I've been reading a lot of poetry lately...by Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, C.K. Williams, W.B. Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass...and I have been just enjoying the quality of certain poems, the use of language, and the way some poems make me feel...I guess just enjoying the aesthetic quality and not so much concerning myself with interpretation. The poem I'm posted today is one that I enjoy for the reasons I posted above. The feeling of loss that it communicates and the use of language, such as the street being described as "glamorous and lost" and the "delicate ankles" of the woman...the sense of hopelessness and futility at the end when the sun is just "ordinary and final" and the sentences are "too flat for any poem"...maybe it's the stab of recognition when seeing someone you haven't seen in a long time and then the pain of the passing feeling as you realize the distance is too great between you and you are no longer friends, not even close enough to say hello on the street....

The Sentences by Robert Pinsky

Reading the sentences, November sun
Touching the avenues, offices, the station,
I saw you pass me on a street, your face
Was pink with cold, cold windows flashed, the stores
And cars were like--mythology--, the street
Itself was glamorous and lost, it was
As though I never knew you yet somehow knew
That this was you, a sentence interdicted
The present, it said, you never knew, you passed,
Leaves coppery and quick as lizards moved
Around your delicate ankles; November sun
Lay on the sidewalk, ordinary and final
As the sentences too flat for any poem.

A Rough Draft

This Morning

Bare branches
outside the window
make a picture
more tragic
than imagined.
The fog highlights
dark lines, erasing
the rest.
The wavering heat
sits in the window
and I wonder
about my life,
my children.

A pedestrian
was hit by a car
at 4:45
this morning—
forty-four years old.
Did he see himself,
sixty-five, grandkids
at his knees,
reading stories,
sagacious and revered,
reciting poetry,
stirring curiosity?

Religion is needed
this morning
just to help
fit pieces together
and pray

that maybe
there are reasons
behind circumstance,
behind coincidence,
and not just science,
primitive desires
and rude chance
running the show.

W.B. Yeats

I recently found a hardback edition of Yeats's collected poems at Half Price Books. Inside the front cover in pink handwriting (maybe it once was red?) it says:

Miriam Borenstein
University of Wisconsin
Madison
Sept 1969
Mr. Barton Freidman

Stratford House
H33 W Gilman
Madison 53703
255-0367

The book must have been brand new when Miriam purchased it, because the copyright is 1969 for the 16th printing (the first edition having been published in 1933). In 1969, the book cost a whopping $6.95. Miriam obviously had to purchase this for a class, maybe taught by Mr. Barton Friedman? The book does have a few poems that are annotated in pencil and I assume those are classroom notes she has taken. It's interesting to think about how a book can travel (in great condition actually) through almost forty years of time. I wonder how Miriam is holding up? This leads me to a section of a powerful poem of Yeats's, "The Tower":

Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of the body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come--
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath--
Seem but clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades,
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

It is interesting that the speaker is compelling his soul to study, as if he is resigning himself to his fate at the end of this poem--all things must die...well, except the soul, which the speaker is going to work on educating "in a learned school." So, while death creeps up, it might be best to stop obsessing over your body's health and start worrying about your soul. I like that. I also like how Yeats ties death and the death of friends and those brilliant eyes "That made a catch in the breath" to nature. The "worse evil" will be that death will eventually become so commonplace it is like "clouds of the sky" or "a bird's sleepy cry" so natural and uneventful. The mood at the end of this poem is foreboding: "Among the deepening shades"...the "deepening" means the darkness is descending and death is approaching like a shadow moving towards the speaker.

Well, Miriam, I hope you are still out there somewhere and the deepening shade has not fully descended on you yet. I have the book you once had for a class in college and I know I'm better for it. Hopefully you got something out of your reading of Yeats as well.

