My new (poetry) diet

So, I had a meeting today with my workshop prof, Anne Winters, who I absolutely adore. Her critiques are often scathing, but she is funny, whip-smart, and an invested teacher.

...but, she put me on--what she calls--a poetry diet. Said I'm not allowed to read any more contemporary poetry until I catch up with the canon. I'm supposed to (re)read Bishop, Yeats, Lowell, plus Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Balzac before I read another contemporary poem. And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. There are more names, collected works, giant novels, etc.

Don't get me wrong. I need to read more classics just like I need to eat more vegetables. But if Yeats = broccoli, then Leilani Hall = sour patch kids and A. Van Jordan = potato chips. Broccoli is good, but some days only junk food will do.

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PS - I'm sorry for the bad metaphor, especially at the expense of two of my favorite contemporary poets. The point is, these are things I just can't resist.

with mixed feelings

My time on the farm is nearing its end. The travelers begin the long trek home tomorrow morning and by Friday, I'll be back at Mom and Dad's house for the weekend before my midnight megabus ride home on Sunday/Monday.

I'm anxious to get back to my apartment, to finish unpacking & get organized before the semester begins, to see my friends. I'm not anxious to return to the city, the el, the concrete and constant noise.

And while I'm anxious to get back to real life, I'm also wishing I had another week or so here (or that I could rewind a week or so) to be more productive. Television seems to be my Achilles heel when it comes to productivity, and I have lost many, many hours to CSI reruns and other brain-draining nonsense (on the upside, I finally saw Juno, which I loved). I'm fighting the urge to turn on the crack box as we speak.

I didn't do much reading--a Nora Roberts novel, the first few chapters of The House on the Hill, a Cesare Pavese novel (still working on that one), a bit of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, and MacNolia by A. Van Jordan (a reread, but well worth it). Also, I don't think I ever made it to 10 pages, but definitely over five, and still working on a long poem which should get me to the goal (two weeks late). I spent a good chunk of time on my Intro to Poetry syllabus, and another good chunk of time catching up with friends...so it wasn't all wasted time. But I do wish I could get back the time I spent watching Wife Swap, at least. Oh, and napping. I did a lot of napping...too bad you can't bottle that--I think I'm going to have a sleep deprived semester ahead of me.

So, was my stay in the country a success? The jury's still out. It'll depend on whether or not I arrive back in Chicago energized and driven...or if I just pout and mope because I'm back in the city. One thing I am sure of--I'd still pick this lifestyle over city living any day of the week. So cross your fingers for me that when I go on the job market in a few years, there's a small town college looking to hire a poet.

And now, back to the to do list--not the TV.

duh!

Why didn't anyone tell me I was being a moron? Cadaver Dogs was not available through the library because it just came out. Why did I think it had been out for a while?

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I found a spider on me while I was on the el today. Ever since, I've been having that creepy-itchy feeling like I'm covered in bugs. Ew.

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What if I stopped blogging? Would I miss it? Maybe I'd write more letters. Maybe I'd write more poems.

I'm not going to stop blogging, but this is something I think about from time to time.

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Plowing through my reading list. Love Denise Levertov even more than I thought. Love Charles Wright less. Feeling somewhat "eh" about Karen Whalley. Having trouble spending time with my library books. They're just so heavy and unbendy. Mary Oliver and Mary Kinzie are both pissing me off a little bit. (In related news, why do how-to-write-fiction books seem so much less preachy and finger pointing than how-to-write-poetry books?)

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Since moving happens in less than a month, I'm trying to eat all my frozen and canned food instead of going grocery shopping. I may be a bit of an apocalyps shopper, bc I definitely have a lot of non-perishable food around. But June is really not the time to be eating non-perishable food. I want watermelon and zucchini and sweet corn (fresh, not canned!) and plums and artichokes... You get my drift. Canned pineapple and frozen brussel sprouts will have to do. I'm being practical.

