Last week or so, John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez which I think is my latest favorite book. Really healthy reading as it moves between close up detail (especially of tide pools) and then wider view. Somehow felt like it was clearing my mind of all the junk that has been in there lately. Lots of listing of animals. I loved it.

Will I ever get time back so I can sit down and read?

While not sleeping last week I read Eleni Sikelianos' The California Poem. Beautiful, utopian, love poem to California. I'm interested in what gets in to the book and what does not show up. And also wondering how it might be different if Eleni had been living in California recently. Not much about dot com and everything else that has spawned the age of Arnold. Not that much about politics really. And not much about California's complicated identity politics (although these show up at moments). Just a lot of nostalgic love. Here is how it ends:

California keep
on, beneficent
as the sun and sea, I ask you leave
to roll on the first inch

of its shady territory; I believe a hundred dollars
and a year would support me in California
The rest I would pluck from the avocado & lemon tree & the sea

where there is no heavy snow but it is "raining behind my back . . . [amd] your rain
will be my rain," in the discovery of apposites that are not bicoastal

California utterly more sky of the looking everything in the mouth of tidelines
the tip of the snail's horn caught in the eye & ice plant poppy bright by the highway deeps

of bituminous, "how do I notice
while being Am, am reading rocks
nothing and riding the surface" my arm rising
out of the dead ring
with rain
over the
veering.
Earth.

At moments it is too much: "California / gives sqwoosky kisses one by one." But in general just a really sweet book. Can there be too much love of place?

A week or so ago but I don't think I wrote it up... Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism. I bought it because I thought it might help with the art and revolution project. Or the art and political education project. But it was no help at all. I am both attracted and repulsed by this sort of discussion about humanism and democracy. Which I guess means I enjoyed reading it. Also like to read Nussbaum for same reason. A sort of guilty academic pleasure. I get to feel like all is not lost in this field. But his descriptions of the wonders of Columbia weirded me out. As did long paragraph on James Clifford's father (I had no idea James Clifford was a heritage academic but it was weird to read it in a discussion of his work).

Recent reads...

Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems.

Gail Holst's Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-culture. I had a hard time finding this one. It took two ILL requests. I wanted it from having read her lament book and also because I was wondering if it would fit into the Worldly Prosodies course. I was thinking about doing something on rembetika and blues (and using the Angela Davis book). This book is very similar in structure to the Davis book. A few critical chapters and then a collection of lyrics at the back. It is a fun read.

Various essays from NLR. Alexander Cockburn's "Anybody but Bush?" and Benedict Anderson's "Jupiter's Dungeons" (third in his series of essays on Rizal which together are excellent and promise to be a great book) stood out. Also review of new Claude Cahun collection in French made me want to check her work out.

Naomi Long's Radiant Field.

Recent issue of PMLA. Somewhat interesting essay by Peggy Phelan on Beckett. (Although I usually find her much more interesting than this essay.) But interesting essay by Haral Weinrich, "Chamisso, Chamisso Authors, and Globalization" on writers who write in German but are not native German speakers and global literature issues.

To check out sometime soon, Krzysztof Ziarek's The Force of Art, just out on Stanford.

Also interesting that I read this weekend was Mark Nowak's Shut Up, Shut Down. It is a series of poems in the documentary tradition about labor and factories in the upper midwest. Mark is from Buffalo originally and several of the poems are about Buffalo's intense decline after the steel markets folded in the late twentieth century. The book is very devoted to the leftist/communist tradition of U.S. poetry (this tradition that Cary Nelson's work has done so much to bring back into focus; I highly recommend his work if you haven't read it yet). It has a wondeful retro feel about it. No avant garde word spew here. And it has a clear position.

I recommend it for anyone who wants to think about getting more voices into their poem or how to sort different linguistic registers. He has different sorts of quotes in bold and italics and Poem in roman. Etc. All are embedded in a Poem structure (ragged right margin; wandering, shortish lines; sometimes prose sections at the top of the poem). Also good for thinking about tradition, about who you write with and what sorts of forms you use to write with them (as in who are your poetic people? Mark is clear on his.).

Great poem here: "Capitalization" which puns on capital the money and capital letters in poems.

I confess though that I keep wanting part two of this book. The book chronicles what happens in parts of the US post-70s globalization. Which is basically that organized labor no longer is labor because there are no jobs. The jobs go elsewhere. I guess I'd like to see a little more global discussion. About both US privilege (those without jobs in the rust belt still eating more than many in other places). And what happens when these jobs go to other places (which tends to be exploitation of labor with low wages and no benefits and environmental disaster).

Have decided I can't talk in detail about poetry books I read on here or I will go crazy and get way behind.

