Reading List: July/August 2015

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the July/August 2015 issue share some books that held their interest.

derek beaulieu
I’ve recently finished reading Philip Glass’s memoir Words Without Music. While Glass’s memoir was chattier and less artistically investigative than I was hoping, it did prompt me to re-read Barrie Tullett’s A Poem to Philip Glass.

Tullett’s 44-page chapbook is a single visual poem (also viewable as a digital scroll here: http://www.barrieagogo.co.uk/Glass.html) composed entirely on a typewriter. Glass eschewed the term “minimalism” preferring to discuss “music with repetitive structures.” Tullett’s poetic ode respects that distinction by building a series of repetitive poetic structures composed from a limited palette of the non-alphabetic symbols / - + ( ) . = and * alongside X and 0 (I am unclear on the typeface if “0” is zero or the capital “O”). This limited palette, reproduced exclusively in black ink, builds from a minor repetition to a visual veil of cleanly executed curtains of notes. Resembling nothing less than a tapestry of fragments that twist, turn, compound, and accumulate, A Poem to Philip Glass readily asserts itself as a major text in contemporary visual poetry. Created on a Brother Electric typewriter, A Poem to Philip Glass doesn’t have the analogue static and ink-laden splatters often associated with typewriter-created poetry, instead this work is stunningly clean and crystalline. Tullett’s original poems were overlaid and reproduced via a photocopier (once again without any degradation of image quality) and overlaid into a narrative sequence. The pages are cut full-bleed, so the visuals run off the edge, suggesting a field of scope far vaster than the restrictions of the page, a limitless horizon of musical data configuring and re-configuring based upon predetermined structures.

Tullett is also the editor of Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology. Fabulous.

Tova Benjamin 
I've been traveling a lot this summer, moving between countries and cities alone with a suitcase small enough to lift onto busses. I don’t have the room or the strength to carry many books, so I brought the three books I can re-read and never get tired of: two collections of Flannery O’Connor's private writings, A Prayer Journal and A Habit of Being, and Writing, a small book of essays by Marguerite Duras. I’ve chosen to move between countries & cities with these books because the ghosts of O’Connor and Duras have proven to be excellent travel companions. Their writings make me cherish aloneness and also feel less lonely, especially O’Connor's prayer journal, which is funny and tragic and wrenching, with lines like this one:

Sin is large & stale. You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited. But perhaps that is too literary a statement – this mustn’t get insincere.

Her letters are just as thrilling. I read them before journaling or writing my own letters and if I’m lucky I’ll find my prose affected. I group O’Connor together with Duras, even though the two are very different, because they both provide a sort of armor. Both of them weigh their books with feelings but completely avoid sentimentality.

Outside of O’Connor and Duras, I’ve been spending a lot of time in library archives reading Avraham Sutzkever’s poetry in Yiddish and I.B. Singer’s Yiddish stories, specifically the stories weighed down by religious weight and untranslatable references and traumas. Naomi Seidman has a very good essay about the popularity Singer found in translation, and it’s true that his original stories are far less charming. I’m glad that this is the case: it feels good to finally delve into the writing and the language that twists around the tradition it respects, that shows the ugliness of communities I feel close to while still allowing me to love them.

Emily Carney
Lately I’ve been reading poetry almost exclusively by women who take risks in literature (as if we should be reading anything by someone who is not taking risks in literature), books like Alone with Other People by Gabby Bess, I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together by Mira Gonzalez, and sometimes my heart pushes my ribs by Ellen Kennedy. These poems are consistently smirking just as often as they are sobbing into their beers, cunningly using every possible mode of culture to discuss loneliness and sexuality and depravation—Price Chopper or a MacBook or a dream about James Franco—and making me, as well as anyone else who reads them, luminous by osmosis. They are the embodiment of shoplifted Swiss Army Knives dancing around singing “I’m not sorry,” the feeling of a dam busting open just forty-five years after it asked if it could. If this is too abstract, well, you should just read them. I feel like these books were written in the back rooms of parties while everyone else thought they knew what was going on. Still, they are humble—all three authors hone art from pain in the same moment they are swearing to you they have no idea what to do with it. When I read their poetry I come out the other side a better person, one who is able to walk down the street, see an anonymous pile of vomit, think “I feel compassion.”

Lily Cao
A friend of mine recommended that I try reading some Saki, so I picked up a short story collection at my library. His stories really are delightful. Even though I usually do not enjoy satire, his stories make me smile and, sometimes, even laugh.

Speaking of short stories, I just finished rereading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. I’ve always had somewhat of an obsession with fairytales, and I’m especially interested in the darker subtexts behind them, so Carter’s sensual yet grotesque retellings and subversions appeal to my imagination.

