Dawn's Reading Blog

Hooray! I’m done with it.

OK, maybe it deserves something better than that.

Hell is inventive. Purgatory is boring. And Heaven is just weird. I wouldn’t live in that heaven for anything. All three places suck, actually.

But never mind the real estate. How was the poetry? Well, when I could understand it, it was OK. My old Modern Library edition had a nice summary at the start of each Canto (chapter) and masses of footnotes throughout. I read the sumamries as it was the only way to tell what Dante was going on about, but I didn’t read most of the footnotes.

What they never tell you about The Divine Comedy is that it’s more a stab at Dante’s enemies than anything. Most of the people you meet suffering in hell, languishing in purgatory, or dancing around as beams of light in heaven are from recent (to Dante) Italian history. This was his way of making sure his real life enemies would “get theirs.” Whoever he considered bad is used as a bad example. The few people he considered good are used as good examples. Occasionally a figure from deeper history (a Saint or a particularly wicked ruler) makes an appearances as well.

There’s tons of references to ancient mythology and you need a fair understanding of how people back-when thought that astronomy worked. In other words, you can’t tell the players without a score card. The Divine Comedy isn’t so much a work of poetry or a religious discussion as it is one big in-your-face at everyone who never thought Dante was a genius. But I guess he had the last laugh.

It took a while to read The Top 500 Poems, as you might imagine. By “top”, the editor means the most anthologized poems written in English. He starts with stuff so old you can’t make out what they’re saying and goes all the way up to Allen Ginsberg. I think I originally had to buy this for a college class but when I sold off my textbooks, I didn’t sell this one, figuring it would be generally useful. I’m glad I kept it as I finally enjoyed reading it. (I doubt I read more than the assigned pages back in school.)

For the most part, the newer poems are better than the older ones. This is because I can tell what the hell they’re saying. A combination of changes in the English language and changes in what we do on a daily basis make some of the old ones either unintelligible or irrelevant. I know the words and the general principles involved, but I can’t grasp a metaphor about plows or planting time. Metaphors require that you have a fundamental instinct about what the subject is being compared to. Otherwise, it’s like explaining how much a white flibbertygibbit resembles a watchmacallit in August.

Of course some of the later poems are unintelligible for other reasons, but that seems to be intentional on the part of the poet. I rediscovered some old favorites and found a couple of new poets whose works I enjoy.

When I was a child I was given, or perhaps my oldest brother was given but that’s a different story, a book of poems for Christmas. My friend Christine who lived across the courtyard from us had gotten the same book and she and I used our matching books to write in secret code. In order to use this code you had to find the word you wanted to say in the text of the chosen book. I guess that meant I had to read the poems.

I don’t remember exactly when or exactly why the book became important to me for its content, but I do remember a few years later assigning neighborhood kids the task of memorizing poems for “school.” I still have a lot of them memorized myself.

At some point the book was lost. At first I knew where it had been lost – at my Grandmother’s – and I expected to get it back. But the more trips I made out west, the more I realized I was never going to see it again.

Enter the internet. I could find my book on the internet, couldn’t I? I could list dozens of the poems contained therein. I knew the cover was blue. I could kind of describe the style of the illustrations which were unique. In short, I’d know if it I saw it. But online searching proved no more fruitful than offline searching had been.

One day last spring I was visiting an Aunt when the urge to look for my lost book struck again. I prowled the book cases in her house, disappointed, when suddenly I noticed a stack of books just inside an open closet door in the playroom. Sure enough, there it was. There was never any doubt but if there had been, seeing my own childish writing would have eliminated it.

Illustrated Poems for Children, illustrated by Krystyna Orska is not just another book of poetry for kids. It’s a superb book of poetry for kids. These are real poems, written by poets whose names we all know. They’re not doggeral or nursery rhymes. In all my searching, I’ve never found a book to compare. If you want your children to grow up knowing and appreciating poetry, you couldn’t give them a better start than this book

You won’t find this book on Amazon. It was written by my Grandfather and self-published for the enjoyment of our family. But one of the biggest stories from the book is available online: La Paloma.

