I used to read only one thing at a time, start to finish, but both grief and parenting have made that hard, so I am currently allowing myself the freedom to “surf” through many books at a time. So I’m currently reading Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” “Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry” by Jacques Maritain, Scott Cairns’s collection “Slow Pilgrim,” “Ponds” by J.C. Scharl, and “The Sum of Trifles” by Julia Ridley Scott (this last towards an upcoming essay in the summer issue of Fare Forward).
For my book club I'm starting Paradise Lost, which to my shame I've never read, not even in college. Writing? I'm on my second draft of a screenplay which I hope will become a smash hit Peak TV series. I'm also editing a documentary about the Ramona phenomenon, which is a largely forgotten part of southern CA history but which lives in the hearts of local Natives.
Wonderful, Pern. Lorena and I read Paradise Lost aloud to each other on a cross-country drive in our twenties, and one of the things that's stuck with me is how easily it reads aloud—how simple to follow.
I just reread Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, my favorite book before I encountered Tolkien in my teens. It's still really good, though it doesn't hold quite the interest for me (now in my 30s) it once did. A couple months ago I finished The Peach Blossom Fan and Bashō's The Narrow Road to the North and Other Sketches, both the peak of their respective genres. I'm also following a couple Substacks working their way serially through Les Miserables and Dracula--neither of which I've read in years--and have been dipping into Proust in the evenings.
In poetry, I recently picked up Henry Weinfield's volume of Ronsard translations, The Labyrinth of Love, and was deeply impressed, as I was with Red Pine's translations in Poems of the Masters.
I have exams coming up, so at the moment, everything I am reading is Scripture-related, but once I am done with those, I will get back to Hardy's Collected Poems, which I am 7/10ths of the way through, Dana Gioia's Pity the Beautiful which I am half way through, and begin Edgar Bowers' For Louis Pasteur.
I've been reading Ada Limon's The Carrying, which Zina lent to me. I really enjoy it as a collection.
Also I've been reading the Irish bilingual poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa. I especially like Lies, which is a group of poems originally in Irish with the author's English translations facing. My Irish isn't good enough to really grapple with the Irish, but I'm fascinated by the fact that she does her own translations. I also really enjoyed Clasp and To Star the Dark.
And Malcolm Guite's meditations on the Psalms, David's Crown.
Recently I've also been reading A.E. Stallings and Ted Kooser and Jane Hirshfield.
Am working my way, gradually through Byron, a life in ten letters. Know bits and pieces of his life, and some of his work, but to see letters he wrote to friends, at least so far, with the history behind them, adds a touch that is very nice indeed.
I hadn't --- to my shame --- really thought about Archibald Macleish for years, until I picked up an essay Mark Strand had written, as an introduction to the book he did with Eavan Boland on form, about "You, Andrew Marvell." The thrust of that essay really is just the spell that that poem exerted on him as a young reader, and the thrill of the closing line, "The shadow of the night comes on . . . ," making him feel the end of things, even in the present-moment-ness of boyhood. I went back and read the poem and thought, "Yes, you know, this is marvelous and enchanting, and why did I not know it before now?"
First of all, a great hurrah to you and Sally Thomas for reclaiming poetry for the intelligent common reader.
Second, a small disagreement about Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica." The poem was used during my youth as an aesthetics lesson for the feeble minded. "See, students, a modern poem doesn't have to mean anything. I just exists!" It took me years to realize what a suave and clever poems it actually was. One could say "Ars Poetica" keeps repeating the same message--pure Jacques Maritain--that poetry communicates differently from workaday prose. But 98 years later, this message still hasn't sunk into literary critics.
MacLeish's poem is not free verse. It unfolds as unmetered lines rhymed in couplets. (I find the rhyming ingenious.) That is what French would call "vers libre," a term which is usually mistranslated into English as "free verse." In French and Italian poetry, what is "free" is only the line length. The rhymes are mandatory.
The young T. S. Eliot became fascinated with the vers libre tradition. That is probably where MacLeish got the idea of using the form.
You shame me, Dana, into admitting that I hadn't really considered the MacLeish poem as more than a placeholder — a marker of one of the first literary rebellions of my youth, when I was taught the poem as a declaration against meaning, a judgment that poetry which makes any claim must be bad poetry. And I remember thinking, in my adolescent way, "What bullshit." My suspicion of grand claims about art may date from that moment at age 15 or 16. And my reaction has kept me from ever going back to the poem in any open-minded re-reading.
I second your "hurrah"! I'm delighted to read this Substack, which I keep thinking is a step up from and in a sense steps in for The Writer's Almanac, which is now in reruns. I read both, along with your series about various poets, rather belatedly trying to enrich my understanding of this literary form I've pretty much neglected during my lifetime immersion in fiction and long-form non-fiction of various kinds. Glad to see your clarification of what free verse means.
My reading is desultory as always. I first heard that word pronounced in a BBC dramatization of Jude the Obscure back in the '70s, by an Oxford don dismissing Jude's claim to learning: "your...desultory...reading." I can still hear it (or think I can), and it kind of stings.
I read Bleak House and Dombey and Son this year and was going to start a big Dickens project, reading the roughly 50% of the novels that I haven't already. But soon I got off on other tracks. Currently reading Mark Helprin's Soldier of the Great War, which was highly recommended by a friend, but having trouble getting into it. Picking at the collection of Helen Pinkerton's poetry recently issued by Wise Blood. Picking at Sally & Micah Mattix's anthology of Christian poetry since 1940, and finding some real gems from people whose names I don't recall ever hearing before.
Writing: mainly folly, I'm afraid. A long poem with the working title of The Miracles. By long I mean 20-21st century long, not classical long. Pretty sure I'm not good enough to make it work but determined to press on. Shorter poems that often have at least one good line. And still trying, with diminishing hope, to peddle a book I've written and rewritten several times, part memoir and part cultural history/analysis of...I'm embarrassed to say it...the Sixties. Of course the world needs another book on that topic.
