The Borrower by Rebecca MakkaiMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
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Review: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. 2, 1937-1975
The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. 2, 1937-1975 by Charles ReznikoffMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Reading Reznikoff is like walking through New York on a grey day. It’s noisy, cluttered, and depressing – but every so often something breaks through and makes you happy, again, to be alive.
That’s not an idle metaphor since many of the poems here are about the day-to-day of New York, though it’s a New York of the 1950s and 1960s, for the most part. As I understand it, Reznikoff was an American version of a type I think of as Yiddish and European, one of those poets at home in cafes and coffee shops, writing and publishing work that only a handful will read – and then eating, drinking, arguing with, and celebrating that same small number of readers, most of whom wrote poetry as well.
There’s a term, Yiddishland, that I admire as a way of describing a transnational community of Jewish poets – largely interwar – who dealt with Modernism in a Yiddish language that created a space that existed more on paper than in the real world. Between Hitler and Stalin, they were almost all wiped out.
So, this is something like Yinglishland, though it’s more articulate than that term implies. It’s a man living to write poetry (poetry that few would ever likely appreciate) rather than writing to live.
I guess I am one of those of his grandchildren’s generation (though I don’t know that he had children of his own) who might most appreciate his work. And, among many poems that I dismiss as flat, there are a handful that absolutely sing.
I’ll just say quickly that I got tired of a lot of his life-in-New-York scenes. There’s historical interest, but not much more. Reznikoff writes in a largely imagistic style, giving us scenes that seem to speak for themselves, but they don’t always have the power he seems to imply.
I also don’t love all of his Jewish history poems. His reflections on the Book of Maccabees late in his life don’t really hold up. I suppose he has a theology, probably inflected by a soda-water-diluted socialism, but it doesn’t work to make these old stories come alive.
What I do love, though, is when he measures his sense of being heir to a Jewish tradition. At this best here, he rises to one of my real poetry favorites, saying more clearly than I can (and from the vantage of someone two generations before me) the challenge and compulsion of that legacy.
I found him because of this excerpt of a much-longer poem, an excerpt that appears in our Yom Kippur siddur and that I linger on every year when we come to it; from “Early History of a Writer,” 15,
I went to my grandfather's to say goodbye;
I was going away to a school out West.
As I came in,
My grandfather turned from the window at which he sat
(sick, skin yellow, eyes bleary –
but his hair still dark,
for my grandfather had hardly any grey hair in his beard or on his head –
he would sit at the window, reading a Hebrew book).
He rose with difficulty –
He had been expecting me, it seemed –
stretched out his hands and blessed me in a loud voice:
in Hebrew, of course,
and I did not know what he was saying.
When he had blessed me,
my grandfather turned aside and burst into tears.
“It is only for a little while, Grandpa,” I said
in my broken Yiddish. “I’ll be back in June.”
(By June my grandfather was dead.)
He did not answer.
Perhaps my grandfather was in tears for other reasons:
perhaps, because in spite of all the learning I had acquired in high school,
I knew not a word of the sacred text of the Torah
and was going out into the world
with none of the accumulated wisdom of my people to guide me,
with no prayers with which to talk to the God of my people,
a soul –
for it is not easy to be a Jew or, perhaps, a man –
doomed by his ignorance to stumble and blunder.
I love that one, just love it for its gentle approach to his grandfather (and to Jewish tradition) and for its straightforward prose verse. It feels like a poem that was always there, waiting for someone to find it rather than write it.
There are others here that come close to that, and I’m happy to have read this whole book to have uncovered a handful of those gems.
From “A Short History of Israel” XI,
I am the least of my house
and my house the least in Israel;
am I also among the prophets?
Or from his poem “Kaddish,” XI, when he has been reflecting on his dead mother,
I know you do not mind
(if you mind at all)
that I do not pray for you
or burn a light
on the day of your death:
we do not need these trifles
between us –
prayers and words and lights.
From “Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays,” IV, ‘Hanukkah,’
Go swiftly in your chariot, my fellow Jew,
you who are blessed with horses;
and I will follow as best I can afoot,
bringing with me perhaps a word or two.
And maybe my second favorite, one I might someday use as an epigraph, also from “By the Well of Living and Seeing,” I,
My grandfather, dead long before I was born,
died among strangers; and all the verse he wrote
was lost –
except for what
still speaks through me
as mine
Again, there’s too much hit and miss for me to want to wade through all of it again, but I’ll be back for these highlights.
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Review: The Nickel Boys
The Nickel Boys by Colson WhiteheadMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
For most of the time I read this, I liked it but I felt it didn’t quite live up to the hype. And there was so much hype that I still thought it was pretty good, just not necessarily ‘the best book of the year’ hype. And then (view spoiler)
So, put me down on the long list of big admirers of this work. I still have more Whitehead to get to, and I look forward to it all.
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Review: Moon Grammar
Moon Grammar by Matthew PortoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I can’t be too objective, about what I think of this book because I am so proud simply to be holding it. Matt was my student several years ago, and it is one of those rewarding moments as a teacher to see how much he has grown and how much he has achieved.
That said, this is a beautiful book, one that meditates carefully on a sweeping set of images and concerns.
We open with the beautiful piece “The Angel Speaks” in which an angel, one unusual for its interest in the doings of humankind, makes us a promise. Instead of blinding us with overwhelming light, it promises us that we must “get used to the light.”
That notion is just one of the themes that runs throughout this fine collection. The first poem in the third section, Endings, called “Ultimate Thule,” talks not of an angel, but of a friend who has swum out to a buoy in the water. As the last line goes, “the last I saw of you, a handful of light.”
Those two poems in dialogue offer a fast-paced overview of the arc of the collection. We move from the perspective of angels meditating on Jacob and Rachel meeting over the well and falling in love. Then Matt explores that image in three or four different poems, conjuring a moment that’s both distant in time and immediate in its intimacy.
From there, we get a series of poems that deal increasingly with archaeological experiences, whether in Ithaca or in medieval England. We are no longer quite from the vantage of Angels, but rather of humans whose experiences are just outside something we can come to know.
As such, the book has a beautiful sweep, a sense of moving from the heavenly through the historical, and finally to a sense of Matt’s personal experiences.
I also have a handful of favorite poems throughout this. Of course, I cannot help but appreciate “Our Eden.” We are told below the title that it is set Scranton, and Matt imagines his college days as Edenic. In the shadow of the perspective of the angels, that seems almost funny, but it’s not a lighthearted poem. It’s a young man looking back at a moment that seemed as if it would last forever, being in love with someone in a dumpy college apartment. In that light, graduation is a kind of departure from Eden.
As I said at the start, it’s deeply satisfying to see how far he has come even as he imagines himself still in that same dumpy apartment in the Hill neighborhood off of campus.
I also really love “From Her Diary: Venice.” Matt talks of visiting Venice with a girlfriend and, among other things, looking for the grave of Ezra Pound. He says at the end of the poem, having found the grave and moving on:
“It is sinking,/ we always hear in the news, forever sinking into the Earth,/ but from our low view on the water,/ it rose and rose until it covered the sky.”
And then, in the final poem, “Epigone: The Latecomer,” we get these concluding lines:
“some light, it’s true, makes it to us, but always/ refractory, errant, struggling to deign downward”
Beautiful stuff, stuff to make me proud and to make me think.
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Review: The Sirens of Titan
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.My rating: 4 of 5 stars
New review:
I am very much in my Vonnegut phase as I prepare for a senior seminar all about him.
I should say more accurately, that it’s all about only five of his novels – Slaughterhouse Five and the four novels that precede it. I’ve said it more carefully elsewhere (and often), but I see Vonnegut as essentially writing one novel, a novel centrally concerned with the trauma of his war-time experiences at Dresden. That is, each of these novels bleed together into what I call a ‘meta-novel.’ Or, in my more creative moments, I call it Slaughterhouses One through Five.
