23 posts tagged “poetry”

I'm not sure why I never have anything to say anymore, on either of my blogs. I'm usually spewing some drivel or another so you might think it would end up here, but well, I have to chalk it up to laziness.

At least with a list like this it proves you can find pretty much anything you want on the Net. And that Stumbleupon rules. Here are a few of my favorites to keep you busy for hours.

 And so, for your lazy link pleasure:

• Sunbeam Poem Projector
• LSD vs Alcohol vs Tree
• Stun your friends with these crazy Latin sayings!
• Mentos and Coke Record Explosion
  
  
  

  Mentos and Coke Record
• An Error
• Lots and lots of cat facts
• I am a Zombie Filled with Love
• The Ten Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts
• Star Wars Urban Photography
  
  
  

  Don't Mess with Boba Fett
• 100 greatest dance songs of the 90s
• I'm a Creep
• Frank Melech's Dreamworld
• Book Autopsies
• Velociraptor season is here. Are you prepared?
• Don't Panic!
• To satisfy your morbid fascination
• 19.20.21
• Forbidden books
• World of Inspiration
• Sickeningly cute
• How to make roses from maple leaves (useful, I know!)
• CandyKitty will take care of your money (coveting)
• Cottonmonster
• May the force be with you
• 349 scandals in eight years with time for more!
• Face your childhood fears

That should keep you busy for now. :)

by Alfred Domett (1811–87)
 
Hence, rude Winter! crabbed old fellow,   
Never merry, never mellow!  

Well-a-day! in rain and snow   
What will keep one’s heart aglow?   
Groups of kinsmen, old and young,         
Oldest they old friends among;   
Groups of friends, so old and true   
That they seem our kinsmen too;   
These all merry all together   
Charm away chill Winter weather.
 
What will kill this dull old fellow?   
Ale that ’s bright, and wine that ’s mellow!   
Dear old songs for ever new;   
Some true love, and laughter too;   
Pleasant wit, and harmless fun,           
And a dance when day is done.   
Music, friends so true and tried,   
Whisper’d love by warm fireside,   
Mirth at all times all together,   
Make sweet May of Winter weather.

Point
by Pablo Neruda

There is no space wider than that of grief,
there is no universe like that which bleeds.

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”  ~ Marianne Moore

Born November 15, 1887, Marianne Craig Moore was destined to become one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century. During the 85 years of her life, she received many awards for her work, including the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Medal for Literature. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. In 1957 she was made Chevalier de l’Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic, and in 1969 she received an honorary doctorate in literature from Harvard University, her sixteenth honorary degree.
    
Many scholars would argue that her poetry is not, in truth, the most remarkable work that she did during her lifetime. She was not a terribly prolific poet, publishing only nine very slim volumes of poems, in contrast to many other poets of her time. It’s no wonder, for Moore was instead one of the most vibrant letter-writers of all time, and her poetry wove itself into the over 30,000 letters that have been preserved. She wrote letters nearly every day of her life, not only letters to her ever-widening circle of friends and fans, but also rich, descriptive letters to her close friends and her family—her mother, Mary Warner Moore, and brother, John Warner Moore. Some of her family letters would often exceed fifty pages in length. In her introduction to The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, Bonnie Costello notes:

While Moore’s literary correspondence is significant for the picture it gives of literary culture, of equal importance is the family correspondence. These letters provide a rare, intimate portrait of the artistic, social and psychological development of a poet. Moore’s family members were closely involved in her life of writing and were often the sources of her literary ideas.

Before her birth, Moore’s father had a nervous and mental breakdown and was hospitalized in Massachusetts. Afterward, Moore’s mother moved her brother to the home of her grandfather, where Marianne was born and spent her early childhood. She was very close to both her mother and brother throughout the course of her life, even as a student at Bryn Mawr and while her brother was studying at Yale. After she finished school, she lived with her mother until her mother’s death in 1947.

