Month: September 2019

Said and read – September 2019

Standard

“Every society has some group of people—somewhere between a minuscule amount and half the adults—that read a lot in their leisure time,” says Wendy Griswold, a sociologist at Northwestern University who studies reading. Griswold refers to this group as “the reading class,”– The Atlantic

In further news of technology really changing things, I sat down with my Kindle a few weeks ago to read Robert Coles’s The Call of Service – a school book. I made some progress and set it aside. A few days later, when the time came to write an assignment with the aid of the book, I went back to the Kindle and started reading again and wondered how and when the tone had shifted so dramatically. Suddenly, it had moved from people in the segregated south who were compelled, at their own peril, to act against segregation to… a man pondering whether he was still attracted to his flirtatious wife. I kept reading… for 30 minutes wondering when Coles was going to return to the core themes of the text. I might not have persevered as long as I did except that one of my classmates had posed a question in response to one of my papers about whether Coles gave enough attention to gender differences and women in his book. I thought maybe these passages about the attractive, flirtatious, non-compliant wife were what he was referring to.

And then, never reaching a return to the theme of service, I clicked out of the book to discover that I was somehow reading The Winds of War instead. I am not sure how that book got opened on the Kindle and the Coles book closed… but clearly I was reading the wrong book.

Once upon a time, such a mishap would not have been possible, but these are the modern times we live in and the strange form factor with which many of us do the bulk of our reading.

Clearly I’m back, writing again about my reading exploits, but in truth, I am busier than ever and don’t quite have the time to dedicate to the format I had been using in writing about reading. For now I will simply share some impressions and titles and see where it takes me.

Here’s what you missed in the last year-plus: 2019 – May, April, March, February, January. 2018 – November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January.

Thoughts on reading for September:

I knew I would begin reading a whole lot more this morning, and I did make my way through some lovely books of poetry and a few school texts. But finding the time to comb through my thoughts and observations… not quite as easy. I will take this up, hopefully, in more depth in October.

american sonnet

Standard

American Sonnet
–Billy Collins
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,
adding to the view a caption as conventional
as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.

We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are,
walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversible display:
a few square inches of where we have strayed
and a compression of what we feel.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

clouds

Standard

Clouds
–Philip Levine
1

Dawn. First light tearing
at the rough tongues of the zinnias,
at the leaves of the just born.

Today it will rain. On the road
black cars are abandoned, but the clouds
ride above, their wisdom intact.

They are predictions. They never matter.
The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs,
black arrowheads trailing their future.

2

When the night comes small fires go out.
Blood runs to the heart and finds it locked.

Morning is exhaustion, tranquilizers, gasoline,
the screaming of frozen bearings,
the failures of will, the TV talking to itself

The clouds go on eating oil, cigars,
housewives, sighing letters,
the breath of lies. In their great silent pockets
they carry off all our dead.

3

The clouds collect until there’s no sky.
A boat slips its moorings and drifts
toward the open sea, turning and turning.

The moon bends to the canal and bathes
her torn lips, and the earth goes on
giving off her angers and sighs

and who knows or cares except these
breathing the first rains,
the last rivers running over iron.

4

You cut an apple in two pieces
and ate them both. In the rain
the door knocked and you dreamed it.
On bad roads the poor walked under cardboard boxes.

The houses are angry because they’re watched.
A soldier wants to talk with God
but his mouth fills with lost tags.

The clouds have seen it all, in the dark
they pass over the graves of the forgotten
and they don’t cry or whisper.

They should be punished every morning,
they should be bitten and boiled like spoons.

Photo by Nicolas Ukrman on Unsplash

french chocolates

Standard

French Chocolates
–Ellen Bass
If you have your health, you have everything
is something that’s said to cheer you up
when you come home early and find your lover
arched over a stranger in a scarlet thong.

Or it could be you lose your job at Happy Nails
because you can’t stop smudging the stars
on those ten teeny American flags.

I don’t begrudge you your extravagant vitality.
May it blossom like a cherry tree. May the petals
of your cardiovascular excellence
and the accordion polka of your lungs
sweeten the mornings of your loneliness.

But for the ill, for you with nerves that fire
like a rusted-out burner on an old barbecue,
with bones brittle as spun sugar,
with a migraine hammering like a blacksmith

in the flaming forge of your skull,
may you be spared from friends who say,
God doesn’t give you more than you can handle
and ask what gifts being sick has brought you.

May they just keep their mouths shut
and give you French chocolates and daffodils
and maybe a small, original Matisse,
say, Open Window, Collioure, so you can look out
at the boats floating on the dappled pink water.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

de facto

Standard

De Facto
–Thomas Ligotti
In order to get things done,
it’s essential to have pain:
without it, nothing could be.
But we’re so easily fooled:
no one praises hungers,
yet everyone likes to eat.
Little pains and big pains:
they keep you living,
however much it may hurt.
And when it comes to dying,
you want your epitaph to read:
“He never knew what hit him.”

Photo by Wendy Scofield on Unsplash

telescope

Standard

Long View: Negro
Emancipation: 1865
–Langston Hughes
Sighted through the
Telescope of dreams
Looms larger,
So much larger,
So it seems,
Than truth can be.

But turn the telescope around,
Look through the larger end-
And wonder why
What was so large
Becomes so small
Again.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash