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Gorman Carries Weight of World

5/19/2023

A WRITER'S WIT
A man can do what is his duty; and when he says “I cannot,” he means, “I will not.”
Johann Fichte
Author of Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of Scientific Knowledge”)
Born May 19, 1762

J. Fichte

My Book World

Gorman, Amanda. Call Us What We Carry: Poems. New York: Viking, 2021.

This collection of poetry may be the most innovative one I’ve ever read—quite fitting for one of our youngest and most distinguished poets. Gorman uses a wide variety of poetic forms. Concrete poetry portrays Melville’s whale, and a poem about the Covid Pandemic is a black mask with white print. She devises a series of free forms fitting the subject matter. Yet others are truly novel, for example, in “The Soldiers (or Plummer),” in which her lines representing a young soldier’s diary appear as dated diary pages. The poet seems to be telling the broad sweep of African-American history by searching out every appropriate form and by sweeping out every ignored corner of said history. One reading, as with most fine poetry, will not be enough. And I look forward to Gorman’s next collection.

TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Wise Brown
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elsa Maxwell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Bennett Cerf
FRI: My Book World | Denis Johnson, Angels

A Writer's Wit: Cecil Day-Lewis

4/27/2023

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet and Novelist
Author of A Hope for Poetry
Born April 27, 1904

C. Day-Lewis

Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Hill McCarter
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Reza Aslan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Henryk Sienkiewicz

A Writer's Wit: Margaret of Valois-Angoulême

4/11/2023

Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and stretching the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.
Margaret of Valois-Angoulême, Poet
Author of Heptaméron
Born April 11, 1492

M. of Valois-Angoulême

Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Aleksandr Ostrovsky
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Eudora Welty
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin

A Writer's Wit: Phyllis McGinley

3/21/2023

Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps
To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.
Phyllis McGinley, Poet
Author of "The Conquerer"
Born March 21, 1905

P. McGinley

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Nicholas Monsarrat
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Kim Stanley Robinson
FRI: My Book World | Dedman/Clark's Empty Mansions

A Writer's Wit: Robert Lowell

3/1/2023

No use describing Yaddo—rundown rose gardens, rotting cantaloupes, fountains, a bust of Dante with a hole in the head, sets called Gems of Ancient Literature, Masterpieces of the World, cracking, dried up sets of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Balzac, Reminiscences of a Happy Life (the title of two different books), pseudo Poussins, pseudo Titians, pseudo Reynolds, pseudo and real English wood, portraits of the patroness, her husband, her lover, her children lit with tubular lights, like a church, like a museum . . . [from a letter to poet, Elizabeth Bishop]
Robert Lowell, Poet
Author of Life Studies
Born March 1, 1917

R. Lowell

Coming Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Matt Taibbi
FRI: My Book World | Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

A Writer's Wit: Elizabeth Bishop

2/8/2023

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
Poet, Author of Geography III
Born February 8, 1911

E. Bishop

Coming Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Brendan Behan
FRI: My Book World | Reynolds Price's Ardent Spirits

'Swan Wife' by Sarah Moore Wagner

12/2/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
. . . the measure of the value of any work of fiction . . . is the worth of the speculations, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it.
David Masson
Author of Edinburgh Sketches
Born December 2, 1822

D. Masson

My Book World

Wagner, Sara Moore. Swan Wife. San Diego: Cider Press, 2022.

These may be some of the most exciting poems, the most developed poems I’ve read by a contemporary poet in a long time. Wagner’s structure is deliberate, appropriating certain aspects from Joseph Campbell studies to frame her collection. Sure of her technique and subject matter, Wagner ensures her poems pop with energy: they possess a natural, almost childlike quality in their enthusiasm about youthful love, marriage, having that first child. In “Licentious,” my favorite passage may be:

She tells me come out,
someone might see me, the bounce
of my breasts, this ache. I will have to marry the snake
slivering into the banks, will have to marry the sun,
a thick hand on my shoulders (xi).

