Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

I’m supposed to give you my favorite quotes about books, but while I highlight them in the books I read (and I have an unbelievable amount of books about books and reading), I don’t tend to remember them except for Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. I still use this passage from The Situation and the Story to talk about literature with my students:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

Obviously, the terms “the situation” and “the story” work best with creative nonfiction, but I’d argue you could use these terms to talk about all literature. It’s all a bit emotional, isn’t it?

Otherwise, it might be more productive to list my favorite books about books:

1. The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick - The subtitle is “The Art of Personal Narrative,” which probably explains this better than I could. If you’re a creative nonfiction writer and you haven’t read this, get it immediately. Everyone should read it, though.
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - It’s a memoir of Iran, post-Revolution, mixed with sections on Henry James, Jane Austen, Vladmir Nabokov (Lolita), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby), all of which were/are banned in Iran.
3. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby - Volume one of his columns in The Believer. Dude’s funny. He lists all of the books bought that month, all of the books read (almost never as many), and writes about all of them with his trademark wit.
4. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt by Nick Hornby - The Believer columns, volume two.
5. Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby - The Believer columns, volume three. His words encouraging John Updike to write more are pretty damn funny. And somewhere among all three volumes Hornby admits he’s been buying a lot more than he has previously admitted.
6. The Bibliophile’s Devotional by Hallie Ephron - There’s a book picked for all 365 days of the year. You’ll never be so inspired to read.

I guess I should’ve listed literary criticism, right? The Highbrow (capital H) stuff, right? Eh. Go to hell. I also refuse to list Christopher Hitchens or Harold Bloom, though I do appreciate them because they’re so curmudgeonly. And I quite enjoy how angry Timothy Steele was about what T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did to traditional meter. But, eh. I gave you my favorites.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #9

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - The feminism! The story! I read it last summer and I just couldn’t not love it.
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens - It was 989 pages and I didn’t want it to end. I first started it in a six-week, six-novel Dickens class in Cambridge, England, but I re-started it and finished it years later. Amazing characters, amazing mysteries.
3. Washington Square by Henry James - Catherine Sloper’s end is so realistic and so sad and I completely related to it. I’ve had a Morris Townsend, too.
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - I can never tell how much I’m under the influence of pop culture when I say I love this. But I love it nevertheless. Darcy forever.
5. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - So, so poetically beautiful. I started to have faith in contemporary fiction again after I read it.
6. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - I loved it at 16 and I loved it at 25 and I will always, always, always have special place in my heart for Charles Dickens.
7. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - Joan Didion was the first writer who made me love creative nonfiction. She’s a tough, tender broad.
8. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - Maybe I love this book because Azar Nafisi made me love Henry James. Or maybe I love this book because she came to my campus and gave a speech about the Republic of the Imagination that blew off the top of my head. Or maybe I’m just a little bit (or a lot) in love with Persian culture. Either way, yes, yes, yes.
9. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - Even though he loves big guns and bullfighting and male culture, Hemingway’s a national treasure. I love this novel and these characters. Bonus points for its Modernism.
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner - Of All Time? This book has to be on the list. Faulkner taught me a few essential things about humans with this novel.

This is too hard; it’s like playing favorites with pets (or children). I really wanted to add Our Mutual Friend to this list, but I thought three Charles Dickens novels might be a bit much. And Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And young adult fiction. And poetry. Damnit. I can give you a top five I’m sure of, or a top 25, but not a top 10.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #1)

structureandstyle:

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
      London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
      Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
      Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
      No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
      One average mind — with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
      Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
      You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
      Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
      Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
      That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
      The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
      These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
      Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
      No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
                  Yet this is you.

—Ezra Pound

I love Modernism because all of the change—the Second Industrial Revolution, urbanization, World War I, and World War II, Prohibition, the Great Depression—seems so universal in the Western world, and so obviously reflected in the literary world. Prose writers are very transparent about the changes; Virginia Woolf wrote in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” and Willa Cather wrote in the preface for Not Under Forty that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” But the poets are much more subtle.

I spend a lot of time reading and teaching T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which in some ways is the perfect portrait of the Modern man (“Portrait d’Homme”?): feckless, indecisive, insecure. But Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme” is an interesting opposite, with the Modern woman “our Sargasso Sea”: shoreless. The woman is sought by “great minds” but she’s alone—and not unhappy: “You preferred it to the usual thing:/One dull man, dulling and uxorious,/One average mind — with one thought less, each year.” To be sure, the speaker of the poem concludes that the Modern woman—the “femme” of the poem—still has “Nothing that’s quite your own.” But she seems to have some choice to avoid the “one dull man” and “one average mind.” And that’s a big change from earlier years—and an even bigger change from what the Modern man becomes.

Anyway. Read this poem and then check out “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot and Pound were two of the most influential poets in all of the twentieth century, and their poems are worth your time today or any day—even despite their personal biases.

-R

structureandstyle:

“Gary Snyder lives in the country. He wakes up in the morning and listens to birds. We live in the city.” – Kathleen Wood

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick
I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money

this ain’t no party
this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no foolin a

grab-bag of
clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about

how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun

this ain’t no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bullshit

this ain’t no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and
fall desperately in love

this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down
wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about
the broken rainbow

it is a carnival of dread

it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena

it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but

throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the the motherfucker can swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it

but, my friends…

there is so much to hate These Days

that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I’ll never pay

because they’re after us
they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we get politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glassy magazines promising that they’ll
fuck us till we shoot blood

if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives

I’ve got mine

—David Lerner

I read something about David Lerner a while back, so I googled him and eventually came across this poem. I wanted to post it today because today is a I’m-so-sick-of-the-world day and rather than rant and rave, I’m posting a poem that rants and raves. There are some good lines in here, though, like: “all I want to do is/burn my initials into the sun” (don’t we all?); “I want to be/hated/by everyone who teaches for a living” (interesting thought); “this ain’t no/genteel evening over/cappucino and bullshit/this ain’t no life-affirming/our days have meaning/as we watch the flowers breath through our souls/and fall desperately in love”; and “because love is an excellent thing/surely we need it.” Honestly, I posted this poem because I’m hurting and mad and it would be crappy of me to start screaming at everyone around me, which is what I really want to do. So, I let David Lerner scream for me.

-S

wwnorton:

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

—Molly Peacock, from Cornucopia

structureandstyle:

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

—Margaret Atwood

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a woman and a writer, both. Either is an exhausting job, and to be both seems impossible. And I keep thinking about Adrienne Rich, who supposedly argued in Of Woman Born that until a woman can walk away from a pregnancy like a man can, we should be allowed reproductive rights. (I haven’t read Of Woman Born yet.) Or Judith Ortiz Cofer, who writes in “The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open” that she started “going to bed when [her] daughter did and rising at 5:00 a.m.” every morning to write. Motherhood seems so impossible, especially if you’re a writer.

But here is Atwood, writing ”A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child./there is no either/or.” She says everything I suspect but cannot articulate, and she says it beautifully. I think for me, I’ll have to make a decision eventually, and I’ll have to make it work: “there is no either/or.”

Again, poetry says what I cannot.

-R