Moore’s creativity was apparent at an early age and quickly convinced her mother that she was going to have a poet in the family. As Mary Warner Moore wrote to a friend:

You would have laughed surely, could you have heard my daughter’s lament that the poetry was for Warner, rather than for her. She dotes on poetry to a perfectly horrible degree. I know we shall yet have a poetess in the family, and finish our day languishing in an attic…

Her family was to have a strong influence on her development as a creative artist. The letters she wrote to them during the times she was apart are filled with lengthy descriptions of her adventures, the sights she saw and the people she interacted with daily.  Her brother and mother encouraged her lively sense of play, as is evidenced in the letters—there was a mischievous language and exchange that was developed between them and occasionally shared with the closest of friends. The letters show this elaborate nicknaming structure, with Marianne often referring to herself in the third person, as male and with playful names such as “Fangs,” “Gator,” “Rat,” “Hammy,” and sometimes “Uncle”. Her brother was most often referred to as “Biter” but sometimes “Beaver,” “Badger,” or “Weaz.” Her mother was sometimes called “Bunny,” “Fawn,” or “Mouse.” They would often refer to themselves as a family of dogs or a family of fish.

Clearly Moore grew up in a creatively motivating environment, one that supported her writing and the ability to create fantastic worlds and ideas. Davis notes in his studies about creativity that some of the strongest blocks to creative development are cultural pressures to be practical and economical, as well as the belief that fantasy is a waste of time. On the contrary, Moore grew up in an environment that encouraged fantasy and in which the other family members shared in the same sense of creative play on the same level as the poet. Undoubtedly this approach to creative collaboration was influenced by Mary Warner Moore’s work as a teacher.  Moore’s letters and poems benefited by the creative support of her family and the resulting self-confidence in her writing was clear. By 1909 she considered herself a professional writer:

    I have some poems fresh from the pen which I expect to sell.

Her family was directly supportive of these efforts and her brother went so far as to tell her:

        If your poem is not took by the Book News—whatever you do, don’t quit.

When Moore graduated college, she eventually went on to become the editor of  The Dial, the preeminent literary periodical. This exposure gave her the opportunity to meet and correspond with some of the most famous literary and artistic figures of the day, including Alfred Steiglitz, H.D., Bryher, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Bogan, Edith Sitwell, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, James Merrill, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few. Her correspondence with these literary figures is clearly personally inspiring.
        

        To Ezra Pound   November 9, 1931
        Dear Mr. Pound:
            I value your indulgence. […]
Lemon-yellow-black was my idea of the underwing of the grasshopper but the carmine in connection with the sunset is better. Speaking of minor work, no doubt you recall [John] Skelton’s grasshop in “Phyllyp Sparowe.” I agree with you that there are substitutes for Calvin but the commentaries on the minor prophets, the letters, trouble about translators, and so on, have life….   
 

Moore’s correspondence is full of such ripe exchange. Not only does she review and discuss the literary works of the writers to whom she was writing, but she also received valuable input on her own writing. She immersed herself in the literary life, absorbing the information and advice of her peers and the end result was an editor and poet with accolade after accolade dotting the path of her life.  

Through her correspondence, Moore was also immersing herself in her domain of expertise. In her essay, "Personality Processes and Individual Differences,” Teresa Amabile points out the importance of collecting such information:
    

The nature of domain-relevant information and the manner in which it is stored can make an important difference in creative production. […] knowledge organized according to general principles is of greater utility than specific, narrowly applicable collections of facts. […] an increase in domain-relevant skills can only lead to an increase in creativity, provided that the domain relevant information is organized appropriately.        

As editor, Moore was encouraging and editing the works of other writers; as a poet, she was writing and receiving criticism of her peers; as a friend, she corresponded at length about her feelings, observations, hopes and plans. She was prolific in her letter-writing; she wrote over 100 letters to T.S. Eliot, 100 letters to Ezra Pound, 500 letters to Bryher, and over 200 letters to Elizabeth Bishop, not to mention countless other letters to other literary figures. The Rosenbach Museum and Library, which houses the correspondence between members of the Moore family, lists between the years of 1905 and 1947, over 13,500 leaves to her mother and brother (often in a small hand on both sides).  In everything she did, she was absorbed by the world of writing. She spent the majority of her waking time writing, corresponding, collaborating and learning and the result of such immersion is evident in the numerous awards and honorary degrees that she received.

