Meditations in an Emergency

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first learned to love poetry in college when I had a marvelous professor (whose voice I still hear when I read T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats). But since then I've fallen away from even my favorite poets, short of time and focus. Lyric poetry in particular takes time to read, reread, and savor. If books are like dishes of food, lyric poetry is like a particularly rich, dark chocolate truffle. You can't eat it all at once. "Truffle poems" are ones I've reread a dozens of times, poems that always surprise me. They are like going into a familiar room where all the furniture has been rearranged several inches to the left.

Frank O'Hara is too abstractly unfathomable to be a truffle poet, but there are moments where his use of language evokes a feeling beyond meaning. From "Invincibility":

Lepers nest on the surly cats of glistening delirium

What does that even mean? Darned if I know, but the play of words is fascinating and feels sharp, unnerving. I stopped and reread it over and over, trying to decide what quality attracted my eye back to it.

Probably my favorite poem in this collection was "Poem: There I could never be a boy", dedicated to James Schuyler. I suppose it appeals to me not only for its deft physical description of a "frightened black mare / who had leaped windily at the start of a leaf", but because I value poetry that gets at an insight like "All things are tragic / when a mother watches!" That idea reminded me strongly of W.B. Yeats's "Among School Children" when the elderly Yeats asks if his mother, seeing him as an old man, would have thought herself repaid for all her efforts:

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

I also enjoyed O'Hara's "To the Film Industry in Crisis", where he celebrates his favorite actors with tongue firmly in cheek, theatrically doling out accolades. The rest of the poems are less accessible, but deserve rereading someday.

The one stanza in "Mayakovsky" that I think is a misstep is the one quoted in Mad Men:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

It's a bit too self-pitying, like something a moody teenager would write and relate to. (Sorry if you loved it.) For stark, lovely poems, try W.H. Auden, whose "Funeral Blues" speaks for everyone who's lost someone. You could also check out the avant garde New York School poets and painters.

Glass

Glass by Ellen Hopkins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Under the influence of the "glass monster", Kristina leaves the straight and narrow and her life rapidly spirals out of control.

I can't think of an uglier, more excruciating story than that of meth addiction. Kristina relapses and falls hard, hitting every branch on the way down. She literally never makes a good decision, and it doesn't take long to get exhausted by her self-justifying thoughts, or her checking up on what level of buzz she has that day. Her thinking is so screwy it becomes logical to assume that whatever she does next, it'll be the most terrible choice she can make.

Without the interesting format of concrete poetry (with some of the verses forming billows of smoke or question marks, and others fragmenting as Kristina loses herself in the fog of meth), I never would have finished reading this painful story, sequel to Crank.

To Hopkins' credit, the story could easily play like an anti-drug PSA: as much as I disliked it for its unrelieved darkness, there is no arguing with Hopkins' abilities with character and language. Everything Kristina does makes a twisted kind of sense, since we are privy to her deepest thoughts. The present-tense, first-person narration moves in a fragmented, telegraphic style, and the action is always clear. Glass can easily be understood without reading the other books in the series. (Fallout, the third and final book, chronicles the lives of Kristina's abandoned children.)

In interviews and the afterward, Hopkins reveals that she based this story loosely on her own daughter's "walk with 'the monster' drug crystal meth." She has plenty of other series tackling difficult issues: suicide, incest, prostitution, and addiction - all the things parents pray they can shield their children from. I can see why the topics are controversial, but Hopkins doesn't go in for shock value for its own sake. In spite of the heavy drug use portrayed, there is no swearing and her depictions of sex are honest but not explicit. She's talking about real life, and sometimes real life is terrible and desperately sad.

For readalikes, check out the rest of Hopkins' series, Patricia McCormick's YA novels, or Neal Shusterman's contemporary YA fantasies.

That said, it's not the kind of story for me. If I want depressing, I'll go read a newspaper.

The Creation of Beautiful Things

I am not a Luddite who believes that e-books are not "real" books. I own an e-reader and love it, though I also read traditional paper books, listen to audiobooks (gotta love the Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse - bally stupendous!), and I compulsively read articles on the web. I am always reading, writing, and encountering art.

But sometimes I see things that make me recognize all over again how lovely traditional books can be, and the things they do best. Below is an example of a physical book, engineered to be a work of art. Click the picture for a larger version.

It is a 17th century British "trick" poem "I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail." The video below explains the genre and shows the book and the poem being read.

I don't just love this book because it is beautiful. I love it for what it does with language, which is what all great poetry does with language. It makes us look closer, think more deeply, and imagine extraordinary things.

This book could have been animated on a computer very easily. Printing physical copies was an incredibly complex challenge (read the publisher's blog here for the story). What is the value of human determination to create lovely things that serve no purpose but to delight? I don't know, but it's my favorite aspect of human beings and keeps from becoming discouraged by the ugly side of things.

For other ambitiously intricate books, check out Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes here, and The Night Life of Trees here.

Found via Brain Pickings.

Litany

A wonderful poem, and a mighty precocious 3-year-old!