[New-Poetry] Books To Be Read Immediately

[Helen Ruggieri]

I'll second Writing the Australian Crawl and add in (why do people dislike him these days) 
Robert Bly's News of the Universe. 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp 
  Sent: Friday, November 03, 2006 11:43 AM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Books To Be Read Immediately


  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

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