Year: 2010

When I bought your book the other week, Mr. Sirowitz, it was in perfect condition except for the inscription on the end paper: “DELIA / {from jaime},” which I suppose means that Delia and Jaime broke up and she didn’t want to be reminded of him anymore, though it’s possible that he shot her like the guy in that song “Delia” by Johnny Cash, maybe because she didn’t appreciate the book, and he got rid of it as incriminating evidence. You never know.

“Jaime” doesn’t sound like a very Jewish name — though you never know about that either — but it kind of suggests that some goyim do enjoy your poems about family life. Or at least, Jaime did. And me too: I liked it well enough to read it twice, all 128 pages of it, even if the parents in the book were nothing like my parents, and some of the poems in your own voice seemed a little flat because, let’s face it, you’re not the complex thinker your mother was. But your publisher did an outstanding job shaking down people for blurbs — two of them even compare you favorably with Woody Allen and Philip Roth. I’m sure your mother would’ve been proud to read that.

Aside from the inscription, which is in black ink, it was a very good-condition hardcover — I liked the cover design, and I remembered liking the animations I found on YouTube of a couple poems from the book (even though they were in Norwegian with English subtitles) so I bought it. I put it on a chair with several dozen other books I’ve piled up to read this month.

Unfortunately, a mouse came along and ate a three-inch-long strip from the dust jacket, top center, right above the word “Mother.” I don’t know why it didn’t sample any of the other books on the chair. There must be something special about yours, although I know some readers will disagree.

The mouse was kind of a slovenly eater, leaving two bite-marks in the cover — obviously it never listened to its mother either. I would be more upset about this if I’d bought the book new, but fortunately I only paid 80% of $4.50 — the bookstore was having a sale. I might not have bought it otherwise, though if I hadn’t I would’ve missed the occasional gems of wisdom in it. I reproduce some of these below in case people don’t believe me, having only heard you on NPR’s All Things Considered or seen you on MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged — fine programs to be sure, but always more concerned with the flashy or freakish than anything thoughtful, and afraid to devote more than a few minutes to any one topic. That’s fine if all you want to be is a slam poet, of course, performing for drunks in bars, but I’m not sure that’s why your parents invested so much in your upbringing and education. They’d have wanted you to be taken seriously, especially when the better part of your schtick consists in repackaging their own words to you.

So even though I realize you were probably not trying to be wise, I did notice a number of sayings that would not be out of place in any collection of proverbs. Forgive me if I omit line breaks when transcribing these. If people want the line breaks, they can get a hold of your book for themselves, which I encourage them to do if they can find it in a public library or used bookstore, and can keep it away from the vermin which seem so fond of it.

The more you visit the dead, the less you have to say. (mother)

I happen to be wrong tonight. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be right tomorrow. (father)

Each time I hear my dog bark, she might be asking for you. (girlfriend)

The morning only starts after you’ve made your bed. (mother)

The night plays tricks on you. It makes you think you’re smarter than you are. (father)

Save [God] for bigger things, like if one of us gets sick. (mother)

Even a bum has to work hard convincing people that he’s really poor. (mother)

Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean the airline will let you fly for free. (mother)

The most you can do is make sure that when [death] comes it doesn’t cost you an arm & a leg. (father)

She says she’s very fond of you, but people say that about puppies they’re about to give away. (mother)

Words are everywhere. They’re in your shoe & in the label of your underwear. (mother)

The way to avoid a crisis is to speak in general terms. (therapist)

You tell a stranger your life story. But when you visit me you shut up. (mother)

They claimed that they improved on the Bible by adding the New Testament. But you & I both know that when you try to improve on something by making it bigger, like adding more bread crumbs to the meatloaf, it’s never as good as if you just left it alone. (mother)

Great metaphor, Estelle Sirowitz! You see, Hal really did love you to immortalize your words like that.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

Welcome to the chimerical wilderness of neo-animism, a “forest built from a tree,” a “specific world in a dense abstraction.” Step away from mindless consumption; rent yourself a cabin and engage in a more mindful brand. Trace the meat back to its source. Become a connoisseur of the hunt, gather stories of appetite and violence, gaze at auguries through telescopes and read your own entrails. I know in my gut what a hunger for narrative can do to a poem, how it can lead one to toy with non sequiturs and build alluring traps from a spare rib. But this book is set before the genesis of numbers: its pages are brown and speckled and its cover is a summons to the dissolution that awaits us all. I got it several months ago as a gift in the mail from a poet in Oregon. The protagonist, who may or may not be the author, is hot for the hyperbole of heat and need, in heat or out of it, married to the bear or the barmaid. The book is small enough to fit in a pocket, and in fact I have taken it into the woods with me, as much to introduce it to a real woods as to savor its dense language, printed almost to the edge of the pages. But it’s cold out this morning, so this time I’m reading it in the living room of what I never thought to call a cabin. I hear a squirrel’s claws on the kitchen window and what I suspect is a young woodchuck bumping against the cold air return duct under the floor. (Isn’t it nice of the furnace to take back the cold?)