Sandra Bond of Carnegie Mellon University concluded that there are certain conditions that must be met to increase one’s chances of becoming a successful creative. She states that:
    
        If your society

1. values intellectual activities, and
2. encourages you to be interested in intellectual activities, and
3. encourages you to believe that you can succeed in intellectual activities, and
4. helps you obtain the necessary education, and     
5. does not impose other occupations on you which preempt your time, then your chances of becoming a creative person will be much better than average.

Marianne Moore was fortunate enough to have met all those conditions. She lived her life in pursuit of an intellectual life, her brother and mother encouraged her interest and gave her consistent belief in her abilities (and she counted among her close friends the poets H.D. and Bryher), she attended Bryn Mawr as a popular and successful student, and at no time was she encouraged to work toward any occupation other than the one that she chose for herself, that of a professional poet.

~
Marianne Moore’s poetry has always inspired me. Her lush descriptive verse is a delight to both the eye and the ear and conjures imagery that is a pure pleasure for the imagination. I have always appreciated the specificity of her poetry and find that my sparse style finds synergy in her condensed and precise approach.

Reading her letters is even more inspiring. I find myself in awe of the connections that she made in her lifetime—that she was influenced by such literary giants and indeed, influenced those same individuals in return. Her letters to her family are equally rich and inviting, full of life and love for the world in which she lived. She was a very positive person. While the biographies and essays that I have read don’t specifically say as much, the evidence is overwhelmingly the case. In a letter to her brother on May 4, 1928, she says:

Paul ast me to dinner with him & Edmund Wilson. I said “Edmund Wilson & I were locked in mortal combat & that he seemed to think The Dial needed discipline, speaking harshly of it on every occasion but that I accepted that as a token of respect & was extremely grateful to him for caring about us so much.” Paul laughed merrily. I said I would be glad to see Mr. Wilson, however, that I had nothing against him, & that everybody at The Dial liked him.  

I love how she turned that around so gracefully, how she took something that could have been negative and left her in a place where she might harbor resentment toward that gentleman and yet she graciously listened to his words and at the same time, held her own. I want to be able to achieve the same amount of grace in my life and in my dealings with others. How often have I taken criticism and let that affect my work and my relationship with the criticizer? Far too often. 

 The way in which she spoke about herself, about her writing, about the people in her life are a clear demonstration to the hope she held for herself, for the belief that she had in her writing and in the writing of her peers. She lived in an encouraged, supportive setting and in everything she did, she worked to return that support to the people in her life who had given her the same. Her letters were rarely disparaging and always had a forward reaching hope embedded within her words. 

Even more notable for me, she was resilient and she persevered. She had confidence to push through rejection defiantly and creatively:

On January 18, after a refusal from H.L. Mencken’s The Smart Set, she commented, “If they pray to me, I never will give them a poem.” On February 8 she joked that Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses, “hasn’t seen fit to write to me [about her submission of poems]. I guess he is deciding between 10,000 or a salary”; and on March 27, after these poems were refused, “I am writing a poem as an indirect choke pear for all my detractors and sluggard critics—drat them. It is on a couple of fighters:---perhaps a reference to an early version of “To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity” (published 1916). By the end of 1915 she had published poetry in The Egoist, Poetry, and Others, and by 1918 also in Contemporary Verse, The Chimaera, Bruno’s Weekly, and The Little Review.

To be able to look at such rejection in a humorous light, even in the face of what must have been some painful emotions and self-doubt, is amazing to me. She didn’t let those people tell her that she wasn’t good enough—she kept pushing forward and continued to believe that her poems were worth the ink and paper she had put them on. The end result is a body of work that will be hailed by scholars for years to come.