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I get to see my momma and my pops and my seesters in less than two weeks!! I wanna go now! (Don't tell, but I'm looking forward to driving with the windows down and the radio up almost as much as I am looking forward to seeing my peeps.) I'm going home for one of my nephew's graduation parties. I just looked at the graduation announcement which reminded me I graduated 10 years ago. How and when did I get this old?

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I've spent the last 2 hours (minus the time I just spent here) trying to decide what I was going to try to accomplish tonight. Talk about Epic Fail.

Summer Reading

This is way too ambitious--50 books. I'm a slow reader. But I'm going to do my best. This is an odd amalgamation of books on my shelves that I've never gotten around to reading, books that have been recommended to me, a little poetry homework, and embarrassing gaps in my poetry background. I'm not listing any fiction, but hopefully will have time for a novel or two at some point. Here it is:

Poetry

Complete Works:

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Lorine Niedecker

Arthur Rimbaud

Wallace Stevens

Anne Sexton

John Keats

Thom Gunn

Dylan Thomas

Robert Frost

Selected Poems:

Percy Bryce Shelley

Donald Justice

Denise Levertov

Midnight Voices, Deborah Ager

Theories of Falling, Sandra Beasley

Manna Sifting, Garrett Brown

My Last Duchess & Other Poems, Robert Browning

Raefton Georgics, Garin Cychol

Furious Lullaby, Oliver De La Paz

Practical Gods, Carl Dennis

Then, Suddenly, Lynn Emanuel

Keep This Forever, Mark Halliday

Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes

Intaglio, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Hallelujah Blackout, Alex Lemon

Undersong, Audre Lorde

Cadaver Dogs, Rebecca Loudon

The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995, Michael Palmer

Torched Verse Ends, Steven Schroeder

The Darkness Around Us is Deep, William Stafford

Ohio Violence, Alison Stine

The Rented Violin, Karen Whaley

Self-Portrait With Crayon, Alison Benis White

Steal Away, C.D. Wright

The World of Ten Thousand Things, Charles Wright

Easter 1917 and Other Poems, W.B. Yeats

The Second Person, C. Dale Young

Strike Anywhere, Dean Young

Poetics

The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser

How Does a Poem Mean, John Ciardi and Miller Williams

A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie

Non-Fiction

Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo and Leslie Heywood

Gum Dipped, Joyce Dyer

Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva

Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, Alfred Lubrano

Capital, Karl Marx (maybe)

The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon

Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Willis

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On a slightly different note, I need to compile a list of poetry books published in the last two years for my intro to poetry course (obviously I'm not going to be able to list all of them...). I'm going to have my students write book reviews for their midterm project. Do you have a book I should add to the list?

What I'm Reading #4

I have a short list for some reason this week. I think that means I've been busy.

Winters, Anne. The Displaced of Capital. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Winters is a thoroughly urban poet (she visited class last night and said that to her, nature was a tree growing out of a grate in the sidewalk!) which is something quite foreign to me, but is absolutley captivating. There is something in the way she describes New York city that makes it feel organic rather than man-made.

While some of the criticism I read praised the series "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" above the long narrative poem "The Immigrant Woman," I felt quite the opposite. The sonnets were interesting, but "The Immigrant Woman" was captivating. Snapshots of New York's architecture, of grad student life, of a woman and her daughter living in a tenement, of a friendship that grows and withers--all these things are presented with the right amounts of drama, of detatchment, of detail. I could read this poem 1000 times and not grow tired of it, I think.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Bantam Classics, orignally published 1776.

I'm just starting to dig into this one, so forgive me if I'm short sighted. The back of the book says Smith "provided the first--and still the most eloquent--integrated description of the workings of a market economy." I'm only to the chapter where he describes the invention of money, so... (seriously--he spends 10 pages explaining how much a schilling weighs!)

What's strange here (for me) is the complete lack of political correctness. There are civilized folks and there are savages. People who don't have a specialized skill are likely to be "slothful and lazy"--and it goes on. What he's describing is the division of labor, and the advances that this has made possible. Of course, he seems to be pretty accurate (if you take away the bias) but I'm absolutely at a loss as to what we (a group of first year PhD students in English studies) are going to have to talk about. A classmate of mine who "gets" this theory stuff has directed me to davidharvey.org and Marx to contextualize. We'll see what happens.

What I'm Reading #2/3 - The Lightning Round

I'm a bit busier than I'd expected this semester (isn't that always the case?) and this little project keeps getting bumped to the bottom of the list. I still think keeping an annotated bibliography is a good idea, I'm just not sure how good. So today, I'm setting a timer for 10 minutes. Whatever I can do in that amount of time, great. Here goes:

For Class:

Fried, Michael. The Next Bend in the Road. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Fried is a poet and an art historian, and (as expected) many of his poems are ekphrastic. While I think these poems do what they set out to do, it's not a project I'm terribly interested in pursuing. I do wonder, though, how Fried defines "prose poem," as many of his read more like museum plaques than poems.

Kleinzahler, August. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

If you followed my link the other day, you would have found Kleinzahler's interview at bookslut. I linked it because I think it's amusing, but also because his irreverence is one of my favorite qualities of his poetry. I imagine Kleinzahler to be the middle-aged guy at the party who drinks too much scotch, hits on 25 year old women, and tells stories about French hookers while smoking a giant, nasty-smelling cigar. And usually, I love that guy (although yes, sometimes he can be creepy). At any rate, I liked the book.

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Uh-oh. Ten minutes are up. I don't get many points for that performance.

Here's what I didn't have time to mention:
David Shipler, The Working Poor (the primary text for my freshman comp classes)
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Miscellaneous texts on rhetoric/rhetorical theory

Updates

Oops. No "What I'm Reading" this week. #2 and #3 will be posted together on Tuesday. Blame it on Obama. Anyway, here's a teaser:


Q: Your prose seems to demonstrate a healthy loathing for dullness. Poetry readings these days often tend to be shockingly dull events. What would be your idea of a truly entertaining poetry reading?

A: A beautiful, naked 25 year old woman reading "Tintern Abbey" exquisitely well and in a Northumbrian accent.


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I'm on a mission to eat more fruits and vegetables. For some reason, I never manage to buy the right amount of fresh versus frozen/canned. Something always goes bad. This week--about 1/3 a crate of clementines.

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I'm very glad we're finally going to learn why Izzy can see/talk to/sleep with her dead ex-fiance. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a beautiful man and a pretty good actor, but I'm not a fan of characters coming back from the dead. Unless the show is called Supernatural, in which case, people coming back from the dead is perfectly understandable. Which reminds me--how did this guy get such a bum deal? Two parts on two networks on the same night at the same time and both characters get killed? He should fire his agent.

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I'm getting very excited about AWP. I need to buy some shoes.

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I'm about to watch The Holiday. I hope it's good. Which reminds me. I am dying to see Revolutionary Road. Or maybe I should just read it.

What I'm Reading - #1

As promised, here's a brief look at what I'm reading this week.

Just Because:

Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New Mind, Riverhead Books, 2005.

Pink claims that “Right-brainers” will be the most sought-after and successful employees in what he calls the Conceptual Age (which follows the information age). MFAs will be the new MBAs, he says, and empathy, creativity, and “joyfulness” are some of the key skills we all need to brush up on to stay competitive. I'm only about 60 pages in--I'll let you know if he comes up with anything useful.

For Class:

Moxley, Jennifer, The Sense Record, Edge, 2002.

My first impression of The Sense Record was that despite some really powerful, beautiful poems, the collection as a whole wasn’t for me. Many poems seemed to be overly expository, others too theoretical for my taste. After class discussion last night though, I realized that I missed a lot of what Moxley was setting out to do because my background in poetry just isn’t strong enough. Some of the criticism was helpful (see below), but I will be coming back to this collection after I’ve brushed up on my American poetry pre-1980.* Moxley makes allusions to Wordsworth and Whitman that flew right over my head, and now that I know they’re there, I may be able to take a little more away from what I’ve read. Also in this collection: ars poetica, feminism, critique of the academy, etc., Language poetry meets lyric poetry (?)... I'm feeling terribly inarticulate here, and know I'm not giving this book a fair shake. I'll be reading it again and revising my notes, hopefully before the end of the semester.

