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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. This week it was Theodore Roethke’s turn. Browsing his six poetry collections, I of course find an abundance of themes: his childhood and relation to his father, love of a woman, various dimensions of the self, and more. But the poems I’m most drawn to are the ones where he expresses what I’d call his mysticism— his longing for and then union with the divine.
On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004).
Ever since I first read Pattiann Rogers’s poem “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” (in her 2001 collection Song of the World Becoming), I’ve been enthralled by it. But I haven’t tried to move through it slowly, line by line. That’s what I want to do in this post.
September 17, eight days before the Asheville storm, my wife and I left town. First stop, D.C. to visit our son and his partner. Next stop, New Rochelle, N.Y. to visit our daughter and her boys. Monday, September 30, the day after a “Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry” retreat for the board and staff in Manhattan: head home. Settle back just in time for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That was the plan.
The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. That’s extreme, but there’s some truth to it, and among modern American poets, a case in point is Robinson Jeffers. He’s rarely on syllabi, and it has been this way for a long time. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. He’s well worth reading, studying, and learning from.
On this upcoming family camping trip, there are so many things I should be reading. But what do I want to read? It must be something best consumed in brief snippets. I may take a volume of R H Blyth’s haiku translations. But even that is too much in the way of commentary (brilliant though it is) when what I want is something pared down to essentials, something crystalline, elemental, vivid, this-worldly. The only narrative I’m interested in is that of travel in this world.
This list is based partly on some reading I’ve been doing for a novel project now drawing near completion. Two themes govern the list. The more fun theme is that of adventure, romance, epic, enchantment—in a word, fantasy. The equally profound and urgent, if less obviously exciting theme, is that of georgics or the literary tradition that celebrates the cultivation of the earth, as well as its beauty and mystery and terror.
For my birthday, my sister sent me The Carrying, the 2018 collection of poems by Ada Limón, current U.S. Poet Laureate. I hadn’t read Limón’s poetry before, and found that getting to know it was very moving. The poems drew me into themselves, into the depths of Limón’s recurrent joys and concerns.
There’s a mistake I sometimes make in my close reading of literature. In the classroom work I’m doing, or in the essay I’m writing, I tend to interpret the words, lines, and sentences at the beginning and the middle from the vantage point of the end. I know where the poem or piece of prose has concluded, and I project what I have come to know into what I had earlier read.
I’m going to have to bow out for a little while. In the middle of life’s way I have suddenly returned to school to study environmental science and law. Whether this is wandering in a dark woods—and if it is, whether I will emerge on the right side of the woods—time will tell. I don’t think of this wandering as a complete career shift, as I still have literary work to publish.
When Karen Armstrong writes “Nature does not figure prominently in Judaism and Christianity,” in a chapter which looks mainly at Islam (she goes on to imply this is not the case in Islam and that in that religion, unlike in the other two, nature is a revelation on par with the Qur’an—which is of course also what Jews and Christians believe about the Bible and nature)—when she makes such a sweeping statement, I balk.
I don’t know the desert. I’ve slept in a palm-branch hut, rented for $1 a night from a Bedouin, by the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula when it was under Israeli control. I’ve spent hours in a broken down Jeep waiting for help somewhere in the Sinai. I’ve watched the sunrise from atop Masada in the Judean Desert. Just a few weeks ago, I visited Joshua Tree National Park, where two deserts, the Mojave and the Colorado, meet.
Henry David Thoreau was a profoundly religious man. He is called a Transcendentalist, and the term is taken to mean a kind of hippie or New Age guru, perhaps something like the founders of the Deep Ecology movement. That’s nonsense. Thoreau was a Yankee, the near descendent of (the grossly misunderstood) Puritans, and he comported himself as such in his life and thought.
I think one of my favorite publications of 2021 was Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation of nineteenth-century Austrian author Adalbert Stifter’s collection of short fiction, Motley Stones. These stories fit into a collection of books I’ve been assembling for over fifteen years, writing I call hypethral.… Hypethral writing finds the natural world iconic or sacramental.