What is most evident about Moore is that she was extraordinarily prolific. She wrote constantly, sometimes as many as 50 letters in a day, in addition to her work as an editor and her poetry writing. She made it a priority to write and write she did. She connected, she collaborated, she conferred, but that pen was always down on the page and I admire her drive and discipline, but more importantly her passion for her writing, be it a letter or a poem.
   
Marianne Moore has become a strong role model for me. I admire her self-confidence, her continuous desire to pursue her love of writing, her candor, her grace, her motivation, her positivism and her ability to seek out and collaborate with some of the greatest minds of her time. I already am looking at ways to change my life to more mirror her creative efforts. For me, that means re-dedicating myself to my writing, not only my poetry, but also my novels, and my correspondence with friends and family. It also means looking at my life in a more upbeat way, in looking at hurdles not as stopping blocks, but as challenges to climb or maneuver myself around. It means exploring ways to become more patient and graceful in my every day dealings with people. It means finding ways to inspire the people around me, to be able to share my feelings with them in a frank but caring, and will encourage them to work better and harder in pursuit of their beliefs.

    Above all, I am inspired by her words:

“Again the sun!
anew each day; and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul.”   (excerpt from The Pangolin)

The Mind is an Enchanting Thing

Is an enchanted thing
    like the glaze on a
katydid-wing
        subdivided by sun
        till the nettings are legion.
Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;

like the apteryx-awl
    as a beak, or the
kiwi’s rain-shawl
        of haired feathers, the mind
        feeling its way as though blind,
walks along with its eyes on the ground.

It has memory’s ear
    that can hear without
having to hear.
        Like the gyroscope’s fall,
        truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of
    strong enchantment. It
is like the dove-
        neck animated by
        sun; it is memory’s eye;
it’s conscientious inconsistency.

It tears off the veil; tears
    the temptation, the
mist the heart wears,
        from its eyes—if the heart
        has a face; it takes apart.
dejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s

iridescence; in the
    inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.
        Unconfusion submits
        its confusion to proof; it’s
not a Herod’s oath that cannot change.

Works Cited
Amabile, Teresa, “Personality Processes and Individual Differences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology   Aug. 1983; 357-376
Bond, Sarah, “How Social Conditions Affect Creativity,” in class handout 235
Costello, Bonnie, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1997)
Davis, Gary, Creativity is Forever, in-class handout, 22-25
Moore, Marianne, Complete Poems  (New York: MacMillan, 1994)  

This has been circulating for a few years now but figured I'd resurrect it here. Because I'm a freak for books.

Name Five People To Carry On This Meme:

Greg
Angela
Reese
Suzychapstick
Bookmole

Total number of books owned:

I would say at least a thousand, half of which are probably in boxes in the attic. It's sad actually, how we're really lacking in bookshelves. I need to go through them and get rid of the crappy ones. But I love love love books and owning books. And yes, I do often re-read them.

Last book bought:

Margot Livesey spoke at the Grub Street conference I attended last weekend. The odd thing was, I didn't attend her session, but was drawn to two of her books at the sale table at the end of the day. Now I'm kicking myself that I wasn't able to sit in on her session. I picked up this gem of a book about a woman who grew up with two mysterious ghost "companions." I already sucked this one down and I highly recommend it.

Last book read:

See above. Except that I'm still reading other books, so I suppose it's only partially accurate. I read Catch-22 at lunchtime, Le Chanson de Roland in the bathroom, Fragile Things before I go to sleep (although that may not be the wisest bedtime choice) and Aristophanes is waiting in the wings. Sad, I know.

Five books that mean a lot to you:

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
This was the first book I read by Carson and it forever introduced me to new possibilities in poetry. Carson is an expert in classical myth and literature and in this book she draws upon the myth of Herakles and the red winged monster, Geryon, that Herakles slayed as part of his numerous labors. Except in this incredible piece of literature, a lot of the slaying going on was that of the heart as Geryon and Herakles were both strange friends and lovers. The piece is at once classical but takes place in contemporary settings. It made me realize the infinite possibilities when it comes to verse, that deep, intricate stories can be buried in poetry and there is immeasurable joy of discovering a story told in such a way. It tears into you in a way that prose pieces cannot. This is a beautiful, haunting, disturbing, creative, imaginative, inspiring book that I think everyone should read.