Wagner’s title may well spring from “Ball and Chain,” the moment the persona emotionally becomes the betrothed, the soon-to-be swan wife:

I dipped my toes in and you called me swan,
you said you’ll go where you want. It was maybe then I knew you saw me, how I wanted to fly or float, to cover. How even a mute swan will hiss and attack if you get too close. How you called me beautiful then, so beautiful and so loud, the say I’d hoot up to the stars, the way I showed my teeth (7).

The poet’s persona maintains her controlled ebullience throughout the entire collection, and I hope to read more of Wagner’s work. Congratulations to her for winning the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award. The collection is quite deserving.

Coming Next:
TUES 12/06: A Writer's Wit | Ève Curie
WEDS 12/07: A Writer's Wit | Noam Chomsky
THURS 12/08: A Writer's Wit | John Banville
FRI 12/09: My Book World | Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country

Sylvia Plath's Life: A Red Comet

8/26/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26, 1904

C. Isherwood

My Book World

Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 2020.

This impressive biography of the famed poet may be the most comprehensive literary biography I’ve ever read. Clark, who took more than ten years to write this book, utilizes a broad range of sources, including Sylvia Plath’s diaries, letters (some never before seen), journals, and poems. Clark also includes the story of Plath’s famous poet husband, Ted Hughes. It would be like telling the story of one conjoined twin without including the other; that is how inextricably woven their lives are, right up to Plath’s infamous suicide, in 1963. The acknowledgement page and Clark’s notes section are filled with other sources, she having visited England to conduct research as well as interviews, and having combed U.S. libraries from coast to coast.

The book reads more like a novel, achieving a fiction-like narrative arc. We learn of Plath’s early childhood, the loss of her father, her dominating but generous mother. We learn of Plath’s education, particularly her four years at the prestigious Smith College. We learn of her creepy attempt at suicide, almost succeeding, when her near-dead body is discovered in a crawl space beneath the family home, her electroshock therapy at a draconian institution in Massachusetts. We cross the Atlantic where Plath continues her education at Cambridge University, where she meets her match intellectually as well as future husband, Ted Hughes. This narrative continues to build as we learn of her struggle to cope with a male dominated literary life in London. She is alternately elated and deflated as some of her work is accepted with accolades and “her best work” rejected by the likes of the New Yorker as well as prestigious English journals. It would have been a mistake for her to eschew her British education because the Brits seem, at times, more open to her raw style than the Americans.

We live through the Plath-Hughes tempestuous marriage and become acquainted with their two children. Plath’s death comes with fifty pages to go. It is the climax, all right, but it is not the end of Plath’s story. All throughout the biography Clark intersperses lines from Plath’s and Hughes’s work to demonstrate not only biographical elements but fascinating literary observations, as well. But even Plath’s death is deconstructed in such a way that we may understand it differently from earlier biographies (Anne Stevenson’s “famously negative” one, for example). With twenty-twenty hindsight, we see that Plath’s suicide (as many are) is mere minutes away from being another failed attempt. Plath is always, in the damp English climate and because she runs herself ragged, having bouts of a cold or the flu. As a result she takes a number of OTC medications, as well as a merry-go-round of prescription drugs, including antidepressants, sedatives to sleep, other drugs to wake her up so she can work—all of these interacting horribly as a perfect storm to help end her life (some experts understand that those particular antidepressants may have intensified her depression before finally kicking in).

And it isn’t as if she doesn’t try to live. She consults doctors and psychiatrists galore. She corresponds with an American psychiatrist across the Atlantic. She fights like hell to stay out of British psychiatric wards because she is terrified she will be subject to shock therapy again, which she believes, has altered her brain and her life forever. For fans or nonfans alike this biography is a must-read. It generously takes all we knew about Plath before, all the research that has come earlier, and adds or even convincingly contradicts a great deal of the old. I can’t see any biographer attempting to top it for a long time to come. Indeed, the book may finally put her story to rest alongside her grave atop a lonely spot near where her husband grew up at Heptonstall—a simple granite marker worn down now by nearly sixty years of inclement weather.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
Born August 19, 1903

J. G. Cozzens

My Book World

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 (1961).