I have the same problem, having written many short memoir pieces and slightly fictionalized short stories of my coming of age in the 1960s, as you say "part memoir and part cultural history/analysis." I've been told "you've had a hellofa life" and that I should write my autobiography by a well-known writer who I trust and admire, but I have no idea where I would publish such a work. I fear my life story is too raunchy for Christian publishers and too Catholic for mainstream publishers. I believe that it could stand on its own as an interesting well-told story, but I think publishers pigeonhole works in genres, and it is too genre-bending.
After this comment, I posted a four part memoir about a man who captivated me when I was 18. The morning after I posted it, I woke up to find that eleven people in a row had cancelled their subscriptions to my Substack!
I sympathize but can't offer any encouragement. I think it's very difficult for an unknown and contact-less writer even to get a reading, much less acceptance, from a mainstream publisher. Unless that "well-known writer" could get you in the door somewhere? And there certainly aren't many Catholic publishers who would be interested in such a book.
Yeah, I've hit most of them. :-/ Most that seemed remotely compatible, anyway. My book isn't a good fit for a Catholic publisher emphasizing devotional, apologetic, theological, and similar works.
Some things I like are not widely liked But I do think there is a common taste for 60s and 70s stories. The recent documentary about Paul Simon in two parts on TV was very widely reviewed. There was a movie, which was partly about the early Jesus movement, Which I watched. It was more early 70s and 60s but still I think it shows the interest is there.
I admit though I don’t know how to help on getting your book published. I don’t think people want to read about some guys recollections of the 60s. I mean, I would read it because I think you’re a good writer but I don’t quite know what the market is for that.
I do admire anyone who could write a long poem. Even 30 lines. I can’t imagine doing that.
I once commissioned Sally Thomas to write on the serious and maybe originating strain of hippiedom in the Jesus Movement — the eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse micro-bus. And how maybe much of the modern style of Bible-church evangelicalism comes from it. The 1960s just won't die (even if much of it didn't happen till the 1970s).
I'd like to read that! The varieties of American religious experience is a topic in which I'm greatly interested. I'm closely reading Rev. Robert Schuller's autobiography right now. In the 80s, after dropping out for years, when I was working on a Ph.D. in American Studies (forever incomplete), I was intrigued by a book that I can't find any reference to now, titled something like, The American Religion of Health, Wealth, and Personal Power. I was also attending a Jesus People Church in Minneapolis, a charismatic evangelical spin off from the "name it and claim it" movement. So I was in the middle of the milieu. To me the 60s happened over one summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Brandeis. As a member of the freshman class of 1963, I attended orientation in a dress, nylons, high heels, and I fit right in. Girls were still trying to save themselves for marriage, and dorms were segregated. The next year the freshman class of 1965, a group of freethinking students raised in kibbutzes in Israel entered and the dress code not to mention the moral code was shattered. The change in mores and manners was allowable because of the sexual revolution that was well underway by then. So I think a lot of it did happen in the 1960s.
I really knew them through Young Life, which in the late 1970s in Memphis was still pretty hippy-Christian. And then in the early 80s in Nashville, when I was in college, there was Belmont Church, which had begun as Church of Christ and I guess still technically kind of was, but was charismatic and definitely used musical instruments. It was the locus of the early contemporary Christian music thing in Nashville, and again was still kind of hippie and Jesus-Movement-y. I went to church there for several years, at least off and on, and was in Young Life, and if as many people weren't still living in communes called Maranatha House by 1983, there were a lot of people who *had* done that.
So my whole experience is later, but pretty vivid. I still kind of miss the granola-Christian days . . .
All that is totally unknown to me. By the early '70s I was completely out of any kind of "movement." And when. later in that decade, I did get to Christianity it was definitely not evangelical.
My frustration is that the book is really not meant to be "a recollection of the '60s." Or not only that. I wouldn't have bothered to write it if that were the case. I just don't think there has been much real understanding of what actually happened there. But I could only write it as a personal testimony. Not erudite enough for any other approach. It's subtitled "A Testimony." I hesitate to use this comparison, but I think of it as an attempt to do for the cultural revolution something like what Whittaker Chambers did for the communism of the '30s. Not that I think it's that good, but that's the sort of thing it's meant to be.
I appreciate your saying that you think I'm a good writer.
Your opening observation, about many generalizations on poetry being only about as true as their opposites, reminded of a book I just finished reading: Novelist Jane Smiley's rather massive "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel." It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of the novel, followed by mini-essays on 100 (really 101) novels that she thinks illustrate various ways in which a novel may succeed or fail in living up to the genre's promise. One of her claims is that the novel by its nature tends to be "liberal," which is not defined but seems to mean that it focuses on the individual's struggles with his or her social surroundings. But she identifies some novels as "conservative," as they seem to portray the person's problems as arising from human nature and so not subject to a solution involving a change in social arrangements. She also implies that moral principles must be treated as flexible or secondary in a good novel, as they will be shown not to be completely relevant to the individual's specific circumstances. I can't help thinking that the implied definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" are rather arbitrary, and that some great novels (not only those by committed Christians) treat moral principles as very important indeed. I'm even tempted to think that all broad generalizations about literary art are untrue, except for that statement.
Would you say overall that this is a helpful book about fiction, or no? I like a good bit of Jane Smiley's fiction --- her novellas and her short stories more than her longer novels (though my much-younger self did really like The Greenlanders when I read it decades ago). Novellas like The Age of Grief and Good Will have held up for me in ways that I suspect A Thousand Acres, for example, would not. So I'd be inclined to be interested in what she says about fiction, but I'm not sure that even she believes, in practice, what she seems to say she believes when she makes these generalizations. Her own best fiction seems very much to believe that people's problems arise from human nature, especially the human capacity for self-delusion (her novella Good Will is a case in point).