New and Collected Poems 1931-2000 by Czeslaw Milosz
I felt such genuine sorrow when Milosz passed away a few years ago. He wrote some of the most accessible poetry I have ever come across, drawing upon his unique vision of the world and the people in that world. I actually would recommend reading anything he has written, but if you could only get one book of his, this would be it. I was introduced to Milosz by a co-worker many years ago. He gave me his copy of A Treatise of Poetry, a very long and great poem about pre and post war Europe. But back to his collected poems...here is a snippet-- And Yet the Books.

Split Infinity by Piers Anthony
I haven't read this in years but I have very very fond memories of this book. I read it for the first time when I was probably ten. I used to pick up all my dad's sci-fi and fantasy novels that he would leave lying around (I do remember that he wasn't happy when I ran across his Gor books but other than that he never seemed to notice that I read the leave-behinds even though I was most likely way too young for much of the material). I loved Split Infinity, a story about a man who lives in two separate worlds that are side by side, one of science and one of magic. I remember one summer I explained the story (and its follow up, Blue Adept--don't think Juxtaposition was out yet) to my cousin Rhett. We spent the entire month acting out the books. Silly perhaps but we had a great time. I loved the idea of magic and technology existing in the same book.

East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated in 1859 by Sir George Webbe Dasent
I loved fairy tales when I was growing up and this has always been one of my favorite books. It's a collection of dozens of Norwegian fairy tales, of which the most well known is probably the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I read this book from cover to cover when I was a kid, playing out some of the stories in my room when I was probably supposed to be napping or going to sleep. You can read the complete book here.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
My parents used to subscribe to book clubs way back when that allowed you to get volumes of classic works sent to your house on a monthly basis. I have a nice red volume of Wilde's works that I used to paw through for interesting quotes when I was an early teen. I think I became a hardcore convert in high school, however, when I discovered that he was an inspiration for Morrissey, then with The Smiths. I read everything I could by Wilde, absorbing all the nuances of his poetry and plays and reading as many biographies I could about his life. From Wilde I learned to like drama and I also had my first understanding of homosexual love--not that of physical love--but emotional love between people of the same sex. It helped me to be more understanding when my best guy friend came out to me when I was 15. Knowing about Wilde's life enabled me to understand more about sexual repression, discrimination and hatred. As a teenager, I felt an affinity to Wilde because he was passionate, talkative and full of unrequited or forbidden love (not that I loved girls, just that I loved people I couldn't have and who didn't love me back). Wilde also helped me see that there was a lot of value and interest in works that weren't contemporary or based in fantasy and fairy tales, which were my primary love as a kid. It was late in high school that I found that he also wrote fairy tales (which are wonderful!) and that only endeared me to him further.

I just finished Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which is one of the books on my massive list. This year the classic is celebrating its 50th anniversary of its first printing. I don't think I liked the book, to be honest, but it has made me think a bit, not because it was a particularly intellectual novel (I don't think it was at all) but more because I'm pondering all the reasons why it was such an influential novel in general.

Basically, the gist of the story, if you haven't read it, is that a guy named Sal (who was basically Jack--it's a mostly autobiographical novel with the names changed) has a friend that he admires a great deal, Dean Moriarty, who is a bit crazy and inspires Sal to take spontaneous road trips all over America and even down into Mexico. I'll let you check out the Wikipedia summary if you want more plot details, but essentially it's a lot of running all over the place, boozing it up, hitting on chicks (and then abandoning those same girls), stealing cars, listening to jazz and trying to figure out where the next few $ to buy more booze and to get to the next city are going to come from.

The book was probably heavily censored-- barely any drugs figure into the book which seems unlikely if it is mostly autobiographical. Plus I imagine much of the sexuality was toned down as well. Viking is apparently thinking of releasing an uncensored version of the book at some point, which I would probably pick up to compare. I'm not sure I would like the book any more or less even with the extra details though.

