Nonfiction | Everyday Words on Everyday Moments

Poetry, historically, is not my thing. I think I can trace it back to my senior year of high school. I was spending a weekend at a state university as part of an Honors Program interview, and we had a seminar session on analyzing a poem. After much lengthy discussion and debate on the poet's motives, meaning, word choice, etc., our discussion leader informed us that the poem in question was not, in fact, actually a real poem but merely an amalgamation of lines from various Dr. Seuss books. Which then prompted further debate on what does constitute a poem. Needless to say, I found this exercise infuriating, and the interpretation of poetry from this analytical perspective turned me off the whole genre for years.

I've since begun, bit by bit, to appreciate poetry on a more personal level. In academic discourse, we're generally taught to approach poetry with a critical eye. We dissect poems into small pieces of words and patterns and use this analysis to speculate on the author's purpose and meaning. And to me, that kind of close reading is MISERABLE. I like to just accept poetry as is, without any interpreted attribution of the author's words. It was written with meaning by the author; it may or may not connect with each reader.

Despite my own problematic history with poetry, it's a genre I try to promote to my middle schoolers to broaden their reading. For the Read Harder Challenge's "collection of poetry" category, I chose a title I'd recently purchased for my school library, Gary Soto's A Fire in My Hands.

THIS collection I can get behind. Soto writes on small moments and memories from his childhood and adolescence in Fresno, California. The most well-known poem from this collection, "Oranges," captures the awkward, nervous elation of a first date on an ordinary gray December day. "How You Gave Up Root Beer" describes the most embarrassing moment around "the girl you like more than your own life." Soto explains the complex way of the world in juvenile terms in "How Things Work." And "Hitchhiking with a Friend" details the briefest of young adventures with a friend, feeling the exhilaration of being far from home, eyes open to "the notion of beauty" in small, unfamiliar sights.

My favorite, though, is "That Girl," a beautiful reminiscence on those early days of lust.

The public library was saying things
In so many books
And I, a Catholic boy
In a green sweater,
Was reading the same page
A hundred times...

Soto's poems lack a commanding rhythm or rhyme scheme, and they rarely feature such simile or metaphor. The words never devolve into poetic descriptors or illustrative adjectives. But they have a soothing rhythm and use simple words to evoke simple experiences. I found the best part of this collection (the revised and expanded edition, specifically) to be the inclusion of an introduction by the author as well as very brief anecdotes that precede each poem. In the introduction, Soto shares his background with poetry and his connection with the place and environment that inspired these poems. The anecdotes at the beginning of each individual poem add context that contributes to the personal appeal of the poem--which, as I stated earlier, is exactly what I'm looking for in a poem! I think this collection is easily accessible, especially to young readers and reluctant [poetry] readers, because it's the kind of poetry that makes you feel like your own small moments are unique and worthy of mention and memory.

Review: The roof falls in

It's a rare occasion when you get metafiction and philosophy completely infused into a poetic volume without it feeling too pragmatic or instructional. Usually it comes out harsh and bitter to the tongue, a piece of burnt toast upon which rests soggy eggs. And rare it is when careful cadence and diction, argument and anecdote are the focus of such a book.

Nominated for the National Book Award, Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw is that volume. Lerner, a young poet from Brown University, has produced something that reverberates in the mind long after the pages of the book have closed and rested upon the shelf. Borrowing from Russian formalism - if I may dare - Lerner is able to defamiliarise his subject (and readers) to make the writing process, the concept of films and media, the world of theory fresh and anew. Never a dull moment cuts across the pages: 'The fruit is star-shaped when cut in cross section and is therefore called star fruit. Our people often name an object after the manner in which we destroy it.'

Lines that seem to be throwaway shards of wisdom, pregnant with philosophy may grace each stanza, but it doesn't make this volume overbearing or ponderous or even self-important. Angle of Yaw is split into five parts, two of which are eponymous to the title of the book. 'Begetting Stadia', the first canto or part, is the most jarring. The poems within aren't as related to each other, but they create the initial push for waves that will echo later on in the volume. A sense of positivity and negativity start with the first poem, and Lerner's poetic narrator commences with his project's aim - as if invoking it from the gods: 'Resembling its shape / and therefore suggesting its function: // a wave. // Or repeating its shape / and therefore undoing its function // a wave, // which I will here attempt to situate / in the broader cognitive process / of turning the page.' The reader thus is actively involved as his lines come to light, as the narrator goes on to say, 'Reading is important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame. . . . When you window-shop, when you shatter a store window, you see your own image in the glass.'