I did find the book helpful in a number of ways. For example, she makes a case that some novelists now seldom read -- Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, Sir Walter Scott (!), Tobias Smollett -- deserve higher regard. The little mini-essays highlight some works of fiction that I had not heard of before. At the same time she does have her biases. She outlines a broad arc in which, for centuries, a major theme for the novel was "what to do with women?", giving way only recently to letting women say what they want, another generalization that I think may be an overstatement. She doesn't seem to have much use for novelists to whom religion is important -- O'Connor, Percy, Manzoni, etc. She gives very mixed reviews to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, seeming to prefer Gogol and Turgenev. As a personal example of the difficulties of writing and rewriting a draft novel, she describes her own travails trying to put her novel "Good Faith" into shape (as opposed to the sheer joy she had writing "Horse Heaven," partly because she loves horses), and I found that interesting. Worth reading? I think so. My new Bible for judging fiction? Not really.
Oh, this is helpul. The biases I would expect, of course, and the dismissal of novelists who take religion seriously. Her Greenlanders is actually sort of "Kristin Lavransdatter if no divinity shaped our ends rough-hew them how we will." But it does sound interesting.
I went on a Wilkie Collins binge a couple of years ago and found him great fun --- his Poor Miss Finch is both unintentionally and intentionally hilarious. I'd read The Moonstone years ago, but nothing else, so it was interesting to plow through a number of his novels before finally bogging down in No-Name. Of course, you read a lot of Wilkie Collins, and then you turn to Dickens, and you --- that is, I --- think, "Oh, right. I remember now why Dickens is The Man." But I'm not sorry I spent all that time reading Collins.
Smiley likes Dickens and sees him as "liberal," because of his social consciousness. I thought it unusual that the novel of his that she reviews is "Our Mutual Friend."
Huh, that is interesting, though that designation for Dickens seems really reductive (which I know is stating the obvious!). Dickens seems very very very interested, to the point of obsession, in human nature, with all its oddities.
One of my favorite minor Dickens characters, actually, is Mrs. Gamp, the midwife/deathbed nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, whose entire character seems to have evolved from her trick of saying "dispoged" for "disposed." My pet theory is that once she had said that, Dickens went on giving her things to say because she was so entertaining, and out of this she wove a whole fictional friend, Mrs. Harris, and a whole reality around Mrs. Harris . . .
Martin Chuzzlewit is not one of the great novels, but the development of this single minor character feels like a window into what really drove Charles Dickens as a fiction writer, and it wasn't the outrage of the penal system for debtors (though he wasn't not outraged by that).
Agreed. Could any social progress get Miss Flite in Bleak House to stop giving her birds interesting names? "Two more, I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!"
Years ago I ran across a somewhat crazed progressive political rant from Jane Smiley. It caused me to write her off as a novelist. Probably unfair, but I don't feel bad about it--there's too much other good work that I haven't read.
I haven't. I am a forever student, which is why I love threads like this. I am adding him to my list. I might pick him up next when I finish Berry! Thanks for bringing him to my attention
In poetry, Tibullus' first book of elegies, and Liu Zongyuan; in prose, the usual mix of SF, mysteries, and history; in my field, starting a handbook on information structure and rereading a Cambridge blue book.
There's a comment thread about which books of poetry we reread periodically, but what about novels? What are your regular rereads?
Mine (and my lists are always full of eccentric choices):
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness
Barbara Pym, Excellent Women and An Unsuitable Attachment
Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices
Any number of Alice Thomas Ellis novels, but probably #1 is The Other Side of the Fire
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (though I just spent the last year rereading a LOT of Dickens, on a major binge --- about the only one I don't think I reread is Great Expectations, so I should probably do that)
My regular reread list includes classic novels like War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The Lord of the Rings, but also some oddities: Bosco's Malicroix (not a perfect novel, perhaps, but it suits my tastes wonderfully), Chiladze's A Man Was Going Down the Road, Kawabata's Snow Country, Krasznahorkai's Sátántángo, Vodolazkin's Laurus.... Sebald's Austerlitz may end up on this list, but I've only read it once so far.
I haven't reread (or read) a novel in ages, though I began Diary of a Country Priest with the intention of reading it over Easter (Reader, he put it aside for yet another history of Ancient Israel). I would love to reread Ellison's Invisible Man.
Only a few novels have drawn me into multiple readings. I went on a Graham Greene binge several years while back when recuperating from foot surgery. Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana always delights me. I'd like to reread some of Evelyn Waugh's books. I reread The Loved One a few years ago with pleasure. I'd also like to read Dicken's Bleak House again, which I discovered only twenty years ago when I was staying in a Benedictine abbey at Still River MA and came in late one evening to find the monks watching the BBC series made from the book. I adore Dickens but I have no desire to read his novels I read in my youth, such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I went on a Alice Thomas Ellis binge for a while, I adore her too, but I never thought to re-read any of her work. I don't read fiction any more, usually, and most of my reading is online (from the Internet archive), but I recently read The Good Death of Kate Montclair, from a book that was sent by me to the author. Because of a Well Read Moms group, I have been reading and rereading great books, such as The Practice of the Presence of God and A Grief Observed (nonfiction), Kristin Lavransdatter, Brideshead Revisited, Death Comes to the Archbishop, and more. I was delighted to find this group of women where we talk about important things such as literature, faith, and family. The only other book clubs I'd heard of were getting together to read books like Bridges of Madison County, and I kid you not Fifty Shades of Grey. Eek!
