Thoughts on words, sometimes. A thot for words, always.

The Book of Light carries with it. There is a vision to these poems. Clifton described these poems as either received or transmitted. There really is something to these poems. They feel outside of time yet so deeply ingrained in the present moment. Clifton, as always, is a lion, unbelievably tender and fierce. She grapples with herself, "won't you celebrate with me/what i have shaped into/a kind of life?" Later in the poem, "come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed." She speaks with a brilliant divine authority. And yet she is not an author, or sometimes to seem less like an author and more like a possessor, taking in all the light, spreading out all the light, taking in all the light, speading out all the light.

Who gets to tell the story of gentrification, of class violence, of environmental degradation? The answer to that question, unfortunately, will always be at the very least a human. This book is written by a human (unfortunately) but envisions the perspective of a cougar living underneath the Hollywood sign in L.A., a cougar who can understand human language but not meaning. Short, singular lines occupy this book as the cougar is forced into change, wanting only to remain hidden but becoming a more and more visible being. He watches as men have sex on the ground and recalls eating meat with another male cougar, relishing in memory. He understands his own violence, how it is unable to be understood by the people so occupied by their phones. They are always on their phones. This book is a reimagining of perspective in a remarkable way, somehow Henry Hoke manages to write a poem that feels like an animal could have written it, full of hunger, of lust, and of the impossibility of understanding his role as an animal in a modernized city hellscape. One of the most beautiful and captivating ecopoems I have ever read. Go for the throat.

I mentioned that I had not read I remember to a close friend, and in their unrelenting kindness they instantly bought me a copy. I see why now, I will be recommending this book to everyone I meet from now on. I Remember is a truly original book of utter sincerity. I think a lot of poetry gets bogged down with the attempt to reveal a secret, to let a reader into the poet's soft center, but this book actually does it well, it does it in a way that feels vulnerable but creates space between the reader and the poet. Yes it is vulnerable, but it doesn't feel like Brainard is pouring his heart out to the reader, it feels like he is pouring his heart out for the sake of pouring his heart out, for the sake of art. I think poetry has the power to envision a world where every conversation has only the goal of getting to know someone better. I Remember is this world. I don't and will never know Joe Brainard, but I feel I know him a little bit. By reading this book I feel like I know my grandfather a little bit better. Each line of the book starts with two words, 'I remember', and the simplicity of that is just so damn powerful. A list poem that operates in the past, that reveals what one carries with them. The book is both sincere and ironic, tragic and hilarious, deeply unsettling and deeply sexy. The book is a sort of portrait. Every poet should read this book. It is a reminder of where poetry comes from, that soft center, that unrelenting memory.

Invisible Cities is a work of utter imagination and inspiration. Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo discuss the kingdom of the Tartars, which Kublai Kahn, being the ruler, has never been able to see. As the work goes on it becomes apparent that the cities Marco Polo describes are works of imagination. As the work goes on it becomes apparent that the cities Marco Polo describes must be real. The cities are without time, sometimes ancient, sometimes possessing plumbing, sometimes airports and suburbs. I wish I had a way to describe how this book feels to read. The closest I could come is that the book serves as a bridge between the hypothetical and the real, between the imaginative and the stubbornly physical. By the end of the book the cities feel so real it is as if you could almost plan to go visit them. I wish I had more ways to describe this book. It is pure imagination, it is pure joy and play. It not only questions reality but contributes to it. One of the best books I have ever read.

A dialogue is a sort of theory the same way a theory is a sort of dialogue, as in they rely on duality, on a small opposition. The Animal is in the World like Water in Water is all opposition, all dissonance. Kiki Smith's series of drawings--documenting a seemingly emotionless woman being eaten by a similarly emotionless tiger--were initially titled Woman Being Eaten by Animals. Even the titles suppose a sort of dissonance, we know an event happened, what do we call the event? How could we possibly name it? I'd hesitate to say this work embraces multiplicity, instead it closer comes to oneness--not that there are infinite ways of classifying that an event happened, but simply that an event happened. As always Leslie Scalapino's language occupies the abstract, the minimal, the utterly interpretive. Like the drawings, her words--often seemingly nonsensical--beg to provoke an emotional response. The seeing of the entire book-object, of the undescriptive language of place that floods the pages, feels like an omen. Or more that it is composed of inauspicious, unemotive events, which certainly taints it auspicious, taints it emotive. Leslie Scalapino is my favorite poet, so I am certainly biased, but regardless--The Animal is in the World like Water in Water is nothing but an experience, a passing of time, an event that is singular. The book is perfect.

