Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry
For those of you new to me, I have been doing a daily (I use that term very loosely) book excerpt from my huge library for years now. The point of the exercise was this: To start with a section of books, take down the first book in the section, find an excerpt, write something about it, and then move on to the next book. Here was the very first one. I wanted to challenge myself to write on whatever book that happened to be next on the shelf. I may not FEEL like writing about the last Emperor of Ethiopia on one particular day, but it was the next book on the shelf, and I am nothing if not OCD when it comes to projects like this, so I would write something up. It may not be the most brilliant thing in the world, but I really enjoyed forcing myself to gather my forces, early in the morning, to figure out what I had to say. And the randomness was the fun of it. I shelve my books alphabetically, so I would just pick out the next book on the shelf. I have been doing this, off and on, since 2005, my God, and I am still nowhere near all the way through my library. That’s not even counting books I have added since 2005!
With “compilation” books or things like “short story collections” or “essay collections”, I bend the rules (if I feel like it), and do multiple excerpts from the same book, seeing as each part feels like a whole, so I might as well treat it as such. My Norton Anthology of Poetry is a gorgeous copy, two volumes in a nice box, one for Modern poetry and one for Contemporary. The volumes are arranged by poet’s birth-date, and the cut-off point for the Modern volume is 1944. I am almost halfway done with the Contemporary volume now, in terms of excerpting poets. With this, I usually choose poets where I am at least marginally familiar with their work, even if it’s just one poem that I love. I like to write from a personal place, especially for this “excerpt project”. Books mean something to me. Every book I own is there for a reason. They are meticulously organized and I dip into them all the time. I love my library. It’s a real reference library, although I have the entire works of Judy Blume as well. I like to have my favorite books around me.
I’ve been meaning to start this project up again. I have missed the daily-ritual aspect of it.
The next poet in the Contemporary Volume is Louise Glück.
I do not know much about her personally. I know she teaches. I know she had a sister who died before she was born, and that fact haunts perhaps every poem she has written. She misses that sister she never met. She yearns for her. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize and every other poetry prize. Her stuff has a coldness to it, a chill psychological clarity that I often find rather frightening. She is not purely a descriptive poet. I am tremendously bored by descriptive poets. I need something to be revealed, other than what the frost looks like on the grass, as beautifully as it may be worded. My favorite poets start with description and then explode out into revelation or epiphany. Mary Oliver is spectacular at that, but I’ll get to her later.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.
Now that is what I am talking about. And that is what good poetry can give us. Or, I should speak for myself: that is what good poetry can give me. Life can become rote. I look to art to deepen my awareness. I have good friendships, a great family, and do not live life in shallow waters. I sometimes wish I were more shallow, it might be easier, but such as we are made. But things like art, or books, or movies, or painting, or poetry, can help me stop for a moment, and think. Or BE. It may not be a pleasant sensation, a lot of poetry hurts, but that’s also something that art can provide.
Glück is not really “confessional”, at least not in the sense that many of her contemporaries were, although her poems are very personal. Michael Schmidt refers to her as having a “firm reticence” and I very much like that. She steps back and tells us what it’s like. Her language is spare, her line lengths short, giving it a conversational feel. She includes lines like, “Now let me tell you” or “I am telling you”, and when Glück says something like that, batton down the hatches. She’s coming at you with some big truth. And she will say it with no euphemism, no softening. Her poems can be quite devastating. But they don’t have the “ick” factor that some of the confessional poets have. She obscures, even as she reveals.
Here’s one of her more recent poems.
Earthly Love
Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.
As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.
We are all human-
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.
And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occured.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.