You know, the Graham Greene novel that I return to is Travels With My Aunt, which is weird and I guess not supposed to be unironically charming, but kind of is anyway. Otherwise, I reread his short stories, particularly the collection May We Borrow Your Husband.
I've read Travels With My Aunt a few times. I'll have to find May We Borrow Your Husband. I missed that. BTW, I met a woman when I moved to the San Francisco area for the first time whose life story is similar to that of the main character in Travels With My Aunt. She was raised by her father and his sister. She was in her sixties in the sixties when I met her when she was teaching pottery classes in the city, where she grew up. She was quite interesting, and I hung out with her for a few years off and on. She was an undiscovered painter, and she was old enough that she and her family were able to camp all summer in Yosemite where she remembered seeing the great photographer Ansel Adams working as a clerk in the gift store. I don't know how old she was when she found out that her stern aunt was really her mother.
I am sure to forget one but off the top of my head: East of Eden, Death Comes to the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory… I guess those are my top three. I kinda love Agatha Christie’s Poirot books for comfort. Not novels but a constant read… Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the basis of culture and Mako Fujimura’s Culture Care.
And A Month in the Country is one of my ❤️ books. I absolutely ADORE that book.
Oh, my comfort books are Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn mysteries. I just love them --- and love Troy Alleyn (the detective's wife, who is a painter) no end as a character. I love the novels where she features, because there's always a lot about her painting, as in her actually making art and how she does it, how she thinks as an artist. But she's also just sensible and fun and good, and I love that she not infrequently takes center stage in these novels.
Marsh was an actress/producer as well as a painter, so her mysteries around theater troupes and actors are also good --- though I really thought her last completed novel, Light Thickens, would have been better if it hadn't had to be a murder mystery. It would have been an interesting straight novel about the theater otherwise.
I love Bleak House-- ever since I read it for Honors English in high school. We recently did Great Expectations as a family read aloud and the kids liked it surprisingly well.
I'm not a huge re-reader of novels and the ones I do re-read tend to be genre fiction and comfort reads. The Lord of the Rings is perennial. And the Chronicles of Narnia. And Anne of Green Gables. Jane Austen as well. I just finished reading all the Austen novels with my 16 year old, who loved every one. It was an especial treat to share them with her.
In the past couple of years I've read Piranesi several times. It hits a sweet spot for meditative and cozy with just enough frisson of adventure and danger to keep my on my toes. Also The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.
I also love Lewis' space trilogy which is the best science fiction I ever read, because for Lewis space isn't empty, but is populated with spiritual beings of great power.
I'd love to ask the group what books of poetry, if any, do you read annually or every two or three years?
I read Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmare every year in late Autumn. I pick through Frost, Dickinson, and Robert Lowell semi-regularly. I return to Robert Lax's Circus Days & Nights every other year or so.
Janet Lewis' Selected, Louise Bogan's Blue Estuaries. I dip into Hardy's Collected Poems now and again, but I decided to read it cover to cover a year or so ago, and am still part of the way through.
I have a pocket Auden that travels with me. I had a pocket Hopkins that I gave away and need to replace. I also read Jane Kenyon on the regular. Richard Wilbur and Anna Akhmatova as well!
I have a pocket Auden that travels with me. I had a pocket Hopkins that I gave away and need to replace. I also read Jane Kenyon on the regular. Richard Wilbur and Anna Akhmatova as well!
This makes me realize I don't usually read or reread books of poetry. I only read individual poems, and I don't reread them systematically. I love Hopkins above all others, and I keep discovering new favorite poems of his. I was already a lover of his poetry but was introduced to his scruple-ridden and otherwise tortured life by attending a talk by his biographer and also-poet Paul Mariani. I abashedly have to admit I like e.e. cummings. Robert Herrick and John Donne became favorites when I was working on an M.A. in English. I love most of all poems in which the writers wrestle with God or praise Him. Batter My Heart Three-Personed God, Glory Be to God for Dappled Things, I thank thee God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, . . .
T.S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney I read regularly. Frost as well. And selections of Hopkins. I tend to return more to individual poems rather than to books of poetry, though.
A decade ago Yeats and Eliot would've been on my list. I still enjoy them, but I read more Auden these days. I should spend more time with Hopkins. I'll definitely need to return to Merwin.
Oh, 50-100 pages each of the collected poems of Stevens, Auden, Nemerov, Dickinson, and Akhmatova. Most of Chaucer every three or four years, Petrarch a little less often.
The one book that comes to mind, though it's not the only book I pick up regularly by any means, is kind of an eccentric choice: Gillian Allnutt's Nantucket and the Angel. I find myself returning, too, to Ruth Pitter's Collected and Janet Loxley Lewis's Selected, though I haven't had this last one long enough to know how often I'll return to it. Again, these are maybe eccentric choices, but they are poems I love.
I used to read only one thing at a time, start to finish, but both grief and parenting have made that hard, so I am currently allowing myself the freedom to “surf” through many books at a time. So I’m currently reading Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” “Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry” by Jacques Maritain, Scott Cairns’s collection “Slow Pilgrim,” “Ponds” by J.C. Scharl, and “The Sum of Trifles” by Julia Ridley Scott (this last towards an upcoming essay in the summer issue of Fare Forward).
For my book club I'm starting Paradise Lost, which to my shame I've never read, not even in college. Writing? I'm on my second draft of a screenplay which I hope will become a smash hit Peak TV series. I'm also editing a documentary about the Ramona phenomenon, which is a largely forgotten part of southern CA history but which lives in the hearts of local Natives.
Wonderful, Pern. Lorena and I read Paradise Lost aloud to each other on a cross-country drive in our twenties, and one of the things that's stuck with me is how easily it reads aloud—how simple to follow.
When I read Paradise Lost as an undergrad I read it aloud in the dorm lounge. It's much better read aloud than read quietly to oneself.
Have you listened to Anton Lesser's recordings of Paradise Lost on Naxos? The last and greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies!
I just reread Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, my favorite book before I encountered Tolkien in my teens. It's still really good, though it doesn't hold quite the interest for me (now in my 30s) it once did. A couple months ago I finished The Peach Blossom Fan and Bashō's The Narrow Road to the North and Other Sketches, both the peak of their respective genres. I'm also following a couple Substacks working their way serially through Les Miserables and Dracula--neither of which I've read in years--and have been dipping into Proust in the evenings.
In poetry, I recently picked up Henry Weinfield's volume of Ronsard translations, The Labyrinth of Love, and was deeply impressed, as I was with Red Pine's translations in Poems of the Masters.
I have exams coming up, so at the moment, everything I am reading is Scripture-related, but once I am done with those, I will get back to Hardy's Collected Poems, which I am 7/10ths of the way through, Dana Gioia's Pity the Beautiful which I am half way through, and begin Edgar Bowers' For Louis Pasteur.
Thanks for your comment. But you're missing a critical noun. Your "copy of [what?]"???
I've been reading Ada Limon's The Carrying, which Zina lent to me. I really enjoy it as a collection.
Also I've been reading the Irish bilingual poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa. I especially like Lies, which is a group of poems originally in Irish with the author's English translations facing. My Irish isn't good enough to really grapple with the Irish, but I'm fascinated by the fact that she does her own translations. I also really enjoyed Clasp and To Star the Dark.
And Malcolm Guite's meditations on the Psalms, David's Crown.
Recently I've also been reading A.E. Stallings and Ted Kooser and Jane Hirshfield.
Am working my way, gradually through Byron, a life in ten letters. Know bits and pieces of his life, and some of his work, but to see letters he wrote to friends, at least so far, with the history behind them, adds a touch that is very nice indeed.
Thank you!
I would only add that some poems are so badly taught that we blame them and not the teacher!
I had one early teacher who made me dislike Frost. How stupid was that! Luckily, I quickly discovered my mistake.
This is one reason why your column is so important. It makes us reread and reconsider poems .
I hadn't --- to my shame --- really thought about Archibald Macleish for years, until I picked up an essay Mark Strand had written, as an introduction to the book he did with Eavan Boland on form, about "You, Andrew Marvell." The thrust of that essay really is just the spell that that poem exerted on him as a young reader, and the thrill of the closing line, "The shadow of the night comes on . . . ," making him feel the end of things, even in the present-moment-ness of boyhood. I went back and read the poem and thought, "Yes, you know, this is marvelous and enchanting, and why did I not know it before now?"
First of all, a great hurrah to you and Sally Thomas for reclaiming poetry for the intelligent common reader.
Second, a small disagreement about Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica." The poem was used during my youth as an aesthetics lesson for the feeble minded. "See, students, a modern poem doesn't have to mean anything. I just exists!" It took me years to realize what a suave and clever poems it actually was. One could say "Ars Poetica" keeps repeating the same message--pure Jacques Maritain--that poetry communicates differently from workaday prose. But 98 years later, this message still hasn't sunk into literary critics.
MacLeish's poem is not free verse. It unfolds as unmetered lines rhymed in couplets. (I find the rhyming ingenious.) That is what French would call "vers libre," a term which is usually mistranslated into English as "free verse." In French and Italian poetry, what is "free" is only the line length. The rhymes are mandatory.
The young T. S. Eliot became fascinated with the vers libre tradition. That is probably where MacLeish got the idea of using the form.
You shame me, Dana, into admitting that I hadn't really considered the MacLeish poem as more than a placeholder — a marker of one of the first literary rebellions of my youth, when I was taught the poem as a declaration against meaning, a judgment that poetry which makes any claim must be bad poetry. And I remember thinking, in my adolescent way, "What bullshit." My suspicion of grand claims about art may date from that moment at age 15 or 16. And my reaction has kept me from ever going back to the poem in any open-minded re-reading.
I second your "hurrah"! I'm delighted to read this Substack, which I keep thinking is a step up from and in a sense steps in for The Writer's Almanac, which is now in reruns. I read both, along with your series about various poets, rather belatedly trying to enrich my understanding of this literary form I've pretty much neglected during my lifetime immersion in fiction and long-form non-fiction of various kinds. Glad to see your clarification of what free verse means.
My reading is desultory as always. I first heard that word pronounced in a BBC dramatization of Jude the Obscure back in the '70s, by an Oxford don dismissing Jude's claim to learning: "your...desultory...reading." I can still hear it (or think I can), and it kind of stings.
I read Bleak House and Dombey and Son this year and was going to start a big Dickens project, reading the roughly 50% of the novels that I haven't already. But soon I got off on other tracks. Currently reading Mark Helprin's Soldier of the Great War, which was highly recommended by a friend, but having trouble getting into it. Picking at the collection of Helen Pinkerton's poetry recently issued by Wise Blood. Picking at Sally & Micah Mattix's anthology of Christian poetry since 1940, and finding some real gems from people whose names I don't recall ever hearing before.
Writing: mainly folly, I'm afraid. A long poem with the working title of The Miracles. By long I mean 20-21st century long, not classical long. Pretty sure I'm not good enough to make it work but determined to press on. Shorter poems that often have at least one good line. And still trying, with diminishing hope, to peddle a book I've written and rewritten several times, part memoir and part cultural history/analysis of...I'm embarrassed to say it...the Sixties. Of course the world needs another book on that topic.
I have the same problem, having written many short memoir pieces and slightly fictionalized short stories of my coming of age in the 1960s, as you say "part memoir and part cultural history/analysis." I've been told "you've had a hellofa life" and that I should write my autobiography by a well-known writer who I trust and admire, but I have no idea where I would publish such a work. I fear my life story is too raunchy for Christian publishers and too Catholic for mainstream publishers. I believe that it could stand on its own as an interesting well-told story, but I think publishers pigeonhole works in genres, and it is too genre-bending.