I have been lucky that both my Grandfather and Grandmother on my Father’s side have chosen to write about their lives. My Grandmother’s book was more personal. She lived a domestic life and her family was always her biggest interest. My Grandfather has always been a nature lover, feeling most at home in the outdoors. Many of his stories and poems are about his experiences communing with nature. He also wrote poems about his loved ones. His poem, Remembering Mark on His 44th, written to my Father on his birthday, is my favorite.

So, little boy anomaly–
Leader of the pack
And stripper of green apple trees
You, the non-sleeper, teaser,
And patio ice-rink builder,
You are now too old to enjoy
Being Rudolph in the Christmas play.
Yet, you’re still a nailer-of-nails,
Thinker, doer, and self starter
A house builder, though not on beach stilts.
Do you still not sleep unless held down
Eyes wide with plans for infinity?
Dear enjoyer of what’s at hand
And non-complainer,
At forty-four you’re not too old
For us to wish you all our love.

The Pagoda is a collection of modernish poetry by a Brit. The curious thing is that he tries to rhyme in places. It kind of throws you off, like if a novelist’s sentences rhymed. His rhymes are unexpected somehow and not quite right. I didn’t care for most of his work. It wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t good. But there were a few poems from a child’s point of view–remembering how summer felt or describing the thrill of riding on his father’s shoulders–that were evocative and interesting.

For a class from BNU, I read Leaves of Grass (original edition) and Walt Whitman: Selected Poems. You can’t help but wish that someone would go through Whitman’s poetry with a pair of scissors. There’s genius in there but it’s hard to find.

I liked Song of Myself in places, but I got really tired of the endless lists. Those lists always start with the beginning of a sentence. It’s like:
When I see you,
Strong Men,
Beautiful Women,
Robust Children,
etc.

Except that each item in the list is at least a sentence long and the list goes on for three or four pages. By the time you get to the end of the list, and therefore the end of the sentence, you’ve forgotten what the beginning was. I’m not sure he remembered either. Sometimes when I got to the end of the list, I’d intentionally go back to see how the sentence had started and discover that it never really did end. What we need is a combo What Whitman/Kurt Vonnegut. Walt could start the sentence, get in a few list items, and Vonnegut could finish up with a well placed “And so it goes.”

I liked his ideas, but I was longing for some editing.

I Sing the Body Electric was disappointing. The best part about it is the title. I think I expected the words from that song in Fame. Those are better words. The real poem is just another list.

My favorite poem was Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. That one told a story and didn’t have any lists.

Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Love Poems

I’m not an educated reader of poetry but I suspect these wouldn’t be for me even if I were. I was glad I read the introduction first. I frequently leave introductions to the end because they too often give away plot points, but in this case it’s unlikely I would have understood the “plot” if I hadn’t been told it. The sonnets tell the story of Elizabeth Barrett meeting and falling in love, albeit after some reisistance, with Robert Browning.

The other thing I learned from the introduction that was key to understanding her poetry was that she considered herself an invalid, nearly always on the brink of death. There doesn’t seem to be any medical reason for her belief. After she married Browning and had a child, she magically got “all better.” But her maudlin belief in her eminent death comes through in the sonnets.

I found her sonnets overly sentimental, pretty obviously the result of a woman experiencing love for the first time. They’re also repetitive and most are uninspired. Any eighth grader with a crush on the guy in the seat next to her could do as well.

I think I’m not a big fan of sonnets because the strictness of structure and rhyme forces the poet to compromise and say, not what she meant to say, but what fits into the poem. Much of which is completely assinine. Take, for instance, the first stanza of her famous “How do I love thee” sonnet, which is part of this collection.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace,

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.

What’s this business about “when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.” Does that even mean anything? The bit about “the level of everyday’s most quiet need” is nice–the idea that love can be quiet and abiding, as well as violent and passionate. But then she ruins it with “by sun and candle light” which is clearly in there just to rhyme. Taking out the padding (as described above and throughout the rest of the sonnet), you get:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose,

and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

It’s not a sonnet anymore, but I say it’s better.