If one has seen only the movie version of this book, a fine work in its own right that premiered in 1969 with the inimitable Maggie Smith starring in the main role, one might be lulled into thinking the book to be quite similar. One would be wrong. This short novel set in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland, impresses me as being an extended prose poem about an intelligent and nonconformist teacher who is yet rather naïve. Brodie eschews the prescribed school curriculum to lecture her female pupils concerning a wide variety of cultural and artistic topics, and yet when she also embraces the likes of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler, she reflects either a certain naivete or an intellectual dullness. The word “prime” or phrases containing that word appears more than thirty times throughout these brief pages; the phrase “crème de la crème” more than five. Both have a rather fatuous ring to them, “prime” referencing Miss Brodie’s heightened sense of her own refinement and knowledge, and “crème de la crème” indicating the girls she has rather commandeered to follow her—not just for the year they are in her class but for their entire lifetimes: they are the “Brodie set.”

Spark’s structure is an omnisciently meandering one in which she may speak of one child in her adult future, one dying prematurely, another becoming a nun. Very lightly Sparks inserts that the year is 1931 or 1937 or that Ms. Brodie is now forty-three. One knows where one is at all times as if the novel were a sort of hologram. Young Sandy is the only pupil who sees through Jean Brodie’s ways, and early on readers learn that she will bring Brodie down. In the last scene of the film, a wounded Brodie who has been released from her teaching position because of Sandy’s actions screams the word “Assassin!” after her beloved Sandy, but the book ends rather quietly when readers visit Sandy upon her adult position in a nunnery. When asked about her childhood influences, she simply says, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137).

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Career of Sylvia Plath

A Writer's Wit: Ted Hughes

8/16/2022

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
Ted Hughes
Author of The Iron Man
Born August 16, 1930

T. Hughes

WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Sparks's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

A Writer's Wit: Philip Larkin

8/9/2022

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name.
—from "The Old Fools"
Philip Larkin
Author of A Girl in Winter
Born August 9, 1922

P. Larkin

Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World |Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

A Writer's Wit: Elizabeth Hardwick

7/27/2022

This the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Author of Sleepless Nights
Born July 27, 1916

E. Hardwick

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW |Malcolm Lowry
FRIDAY: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate

A Writer's Wit: Walt Whitman

5/31/2022

My America is still all in the making. It’s a promise, a possible something: it’s to come: it’s by no means here. Besides, what do I care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a forecast, a prophecy.
Walt Whitman
Author of Leaves of Grass
Born May 31, 1819

W. Whitman

FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words

A Writer's Wit: Seamuś Heaney

4/13/2022

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamuś Heaney
Author of Death of a Naturalist
Born April 13, 1939

S. Heaney

FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

A Writer's Wit: Jane Hirshfield

2/24/2022

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.
Jane Hirshfield
Author of Ledger: Poems
Born February 24, 1953

J. Hirshfield

TOMORROW: My Book World | Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden

A Writer's Wit: Langston Hughes

2/1/2022

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
Langston Hughes
Author of The Weary Blues
Born February 1, 1902 [Some sources say Feb. 1, 1901]

L. Hughes

FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

Residence on Pablo's Earth

8/13/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
My take is, privacy is precious. I think privacy is the last true luxury. To be able to live your life as you choose without having everyone comment on it or know about.
Valerie Plame
Author of Fair Game
Born August 13, 1963

V. Plame

My Book World

Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth. With an introduction by Jim Harrison. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions, 2004.