After this comment, I posted a four part memoir about a man who captivated me when I was 18. The morning after I posted it, I woke up to find that eleven people in a row had cancelled their subscriptions to my Substack!
I sympathize but can't offer any encouragement. I think it's very difficult for an unknown and contact-less writer even to get a reading, much less acceptance, from a mainstream publisher. Unless that "well-known writer" could get you in the door somewhere? And there certainly aren't many Catholic publishers who would be interested in such a book.
There are small houses like Sophia. Matt Levering started a thing called Emmaus House publishing
Yeah, I've hit most of them. :-/ Most that seemed remotely compatible, anyway. My book isn't a good fit for a Catholic publisher emphasizing devotional, apologetic, theological, and similar works.
Some things I like are not widely liked But I do think there is a common taste for 60s and 70s stories. The recent documentary about Paul Simon in two parts on TV was very widely reviewed. There was a movie, which was partly about the early Jesus movement, Which I watched. It was more early 70s and 60s but still I think it shows the interest is there.
I admit though I don’t know how to help on getting your book published. I don’t think people want to read about some guys recollections of the 60s. I mean, I would read it because I think you’re a good writer but I don’t quite know what the market is for that.
I do admire anyone who could write a long poem. Even 30 lines. I can’t imagine doing that.
I once commissioned Sally Thomas to write on the serious and maybe originating strain of hippiedom in the Jesus Movement — the eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse micro-bus. And how maybe much of the modern style of Bible-church evangelicalism comes from it. The 1960s just won't die (even if much of it didn't happen till the 1970s).
I'd like to read that! The varieties of American religious experience is a topic in which I'm greatly interested. I'm closely reading Rev. Robert Schuller's autobiography right now. In the 80s, after dropping out for years, when I was working on a Ph.D. in American Studies (forever incomplete), I was intrigued by a book that I can't find any reference to now, titled something like, The American Religion of Health, Wealth, and Personal Power. I was also attending a Jesus People Church in Minneapolis, a charismatic evangelical spin off from the "name it and claim it" movement. So I was in the middle of the milieu. To me the 60s happened over one summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Brandeis. As a member of the freshman class of 1963, I attended orientation in a dress, nylons, high heels, and I fit right in. Girls were still trying to save themselves for marriage, and dorms were segregated. The next year the freshman class of 1965, a group of freethinking students raised in kibbutzes in Israel entered and the dress code not to mention the moral code was shattered. The change in mores and manners was allowable because of the sexual revolution that was well underway by then. So I think a lot of it did happen in the 1960s.
Indeed it did! I witnessed that same shift, just a couple of years later. It was the deep South so a bit behind. :-)
I never saw any of those folk at the time but that doesn't mean they weren't there.
I really knew them through Young Life, which in the late 1970s in Memphis was still pretty hippy-Christian. And then in the early 80s in Nashville, when I was in college, there was Belmont Church, which had begun as Church of Christ and I guess still technically kind of was, but was charismatic and definitely used musical instruments. It was the locus of the early contemporary Christian music thing in Nashville, and again was still kind of hippie and Jesus-Movement-y. I went to church there for several years, at least off and on, and was in Young Life, and if as many people weren't still living in communes called Maranatha House by 1983, there were a lot of people who *had* done that.
So my whole experience is later, but pretty vivid. I still kind of miss the granola-Christian days . . .
All that is totally unknown to me. By the early '70s I was completely out of any kind of "movement." And when. later in that decade, I did get to Christianity it was definitely not evangelical.
My frustration is that the book is really not meant to be "a recollection of the '60s." Or not only that. I wouldn't have bothered to write it if that were the case. I just don't think there has been much real understanding of what actually happened there. But I could only write it as a personal testimony. Not erudite enough for any other approach. It's subtitled "A Testimony." I hesitate to use this comparison, but I think of it as an attempt to do for the cultural revolution something like what Whittaker Chambers did for the communism of the '30s. Not that I think it's that good, but that's the sort of thing it's meant to be.
I appreciate your saying that you think I'm a good writer.
Light on Dark Water was beautifully written.
Thank you! I can't tell you how good it is to hear that right now.
Your opening observation, about many generalizations on poetry being only about as true as their opposites, reminded of a book I just finished reading: Novelist Jane Smiley's rather massive "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel." It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of the novel, followed by mini-essays on 100 (really 101) novels that she thinks illustrate various ways in which a novel may succeed or fail in living up to the genre's promise. One of her claims is that the novel by its nature tends to be "liberal," which is not defined but seems to mean that it focuses on the individual's struggles with his or her social surroundings. But she identifies some novels as "conservative," as they seem to portray the person's problems as arising from human nature and so not subject to a solution involving a change in social arrangements. She also implies that moral principles must be treated as flexible or secondary in a good novel, as they will be shown not to be completely relevant to the individual's specific circumstances. I can't help thinking that the implied definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" are rather arbitrary, and that some great novels (not only those by committed Christians) treat moral principles as very important indeed. I'm even tempted to think that all broad generalizations about literary art are untrue, except for that statement.
Would you say overall that this is a helpful book about fiction, or no? I like a good bit of Jane Smiley's fiction --- her novellas and her short stories more than her longer novels (though my much-younger self did really like The Greenlanders when I read it decades ago). Novellas like The Age of Grief and Good Will have held up for me in ways that I suspect A Thousand Acres, for example, would not. So I'd be inclined to be interested in what she says about fiction, but I'm not sure that even she believes, in practice, what she seems to say she believes when she makes these generalizations. Her own best fiction seems very much to believe that people's problems arise from human nature, especially the human capacity for self-delusion (her novella Good Will is a case in point).
