Reading List: April 2016

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

Jennifer Bartlett
The book that I have been reading for the past month is A. David Moody’s three-volume biography of Ezra Pound. I came upon the book in a particular way. I was exhausted, and I decided to spend a few hours in the reading room of the New York Society Library rather than working. There are no computers allowed in that room. I happened to pick up a journal, and I read an academic review that mentioned the Pound book.

The reason that I am so interested in this book is that I grew up hearing “mythology” around Pound: stories of him creating “Imagism,” his teenage love affair with H.D., his time in the cage in Pisa, his non-traditional relationships and so on. What I really wanted was to distinguish between the real Pound and the mythological Pound.

Something I found, which perhaps forgives or saves me from criticism of reading this controversial figure, is a surprising link to some of my own work. Pound was not afforded an actual trial, nor did he plead insanity. This was all navigated by a lawyer James Laughlin hired, and the insanity plea was not something sanctioned by Pound, rather done behind his back. St. Elizabeths was no country club. It was a State Mental Hospital which myriad problems and abuses that come with such. In this, Pound calling the place a “Hell Hole” was no exaggeration.

Martha Collins
In January, I spent a week in Italy with a sick friend, reading to her from Stephen Mitchell’s Rilke—especially the Duino elegies, which she’d translated into Italian some years ago. A transcendent experience for both of us.

Also looking back, I’ve been reading Jane Cooper’s work a great deal, as Celia Bland and I come to the end of editing an anthology of essays about this wonderful and underappreciated poet.

Moving forward: Kwame Dawes’s Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. Especially the “new” poems, which take off from August Wilson’s plays without being dependent on them: a whole book’s worth, which really ought to be a volume by themselves, so they could be carried around and have a name.

Also Philip Metres’s Sand Opera and Susan Tichy’s Trafficke, which I reviewed, and Robin Coste Lewis and Ross Gay, winners of much-deserved prizes.

Just published: Gail Mazur’s Forbidden City, Wayne Miller’s Post-, Martin Rock’s Residuum. A seventh, a fourth, a first book, radically different from each other, but all terrific.

In the fiction department: Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, an expansion of his earlier Mitko, which was already a breathtakingly beautiful novella. That Greenwell began as a poet should come as no surprise: every word counts, every sentence sings.

Finally, some essential nonfiction: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, and, coming up, Bryan Stephenson, Just Mercy, and Jim Wallis, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. Also, for the second time, for a reading group at my church, Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate.

Amanda Johnston
I’ve been reading and coming back to pages of Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Like breadcrumbs showing the way to the heart, I follow its life-pulse to the incredible everyday world. Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds is a transfer ticket into the gut of place and how it nourishes us with the good, bad, and difficult love of family, food, and community. Mahogany L. Browne’s RedBone and Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap bring me neck-deep into the center of vulnerability. These two collections grab me by the wrists, one at each hand, roll up my skin and sing: Listen. Tell the story. It belongs to you, too. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, sits on a table near my front door like a guard against what’s on the outside when I leave and what’s inside when I return. It’s 2016. Poetry surrounds me in cyberspace with informative blogs like Harriet and online journals bringing sharp contemporary realness like The Offing, Muzzle, and Kinfolks Quarterly. Poetry snaps me awake from the online barrage of algorithms designed to distract. Poetry cuts through the rhetoric with links to timely videos from the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series and the growing #BlackPoetsSpeakOut catalog. Poetry is all around us reflecting the human experience in real-time pixelated brilliance. Pay attention and let it in.

Omar Kholeif
I am the kind of person who can never read a single book at a time. Some people call this ADD, but I see it as the product of a hyperlinked mind: I am always trying to make and seek connections between multiple authors and their ideas. These connections are some of the thoughts that run through one of the books I am reading at the moment, The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. These diaries, thoughts, excerpts, and musings form an incisive and critical inquiry into the life of Aaron Swartz—the technologist and activist who reshaped the way that we think about the Internet: its codes of ethics, conduct, and distribution. His tragic suicide at the age of 26 left this reader anxious and furiously wanting to push forward this young man’s wishes for a democratic reimagining of how information is shared and distributed online. While reading this, I was recently also fortunate to come across the activist writings of the Lebanese American poet and artist Etel Adnan, in a book published by the Wattis Institute called The Ninth Page: Etel Adnan’s Journalism 1972-1974. Revisiting Adnan’s poetics reminded me of the work of Ray Johnson, a forerunner of mail art, whose book The Paper Snake was recently rereleased in a beautiful edition from Siglio. I am also dipping into Cynthis Carr’s biography of David Wojnarowicz again (a pioneering artist who passed away from AIDS-related causes); as one can glean, the personal biography, the memoir, the confessional, and the political are literary genres that constantly draw me in.