As for poetry, I’m reading Cate Marvin’s Oracle. Her girlish yet macabre poetry collection creates a strange alternate reality of high school that at times begins to feel too real. My favorite line is from the poem, “High School as The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

You are never not what you were, and queer
it is to see your own cruelty rise in a mirror.
It’s not that masks themselves are lies, rather
our masks are us, therefore uniform: fear us.

Ghosts play a big role in these poems, so naturally I think about the ghosts of my own adolescence. It really is a beautiful collection of poetry.

Caitlin Hazell
Studying fine art at university this year has meant reading a lot of art books, and trying to squeeze in some fiction around them. I fell for Raymond Carver, reading his collected short stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Cathedral. To me he’s a short story genius, and especially good at picking up on obscurity in the everyday and the lives of the common man. Another person good at turning things obscure is Miranda July, and this year I eagerly awaited her debut novel The First Bad Man. Another short story wizard, my copy of her short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You is very battered and loved. At first I struggled with the full novel, finding the change from her short stories difficult, but in train delays coming home from London one night I found I read the whole thing cover to cover. Like everything she does, the book is funny, rich in character, and sometimes a little bit silly.

Anthony Madrid
[6.24.15]

Recent readings in modern sainthood.

Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You
Gandhi, Essential Writings (ed. Raghavan Iyer) + Autobiography
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait + Strength to Love

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Two recommendations.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City. Best book of the year in any genre. Deep as anything; repays study.

Sara Deniz Akant, Parades. A chapbook of thirty poems, full of made-up words and exquisite rhyme effects. Stuff makes no sense; repays study.

Marla Miniano
It seems the books that always end up changing my life are the ones I consume on vacation. I read the bulk of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on a plane from Manila to Singapore, and couldn’t stop thinking about this line for most of the trip: “I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again, or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”

On Good Friday this year, sitting under a tree at my friend’s beach house, I read “Sacred Heart,” one of the stories in Jennifer Egan’s anthology Emerald City. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect to ruminate on the murky layers of good and evil, how there are wolves in sheep’s clothing but there are also hearts of gold buried beneath carelessness and misplaced anger.

On the reading list for future flights, contemplative beach days, and restless bus rides: Kristina Haynes’s Chloe, Derrick Brown’s Our Poison Horse, and a long overdue re-reading of Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl.

Naomi Morris
Because I am on my summer break now, I’ve been trying to get ahead of the game by doing my university reading before term starts. Jazz by Toni Morrison has been my favorite so far. There’s something really intoxicating about the way she writes. The stories are set in the real world but they seem in some way magical, very nearly beyond my comprehension.

The style of Jazz reminded me slightly of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, which I finally read after finishing Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Zambreno exalts women writers much more than I’ve ever experienced anyone else do, and it was refreshing—a relief. Heroines was the kind of book I had to scribble all over, to read sections ten times because of how true they rang.

Amy Newman
In the tradition of chefs who serve the rabbit alongside carrots and peas so that one consumes both the animal and what the animal eats, I read Barbara Pym to see why Philip Larkin championed her, and was affected by The Sweet Dove Died, in which emotion is repressed to a near-granular level; I can see why Larkin would’ve been nourished by it.

For a different take on tone, I love Emily Hahn’s collection of essays, No Hurry to Get Home. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Hahn wrote over fifty books, lived in China during the invasion, and walked across Central Africa on her own in the 1930s. Her essays in that early New Yorker style have an unfazed quality that is crazy-delightful, especially in her piece on taking the train from Shanghai to Nanking with her friend Mary and a pet duck named Sweetie Pie on the day war is declared, and “The Big Smoke,” on her addiction to opium.

Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic work brought me to I Live Here, artistic responses documenting humanitarian crises in Chechnya, Burma, Malawi, and, in Gloeckner’s chapter, Mexico, where, in intensely affecting dioramas, she documents the murders of girls and women in Ciudad Juárez. Miklos Radnoti’s A Wiser, More Beautiful Death, the poems he composed in a labor camp and on his final forced march in 1944, is an important, powerful volume.

I’m devouring Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected poems and drafts. Other poetry books I’m reading: Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones, Seam by Tarfia Faizullah, and When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz. Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine is a book I’ve read and reread, but can’t yet shelve for its pleasures, and like everyone else I’m still loving Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey.