But this weekend...

Dodie Bellamy, Pink Steam. I had read a lot of this before over the last years. But enjoyed rereading it. It has a story about where I work in it that I hadn't read before. This made me excited. Although because I've been in such a bad mood about my job lately, I kept wanting there to be less about the sexy male student (I guess graduate student) and more making fun of the institution itself. I assume though that this is a personal preference. The Vermeer poem joke is very funny.

Finished up Basho's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages, tr. Hiroaki Sato. I'm reading it for Worldly Prosodies course in the spring. I find it hard to read it without all the information about the tradition that comes out of it in U.S. poetries of the 60s and 70s (which sort of means I don't like it because it reads so much to me like a Gary Snyder poem). This edition isn't helping with its two layers of annotation. I checked out a few critical studies out of the Berkeley library which I hope will help me. I know it is great. I should like it. What is not to like? Just not sure how to get there in my body.

Also Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Found this one stunning and sad. It is more in prose than in poetry. It is all in my body. This struck me...

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem--is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive. p. 130

Also want to make note that she does an interesting annotation system at the back of the book (the writing is heavily news and her reading dependent). Sometime I want to collect a series of examples of all the different sorts of annotation that poets use for reference.

Trying to get caught up on the poetry books in my office.

Today read Joseph Lease's article "Progressive Lit.: Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the Politics of the Lyric I." At times I felt like it doesn't give Andrews enough credit for having any sort of nuanced approach. Although I have to admit that at moments I can't tell how much nuance I myself should give some of the writing done by Andrews, Watten, etc., on the I. I wish one of them would write a sort of retrospective on the I at some point. I am confused sometimes about whether they still think it is the same problem. And I am always wondering why the I is under attack and not the narcissism which we all know by now can still be a big part of I-avoidance poetry. Or, in other words, sometimes the things that got said about the I in the 70s seems absurd at the turn of the century. So many new narcissisms (and what about Baraka in this regard?). Several points of Lease's article are crucial. Such as how often a community poetics, Baraka being but one example, falls out of institutional sight lines. And I agree that the communities that poems create need more attention than the communities they avoid.

Then enjoyed Gordon Hadfield's and Sasha Steensen's correspondence a great deal. Interesting on the tourism/documentation issue. The book is about traveling through south America. Sprawling geography and words. They tend to use a "we."

Kim Rosenfield's Trama. Heard her read from this last year. Really strong new work from her. Very tight. Hard hitting. Obvious. All good things in poetry right now I think. I'd line it up with Stacy Doris's work in its combination of beautiful and darkness.

Jeanne Heuving's Incapacity. Haunting personal narrative. An earthquake in the middle of it. Lots of dreams. I was stuck by the shifting of space in it. By the narrative of it.

Also India Radfar's Breathe. Spareness. Beautiful book design. Printed in India on transitional paper with bright colors.

Deborah Meadow's Itinerant Men.

note for future special topics class: class on women's forms/gendered poetry. lament; ghinnawas; pillow books; sappho lyric; etc.

For birders and others, this week's reading... Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. With a title like that...

I've been reading it with an eye for assigning parts of it in special topics class next semester. Has wonderful discussion of how birds show up in Kaluli lament and which birds and how they get represented. Feld is an anthropologist. He got some notoriety a few years ago when he began protesting deals that U of Texas had with a company that was mining in Papua New Guinea (the area in which he does research). Ended up leaving U of Texas. I saw him give a talk a year or so ago at UH on folk music and another on gold mining in Papua New Guinea (which convinced me to never buy gold things, not that I was planning on doing so but am now more convinced than ever).

Also finished up Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in Bedouin Society which I had been meaning to read for years but never did. Great quote that made me think about how we think about poetry so differently than anthropologists (and how some of the anthropology approach, cultural studies?, might help think things through):

What are individuals symbolizing about themselves through expression of these non-virtuous sentiments? What is it about poetry that allows it to be used to express sentiments contrary to those appropriate to the ideals of honor without jeopardizing the reputations of those who recite it? What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that both sets of responses are conventional, what is the significance of having two cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of the ideology of honor and modesty to shape experience? Finally, what does the extraordinary cultural valuation of the poetic discourse tell us about the relationship between the ideology of honor and not only individual experience but also the organization of Bedouin social and political life as a whole? p. 35

Some of these questions are obviously specific to the Bedouin poetry she is talking about in the book, but I like to think that the distance she mentions might help us think about own poetries. Maybe rephrase like this:

What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that [all] sets of [poetry] are conventional, what is the significance of having [so many] cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments [in the U.S.]? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of [language] to shape experience?