Ben Lerner
I am reading three terrific new poetry books: Anna Moschovakis’s They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House), Sara Nicholsons’s What the Lyric Is (The Song Cave), and Mark McMorris’s The Book of Landings (Wesleyan). I am also fascinated by Is That Kafka: 99 Finds by Reiner Stach (New Directions) and Alexander Kluge's latest book, 30 April 1945 (Seagull Books). And with great sadness and gratitude I am rereading everything by C.D. Wright.

Craig Santos Perez
Several first books have caught my attention recently, all of which I strongly recommend.

The Taxidermist's Cut, by Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir.
Stereo. Island. Mosaic. by Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro.
100 Chinese Silences, by Chinese-American poet Timothy Yu.

Besides these books, I have been reading a lot of poetry from students in my ecopoetry course here at the University of Hawaiʻi. Mānoa. If you are interested in this topic, my class has published our poems in an online journal, The Hawaiʻi Independent, as part of our engagement in the public environmental humanities.

Tilleke Schwarz
Rereading is relaxing, especially when ruminating old-time favorites like The Illustrated Old Possum by T.S. Eliot. It was written around 1930 and even inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber to create his musical Cats. According to Amazon, it is written for the age group 7–12. I am convinced this must be a printing error as the book is absolutely suitable for people from 7 to 121. Maybe the best part is the humor and rhythm in the poetry, which evokes the way the different cat characters move. Just one quote as an appetizer: “the Rum Tum Tugger is a curious cat.” Last but not least: this charming book about practical cats contains many humorous illustrations by Nicolas Bentley.

Most of the time I do not reread old books. I am a great fan of Haruki Murakami. I started out with the book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and got immediately addicted to Murakami’s mysterious way of storytelling and his almost surrealistic fantasy. After that I read his exciting trilogy 1Q84, in which the girl Aomame enters a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84. “Q is for ‘question mark.’” The book is fascinating and sometimes kept me up at night as I could not stop reading. Murakami has written many more books and I am probably going to read them all. Today I bought his new book, The Men Without Women.

Jeff Shotts
An editor’s reading list is made up of wishful thinking for the future. I’m always deep into manuscript submissions, and am hugely excited to be absorbed in proofs of forthcoming Graywolf poetry books for the second half of the year—Look by Solmaz Sharif, Standoff by David Rivard, Blackacre by Monica Youn, There Now by Eamon Grennan, Bestiary by Donika Kelly, and an essay/poetry hybrid text by Fanny Howe titled The Needle’s Eye: Passing through Youth. And I’m reading, rereading, editing, and preparing titles for the first part of 2017—a “double” book of essays (read it one way, then flip it over and read it the other) rightly titled The Adventures of Form and Content by Albert Goldbarth; the first career retrospective, Cinder: New and Selected Poems, by the ever-brilliant Susan Stewart; and an amazing, important debut collection, WHEREAS, by Layli Long Soldier; and more to come in that hopeful future…

It can be a challenge to read a lot beyond the editorial bustle and deadlines involved with these books and writers. I recently read Seamus Heaney’s moving translation of Aeneid Book VI, all the more powerful for being a surprising, reassuring voice from the other side of the river. Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property is a smart, intriguing, and syntactically inventive new collection that I hope to reread to remain under its spell. I am eager to read Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May, The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay, So Much Synth by Brenda Shaughnessy, and many other new collections coming soon, including New Directions’s release of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Craig Morgan Teicher.

And the March issue of Poetry has offered spring wonders. I have greatly admired Francisco Aragón’s terrific selection of artwork and poetry in the PINTURA : PALABRA portfolio, including fantastic new poems by Eduardo C. Corral, Carmen Giménez Smith, and others. Tom Sleigh has a sequence of poems, “House of Fact, House of Ruin,” in eight sections that become a kind of remarkable disappearing act. And Carl Phillips’s two poems that open the issue, and his online essay “Toward a Politics of Mere Being,” are essential, not to be missed in their statement and beauty. And to look just a day beyond April, it was wonderful to see two poems by Gretchen Marquette, whose debut May Day comes out, appropriately, in May.