[New-Poetry] Books To Be Read Immediately

[David Graham]

The thread has long since evolved from whatever it was to Books I  
Like/Recommend.  Cool.  I'm all for it, especially when people (like  
Tad below) give us more than just a title to chew on.

Hugo's *The Triggering Town* was crucial to me, also, along with  
Stafford's *Writing the Australian Crawl* and Wagoner's edition of  
Roethke's journals--all of which came to me at about the same  
formative point, forming as well as informing me in ways I'm still  
sorting out decades later.

Right now at the top of my bedside stack is Francine Prose's *Reading  
Like a Writer*.  Her subject is great prose, not poetry, but I can't  
imagine a poet not finding it delightful and instructive.  The book  
is a big ode to the pleasures and rewards of close reading, and in  
her own prose Prose wonderfully practices what she preaches.  It's  
filled with little gems, and makes you want to drop everything and  
pick up Chekhov, G. Eliot, Flaubert, and a host of more recent classics.

She assumes that there are some good reasons that the classics have  
been in print for so long, and she quotes extensively from them,  
along with contemporary works she thinks of as likely to become  
classic.  The book is an implicit (and occasionally explicit) brief  
against literary fashion and the tendency to view books primarily  
through theoretical lenses.

Here's one passage from her introductory chapter that caught my eye:

"Part of a reader's job is to find out why certain writers endure.   
This may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes  
you think you have to have an *opinion* about the book and  
reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as  
something that might move or delight you.  You will do yourself a  
disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six- 
figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work  
should be heading.  I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers,  
some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity.  I'm only  
pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long,  
glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written."

(My subject line is the heading Francine Prose gives to her selected  
bibliography at the close of her book.)

-------
Incidentally, Tad's post sent me out to my library to fetch Michael  
Schmidt's *Lives of the Poets*, whose doorstopping bulk and my  
natural sloth had previously prevented my acquaintance.  I've just  
sampled so far, but he's right:  it's a lively and fascinating  
history, full of opinions ripe for argument and exploration.


On Nov 1, 2006, at 11:36 AM, <opus40-01 at opus40.org>  
<opus40-01 at opus40.org> wrote:

>
> The Triggering Town is one of my favorites, not just as a teacher  
> but also for my own delight and edification. I use both of Mary  
> Oliver's books, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, but more  
> as a teacher than as a poet. I've gotten insights I liked out of  
> Diane Middlebrook's Worlds into Words: Understanding Modern Poems.  
> I like Babbette Deutch's Poetry in our Time. I like to look at what  
> people not of our own time have said about poetry -- I think it's  
> more useful than reading contemporaries (Hugo being a huge  
> exceptuon). Which means I like Coleridge, Sir Philip Sidney, etc.  
> But someone like Deutsch, who's close enough to connect to, and yet  
> a sensibility not of today, I find particularly interesting.  
> Rukeyser and Jarrell similarly, but they've been mentioned.
>
> I love Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets. It's inspiring and  
> educational. I go back to it a lot.
>
>

==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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