Reading List: November 2014

Zackary Sholem Berger
“Instantaneously your attachment [to others] seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self,” says Claudia Rankine in her Citizen, her African-American “Song of Myself.” My attachments are differently shaky: individual, historical, multilingual. Right now, in this reading moment, I navigate them with Rankine, and with Laura Kasischke’s The Infinitesimals, a mythopoesis of life, disease, and healing (thanks Stephen Burt for this and many other recommendations). Like a pecking bird, caught by music in the day’s flow, I follow random Spanish-language poets on Twitter. I read Mallarmé on Facebook in the Hebrew translations of Dory Manor. The blog posts of Katle Kanye, Talmudic scholar on Sholem Aleichem steroids, fuel my Yiddish jalopy.

This is the new stuff. Meanwhile the inner time machine skips and leaps like a lamb. The other day, lost and over-caffeinated, I retained Helen Vendler as escort in the interstices of a Dickinsonian paean to Jesus, condescending his entire body for our salvation. And every day, a Jew commanded to peruse, I go back to the Pentateuch and Rashi’s countermelody; the Midrash’s endless narrative curlicues; the Talmud’s Jenga rhetoric—all the way to the latest generations of holy-profane Yiddish/Hebrew literature. Abraham Sutzkever, of course, but also Anna Margolin, who I read to my daughter, and Tom Sawyer in Yiddish, with my son. My fence is painted by others, and I loll at my ease.

Maia Evrona
My reading lately has been historical (and some would say political) prose, and not, on the surface, particularly poetic: I’m halfway through Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, a highly detailed history of the Zionist-Arab conflict. My pattern when it comes to prose, which I read far less of than poetry at this stage in my life, is to read the first half of a book slowly, still devoting most of my reading time to poems. When I come upon the halfway mark, I suddenly find that I can’t tear myself away, and my reading of poetry finally falters.

Still, many of my favorite poets have lived in the Israel/Palestine region (Amichai, Darwish, and Sutzkever, too, though he’s associated more with Vilna than with Tel Aviv) and a deeper knowledge of history does significantly enrich the reading of poetry. The poets I’ve mentioned (among valuable others) have done the essential work of representing people trying to live their lives in the midst of a conflict often viewed through a highly partisan lens.

I never completely stop reading poetry, however, because I try to translate at least one poem every day, usually over breakfast (I don’t always succeed). Lately I’ve mostly been translating Amichai and Sutzkver, though I mix in other poets as well. The last new book of poetry that I was deeply struck by was Diaries of Exile, by Yannis Ritsos. Ritsos has long been one of my favorite writers and the diary genre—in poetry, prose or a fusion of both—is one that I enjoy.

The last book of poetry that I purchased on a whim was Halting Steps by Claribel Alegria and the next book on my list is another one of the journal/diary genre: In the Land of Pain, by Alphonse Daudet.

Katherine M. Hedeen
Translating is my way of reading. And right now, I’m reading various poets I want to translate. Currently, I’m focused on the Jorgenrique Adoum (1926-2009), undoubtedly the most important Ecuadorian intellectual of the twentieth century.  In Adoum, we find one of Latin America’s most radical formally experimental poets. Word play, neologisms, and the juxtapositioning of several different social and cultural registers at once accompany a shift toward narrativity and chronicle on the one hand, and fierce lyricism on the other. His poetry is not yet available in English (I’m working on that), but for those who know Spanish I can’t recommend it highly enough, and especially the long poem, El amor desenterrado [Disinterred Love].

I also translate from English into Spanish (with Víctor Rodríguez Núñez) and our latest project is an anthology of contemporary Welsh poetry. Not a lot is known about Wales in Spanish America, though the two regions share a common history of colonization and a special affinity for poetry. It’s exciting to discover such wonderful contemporary voices from a country with a long, proud poetic tradition, in particular, Menna Elfyn’s Perfect Blemish, Robert Minhinnick’s After the Hurricane, anything by Twm Morys, and Zoë Skoulding’s The Museum of Disappearing Sounds.

Lastly, some of my favorite books are bilingual Spanish-English editions of poetry. It’s fascinating to consider translators’ choices and solutions. Pinholes in the Night is a collection of Latin American poetry in translation, chosen by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita and edited by Forrest Gander. What strikes me most is the selection, which introduces American audiences to amazing poets who are not well-known here, and, specifically, the inclusion of the Mexican prose writer Juan Rulfo, who penned short stories and my favorite novel, Pedro Páramo, though many of us consider his work to be poetry. The same could be said for including here long prose poems by authors who are better known for their lyricism, like Pablo Neruda. I’m impressed with how this anthology dismantles conventional classifications of literary genres.