Beautiful Children

I just finished reading Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Here is the review I posted on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:
This book deserves its distinction as one of The New York Times Best Books of 2008. It is well-written and organized in such a way that readers understand these characters as people and not as caricatures. Not only that, but Charles Bock has a keen eye for social critique and many of his characters provide insightful commentary about society as well as a developing sense of their own reasons behind their actions. For example, Lestat appears earlier in the novel and the reader is repelled by him, but later on Bock allows the narrative to pick up Lestat's voice and the inner workings of his mind and suddenly the reader is given a new perspective on this character: "The sane sober businessman does not walk down the street talking out loud to himself, but the crazy homeless man does...Over time Lestat had also grown to understand how the former becomes the latter. How all your thoughts and frustrations can inch closer and closer toward one uninterrupted rant. How the chasm between a person and the world around him can grow, a shell forming between the life you once had and the life you are living." This situation is true for the characters in the novel. Each one is dealing with a chasm that either developed while he/she was consciously or unconsciously oblivious or is coming to terms with the fact that the chasm is developing at that moment, based on a particular decision that needs to be made. This, for me, is the best part of the book--that the philosophy and vision behind it are so satisfying. Who hasn't at times felt like Kenny on the side of the road, raising our hands in the air and wondering "What am I supposed to do now?". I like the nun's answer in this novel: You must question how you might be more than you are. Like Rilke writes in his poem "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," You must change your life. I agree. You must also read this book.

Donald Hall

I've been reading Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone, which is a collection of his poems from 1946-2006. This book comes with a CD of Hall reading some of the poems, which I've been listening to in my car while driving to and from school. I recommend Hall's poem "To a Waterfowl." Here is a link to the audio of the poem online: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/category/poet/donald-hall/. I laughed out loud in the car while driving. I keep relistening to the poem over and over again. In teaching news, I only have two days left until Christmas break, not that I'm counting...but anyway, this year has gone well so far and my honors students are working on a project right now comparing Montag from Fahrenheit 451, Equality 7-2521 from Anthem, and Truman from The Truman Show. Oh, I don't think I've updated my blog since my post about censorship and Feed by M.T. Anderson. I can teach it as long as I get parent permission. I made the permission slips, sent them out, and received them all back. After break, Feed will be the next book we read.

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road, a novel by Richard Yates, is set to come out as a movie in January. The movie is pairing up Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first movie together since Titanic. I'm not a big DiCaprio fan, but I do think he could really pull off the part of Frank Wheeler. I read the book in my early twenties; now I'm reading it again in my late late twenties. I have to admit the book has a lot more resonance with me now that I have a wife, two kids, two dogs, and live in the suburbs. If you've read the book, then you know why. Richard Yates writes so well that when Frank Wheeler is discussing "American life" and "consumerism" I can't help but think of how closely it resembles Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451. Yates is a great cultural critic, which also reminds me of Don DeLillo and how closely Revolutionary Road resembles Americana. DeLillo definitely develops the character of David Bell with more darkness of soul and paints a more disturbing, haunting, and dangerous portrait of America than Yates, but the connection is still there.

I'm also reading the poetry of W.S. Merwin and Joseph Brodsky.

Censorship

It is ironic that my "name" on this blog is Granger, which obviously is an allusion to Fahrenheit 451 and also illustrates my intense love of the book and it's message, and the fact that the high school where I teach has just banned Feed by M.T. Anderson. Both Feed and Fahrenheit 451 are similar, which is why I recommended Feed to our Book Review Committee and why it was originally adopted. Well, it was adopted two years ago, under a different school administration and a different school board...now, um, the inappropriate language (the F-word) is causing it to be banned. I was not the one who was teaching Feed at the time of the controversy. A new English teacher in our department was teaching it and a parent complained that she didn't want her daughter to read the book; the teacher gave the student an alternate book; end of story, right? No, the parent also complained to a school board member, who then complained to our new first year principal, who then decided...to suspend teaching of the book and made the new English teacher personally confiscate each copy of the book from each student. My students were just finishing Fahrenheit 451 and heard about the controversy. One of my students came up to me after class one day and said that it all reminded him of the Coda from Fahrenheit when Bradbury writes about how there is more than one way to burn a book. That says it all. You can't fool students and you should never underestimate them. That school board member and the new principal provided the most relevant text-to-world connection my students could ever encounter with their reading of Fahrenheit 451. Oh, and yeah, since we have so many copies of Feed, we are still allowed to offer the book as "independent reading." The next week, the new English teacher offered the book as independent reading and every single student, except the one whose parent complained (who actually really wanted to read the book), chose to read the book. It's interesting how things work out in the end.