I did find the book helpful in a number of ways. For example, she makes a case that some novelists now seldom read -- Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, Sir Walter Scott (!), Tobias Smollett -- deserve higher regard. The little mini-essays highlight some works of fiction that I had not heard of before. At the same time she does have her biases. She outlines a broad arc in which, for centuries, a major theme for the novel was "what to do with women?", giving way only recently to letting women say what they want, another generalization that I think may be an overstatement. She doesn't seem to have much use for novelists to whom religion is important -- O'Connor, Percy, Manzoni, etc. She gives very mixed reviews to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, seeming to prefer Gogol and Turgenev. As a personal example of the difficulties of writing and rewriting a draft novel, she describes her own travails trying to put her novel "Good Faith" into shape (as opposed to the sheer joy she had writing "Horse Heaven," partly because she loves horses), and I found that interesting. Worth reading? I think so. My new Bible for judging fiction? Not really.
Oh, this is helpul. The biases I would expect, of course, and the dismissal of novelists who take religion seriously. Her Greenlanders is actually sort of "Kristin Lavransdatter if no divinity shaped our ends rough-hew them how we will." But it does sound interesting.
I went on a Wilkie Collins binge a couple of years ago and found him great fun --- his Poor Miss Finch is both unintentionally and intentionally hilarious. I'd read The Moonstone years ago, but nothing else, so it was interesting to plow through a number of his novels before finally bogging down in No-Name. Of course, you read a lot of Wilkie Collins, and then you turn to Dickens, and you --- that is, I --- think, "Oh, right. I remember now why Dickens is The Man." But I'm not sorry I spent all that time reading Collins.
Smiley likes Dickens and sees him as "liberal," because of his social consciousness. I thought it unusual that the novel of his that she reviews is "Our Mutual Friend."
Huh, that is interesting, though that designation for Dickens seems really reductive (which I know is stating the obvious!). Dickens seems very very very interested, to the point of obsession, in human nature, with all its oddities.
One of my favorite minor Dickens characters, actually, is Mrs. Gamp, the midwife/deathbed nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, whose entire character seems to have evolved from her trick of saying "dispoged" for "disposed." My pet theory is that once she had said that, Dickens went on giving her things to say because she was so entertaining, and out of this she wove a whole fictional friend, Mrs. Harris, and a whole reality around Mrs. Harris . . .
Martin Chuzzlewit is not one of the great novels, but the development of this single minor character feels like a window into what really drove Charles Dickens as a fiction writer, and it wasn't the outrage of the penal system for debtors (though he wasn't not outraged by that).
Agreed. Could any social progress get Miss Flite in Bleak House to stop giving her birds interesting names? "Two more, I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!"
Years ago I ran across a somewhat crazed progressive political rant from Jane Smiley. It caused me to write her off as a novelist. Probably unfair, but I don't feel bad about it--there's too much other good work that I haven't read.
I'm just over her frantically adding titles to my book list. What a delightful thread.
I have taken a deep dive lately into Wendell Berry's works, especially his Sabbath Poems which has given me a new love of the natural world.
I am amazed at how much faith and nature intertwine, and that's been filling up my writing thoughts lately.
To leap in with a cliche, have you read much Hopkins? Faith and nature intertwined brings him to mind.
I haven't. I am a forever student, which is why I love threads like this. I am adding him to my list. I might pick him up next when I finish Berry! Thanks for bringing him to my attention
In poetry, Tibullus' first book of elegies, and Liu Zongyuan; in prose, the usual mix of SF, mysteries, and history; in my field, starting a handbook on information structure and rereading a Cambridge blue book.
There's a comment thread about which books of poetry we reread periodically, but what about novels? What are your regular rereads?
Mine (and my lists are always full of eccentric choices):
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness
Barbara Pym, Excellent Women and An Unsuitable Attachment
Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices
Any number of Alice Thomas Ellis novels, but probably #1 is The Other Side of the Fire
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (though I just spent the last year rereading a LOT of Dickens, on a major binge --- about the only one I don't think I reread is Great Expectations, so I should probably do that)
My regular reread list includes classic novels like War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The Lord of the Rings, but also some oddities: Bosco's Malicroix (not a perfect novel, perhaps, but it suits my tastes wonderfully), Chiladze's A Man Was Going Down the Road, Kawabata's Snow Country, Krasznahorkai's Sátántángo, Vodolazkin's Laurus.... Sebald's Austerlitz may end up on this list, but I've only read it once so far.
I haven't reread (or read) a novel in ages, though I began Diary of a Country Priest with the intention of reading it over Easter (Reader, he put it aside for yet another history of Ancient Israel). I would love to reread Ellison's Invisible Man.
Great Expec is really good. It’s extremely dark, much darker irony, then you might even expect from Dickens
I love it -- it's dark, but also darkly funny. Being "brought up by hand" . . .
Only a few novels have drawn me into multiple readings. I went on a Graham Greene binge several years while back when recuperating from foot surgery. Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana always delights me. I'd like to reread some of Evelyn Waugh's books. I reread The Loved One a few years ago with pleasure. I'd also like to read Dicken's Bleak House again, which I discovered only twenty years ago when I was staying in a Benedictine abbey at Still River MA and came in late one evening to find the monks watching the BBC series made from the book. I adore Dickens but I have no desire to read his novels I read in my youth, such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I went on a Alice Thomas Ellis binge for a while, I adore her too, but I never thought to re-read any of her work. I don't read fiction any more, usually, and most of my reading is online (from the Internet archive), but I recently read The Good Death of Kate Montclair, from a book that was sent by me to the author. Because of a Well Read Moms group, I have been reading and rereading great books, such as The Practice of the Presence of God and A Grief Observed (nonfiction), Kristin Lavransdatter, Brideshead Revisited, Death Comes to the Archbishop, and more. I was delighted to find this group of women where we talk about important things such as literature, faith, and family. The only other book clubs I'd heard of were getting together to read books like Bridges of Madison County, and I kid you not Fifty Shades of Grey. Eek!