Alice Notley
Trying not to reveal too much, I'd say that my reading has been more fragmentary and weirder than usual—I wouldn't want to recommend that. But these two books are great: The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll and Complete Plays by Sarah Kane. Anyone could like them, though the Sarah Kane is hair-raisingly frightening. I also recently read Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts by Harry Y. Gamble, which is the kind of book I pick up at Unnameable when I'm in New York. It is essentially about how books got around in early AD: Were there bookstores? How were books copied? Did anyone get paid? Were Paul's Epistles a popular item? This book is good, and I may reread it. Meanwhile I am very slowly reading A Guide to Old English by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson. I mean that I'm just reading it, not trying to learn the language; I like to look at the words. I have also recently reread the complete oeuvre of the British mystery writer Catherine Aird, which I don't necessarily recommend. Oh and also at Unnameable, I picked up Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, which brought back joltingly the 60s and 70s I knew—but the words in the poems look like sculptures, letter by letter. And the book has a worn, pretty cover.

Alex-Quan Pham
I finished Janet Mock's memoir, Redefining Realness, last week. At the moment, I'm almost done with Toni Morrison's Sula, although I'm not sure if I'll ever be done with either of these books. Some books linger for a while, or forever. I've been in search of books about sisterhood, womanhood, and motherhood, for two reasons: one, I miss my mother, and two, I've been taking back the femme magic that was snatched from me. In Sula, Ajax's mother is described as an "evil conjure woman." I want to be that. All the time.

I've also been poring over articles about Viet Nam's indigenous magic. I don't think I'll ever read anything by a cisgender white man ever again.

John Wilkinson
In the past decade the once fusty world of English-language poetics and prosody has heated up. American historicists and British phenomenologists lock in combat on a terrain often mapped in late Romantic and Victorian verse (“verse” is back). Recently I read Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, a ground-clearing work whose lucidity makes bold propositions sound reasonable—for instance, praising amateur knowledge rather than close reading. Other than Charlie Parker obsessives most people know music without close listening—poetry readers should learn to love. By contrast, David Nowell Smith’s On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation is a dense, philosophically rigorous set of speculations around an enigma—readers with a taste for Coleridge or Heidegger will be gratified. Gerard Manley Hopkins is a focus for Nowell Smith, and for Derek Attridge too—Attridge, the rhythm king of English-language poetics, has two new books. Surely rhythm will become the next hot topic, as Henri Meschonnic’s prodigious work crosses the language barrier.

Packing for summer I have whittled books down to those I need for meeting deadlines, and just a few I want to volunteer time with. I have as many books by Lisa Samuels as I can find—why did it take me so long to discover this glorious poetry (you could call it eco-feminist if labels help). Her books are published by Shearsman. Also the first chapbook by Laura Kilbride, In the Square from Punch Press. Kilbride is a scholar of Victorian verse whose beautiful poem reminds me of Jennifer Moxley’s most avidly open writing, and of a neglected twentieth century masterpiece, Andrew Crozier’s The Veil Poem. I now wish I had brought An Andrew Crozier Reader (Carcanet) with me.

Jenny Zhang
I've been reading the second volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle before bed—why? I don't know. I laugh at these long sections of dialogue where his character's dialogue always comes off sounding virtuous and genius and interesting and everyone else sounds provincial and basic. It feels like a portal into the cruelty and heartlessness of men who also think of themselves as very tender and very sensitive. During the day I read Elena Ferrante, I'm on the second of the Neapolitan Novels, The Story of a New Name. She's like a portal into the desire and rage I used to be ashamed of but now accept, like everything else. I'm reading the short stories of Janet Frame mostly on subways and busses because they are short and there's enough time to wipe tears away before going out onto the platform. I like to savor the poems I read from Veronica Bench by Leopoldine Core and Tender Data by Monica McClure by reading them slowly or out loud or both and only a few a week. For research, I'm reading a shitty copy of Mao's Little Red Book, shittily translated for shitty tourists like me who thought ten years ago it would be hilarious to bring this book back with me to America. If I'm not too anxious I try to make some headway into Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant and How We Be by Jeff Chang and Uncle Swami by Vijay Prashad. I can't seem to finish The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I need a lot of laughs in my life and I find a lot of them in Doreen St. Félix's Twitter, like this gem: "idk fam if the only 'political' thing you've done on your profile this year is this rainbow thing, you're getting lined up on the wall" and this one: "I guess the rainbow thing allows for normally politically unengaged people to be a 'part of a movement'? But mackle less IMO." I also troll chowhound and yelp and eater and grubstreet and gothamist for reviews of the best Sichuan food and soup dumplings in New York and then laugh at how disgusting it is to make more than $20,000 a year and fetishize cheap eats as if their cheapness and their deliciousness belonged to you while tweeting earnestly about how shocking it is that nail salon workers are exploited, underpaid, and exposed to harmful chemicals. Anyway, I like to read Archie comics in the bathroom. They help me be regular.