Essays

I’m reading Robert Cording’s latest poetry collection, What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems. In the “Selected Poems” sections, we get a survey of Cording’s long, celebrated poetic career, ranging from Life-List in 1987 through Without My Asking in 2019. Cording actually published a subsequent book that he doesn’t include selections from: In the Unwalled City (2022). The reason for this omission is that the section of “New” poems in What’s Possible continues the theme of the 2022 collection: Cording’s grief over the recent death of his thirty-one-year-old son, Daniel.

I’ve always felt my work centered on the inextricable nature of joy and sorrow.  I’d say the selection of poems drew on three aspects: that for me the ordinary world is extraordinary; that what’s extraordinary is we live in a creation that need not be, but is; and that our work is, as Gary Snyder has said, to make the real world as real as possible.  To me that involves my attempts, however often I’ve failed, to see the world and not my “idea” of the world, as Wallace Stevens put it.  I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world I live in and I hope the poems I’ve chosen reflect that in myriad ways.

Paul Gauguin’s first major Tahitian canvas, “Ia Orana Maria” (“Hail Mary”) is a painting that should be seen at the Met, if you can get there. My wife Peggy and I can’t. But we visited the painting anyway, not once but twice, in the form of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring “Ia Orana Maria.” We painstakingly put it together, took it apart, and just now, a year or so later, put it together again.

In The Death of Rabelais, her recent verse play, J.C. Scharl has created something rare: an excellent comedy about death. It is, moreover, not only a comedy about death, but a comedy about comedy’s relationship with it. But the most impressive thing is that the play manages to take death seriously and, at the same time, be very funny.

My previous post, keyed to Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, was about the making of decisions, and this new one is related to it. Through examples from Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass, I’ll try to explain what the relationship is.

Yes, I know: a flat-out contradiction. How can space be eloquent? or speak at all? Space is a nothing, isn’t it? An absence. A way of indicating a separation. The words around it speak, not the space itself. But if you think that way, you’ll find yourself challenged to think otherwise by the recently published This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater.

The work of both W. G. Sebald and Edmund de Waal is the result of a never-ending curiosity, steeped in years of craft, whether (for de Waal) at the potter’s wheel making porcelain vessels, or (for Sebald) pen to paper endlessly revising paragraphs. Both strike a similar chord; one of tenderness, of loss, estrangement and displacement.

I’ve never actually seen Arnold Böcklin’s famous but now not really all that famous, let’s say once-famous and now fairly obscure painting known as Die Toteninsel, or The Isle of the Dead. I haven’t seen it in person. There is a version of the painting, I guess Böcklin painted a number of versions of the painting since they kept getting destroyed by wars and other annoying events, but there is a version of the painting at the art museum in Leipzig and I kick myself that I was in Leipzig not that long ago, a couple of years ago and completely and utterly failed to go see the painting.

I find myself writing a lot about the feeling of things coming an end, and so the worlds in the stories inevitably share some characteristics. Things are always breaking down, or are right at the point of breaking down. I don’t try to link the stories or sketch out all the rules, so there’s not much true world-building going on outside the pages. But I wouldn’t disagree that a lot of the stories could share a single imaginative landscape.

Narcissus, one of many mythical figures in Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is too important a character in our lives today to be dismissed as a word-jumble. That’s because Narcissus’s story forms the basis for the psychological malady called narcissism. It’s a malady characterized in one dictionary as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Maybe close reading Narcissus’s story will help us figure out who is who the next time we look in the mirror.

About a year ago, a friend recommended to me Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel The Summer Book, saying it was the most perfect piece of writing he’d ever experienced. So of course I bought it right away—but have just now gotten around to reading it. Yes, it’s extraordinary—and unlike any other fiction I’ve read. It’s not really a novel in the usual sense. It’s a serious of vignettes, from two to twelve pages each.

When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.

This post is about the decisions we’ve made that led to the full and complex stories our lives have told. We made these decisions, or so we believe. But maybe we didn’t. It could be that they were made by some other force or agency and occurred beyond or outside us, fatefully, through no conscious choice-making of our own. There are literary examples that help to explain what I’m getting at, one from Ernest Hemingway, the other from Henry James.

Nonetheless, there are still the hours to stare down. To care for someone sick, even when joyfully, is to watch the painful inching forward of time, just as it is to watch the day fall forward on a Sabbath without electronic amusements. And to bear the breadth of literature can be exacting, but a labor that ultimately satisfies.

After reading Dr. Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” again and again over many years, and reading it again now, I don’t find it depressing at all. Quite the opposite. I find it invigorating. And that’s in large part due to its language, maybe especially to its vigorous, often surprising adjective-noun combinations.

John Poch’s new book of poems, “The Future of Love,” is so full of riches that I can’t possibly do them all justice in this post. So I’m going to focus on three of the book’s main motifs: Spain, colors, and love. Poch has clearly spent considerable time in Spain. It’s referred to or is even the setting for over fourteen of the book’s poems.

Along with Richard Wright, many other African American writers have spoken about the awakening they received from books. Ralph Ellison recalled that he “read voraciously,” that “the act of reading” was “an apprenticeship in freedom.” James Baldwin read “every single book I could get my hands on.… Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”

This book is primarily composed of love poems that I have been writing for over twenty years for my wife. They are all free verse poems, except for the title poem, made of lines of only three syllables each. Of all the poems I’ve written, probably half my work is in strict forms and half free verse. But this collection, for some reason, has pushed the regular meters/structures away in favor of wilder rhythms and lines. Lastly, this book is almost entirely set in Spain, where we spent a good amount of time in the first fifteen years of our marriage.

One early morning, after unloading the dishwasher, grinding beans for my wife’s coffee, and boiling water for my tea, I sunk into my usual spot—a love seat near our gas fireplace—, switched on the reading lamp, and opened Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air. My head was filled with a fog like the thermal inversion fog I often see in the valley outside my window. I hoped one of Jacobson’s poems would, like the sun, warm the mental fog sufficiently for it to be lifted.

I was watching “Vampyros Lesbos” the other day, which is, shall we say, very much less than a perfect movie. It is not even, by any reasonable standard for what makes a movie good, a good movie. It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I’m not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily.