Rowdy...robust...r.i.p. ... poet John Hollander

poet-john-hollander Well, John Hollander couldn't live forever, could he?

I thought he might. His poetry's  so rowdy and so robust that I figured, if the Grim Reaper showed up at his door, Hollander would tell him to #$%&@ off, and the Reaper would have to listen.

Alas, that didn't happen. The New York Times reported the passing of a great contemporary American poet this Saturday at the age of 83. I have little to add aside from saying that I worked on some edits to an article with him once -- he was the soul of kindness, by the way --  and sharing a poem of his that mixes the high and low as he muses on the battle of the sexes. I hope you enjoy it, my friends.

The Lady's-Maid's Song

When Adam found his rib was gone He cursed and sighed and cried and swore And looked with cold resentment on The creature God had used it for. All love's delights were quickly spent And soon his sorrows multiplied: He learned to blame his discontent On something stolen from his side.

And so in every age we find Each Jack, destroying every Joan, Divides and conquers womankind In vengeance for his missing bone. By day he spins out quaint conceits With gossip, flattery, and song, But then at night, between the sheets, He wrongs the girl to right the wrong.

Though shoulder, bosom, lip, and knee Are praised in every kind of art, Here is love's true anatomy: His rib is gone; he'll have her heart. So women bear the debt alone And live eternally distressed, For though we throw the dog his bone He wants it back with interest.

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Tolkien's household and poetic places

Knight_of_the_woeful_countenance_05424uFAMILY MATTERS: Andrew O'Hehir gives a nice overview of Tolkien's "The Fall of Arthur" in the pages of the New York Times that only stumbles at the very end. A couple of reasons why Tolkien abandoned that poem, which his son Christopher notes in the new book, involved the pressures of work and his family. Tolkien the Elder's interest also seemed to flag as his conception of Middle-earth started to grow.  All sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you've ever tried to compose a long work of fiction or nonfiction, and you have a young family, that line about Tolkien's situation might resonant as strongly for you as it did for me. I can relate to the bard. I can easily see us, side by side in the pub down the road from Merton College, throwing back what's left in our pint glasses.

"I'm stuck!" he says. "I can't get a bleedin' moment to meself  for Arthur!"

Tears pop from my eyes. I pound my fist on the bar.

"Aye John, you dinna hae to tell me!  Barkeep, two more glasses!"

Near the end of his review, O'Hehir thinks Tolkien more likely broke off his work because the alliterative, Anglo-Saxon style of the poem doesn't fit the Arthur of history: "If there was ever any historical cognate to Arthur, he was a Celtic Briton who spoke a language ancestral to modern Welsh and Cornish. To write about him in the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon verse style of later centuries ...  can only have struck this eminent philologist as an uncomfortable linguistic and historical pastiche."

Holy smokes that's fancy. Maybe it's true, but more compelling for me is the fact that in the years when he composed his Arthur fragment, Tolkien and his wife had four kidlings -- two early teens, two pre-teens. I'm sure any attempt to write about Arthur's clash with  Saxon invaders paled beside the battles taking place in the Tolkien house!

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO: A post last week on worthwhile poetry websites drew some nice responses from my friends, Jilanne Hoffmann and Michael Odom. Along with my recommendations:

Red Hen Press

Sarabande Books

Copper Canyon

they suggest a couple more that you should start patronizing:

SPD (Small Press Distribution)

Marick Press

Bookmark them and make a point of dropping in on a weekly (or more frequent) basis. You don't have to do too much, but the small gestures count for so much. They encourage the small publishers to continue on with their sacred work and, who knows? You might find yourself discovering some exciting new voices. Hope you're having an excellent week, friends.

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Reviews of Dan Brown's latest ... ugh

Il Miglior Fabbro in a pensive mood (perhaps thinking about books and book reviewers): portrait by Agnolo Bronzino

Another Dan Brown novel, another pack of smug reviews.

Here’s my confession:  I’m already sick of the reviews of Brown’s "Inferno," and the book only pubbed a day ago. Reviewers say that Brown doesn’t do anything new in his latest, but here’s the thing: neither do they.