The translator for this collection, Donald Walsh, in his Translator’s Note, sites critic Amado Alonso who declares: “‘Instead of the traditional procedure, which describes a reality and suggests its poetic sense between the lines, poets like Neruda describe the poetic sense and nebulously suggest to which reality it refers’” (363). Amen. Instead of moving from the concrete to the abstract or allowing metaphors to emanate from the specific, Neruda seems to dwell, in the bulk of his work, on abstractions or impressionistic articulation of ideas, and one can tend to tune out. However, of course, a number of his poems do catch hold of me for their perceptions of human nature, of the nature of power, particularly political power in mostly Spanish-speaking nations. I particularly admired “Burial in the East,” “Single Gentleman,” and “Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca.” “General Franco in Hell” arrested my attention with its quickly shifting imagery, emphasizing in its closure the utter contempt and hatred for fascist, Franco. All in all, not my cup of spiced tea, but I feel better for having read perhaps Neruda’s most notable collection.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

A Writer's Wit: Hart Crane

7/21/2021

The bottom of the sea is cruel.
Hart Crane
Author of The Bridge
Born July 21, 1899
[Because Hart Crane apparently committed suicide by jumping from a ship in 1932, his statement rings with a certain irony. RJ]

H. Crane

FRIDAY: My Book World | Frank Lloyd Wright's An Autobiography

A Writer's Wit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

3/24/2021

If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Author of A Coney Island of the Mind
Born March 24, 1919

L. Ferlinghetti

FRIDAY: My Book World | Benjamin Dreyer: Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

A Writer's Wit: Arthur Rimbaud

10/20/2020

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
Arthur Rimbaud
Author of A Season in Hell
Born October 20, 1854

A. Rimbaud

FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin

A Writer's Wit: Eavan Boland

9/24/2020

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
Eavan Boland
Author of A Woman without a Country: Poems
Born September 24, 1944

E. Boland

TOMORROW: My Book World | E. M. Forster's The Life to Come and Other Stories

A Writer's Wit: Dannie Abse

9/22/2020

The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
Dannie Abse
Author of The Presence
Born September 22, 1923

D. Abse

FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Life to Come and Other Short Stories

A Writer's Wit

6/3/2020

Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.
Robert Hillyer, Poet
Born June 3, 1895

R. Hillyer

FRIDAY: My Book World | Letters of Cole Porter

This Book of Daniel Is Not in the Bible

5/1/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Born May 1, 1940

B. Mason

My Book World

Smith, Aaron. The Book of Daniel: Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2019.

This poet's persona clearly has a crush on actor Daniel Craig and cleverly weaves together nearly fifty poems with pop culture in mind. A couple deal directly with our eponymous persona, Daniel, but many cover other icons. In “I Need My O’Hara Frank” he idolizes other poets:

I Need Sharons:

Tate and Olds,
but mostly Olds,

and never, ever
the Rose of.

In “Celebrity,” he, stream-of-conscious style, connects the deaths of various celebs with himself:

Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.
Thomas James died in 1974 and was born
in Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wrote
Letters to a Stranger before he killed himself.
I’ve written three books few people read
and wanted to kill myself. He was 27 like
Joplin Hendrix Morrison Cobain.

In the title poem, the persona levels with readers about Daniel Craig:

I made a Daniel Craig scrapbook
called The Book of Daniel. For years I bought
every magazine with him on the cover. In Interview
he’s stripped to the waist, hopping around on the beach.
Jamie Dornan was in Interview, too: arms behind his
head in a bathtub. I fell in love with Daniel Craig
when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love--
before he was Bond-hot and too famous.

I rarely read a book of poetry in one sitting. To me, that’s like eating an entire box of chocolates in thirty minutes or less (which I’ve never done but know better than to try). Yet I found myself turning page after page, getting Smith's poetry when often I do not get what a poet wants me to. And when I was finished, it may also be the only book of poetry I turned around and read all the way through again. There.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey

A Writer's Wit

1/22/2019

No man,
Til thirty, should perceive there’s a
plain woman.

Lord Byron
Born January 22, 1788

Byron

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-38 Maine