Tender Buttons is a book that is not. A book called Tender Buttons was written in 1914, the same year as WWI, a year marked by tension, globalization, and abstraction. I do not think Gertrude Stein was thinking about the war. But the tension appears throughout the book, and I can't help but wonder what the war did to the book. First the language--it is near incomprehensible. It took me an hour to understand the first four line paragraph. I had to watch a youtube video about it. More than it it is incomprehensible it is play, Stein weaves words between her fingers, swaps tense, possession, sometimes just sticking them together almost haphazardly. But nothing about this book is haphazard. I think, at it's core, the book is about language, it's soft and imperfect capability. If language is water, craft is a carafe, and Stein's carafe might be a Klein bottle, of more dimension than most could see. And that makes me ask--how do we talk about the war. Maybe I am only thinking about the war because of the current and inauspicious global moment we find ourselves in, of genocide playing through tv screens, pandering politicians... how do we talk about the war, how do we shape the carafe, how to make the carafe a bullet...

A not book of poetry that almost is. As I checkout out this book, the library attendant and I talked for a second--they noted 'it's tragic, but beautifully writ'. The book is also beautiful and tragically writ. Tragedy and beauty walk together through this book, albeit the beauty less visibly. The characters strive for happiness, confusing happiness with beauty. The characters run from tragedy, confusing tragedy with loneliness. I spent last summer in Ireland, and sure felt odd about being an American, being both attached to my identity but uncomfortable with what such an identity signifies. In Giovanni's Room, the body is a room. The body is a space. Giovanni's room (the character this time) is Giovanni's internality forced into externality. Where do we export our baggage? How do we deal with longing? We put it in a room, which is to say we export a part of ourselves. To deal with class, responsibility, social norms, what is exported to the separate, confined room? More importantly, how do we decorate it?

To say that all Gwendolyn Brooks deserves is a posthumous Nobel Prize is an understatement. I find it remarkably sinister that she isn't talked about more. Her poems move through transition, she sometimes uses rhyme, sometimes free verse, sometimes writing with little punctuation. All of it is perfectly intentional. Brooks was interested in the lives of the people around her. In her community. At a time when Robert Frost and similar poets ventured off into the woods to 'discover' something, Brooks was right there, in Bronzeville, eye to the world around her. The book is, in some ways, a catalogue, moving through moments of joy and grief, always wth the goal of just understanding someone better. Brooks wanted to understand the people around her. It is crazy that such a goal isn't more present in poetry. Brooks understood the world around her. Terrance Hayes, in Watch Your Language, asks 'If you don't turn your suffering into art, will it remain suffering?' I imagine Brooks responding 'If you don't turn your joy into art, will it remain joy?'

To read Eleni Sikelianos is to be obsessed with the mystery. Or maybe just to move through the mystery. Or maybe to think of your own good self as a mystery. These poems are as impossible as they are beautiful. They are barriers, but less like a wall and more like a mirror. Her poems occupy an odd space not between living and dying but in tandem with both. To Sikelianos, the world (maybe every world) is both living and dead. Dreams are both living and dead. The figure referenced throughout these poems, 'Charlene', sometimes a child but always beyond her years, might as well be dead. As in she is living. The poem 'Charlene,' begins with the line 'Shall we speak of the dead? How shall we speak of the dead.' followed by a newspaper list of war casualties. Where is this book. Where is the poem. Where is the reader. Is a poem living, is a character in the poem living, what do we call dead. The mystery of this book, at least, is certainly alive.

Lucille Clifton rides (or maybe is) the line between tenderness and fire, her poems are like smoked meat--absolutely dripping and soft but with a clear reminder of the violence preceding any possible meal. I hadn't read any of Clifton's work before this collection, which appears near the end of her decades long career, but instantly began to see her influence everywhere. Each poem in this book is a masterclass in both content and craft, reading the book I instantly felt that this matters, that Clifton's voice is an essential touchstone for bother American poetry and American experience. The book is divided into several sections, each section a specific quilting technique (tree of life, eight-pointed star, etc). The content of these sections reflect the style of quilt itself, and throughout the book Clifton stiches together a blanket of these different sections, from talking unabashedly about her period to discussing the fall of Lucifer, from the lamentation of the death of a son to the abrupt joy of eating fruit. In Eve's Version, she writes "smooth talker/slides into my dreams/and fills them with apple", a really remarkable set of lines. The sonic lushness of the soft 's' sounds to discussing the apple as a singular (bringing it to the conceptual level) rather than plural lead to this sense of wonder, and more importantly surprise. Clifton writes like a mapmaker charting imaginary cities, each word and line she chooses is both a surprise and entirely makes sense, as if there was no other word she could have possible chose. This book is a masterclass. Give Lucille Clifton a retroactive Pulitzer, she deserves it.

I've been trying to read one book of poetry a day. I've been reading notably less than that. But I think it would help my fried egg of a brain to write about what I'm reading a little more, so on this blog I'm gonna write brief creative reviews of everything I read (maybe) (hopefully). Enjoy it or don't! Stay creamy!