As the book goes deeper and deeper into thoughts, it becomes more unified - although mysteriously, as the amount of subjects Lerner tackles grows too. Perhaps the part/canto that is most impressive is 'Didactic Elegy', which is basically a philosophical essay in verse that begins peripherally but then makes it central as theme and subject the towers of the World Trade Center falling. Unlike some who perhaps use it as a crutch, Lerner brings a sort of theory into the image, suggesting that the art of memorialising in fact does the opposite, makes it common. The more we watch the video of the towers crash down, the less real it becomes: 'The critic watches the image of the towers collapsing. / She remembers less and less about the towers collapsing each time she watches the image of the towers collapsing. // The critic feels guilty viewing the image like a work of art, / but guilt here stems from an error of cognition, / as the critic fails to distinguish between an event / and the event of the event's image.'

The argument of 'Didactic Elegy' builds a wonderful discussion, and Lerner guides us in not such a didactic way. We feel confident of our decisions about what his narrator is saying throughout. And then he drops a bombshell in the end, which basically sums up the wonderful paradoxes and issues brought up in Angle of Yaw, as if straight from a JM Coetzee or TS Eliot work:

When violence becomes aware of its mediacy and loses its object

it will begin to resemble love.

Love is negative because it dissolves

all particulars into an experience of form.

Refusing to assign meaning to an event is to interpret it lovingly.

The meaninglessness of the drawing is therefore meaningful

and the failure to seek out value is heroic.

Is this all that remains of poetry?

Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.

Review: Naturally selected

Since Ruth Padel received so much press for the controversy over the Professor of Poetry position at the University of Oxford, I figured I’d give her new book of poetry a go, believing that a poet who can cause that much of an uproar must be pretty decent.

When I think of poetry, I generally believe that it’s the most personal of the creative art forms – the closest to the expression of self through abstractions and highly selective diction, an eye on the I. The paired down language is key; and through metaphors and emotive techniques the poet is able to create an entire world, sometimes in just three lines.

So when I approached Darwin: A Life in Poems, I was a bit jarred. Even knowing that the project was to give the reader a biography on Charles Darwin through verse, it still felt somewhat off that this was not going to have the poet’s personal reflections. (I do realise that many poets don’t necessarily use themselves as the narrators of their own poems, but it’s still quite common.) But it didn’t take long to convince me that this is a highly intelligent and original way to create and reveal a biographical story.

Two hundred years ago, Charles Darwin was born. His story starts like most: He was raised in a small country town in Shopshire; he studied at Edinburgh then Cambridge (ok, that’s not like most) and originally trained to go into vestments (clergy or medical), but decided that the biological sciences were more fascinating; his father disapproved yet accepted the change since the Cambridge dons thought his son was one of the brightest students. Darwin travelled to the Galápagos, observes some birds and beetles, returns home to marry a childhood (and cousin) sweetheart, has a couple of children (some that don’t survive past a year), and formulates a theory that changes the world.

In Padel’s hands though, we are transported not just into these standard facts; she takes us closer to the Darwins’ marriage bed, to the inner mind of Darwin – not just as he was formulating his theory on natural selection, but as he thought of being separated from his wife or of being what seemed deathly ill his whole life. One of the cleverer poems, ‘Survival of the Fittest’, one of the major theories that Darwin is famous for, doesn’t deal just with the cold, scientific facts that brought him to such thoughts; no, it’s much more personal than that: ‘Was it because of him that Annie [his daughter] died? / “My dread is hereditary ill-health. / Are marriages between first cousins doomed / to deformity and illness? Effects / of inbreeding – only the fittest survive?”’ Darwin (and Padel) make it seem that he derived his theory through his family life, not his voyage on the Beagle.

Padel is methodical; her lines are timely and well-timed. There is a wonderful cadence to each verse, as if we’re being read some sort of melancholic bedtime story. Words are to be relished, not to be rushed. Padel makes sure that we understand Darwin from all angles – scientifically, as a son and brother and husband and father, religiously. Emotive effects are strong, especially when Darwin thinks not of his science but of his wife and of his children.

Closing this book, I immediately took an interest in Darwin’s writing. I’d be curious to know whether Darwin was truly as poetic as Padel (his own great-granddaughter) makes him out to be. Her introduction says that most of the writing is his own, but words were changed in order to make it ‘poetry’. But I don’t think that takes away anything from either’s talent.