The binding of my 1988 paperback edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Collected Poems is drying out, so that some sections of pages are coming apart. But what haven’t dried out are my many yellow post-its throughout the book—notes on various poems that especially spoke to me two or three decades ago. Many of these poems address in some way Milosz’s relation to God—which is what interests me for this post.
There’s a five-stanza poem by Wallace Stevens that I return to often. I’ve never seen it reprinted in a selection of his poems or in an anthology, but its story intrigues and absorbs me, and I’m mesmerized by its sounds and images. It has been on my mind recently as I’ve been thinking about close reading, what it is and the terms we use to describe it.
Five years after reading her poem at President Biden’s Inauguration, Amanda Gorman offers us two new poems addressing public affairs—but now not in a hopeful time, but in a time of grief, fear, and outrage at I.C.E.’s brutality towards the members of the “homeland” it claims to secure—towards Renee Good, towards Alex Pretti, towards all of us.
Born in Gaza in 1963, Nasser Rabah lives there to this day. He has published five collections of poetry and two novels. With the help of his colleague and friend Saleh Razzouk, a Syrian translator and writer in Aleppo, Philip Terman has been translating some of Rabah’s poems. The poem “14,000,” about Gazan children, was originally posted on Rabah’s Facebook page as “4,000” on December 1, 2023.
Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her “Diary of a Young Girl” in a middle school literature class. But my own first impression of Anne came from her less well-known “Tales from the Secret Annex,” which deviates from the tone and material of her Diary in that it is a collection of mostly fictitious anecdotes and sketches.
I keep coming back to the color blue. Or maybe the color blue keeps coming back to me. Or I keep getting directed and redirected to the color blue. I spent a lot of time, over the last few years, with the paintings of Joan Mitchell. There wasn’t a tree out there she couldn’t paint blue. And before Mitchell, for me, was Franz Marc. He liked to paint animals blue, especially horses.
I’ve been making my way through books of photographs on the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly always, he’s dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. It’s the consistency of this visual record that by contrast makes John Wilson’s portrait of King (1985) so mesmerizing. Wilson (1922–2015) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and muralist known for powerful paintings, illustrations, and other works of art that honor Black dignity, racial justice, and equality.
I believe that the great poets and writers (and other artists) can be like shamans who show us deep truths about the society of which we are part. That’s why I wrote Legends of the Slow Explosion, which is about various figures who had stories to tell us that were embodied in their lives and times. The people are various—Miles Davis and Hannah Arendt, for instance—but they all fit that legendary profile.
Loose talk recently emitted by powerful people about the possibility of exploding nuclear weapons again made me recall Beat poet Gregory Corso’s marvelously playful shape-poem “Bomb.” In 1960, when it was included in Corso’s poetry collection The Happy Birthday of Death, because of the poem’s length, “Bomb” was inserted into the binding in a compressed fold-out accordion format. When expanded, the poem revealed the exploding bomb itself.
There’s no question that O.K./okay is an American coinage, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I’ll touch below on the various theories of its origin, but first I want to give some evidence of what Mencken calls its “success.” In fact, without intending any hyperbole, he claims that O.K. is “the most successful abbreviation ever coined, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere.”
Nearby on my desk is a thick textbook, 10 inches high, 7½ inches wide, battered, edges stained from sweat and dirt, with the word LITERATURE in white letters on the faded brownish-orange cover. Just above this word, in smaller letters, is the phrase “An Approach” to. The book’s full title, AN APPROACH TO LITERATURE, is printed horizontally in white block caps on the binding, a dark gray-green color that curls an inch onto the front and back.
This phrase took me aback. Not that I hadn’t already been happily startled by other passages in the book where I’d come across it: David Bentley Hart’s brilliantly, playfully pugnacious The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. But somehow the phrase I’ve used as my title stood out for me.
I’d been thinking for a while about the time and place of where I grew up—in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, in the middle of what came to be called the farm crisis. For my MFA program, I had written an essay exploring one or two aspects of the experience. Then right at the end of my program, my father had this huge meltdown, his whole nervous system was just shutting down.
W.H. Auden’s phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen,” has been misinterpreted: instead of saying that literature is ineffectual, Auden was simply resisting the idea that literature should be reduced to propaganda. Indeed, a couple lines below the phrase Auden writes that poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Literature, in short, doesn’t put up barricades; it is, rather, a “mouth” that makes the “nothing” of words happen.
If I handed you an essay called “The Poet,” you’d likely expect an analysis of, say, the poet’s meter or imagery and symbolism. But if the essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” you won’t find any of this. Rather, you’ll read that “it is not meters but meter-making argument that makes a poem.” And “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol.”
Recently I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see an exhibition that focused on Salvador Dalí. I tried to be receptive to the paintings by Dalí, but nothing called out to me. I devoted some time to four Dutch engravings from the sixteenth century and a few other things. I then rounded a corner, and, twenty feet away, I saw a portrait. My response was immediate: “That’s a great painting.”
I hadn’t realized how narrow my understanding of this blog’s title—“Close Reading”—had become until a friend loaned me a fine new book, Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Yong’s book has reminded me what “close reading” is for, as described by Slant Books’ own definition: …the art of close reading reminds us that great literature deepens our respect for mystery and the divided nature of the human heart—and in so doing offers us hope for healing and reconciliation.
Wait, you might ask, what do Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist writer and Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, have to do with one another and, for that matter, with the Boca do Inferno? That’s a good question. The answer is surprising in all sorts of ways and also slightly crazy and definitely confusing and then maybe even verging into the territory of….
During the summer season, when local peaches are plentiful, as we’d finish dinner I’d ask my husband “Do you care to eat a peach?” I knew I was playing on the line “Do you dare to eat a peach?”—from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But after a while I realized that there was nothing else I remembered from that poem. I hadn’t read it in, literally, decades. So I pulled Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays from my bookshelf and opened the book.
Early on, I recall reading a lot of Robert Lowell’s poems, including his poem “For the Union Dead.” More recently, in addition to a large array of many other poets’ works, I’ve been paying attention to the work of Eastern European poets, including Miklos Radnoti, Milosz, and Adam Zagajewski. This is not definitive, though.