Two Books of Poetry for Your "Ready to Buy These" List

The cover photo is from the 1960s ... the author's family.

 

It's a tough time economically in America. That's not new. Sure, a lot of people owning houses and raising children in the 1950s and 1960s felt like their American Dream had come true, and they even had retirement packages for later.

But the 1930s involved plenty of crushing poverty and despair, and the 1940s saw Americans sacrificing for global warfare. The 1970s? After the Vietnam War ended, it seemed things would get easier. Buying a house with a young family felt normal then.

Things have changed. 

For a lot of us (outside the billionaires group), spending money can be kind of scary, because it's so hard to know whether we'll "have enough" to see us through the years ahead. 

Do you keep a list -- on paper, in your phone, or in your thoughts -- of the treats you're going to indulge in?  I have a very basic wish list that includes upgrading my mattress and, when I can't push the lawnmower as well, maybe opting for a riding version. 

Fortunately, as a writer, books aren't on the optional list. They are necessities. I recharge the word fountains by savoring the really good stuff that other people put on paper.

If you get discouraged, have days when "the blues" settle in, are still recovering from some challenges of childhood or adult "big losses," books might be on your necessities list, too.  Or, of course, among the "let's have a treat today!" options.

Recently I bought new mysteries by Jane Harper (superb Australian writer) and Tana French (Irish, and because I reread her books once a year or so, they are really worth spending for), as well as Charles Todd. I did buy this year's Louise Penny Three Pines novel. And I have some things to say later this weekend about Sujata Massey's fifth mystery that features young woman lawyer Perveen Mistry (this one's 1922).

And sure, I recommend those authors, and often review crime fiction at KingdomBks.blogspot.com, one of my other blogs.

But I'm slow to purchase poetry, because I want it to always be the kind I'll be re-reading. (Did we mention economic tough times?) I want to savor it, maybe learn from it, feel grateful that the poet can pull together thoughts and feelings in ways that confirm my own, even lift me up.

Which brings me at last to the point: Get yourself a copy of AMERIGUN by Anne Marie Macari.

Never heard of her? Well, how many of those crime fiction novelists I listed have you heard of? One or two? That's not because the others aren't terrific ... it's because advertising budgets get slanted to the books that the publishers figure will make a Big Profit. Which might not be the case for this slim 67-page collection. Since it's amazing, beautiful, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking, I guess we'll have to share word of AMERIGUN with each other!

Writing forty years after her brother Edward's death by self-inflicted gunshot -- which he explains, maybe through a "medium," was an accident -- Macari faces the role of firearms among us. Yes, of course, the clever machine called a handgun (my second husband, R, a gunsmith, adored their mechanisms) can't fire its deadly round without a person's hand involved. 

But Macari allows the American gun -- AMERIGUN -- itself to take on personality. One of the poems reads:

Sometimes I see the gun entering
the room   it is smiling and has come

from a different world made
of materials I don't

understand.    When it calls you
with its steely music how

can you resist its metal grip grazing
your skin like another

hand warming yours —

Macari goes on to the sexuality of the gun (the way cigarettes have been; remember those Marlboro ads, the ranch hand leaning back provocatively against a horse, cigarette in his fingers, held low by his hips and holster or close to his lips). She touches discreetly, feather-light, on the firearm as American symbol. Spills some sorrowing statistics of children's gun deaths, lets anger flicker among her fireworks of phrases. Weaves in the losses of people who've shaped her life since her brother's death -- including other poets you may recognize. 

And at last, because she is one of our poets who values and can sing the words of life's enormous beauty, she brushes her fingers against forgiveness, that sweetener of painful memory.

Go ahead, treat yourself. The book costs less than dinner out, and will satisfy much longer. 

* * 

Oh, that second book to carry on your list and get around to buying soon? It's mine -- THRESHOLDS -- where you and I get to share and reflect the transitions of our lives. Let me know if you'd like a signed bookplate mailed to you, wherever you are, or visit northeastern Vermont and maybe we will cross paths. No firearms involved in this collection, but I promise to salute my "ex" by allowing them into a later group of poems, already gathering. 

 

Mark Doty's 2020 Book on Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Much More

 

Visions are not as far from ordinary life as we sometimes think, and artists need to live as if revelation is never finished. (Mark Doty, What Is the Grass, p. 31)

 WHAT IS THE GRASS: WALT WHITMAN IN MY LIFE has been called one of the most anticipated books of 2020. And for anyone who knows the writing of poet and memoirist Mark Doty, that's certainly the case. I caught a Zoom (virtual) interview that he provided this summer and promptly ordered a copy of the book -- and knowing the book would probably devour hours when I "ought to be working," I waited a little longer.

Then gave in. So, fair warning: Be ready to clear six to eight hours from your schedule to savor this book.

I had two reasons for particularly wanting to read this, beyond being a fan of Mark Doty's poetry. First, I'm writing a series of novels set during the prelude to the Civil War, and since that's the time Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, every scrap of detail on that time and the emotional life of a vivid speaker then can be golden. I need these.

 Second, I'm wandering in the land of memoir, trying to find the very personal balance of telling enough — because there are things that I did that, even now, look adventurous and intriguing and worth talking about — and not telling too many things that are best left unsaid. Since Doty has managed this before, most powerfully in My Alexandria but also in his poems, I wanted to learn more. (See some reviews I've written that circle around some of Doty's work, here.)

What I found is a book that walks several journeys at once: Whitman's into becoming the first "American poet" (leaving behind European fuss and feathers); America's in developing its own language; and Doty's braided experiences of both love and physicality that celebrate (eventually) his love of other men. But the book is also a langorous paddle along the river of life itself, from childhood to maturity to the contemplation of the dead.

The dead are not lost, but in circulation; they are involved in the present, in active participation. Bits of them are streaming through your hand and mine, just as language is circulating through us. Lexicon and materiality forever move onward and outward in the continuous wheeling expansion this world is. This is no mere philosophical proposition on Whitman's part, not an intellectual understanding but a felt actuality. We are alive forever in the endless circulation of matter. Nothing luckier, stranger, or more beautiful could ever happen. There is no better place.

Doty probes Whitman's own coming of age in the 1840s, in an era when the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" weren't yet available. He touches on the warmth and affection that was customary among young adults of the time, men with men in particular. More, he fingers the period when movements and associations to better the lives of humans were exuberantly rising. For Whitman, writes Doty, "Either his character was shaped by the decade or happened to be a perfect fit; the expansive, optimistic curiosity of the times was superbly suited to his own."

For poetry lovers, Doty's explanations of how Whitman's lines, repetitions, and stanza breaks created and nurtured the energy of Leaves of Grass and especially of the poems "Song of Myself" and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" provide the detail and illumination of perhaps an entire term (or more) of a wonderful literature seminar. For those who love plot more than the words that tell it, the binding of Whitman's life and Doty's can fascinate -- because, as in his earlier books (even the ones focused on dogs), Doty writes love stories. Not soppy ones, but surprising, inventive, redemptive ones in full chest hair or leather harnesses, in risky interludes, in committed long-term discoveries. And this book, dedicated to Doty's husband Ethan, is first to last a love story, "It's a matter of magnitude, of what leads one to step into one's largest self, and to enter into experiences that inscribe themselves so deeply into us as to become benchmarks in a life, unforgettable. ... I have never loved anyone in quite the way I do Ethan. We spent a long time coming to know one another physically, in the present tense, and from our bodies all else has proceeded."

Indulge yourself with this book. It will surely inform and shape how I write my own next novel, or next poem (it already has done the latter). May it enrich your season ahead, and bring this powerful writer into the circle of the people you enjoy listening to.