Bartlett, Lee, "What is 'Language Poetry'?" Critical Inquiry 12, 1986.

Language poetry is a reaction to/critique of "the workshop poem" and the "organizing I" in confessional poetry, yadda, yadda, yadda. Here's what I don't get: why can't we all just write the kind of poetry we want to write?

To be fair, what I did find interesting/instructive is the emphasis on deconstruction, text "as a play of subtexts," and the importance of signification and sound.

Also interesting: what I thought was Language Poetry is not Language Poetry, although I'm still not sure what is.

Burt, Stephen, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters and Commentary, 1999 (?).

In this short essay, Burt identifies a school of poetry that follows Language poetry and is characterized by “Fragmentation, jumpiness, audacity, performance, grammatical oddity, rebellion, voice, [and] some measure of closure.” Some poets he names to this school are Ann Carson, C.D. Wright, Liam Rector, Mark Levine, Lucie Brock-Broido, among others. Rather than paraphrasing, I’ll just quote his conclusion, which ties things up nicely:

[Elliptical poets] want to convey both metaphysical challenge and recognizable, seen and tasted, detail. Ellipticists reject: poems written in order to demonstrate theories; scene-painting, and prettiness as its own end; slogans; authenticity and wholeheartedness; mysticism; straight-up narrative; and extended abstraction […]. Elliptical poets are uneasy about (less often, hostile to) inherited elites and privileges, but they are not populists, and won’t write down to, or connect the dots for, their readers; their difficulty conveys respect.

I also read, but won't bore you with summaries of:

• Oren Izenberg's "Language Poetry and Collective Life"
• Marjorie Perloff's "After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents"
• OEI's special "After Language Poetry" issue, with short essays by poets including Moxley, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, and others

*Yes, I know. It's shameful that I am only well versed in contemporary poetry. I focused heavily on fiction as an undergrad and am trying to make up for it little-by-little. That's why I'm getting a PhD.

Spring Semester Eve

John is on a plane back to Cleveland, I've finished some proofing on Barn Owl Review #2 and there's nothing more I can put between myself and day one of Spring 09.

I don't have butterflies in my stomach...they're buzzards.

I'm not ready to teach tomorrow. I don't have a solid class plan, I don't have copies, and (more importantly) I don't know what I'm going to wear. I can't wear power heels because there's a foot of snow on the ground, and I don't think my ugly-ass hiking boots (the only water proof shoes I own) are going to inspire anyone. But seriously. The copies are my biggest worry. Do I go to staples and pay, or do I try to wake up early enough to get to school an hour or so before class starts so that I can get my copy code and do them for free? And why, oh why, do I have to do my own copies? At UA, you just fill out a little form and the student assistants do it for you. I like it a lot better that way. (Item #817 on the list of things I like better about UA.)

Okay, so I procrastinated. But does that really surprise you? I always wait until the last minute, and with John visiting for the last week, I wasn't about to spend all my time in University Hall putting the finishing touches on my syllabus and handouts. So I'm down to the wire. It'll get done and this time tomorrow I'll be one down, 44 to go.

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Since the beginning of my grad student career, I've been meaning to start an annotated bibliography. A prof suggested it once, and it seemed like something only the most anal retentive people would actually do, but now it seems almost essential to keeping everything straight. I haven't even started putting together my exam committee yet, but I'm fairly sure of the topics I'll choose (contemporary poetry, working class lit, etc., etc.), so it couldn't hurt. Anyway, the point is I am going to try to start my annotated bib this semester, and I'm going to use this blog to keep myself honest. So, starting Tuesday, I'll be posting a list of what I'm reading, with short summaries/reviews each week. You have my permission to poke, prod, and torment me if I miss any of the next 15 weeks.

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Well, I've officially procrastinated longer than I planned. Sigh. Back to the plans...

