Excerpt from a Reading Journal, 2009
18th June
James has come to stay and has introduced me to Anne Carson. After reading the first few pages of Autobiography in Red I felt completely inadequate and in awe. How much imagination can a book —; the world —; contain? In this novel in verse Carson reimagines an encounter between Hercules (Herakles in the poem) and Geryon as a destructive love affair; in her replay of Stesichorus, Hercules does not kill Geryon, he breaks his heart.
Her cool voice floated Ruth Padel describes her work as sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted. He burned in the presence of his mother. I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room. It had rained suddenly at suppertime, now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes filled the room. Love does not make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other from opposite shores of the light. I particularly like her startling similes and descriptions. They are arresting. Some examples: Saturday went whitely on. …stinging sea fog hung in clots… Facts are bigger in the dark. New moon floating white as a rib at the edge of the sky. Black mantle of silence stretches between them like geothermal pressure. He saw himself in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick Wow.
Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. I like her variation in line length and the presentation of the work on the page but particularly her control of language that is fresh and startling. Another excerpt from 'Tango XII':
If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you. Carson is both readable and obscure. While exploring complex themes the reader is challenged to make connections within the collages she creates.
20th July
Yesterday I began Homer's The Odyssey. How ignorant I feel of this world and in particular of Homer's work which seems like the genesis of so much Western writing. The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to The Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon. Indeed it is the second — The Iliad being the first — extant work of Western literature. It was probably composed near the end of the eighth century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the then Greek-controlled coastal region of what is now Turkey. The poem mainly centers on the Greek hero Odysseus (or Ulysses, as he was known in Roman myths) and his long journey home following the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. In his absence, it is assumed he has died, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with a group of unruly suitors competing for Penelope's hand in marriage. The non-chronological structure appeals, as the reader is able to remain current with the action in several different theatres.
the silence through which you move She has arranged Meadowlands, full of ocean refe rences, in wave patterns: poems describing hints of reconciliation alternate with accounts of the triggering of minefields both (Odysseus and Penelope) have been planting for a decade. The knock of waves against pilings is an answer to the perpetual question, do you love me? Yes and no and yes and no. And if silence can be speech, absence contrives to be presence as well.
I see them together I feel more appreciative of Glück's writing this second time around. Her combination of Homeric storyline with domestic imagery resonates with me. Or perhaps it is a familiar tale in which I am one of the protagonists. Ouch.
It is dawn and the moon is on its back. I am tempted to reduce all the early work into a smaller series about the coast-watchers and work on the prose poems with some longer semi-autobiographical piece bridging the two. I have a supervision session soon from which I hope to discuss the limitations of my work and the overall structure of my final submission.
24th August
Christopher Reid demonstrated a model for appreciating a poem which I am beginning to utilise. He started with the title and formed a set of ideas evoked by it. Then approaching the poem line by line he would form a picture in much the same way that a photograph being developed evolves to a complete picture. If lines were working against the development he tended to suspect the quality of the writing. If the image remained indistinct he did likewise. A kind of structured deconstruction. It is difficult to apply to your own work.
Bill Manhire writes in Breaking the Line, a chapter of Doubtful Sounds, I do not believe that American poetry made the poets of my generation into American clones — ….What it did do was make diversity and possibility available, and, in so doing it freed New Zealand poetry from the single line represented by the English tradition.
25th August
Frederick Seidel'sOoga-Booga celebrates hedonism and luxury while dripping with candor. The subject of his 'Climbing Everest' poem is timeless; that of the romantic fascination that older men have for younger women. It begins:
The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger. His take on such couplings — It's almost incest when it gets to this — is as novel as it is harsh. I am not repelled by this forthrightness. And incest isn't even the half of it, only the base camp from which Climbing Everest begins its ascent to an even more perilous view. For the title is a metaphor for the sexual act the poem goes on to detail, in which an old man makes the deliriously pleasurable but nonetheless arduous and by all rights deadly trip into seductively thin, late-life sexual air. When the poet reaches that summit, he pays the price, reduced to being constantly out of breath . . . reporting to the world from an oxygen tent. The poet's mind makes its weary march to the exit music of the poem's final lines:
A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare, In an interview when asked about why he lapsed into a significant period of not writing Seidel replied, Cowardice.
'The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.' He added: 'Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you that are your subjects. It's almost as if there's a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that's it.' I admire his courage to write what is ugly but rings true.
30th August
The final entry.
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