May, June, early July reading

Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong
Purgatory, Raul Zurita
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase, Lynn Xu
All the Flowers Kneeling, Paul Tran
Plainwater, Anne Carson
The Renunciations, Donika Kelly
Some Say a Lark, Jennifer Chang
The Master Letters, Lucie Brock-Broido
Stay, Illusion, Lucie Brock-Broido
Praise, Robert Hass
Water Puppets, Quan Barry
The Octopus Museum, Brenda Shaughnessy
Versed, Rae Armantrout

Comments

greatness

The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.) The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work ...

Shiji (史记)

A. Sima Qian's account in his seminal 史记 ( Shiji , History Record - usually translated as 'Records of the Grand Historian') of six assassins is probably the most absorbing part of that work. But why would Sima Qian devote a section on commoners in a work that otherwise considers only nobility and rulers? Perhaps the better question is: what's the effect of this inclusion on us?

summer reading (Richard Hugo)

Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road . I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks . I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.) Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars don't glitter, arrogant as moons. When did we start? Light-years ago. Why did we come? No matter. We are not returning to that world of ditch and strain, the research terms: cryogenic fuels, free radicals, plasma jets, coordinated fusion. Only the last, in all this void, applies. A universe is fusing in our eyes.

confused about the ceiling

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