Quickies

Check it out - Hobble Creek Review is all new and shiny. Good work, Justin!

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What is going on with AWP? If you did get a pass, make sure you visit me and Mary and Jay and Jay at the Barn Owl Review table, and all of us at the NEOMFA reception on Saturday night.

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I just finished reading Nickel and Dimed, which didn't tell me much I didn't already know, but brought back some unpleasant memories. Ehrenreich did her little experiment durning the same year that I did mine (ha! I wish it was an experiment, but unlike our author, I did not have stock options and a savings account waiting for me in "real" life.) One thing I forgot until I started reading--the constant, and I mean constant, job hunting. You never want to accept that this job is the best you can get, so you keep looking. I started at least four jobs in two months. Fun!

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Had coffee with Jennifer and Jay yesterday. It was good to talk poetry, theses, life in general. Funny how much I miss my classmates during breaks.

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Doing better with the reading list this week. I also finished Boomer Girls, an anthology of women poets born between 1946 and 1964, which is apparently kind of hard to get your hands on (I got it from a UA used book sale). Lots of familiar names in that one: Kim Addonizio, Cathy Song, Jan Beatty, Rita Dove... and a lot of good poems (I only rolled my eyes a couple times). So, where's the next generation's anthology (let's say 1965 to 1980 or so)? I'm imagining a list of poets I'd solicit if it were my project, but who would you include?

Reading List + Seven

Last night, instead of working on my PhD apps, I reorganized my shelves into read and unread. Here's the unread shelves:

Some of these are partially read but not finished, or read but don't remember. At any rate, this is my new goal. At least one book per week (with the exception of the Nortons on the bottom shelf, those might take a little longer). There are 104 books on these shelves, so that means I should be all caught up by the end of 2009. Of course, new books will always be added, so it is really a never ending project, but an admirable goal, right?

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Karen tagged me. Here are the rules. Link to the person who tagged you and post the rules on your blog. Share 7 random or weird things about yourself. Tag 7 people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs. Let each person know they have been tagged.

1. When I was little, I used to collect the little cardboard tags that get punched out of toy boxes and whatnot so they can be hung. I called them "collecties."
2. I also used to collect clown figurines. I know people think clowns are creepy, but when I was a kid, I thought they were cute. I wanted to be one. Unfortunately, once everyone knew I collected clowns, that's all anyone ever bought me. At the height of my collection, I had about 60. Then I got a cat. He thought clowns were creepy. Broke most of them by jumping on the shelves and swatting them down. Now I have about 10/15 nice ones stored away in a box. I don't think I'll ever display them again.
3. My mom used to make ruebens for lunch a lot, except she put salami on them instead of corned beef. My sister didn't like saurkraut, so hers were just salami and cheese warmed up in the microwave. She called them "roonies" and they are one of my favorite comfort foods.
4. I used to think the word "burlesque" was pronounced "burly-que." Then people laughed at me.
5. I am a sucker for animated Disney movies. My favorites are The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.
6. I used to loooove playing football. Tackle football. I can't throw or catch, but I'm a damn good tackler.
7. I say "bless you" when people burp. My dad does it too. I learned it from him.

I tag: Jennifer, Jay, Emily, Frank, Kelly, Amy, and Nin. But I'm not going to tell them unless they come here because I'm lazy.

Crap

I don't know half of what I should.

When are they going to find a way to inject information intravenously? Why can't I just download someone's brain into mine?


Addendum:


For those of my readers whose brains I would like to download-

Do you ever feel this way? What have you read to fix it? What haven't I read that you think I should? (I haven't read much, so tell me even if it seems obvious.)


Why the questions? I'm trying to make a reading list for myself of stuff I probably should have read already.

Maybe I should just start here:

For example, here's a list of books on these shelves that I haven't read yet:

• To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee
• War and Peace - Tolstoy
• My Antonia - Willa Cather
• The Wasteland & Other Poems - Eliot
• Easter 1916 and Other Poems - Yeats