway car, trying perhaps to write a poem “against war” as so many of us have done during and since the Vietnam era (and, historically, way back). But to be “against war” has come to seem too easy a stance. War exists in a texture of possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist exploitation, nationalism, unequal power. Who decides to make war? Who is destroyed in it? Who creates the rhetoric of “terror” and “democracy”? And so this poet in the subway has to write “in contraband calligraphy” against a poetry that makes “peace” seem all too easy or comfortable, war too morally simple.
- Adrienne Rich interviewed for The Paris Review Daily blog.