John William Narins
I’m thinking about how transitions are made—from thought to thought, line to line, section to section. With that in mind, I’ve been playing with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Rae Armantrout (puzzle that out, if you will!).

I’ve also been looking at “poets’ prose,” or prose that easily shades into poetry, including David Markson’s magnificent associative novels, broken into lines almost aggressively poetic—Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel), Ivan Turgenev’s rather trying prose poems (and these by the author of “First Love”!), Osip Mandelstam’s fantastically rich, dense, and difficult The Egyptian Stamp and Fourth Prose, de Chirico’s enigmatic Hebdomeros.

David St. John
Hauntings. It’s not only because I’m writing this at the end of October that I’ve chosen to note several books that seem to me especially remarkable for their engagement with spectrology. These volumes of poetry and prose all reckon with the odd intimacy of ghosts, whether personal or historical, and with legacies that are often both cultural and familial.

Two of my favorite books of prose from the last two years are by the same author, Howard Norman. His memoir I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place is a stunning series of reflections, lyrical and sorrowing by turns. The narrative of Howard Norman’s most recent novel, Next Life Might Be Kinder, constellates around a particular haunting, of a writer by his dead wife (murdered by someone both she and the speaker know), and the writer’s inability—or refusal—to give up his beloved ghost.

In the past fifteen years, American poetry has been replete with every variety of ghost, but my favorites are still those conjured by Cole Swensen, most recently in her superb collection, Gravesend. Another of my favorite poets, Ralph Angel, has an ephemeral and luminous new book entitled Your Moon, which—somehow—miraculously blends the lyric abstraction of Ashbery with the viscous textures of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Lastly, I need to mention a debut collection by the young poet Brandon Som, The Tribute Horse, an absolutely brilliant collection of poems that interrogates not only the legacy of the poet’s own Chinese American identity but the stability of language itself. Don’t miss it.

Rosanna Warren
Colm Tóibín’s essay in the most recent Hopkins Review (Fall 2014), “Something Understood,” on Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn, is one of most penetrating and delicate pieces of writing on poetry I’ve seen in a long time. He has found a way of writing about what’s not said, and about the poetics of tone in relation to matters of autobiography, the imagination, sorrow acknowledged and unacknowledged, without vulgarity. Without tromping on the mysteries of other people’s experience—especially writers of the complexity and privacy of Bishop and Gunn (in their different ways). He deeply honors the art.

David Wheatley
Fifty years ago, Roy Fisher was part of one of the most dynamic Anglo-American exchanges in post-war poetry, publishing his early books alongside Ed Dorn, George Oppen, and Lorine Niedecker with Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press. While this era gets its due in An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013 (Shearsman), there is a lot more to the book than period interest: these autobiographical and critical pieces form an essential part of the counter-history of modern British verse. Fisher has described himself as a “sub-modernist,” but writers don’t come more chronologically “sub-modernist” than the poets of Maurice Riordan’s The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics (Faber) while still managing to sound like a gathering of Gaelic Objectivists avant la lettre. Among the translators on duty are Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Patrick Crotty, and Kathleen Jamie. Ciaran Carson has added to his impressive body of work in translation with From Elsewhere (Gallery Press), a series of workings from the French of Jean Follain.

Three poets who do as much as anyone to keep the spirit of the Fulcrum Press alive today are Tom Raworth, Peter Manson, and Peter Gizzi, whose XIV Liners (Sancho Panza Press), Poems of Frank Rupture (Sancho Panza Press) and In Defence of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 (Wesleyan) all deserve a wide readership. Manson’s “My Funeral” begins with an instruction to remove the dead poet’s teeth, but one writer with plenty of bite is Miriam Gamble, the poems of whose Pirate Music (Bloodaxe) are “denizens of the fiefdom of flux.” In Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains (Salmon Publishing) Dave Lordan continues to give the Irish poetic gentility principle a well-meaning kick in the backside, swapping its cozy hearths for exposed and lonely “summits the rooted / cannot even imagine.” Mention might also be made of The Letters of Samuel Beckett vol. 3: 1957-1965 (Cambridge UP), which no respectable home will wish to be without.