The Last Books I Bought Xmas Gift Card Edition

As I'm sure applies to many booksellers, I always get gift certificates to Porter Square Books as Xmas presents and this year was no different. Ergo, welcome to another exciting installment of my semi-frequent blog series about books I have bought. (Rather than grabbed the galleys of, begged for comp copies for, or only gotten out of the library.)

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

A debut collection of poetry won the National Book Award, you say? A collection anchored by a long narrative poem? Well, then sign me the fuck up. I got this one out of library and halfway through said long narrative poem, the titular "Voyage of the Sable Venus" I knew I had to own it, because the poem is amazing (more on that later) but also because I want to live in a world where debut collections of poetry in hardcover are bought in meaningful numbers (more on that later as well) and one of the ways I can contribute to that world is buying debut collections of poetry in hardcover.

On to "Voyage of the Sable Venus" itself. As described in an author's note that's pretty remarkable in its own right, the poem was composed using only the titles and descriptions of works of art and other museum pieces in which "black female figure is present." The explanation of her formula, in about a page, grapples with the nature of art, identity, history, erasure, appropriation, the white gaze, the white museum gaze, and the nature of poetry to transform descriptive, critical, faux-critical, and accidentally-critical prose into an entirely different and powerful from of expression.

Blue Laws by Kevin Young

I cannot describe to you, even with my penchant for vulgarity, how much I hate contemporary short-line, short-stanza poetry. Few things make me want to extricate my eyeballs with a dull spork to stab at the searing pain in my thinking brain, than a poem that is clearly nothing more than a boring sentence about a bird you saw driving to work Cuisinarted into something that looks like a poem if you don't think about it for a goddamn second. Which is not to say that I think long-line and long-stanza poetry is inherently better—there is plenty of terrible poetry in every form to go around--but that, in my reading experience, longer forms attract a little less laziness than the “Oh, the white space is my way of communing with the silences of the universe,” “my work seeks to elevate the spirituality of the mundane through verse,” “Well, Bukowski did it and so did Emily Dickinson,” bullshit Like-A-Poems so prevalent in so much contemporary poetry.

Except for Kevin Young. He writes mostly in short-line, short-stanza poems and he's a fucking genius. His short lines sing. His white space vibrates. He dashes like Dickinson. He goes long when he needs to. I want to live in a world where people buy their favorite poets' books in hardcover and so when I can, I buy my favorite poets' books in hardcover.

The Road Beneath My Feet by Frank Turner

Frank Turner is my Bruce Springsteen. (Don't get me wrong, Bruce Springsteen is also my Bruce Springsteen, but, well, you know what I mean.) His political consciousness, his sense of irony and humor, his exuberant atheism. I got to meet him very briefly when I bought a t-shirt from him after his opening set for the Dropkick Murphys and I told him that it felt like he crawled inside my brain and wrote songs about what he found there. And his live shows are singalong revivals. I follow him on social media so I've known this book existed and have been waiting for it to be available in the states (he's much bigger in the UK) for ages.

In related news:

Dear Overlook,

Frank Turner plays in Boston all the time. His shows always sell-out, often months in advance, and he often adds shows. It's just leaving sales on the table if you don't piggy back a signing/reading/event at a local independent bookstore the next time he's in town. And I'd give him one hell of an introduction.

Sincerely Yours,

Josh

A few other notable purchases not previously discussed that I am just now noticing on my desk: The Mirror Empire, Rails Under My Back, and The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Nope. The gift card did not last very long indeed, did it, Precious. Not very long  indeed.

The Last Book I Bought: Grave of Light Edition

It might sound odd to say, but I buy books much less frequently than I would prefer. A combination of limited money, even more limited space in my apartment, and great relationships with a bunch of fantastic publishers who just give me books, means that, even with my generous staff discount from Porter Square Books, I rarely buy books for myself. Which tells me there is often something distinctive or important about a book that compels me to actually spend money and shelf space to own it. Something distinctive and important enough that I think it's worth an informal series on my blog, one that provides another avenue or structure for talking about books that I think you should read, and one that riffs on The Rumpus's great also somewhat informal Last Book I Loved Series.

So the inaugural Last Book I Bought post is Grave of Light by Alice Notley.

I love poetry. I read it, I write it, I review it, I've even blogged about my love of poetry, but there are some major gaps in my awareness and understanding. Perhaps the most glaring one is in American poetry from about the end of the Beats until about Kevin Young, later James Tate, later Merwin, Mary Reufle, and more contemporary poets like Patricia Lockwood and Brian Turner. Basically it is a gap from what is usually taught in schools up until I began reviewing poetry about ten years ago. A lot of poetry happened in that time and a lot of changes happened in the landscape of American poetry in that time.

Alice Notley is in that gap. She was one of the names I would see in collections of poetry criticism or in interviews with poets, but for some reason, the timing of her new collections or my enthusiasm for other poets, or the standard-issue chaos of existence, I never got around to trying her until I saw Grave of Light in the bookstore. I flipped through and saw big blocks of text, long poems, unique arrangements of lines on the page, a blissful absence of pointless empty white paper (don't get me started on poets who assume white space inherently communicates and create these giant fucking books that don't fit on the shelves of any human bookstore), and, at least through the course of a casual flip-through, a refreshing diversity of style, form, and technique. Notlety is, obviously, a poet struggling to express the complicated currents of human experience and is not afraid to be complicated herself to do it. So I got the book out of the library first. (Remember all that about money and space.)

I like the debate about the relative impact of Whitman and Dickinson on American poetry. To me, even if I'm hashing out the distinctions by myself, distinguishing between the two and assigning value to those distinctions, reveals much about my poetics, my political values, and my general aesthetics of literature, as does following their influence through other poets I read and respect. For all her influence, I still contend that American poets have not caught up with Dickinson's innovations in poetic grammar. (If I were focusing on our ideas of grammar, I might take a moment to argue that Dickinson's use of the dash might be the greatest consistent use of punctuation in English, but this post is about Notley.) In fact, I'd go so far as to say very few poets, perhaps especially those short-line white-space enthusiasts that so get under my skin, have even attempted her way of arranging clauses, enjambing lines, and arresting and diverting grammatical momentum.

It's important to note that grammar isn't just about punctuation, but about how the parts of sentences are arranged in relation to the idea of “making sense.” At it's heart, grammar is an agreement that facilitates efficient verbal communication. Grammar is a system of logic, a way of arranging ideas so they make sense to the people who did not originate them. Though poetry has a very different relationship to the nature of sense and logic and communication than prose, it still has grammar, it still has agreements that allow for communication. Beyond her dashes, Dickinson had a way of arranging her ideas to stress the seams of poetic grammar, almost without us noticing it. Each phrase that seems to act as a qualifier or a descriptor also complicates and obscures. There are moments where her work feels so overt and open as to lurch towards a kind of obscenity, but that overtness collapses upon closer reading.

What I found when I started reading Grave of Light was a poet grappling with Dickinson's grammar. And that made the sale.