You know, the Graham Greene novel that I return to is Travels With My Aunt, which is weird and I guess not supposed to be unironically charming, but kind of is anyway. Otherwise, I reread his short stories, particularly the collection May We Borrow Your Husband.
I've read Travels With My Aunt a few times. I'll have to find May We Borrow Your Husband. I missed that. BTW, I met a woman when I moved to the San Francisco area for the first time whose life story is similar to that of the main character in Travels With My Aunt. She was raised by her father and his sister. She was in her sixties in the sixties when I met her when she was teaching pottery classes in the city, where she grew up. She was quite interesting, and I hung out with her for a few years off and on. She was an undiscovered painter, and she was old enough that she and her family were able to camp all summer in Yosemite where she remembered seeing the great photographer Ansel Adams working as a clerk in the gift store. I don't know how old she was when she found out that her stern aunt was really her mother.
I am sure to forget one but off the top of my head: East of Eden, Death Comes to the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory… I guess those are my top three. I kinda love Agatha Christie’s Poirot books for comfort. Not novels but a constant read… Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the basis of culture and Mako Fujimura’s Culture Care.
And A Month in the Country is one of my ❤️ books. I absolutely ADORE that book.
Oh, my comfort books are Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn mysteries. I just love them --- and love Troy Alleyn (the detective's wife, who is a painter) no end as a character. I love the novels where she features, because there's always a lot about her painting, as in her actually making art and how she does it, how she thinks as an artist. But she's also just sensible and fun and good, and I love that she not infrequently takes center stage in these novels.
Marsh was an actress/producer as well as a painter, so her mysteries around theater troupes and actors are also good --- though I really thought her last completed novel, Light Thickens, would have been better if it hadn't had to be a murder mystery. It would have been an interesting straight novel about the theater otherwise.
My daughter and I have had a lot of conversations about why exactly police procedure is so consoling to us . . .
I love Bleak House-- ever since I read it for Honors English in high school. We recently did Great Expectations as a family read aloud and the kids liked it surprisingly well.
I'm not a huge re-reader of novels and the ones I do re-read tend to be genre fiction and comfort reads. The Lord of the Rings is perennial. And the Chronicles of Narnia. And Anne of Green Gables. Jane Austen as well. I just finished reading all the Austen novels with my 16 year old, who loved every one. It was an especial treat to share them with her.
In the past couple of years I've read Piranesi several times. It hits a sweet spot for meditative and cozy with just enough frisson of adventure and danger to keep my on my toes. Also The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.
I also love Lewis' space trilogy which is the best science fiction I ever read, because for Lewis space isn't empty, but is populated with spiritual beings of great power.
Oh In This House of Brede and Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy are frequent re-reads for me too.
Oh, yeah, I've reread Brede a number of times. Should have put that on the list.
currently reading the OT alongside the Koran and reflecting rather poignantly on how much they have in common
I'd love to ask the group what books of poetry, if any, do you read annually or every two or three years?
I read Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmare every year in late Autumn. I pick through Frost, Dickinson, and Robert Lowell semi-regularly. I return to Robert Lax's Circus Days & Nights every other year or so.
Janet Lewis' Selected, Louise Bogan's Blue Estuaries. I dip into Hardy's Collected Poems now and again, but I decided to read it cover to cover a year or so ago, and am still part of the way through.
I have a pocket Auden that travels with me. I had a pocket Hopkins that I gave away and need to replace. I also read Jane Kenyon on the regular. Richard Wilbur and Anna Akhmatova as well!
I have a pocket Auden that travels with me. I had a pocket Hopkins that I gave away and need to replace. I also read Jane Kenyon on the regular. Richard Wilbur and Anna Akhmatova as well!
This makes me realize I don't usually read or reread books of poetry. I only read individual poems, and I don't reread them systematically. I love Hopkins above all others, and I keep discovering new favorite poems of his. I was already a lover of his poetry but was introduced to his scruple-ridden and otherwise tortured life by attending a talk by his biographer and also-poet Paul Mariani. I abashedly have to admit I like e.e. cummings. Robert Herrick and John Donne became favorites when I was working on an M.A. in English. I love most of all poems in which the writers wrestle with God or praise Him. Batter My Heart Three-Personed God, Glory Be to God for Dappled Things, I thank thee God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, . . .
I too am a big fan of E. E. Cummings. He and Robert Frost have been with me my whole life.
T.S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney I read regularly. Frost as well. And selections of Hopkins. I tend to return more to individual poems rather than to books of poetry, though.
Not annually or even bi-annually, but Yeats, Eliot, Hopkins, and the W.S. Merwin books of the mid '60s through early '70s.
A decade ago Yeats and Eliot would've been on my list. I still enjoy them, but I read more Auden these days. I should spend more time with Hopkins. I'll definitely need to return to Merwin.
Oh, 50-100 pages each of the collected poems of Stevens, Auden, Nemerov, Dickinson, and Akhmatova. Most of Chaucer every three or four years, Petrarch a little less often.
I can't go too long without returning to Chaucer as well.
The one book that comes to mind, though it's not the only book I pick up regularly by any means, is kind of an eccentric choice: Gillian Allnutt's Nantucket and the Angel. I find myself returning, too, to Ruth Pitter's Collected and Janet Loxley Lewis's Selected, though I haven't had this last one long enough to know how often I'll return to it. Again, these are maybe eccentric choices, but they are poems I love.