The book is a signpost for the Beat Generation. Wikipedia describes members of the Beat Generation as:

...new bohemian ecstatic epicureans, who often engaged in spontaneous creativity. The style of their work may seem chaotic, but the chaos was purposeful; it highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences. The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

On The Road fits the bill, of course, both in how it was created (written in three weeks on one long roll of paper, no margins, single spaced, no paragraphs) and in the content of the story, which is chaotic, rebellious, carefree and in my opinion, very selfish.

At the time, I imagine it was a monumental novel in the sense that it completely defied the reigning moralistic majority in America in the early 50s. This was no Leave It to Beaver -- it was the polar opposite, which was strange and shocking to me when I considered what I thought of the 50s (or even further back, in 1947 when the story supposedly took place).

Dean Moriarty, based on the real life friend of Kerouac, Neal Cassady, is both hero and pathetic fool. He throws away his money, women/wives and children whenever a whim or an itch gets into his head. I think that in many ways, my frustration and anger at this character is because I'm a woman and this is REALLY a man's man book. It's all about hanging out with the guys, finding a fun time, living life in the moment and forgoing all responsibility to anyone if it gets in the way of having that experience. It's probably also hitting a chord with me because my brother-in-law is playing the drunken asshole fool and throwing away his family at the moment--not nearly so drastically as Dean did, but the effect, I imagine, is the same on my sister as it would have been for his two wives and the kids he fathered along the way.

Overall though, boredom started to set in about 30 pages into the book. The story is circular--one crazy trip after another. It's all the same sort of thing, the boozing, the car stealing, the womanizing, just in different places all over the country. And yes, I get it...it was the poetry of living in the moment. But the moments didn't seem very appealing to me. It was dirty, grimy, sad and I couldn't find any joy in the book although over and over Sal seemed to revel in the various little joys of the people he met and admired. In the end, Sal came to a similar revelation, but it took so long to get there that I just didn't care. I found myself scanning a lot of the last half of the book and wishing that I had read it in college so I could have had better perspective from my professors and peers.

I find that I'm more interested in the lives and the influence of the Beat writers than I am overly intrigued by their writing. I'm not a Ginsberg fan (who had the role of Carlo Marx in the book) or Bukowski and while I liked Naked Lunch I think that was more because it was Cronenberg who did the movie, not because I would like Burrough's book (which the movie is only partially based upon). I just don't find the whole pack of sex and drug induced writings to be generally appealing to me. They rely so much on shock value that I find myself uninterested and unimpressed. But the lives those people led and the influence that they have had on overall culture and politics is highly intriguing to me. I find that I want to read the books not because of their own merit but because they may give me a greater understanding of what came as a result of those writings.

I also have to wonder, what sort of impact did the Beat Generation have on things like manners, the idea of keeping families intact, freedom of sexuality (the love 'em and leave 'em attitude becoming more acceptable), etc. I'm not someone who is terribly keen on the institution or the corporation but at the same time, that era was the breaking apart of some things that I wish our society still had. Little things mostly--that guys would take off their damn hats in restaurants, more courting on the dating scene (which IMHO doesn't cut into gender equality or have to cut down on sex--it's more about courtesy and thoughtfulness), families eating at the dinner table instead of in front of the TV, and the like. Hmm. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Coppola bought the movie rights to On the Road 39 years ago and for the last few years there have been reports that he's finally started making the film. A 2001 account mentioned that Brad Pitt had been cast as Sal but a 2005 article I found said that Billy Crudup had been cast with Colin Farrell as Moriarty. But since then? Nothing, nada.  I suspect that it has once again fallen by the wayside, which is a bummer. I think I might find more affinity with the story if I could see it on screen.

At some point though, I should take a trip up to Lowell, where he was born, and check out his grave site. I want to collect visits to author birthplaces, houses and grave sites and he's just so darn close that I don't really have an excuses. And if I ever manage to become a runner, I suppose I'll have to run the 5k too...