***

This time I am trying to read Bear Stories as if the speaker in every poem were really a bear, in keeping with the book’s own thought-experiment or being-in-the-world-experiment style. But it doesn’t work. The first page in Animism for Dummies says, Know your animals before they know you. I begin to think that Chapman’s bears are really raccoons: bear-like, to be sure, but more charming and much less discriminating, adaptable to the habitats eviscerated by human habitation. Her wolves are bloodthirsty mustelids. I do not think this is a fable about consumerism, but it could be. Consider the raccoon’s obsessive-compulsive washing of its food. Consider its sense of fun, its legendary appetite for sex with multiple partners and its highly marketable lucky penis bone. The protagonist claims she knows nothing about “the fish in the bottom of the river … the winter birds in their molting. I cannot tell the difference between this tree and that one.” But she says, “I want no project except to watch and to give over the body to the body.” Chapman’s prose poems are full of beautiful fragments, the kinds of trinkets a raccoon would hoard. Even more tellingly, she compares her stories to wasp nests, with their drones and sugar wrapped in paper. But now I am feeling a bodily urgency of my own. The morning coffee has run its course, and when I go out to urinate I station myself, as I do so often, in front of a dead wild rose with rapier thorns, as if my hairless trouser mouse feels some primal need to face down the sharp-fanged weasels of the wood. This is the easy bravado we bring to what’s left of the wild these days, forgetting that the midnight oil we burn day and night is nothing like mother’s milk, and that we could be getting almost all the meat we need from the motherly oaks.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

Easter morning. Another perfect day to sit outside and read, pausing to watch the sun pour through red maple blossoms and forsythia. This might be why I prefer poetry to fiction: it does not take you completely out of the world. But Judson Mitcham comes from rural Georgia, from cotton fields and church suppers and sandlot baseball, and I am made to reconsider what I think an April day might mean. I’m seeing double, which is always a good thing.

Where an earlier book of his might’ve looked Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, a poem in this one sports an epigraph from Ecclesiasticus, and soon I am finding fresh apocrypha everywhere. Mass mailings sent to a man eight years dead bristle with significance. Lines of pure poetry are fathered upon a couple at an airport whispering in an unknown language. By page 29, I too am “getting lost on purpose.” A Klan gathering turns out to be little more than a worship service, and rock guitar riffs a legacy “from unknown men with second-hand guitars.” For some reason, the truth of these simple assertions gives me chills. An old woman writes a love letter to a man named Clarence, who used to make up stories about the drivers of cars going past in the darkness, and I can sense that attraction, too. Who needs the truth when an artful invention will do?

The church bells are ringing in town, but I can’t make out the melody, only the notes. (It sounds odd to put it that way, doesn’t it?) I read, “God’s editors erased what they thought not right,” about the pious canon-creators and their deafness to any laughter on the part of Jesus. A few pages later, there’s a poem in four parts called “Laughter,” and oy, it is as close to difficult parable as anything in the book. Mitcham knows how the smell of insecticide might provoke longing, how a fart at the right moment can be redemptive, and how the sound of one’s own laughter can prompt a sudden recognition of home, even when

The developers had cut
the old oaks, leveled off the hills, even made
the road go straight where it shouldn’t have, so
the homeplace seemed like a lie he had told
all his life, to himself.

I read these apocrypha just as I read the Bible: with great enjoyment tinged with a little bit of wistfulness for a storytelling tradition I could never quite feel at home in. But homelessness is the natural state of most poets, and Mitcham (or at least his protagonist) is no exception. He flees from a proselytizing woman on an airplane only to encounter in the concourse full of strangers his own “hope of someone waiting there/ who loved me.” A poem called “Home” is set in a home for the elderly, where “a history of groans began to grow/ till the sing-song noise made sense.”

A Cooper’s hawk begins to chitter up in the woods. I think of the hermit thrush I watched sing from a branch beside the porch two hours before, the quiet, ethereal song seeming to come from a great distance. “We are,” says Mitcham, “like/ the hymns once played on the out-of-tune piano … versions no one else/ will ever reproduce.”

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

An exercise in close reading: that’s what I’m planning this year. I’m going to try reading a book of poetry a day, first thing in the morning after I come in off the porch, instead of just the usual half-dozen poems. And then I want to try writing about it: about the book, about the reading experience, or about whatever thoughts or memories it might shake loose. And because I do believe in the value of what John Miedema calls slow reading, these books will probably tend to be pretty short, though I have found that with the right level of concentration, it’s possible to read fifty or more lyric poems in one hour.

Why am I doing it? Three reasons, I guess. First, I love poetry books, and I feel I haven’t devoted nearly enough space to celebrating them here. I’ve been trapped in pre-conceived and rather boring notions of how to write about books, I think, and I’m hoping to break out of that.

Second, I’m curious about what a month-long immersion in poetry reading will do to me. Will it be mind-altering? Almost certainly. Will it change the way I read poetry? Maybe. Will it prove to be an overdose, and send me rushing naked and screaming into the streets? Well, let’s hope not.

Third, I do want to be part of the whole poetry month thing, and share a bit of fellowship with other poetry bloggers. But I’ve always had a hard time joining group activities, so if everyone else is writing poetry every day, I have to be reading it. I do hope to make time for reading the new poems that will be appearing on other people’s blogs, too, though. And maybe even writing a few of my own.