In any event, as I return to this from a few years away and look for evidence to support my thesis, I want to say: this is the same novel as Slaughterhouse, just not as well written and not as concentrated in its recognition that it’s dealing with trauma.
In other words, this is a novel about a man – Malachi Constant, aka Unk, aka the Space Wanderer – who’s supposed to be part of an invasion but who spends the battle sheltered from disaster underground. (view spoiler) Like Vonnegut at Dresden, he is both part of the attacking army and part of the people who are being attacked.
What’s more, just as Billy Pilgrim is ‘unstuck in time’ – by the creatures of Trafalmadore, who are central to this novel – Winston Niles Rumfoord is similarly caught up in a loop that has him experience everything in his life as if it’s part of the same moment.
In my reading of this, we see the outline of the novel that will become Slaughterhouse Five. The same questions are here – a victim doesn’t know how to tell the story of his trauma and that trauma expresses itself in part by a perpetual present, a perpetual inability to move beyond the moment of that trauma.
All of that squares with the lens of trauma theory in literary studies that I am working with, so it’s all very reassuring of my central thesis.
Maybe I won’t persuade people to read Vonnegut in the way I propose, but I do hope I can persuade at least some to keep reading his stuff. The later novels tend to bore me – worse, they disappoint me so much that they make me question how good these early novels are. Starting with this, though, and moving through the next four, I think Vonnegut accomplished something powerful, something worth preserving.
If you believe me, start here. Keep going because it gets even better – next to the others, this is cluttered and unsure of its way – but this is funny and humane in ways that only Vonnegut could be.
---------------Original review, Sept. 27, 2017--------------
I had a Vonnegut phase in high school and into my early college years, and I remain grateful to him for showing me that literature can make you think even as it makes you laugh. I loved him for four or five years, then I felt I’d outgrown him. It’s only in the last four or five years (leaving a good 25 in between) that I’ve come back to him in a more measured way.
I think the best Vonnegut really is as good as his partisans say, as good as I thought it was when I first encountered it in the Reagan years. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five, and, of course, Cat’s Cradle are all substantial works that hold up. They take elements of science fiction, combine them with a cynicism that can only be the product of an even deeper idealism, and give us some of the most memorable critiques of American life from the last 50 years.
Sirens of Titan isn’t quite up to that level. It’s Vonnegut feeling his way toward his more successful work. He senses there’s an intellectual freedom in a science fiction mode, but he gets mildly trapped in it here. The idea, for instance, of Rumfoord as a cosmic intelligence capable of seeing past and future is an intriguing spin on the idea of a god, but it also becomes a bit self-defeating. Rumfoord moves the events of Constant’s life forward, but it isn’t clear why. He seems to want to teach humanity a lesson – and Constant’s conclusion that our purpose is to love another isn’t a bad distillation, even if it sounds trite in my paraphrase. In the end, though, he himself is confused and moving on. It’s solid and intriguing, moving in some ways, but it also implies an anxiety from the still-learning Vonnegut.
Much of what is striking in the novel gets refined in later ones. We have, for instance, the rudiments of a religion that comes across more impressively in Cat’s Cradle. We also have a riff on the use of impediments to arrive at true equality; an idea he does a lot more with in “Harrison Bergeron” and that feels tacked on here. And we have disaffected rich men, unsure how to account for their great fortune, who get crystallized in Eliot Rosewater.
The one great contribution here, I think, is the Tralfamadorans. Yes, they come back in Slaughterhouse Five, but they’re here in fully realized form. It’s a brilliant idea: life forms so different from ours who direct humans toward great accomplishments that serve as trivial ‘text messages’ from across the universe. What is the Great Wall of China but, in effect, a post it note from the inter-stellar UPS driver saying he’ll be back soon with the package.
Definitely read this one. It’s not a bad place to start with Vonnegut if you know you’ll go on, and it’s a great way to echo the pleasures of the more mature novels if you’ve read them. Either way, commit to reading other Vonnegut as well. As striking as this is, it’s only a glimpse at what was to come.
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