But mostly, about the book itself, I would tend to agree with Truman Capote, who, on commenting on Kerouac's method of free-flowing writing, said, "That's not writing, it's typing."  It was too rambling, too seemingly stream-of-consciousness (even if he was working from notes he took over the previous seven years). I just couldn't see it as a serious or a good novel, but in the end, it doesn't really matter if it was serious. It was influential in so many ways, and for that reason alone, I think that the story of Sal and Dean will sit with me for years to come.

by Ranier Maria Rilke

Promise of Spring, 1890, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dutch

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

What an apropos poem for today! Everything is starting to soften--the earth in particular is no longer hard and is starting to sprout the first green grass. In the backyard the tiger lilies have started to shoot up through the earth on their journey toward a full bloom in June. No leaves on the trees but the oaks in the front yard have thousands of little red buds on them--tomorrow's near 80 degree heat should bring them to near full bursting. Rilke captures the sense of early spring perfectly with the vanishing harshness, softness, rivulets, tendernesses, subtle risings, expression. The sounds are there, the images are there, the little green song is peeking through the words and through the poem, just as the spring is beginning to poke through the oppressive winter that we've had here in New England.

April really is the perfect month for poetry.

I've become obsessed with the compilation of my ever-growing Books To Read Before I Die list. I've taken the best of many numerous lists and begun to add in many less obscure texts as suggested from other great book lists. The end result will be massive and quite comprehensive. Currently it's at 361 authors (but I see it growing to over 500), of which there may be multiple works to read. For example, all of the major books by Dickens or all the plays by Christopher Marlowe for example.

This may sound somewhat crazy and perhaps it is, but the good news is that I read like a fiend. I mean, really, like a fiend. 800+ wpm sort of fiendish. I usually read 2-3 300-page paperbacks on plane rides from Boston to California. New Harry Potter book come out? No problem--one day max. I gravitate toward bigger, thicker books because the stories last longer. Joe thinks that this list will only take me 5 years or so. I do think it will take longer than that, considerably longer, probably, mostly because my time to read tends to wax and wane. And also because I'm bound to take swerving breaks from the list to digest the latest Tad Williams novel or to check out Stephen King's son, Joe Hill's, new novel Heart-Shaped Box.

I was going to read my list chronologically, but I think that I may slip into other eras from time-to-time. Months and months on end of the same historical period might drive me crazy (especially as I move toward the 1700s). For the most part, I'll continue reading in order but will supplement with other popular reading or with selections from other parts of the list. Right now, for example, Jack Kerouac's On the Road is the bathroom book of the week.

On my Google spreadsheet, I'm marking if I have read the book in the past, if I own the book, if I have finished recently reading and any other notes, such as works I can only read online (like The Story of Sinhue or the works of James Shirley). I plan on purchasing as many books as I can, probably from used bookstores, but in some cases, I'm finding that may not be possible. James Shirley, for example, has an astonishing lack of print despite his success as a prolific playwright. I'm not going to drop $2,169 for the 1833 edition of his collected works, not unless I win the lottery at some point in the future. I may also explore newer translations of particular works, such as Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, which I will also note.

Once I get the list better in order, I'll publish it for others to see. I can't believe I would be the only crazy person to do something like this.

I'm currently reading The Upanishads which I find to be more accessible than the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda is hard to comprehend in many places or lapses into too much description about ritual (how to sacrifice horses for example). I find the Upanishads (I'm reading 12 of the 108) to be more of a spiritual journey, a discussion about how to find enlightenment, joy and to experience god as a part of the self. The Upanishads contain the first mention of yoga--a practice to finding "inner-union." The Penguin Classics version contains a really wonderful introduction by Juan Mascaro comparing the tone and feeling of many classic poets to the sense of spirituality that the Upanishads brings forth. The essay describes how the sentiments echoed within the book are similar to that of the Bible and other works (such as Shakespeare and the English Romantic poets) that Westerners are familiar with. In reading the slim volume, I find myself wishing that my mom (who is a bit of a Bible freak) would be open to reading it. The back of this book says, " The Upanishads represent for the Hindu approximately what the New Testament represents for the Christian." I think that even more so, in some ways, this book encapsulates what I think that true spirituality should represent in all people, regardless of religion. The book talks about self-knowledge and finding joy and God within. I find it to be not only a beautiful peace of literature but a true guidebook to becoming a better person.

I just finished the first book on the Great Books List that I decided to plow through as a new path to some form of

literary enlightenment. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem that tells the story of a hero-king who is 2/3 God and 1/3 man (curious how that works, huh?) that ruled the ancient city of Uruk in approximately 2650 B.C.E. The poem as we understand it today comes from a variety of tablet sources found in excavations all over the ancient world. The tablets are often in pieces or indecipherable but enough copies exist that translators have been able to piece together the majority of the ancient poem.

The most famous tablets were discovered in 1850 and 1853 by British archaeologists who found the royal libraries of Ashurbanipal, king of Nineveh. But those tablets weren't the only copies of the poem. It was a story that had been widely copied and distributed throughout the years and it is because of its ancient popularity that so many tablets have been discovered and have given us the ability to recover so much of the lost text.

According to the book at the right (pg. xxvii (talk about lazy citations!)), translated by Andrew George:

The standard version of the Babylonian epic is known from a total of 73 manuscripts extant: the 35 that have survived from the libraries of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 8 more tablets and fragments from the three other Assyrian cities (Ashur, Kalah and Huzirina), and 30 from Babylonia, especially the cities of Babylon and Uruk.

Several things stood out for me while I was reading:

• The poetic repitition, clearly a mechanism for driving memory for what was intially a long-standing oral poem. The poem, if it were intact, would be nearly 3,000 lines long (but according to George approximately 575 are missing). But if you took the numerous repeating stanzas out I imagine the entire piece would be closer to perhaps 1500-1800 lines. I find that I liked the repetition--it gave me a sense of ritual and of connection that drew me into the narrative.
  
• The use of the numbers seven, ten and thirteen in various ways throughout the poem. What struck me was how far back the significance of these numbers goes.
  
• The flood/ark comparisons which many other people have made so I don't need to. But the fact that hundreds of ancient cultures have a flood story make me personally doubt the word-for-word Noah story.
  
• This story takes place in what is now Iraq. Many of the tablets are/were housed at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which has been subjected to looting during the war. The ancient Sumerian cities of Ur and Uruk are now located in what is currently a war zone. I find an incredible sadness about this...that so many of the world's oldest treasures have been or are being destroyed by senseless violence. 7,000 years of history gone in the blink of a suicide bomb or by air raids. These cities have importance in a variety of the world's religions, including Christianity. Ur is even thought to be the birthplace of Abraham. Sigh, it just makes my heart sick to know that we care more about blowing each other up than preserving world history. 
• In 2003, they think they found Gilgamesh's tomb, which sounds incredible...buried under the Euprhates.
  
  

Next on the list is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I have read in the past, but quite a long time ago, most likely when I was a little goth chick interested in spells or something. I picked up a used book from Powells but unfortunately, the copy that I have is from 1967 (and water-damaged...sometimes you get what you pay for, huh?). I am thinking I may look into a more up-to-date copy that incorporates findings/insight from the last 40 years.

Well, maybe not entirely amazing, but still fun! From Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator with my URL plugged in:

Cynosure
glissando reesie said: what
incredible tension and
while Joe turned to something
else about this band, endorsed by nature
but I'm very clever
videos, art, writing, artists, gambling,
The bathroom or TV.
even when I think
I like the turning after
that. if you are a lot more
that best fits
the world that has
left and as
a neighbor what
she recall much gorgeous music but
makes me perhaps surrounded
by the upcoming performances
but am totally aware of an hour.
And heaven I
putting it They can
also be
redeemed for me to turn numerous times but
I'm very yummy rose
champagne we would have to
write to do
it will earn cash!I
can
create such a
good people there were
saving seats at the book stores, parks, coffee
shops, workshops, poetry.