The criticisms are predictable; the angles are all the same. "How can he write such drivel?” they say, wringing their hands. At this point, after four books, attacking Brown's prose style or story line is unimaginative and tiresome -- like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.

If they can do better than Brown, then they should give it a try. Please. That’s what’s changed for me, my friends. As I've worked with historical material and puzzles in a book of my own,  I’ve come to appreciate Brown even if I wouldn’t make the same narrative choices.

Every reviewer, in fact, should try to write a novel or a story before offering to review one. That doesn't mean that you'll become an instant cheerleader. But at least you'll have a broader perspective ... and maybe you'll avoid carpal tunnel syndrome from all that hand-wringing. Writing  is an extraordinarily humbling, powerful journey.

FOR YOUR READING (DIS)PLEASURE:

Good: New York Times (keeps perspective on the story, and the thriller genre): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/books/inferno-by-dan-brown.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Decent: The Globe and Mail (it starts off like all the rest, and then changes) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/has-dan-brown-become-gasp-a-better-writer/article11940973/ New York Daily News:  http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/dante-catholicism-fill-brown-sizzling-inferno-article-1.1343823

Eye-rollers The Standard: http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/book/review-a-chase-a-blonde-some-dimwit-culture-it-must-be-dan-browns-new-blockbuster-inferno-8615057.html Clives James in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/14/clive-james-dan-brown/2155487/

Praise (with an extreme back of the hand) The Telegraph:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10053517/Inferno-by-Dan-Brown-review.html

Completely lame: The Guardian (imitating Brown’s writing)  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/14/dan-brown-inferno-first-look

Mea culpa: I’m no innocent bystander. I was once guilty of this sort of holier-than-thou reviewing too  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-lost-symbol14-2009sep14,0,5481048.story (blech)

Angels, Neruda, Odom's poetry and more: a roundup

odom_bookComing soon: What begins Michael Odom's book of poetry "Strutting Attracting Snapping" isn't a poem... it's a picture. A sheet of grid paper with a maze written in pencil. The maze has a "Start" and a "Finish" and a lot of twists and meaningful detours in between... and it's much like the experience of reading Odom's powerful chapbook. Look for a Q & A with the author to appear here, at Call of the Siren, very soon. Young readers: How do we  improve our children's reading ability? I think of that all the time, especially as mine grow older and I realize that I can share more of my book interests with them. There's a great comments thread that you might unspool at Games4Learning and gain some helpful ideas to try at home.

Harper Lee: Won't she live forever? It's been impossible to think of the real Scout as susceptible to time and declining health, but then I learned about her  unfortunate situation with her agent and the copyright of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Rather than brood on that, though, I have a question for Ms. Lee: Why won't you say something about your novel's creation before it's too late? If it's a one-off and you never found the right material to make another, then why not say so? (Plenty of "one and done" authors would find deep consolation in what she has to say.)  On the other hand, if Truman Capote helped her to write it,  why not admit it and give credit where it's due? It might be a sore spot, especially for so many years' recognition as the book's sole author, but if someone's going to have a co-author, they could do far worse than Capote, don't you think?

snake12Holy angels, Batman: The Red Serpent takes a pithy, sardonic look at angels as the first comic book superheroes in a new post. What line did I especially like? This one, on something that angels and superheroes have in common: "Items of clothing that closely resemble lingerie or underwear." Check it out. Definitely worth your time.

Pablo NerudaDeathproof: Pablo Neruda was unearthed to decide whether or not he died from a lethal injection given by Augusto Pinochet's regime. So far, the early tests reveal that he had advanced cancer. If anyone deserves to be called a superhero besides an angel -- see item above  -- it's Neruda. He was a superhero for Chile. Whatever the results of the exhumation -- whether death by cancer or poison -- the same's not true of his poetry.  His poetry's immortal. Bullet-proof. That's what Ilan Stavans points out in a lovely item in the New York Times, and that's what Neruda also says, about poetry's power even in the darkest moments, in "A Song of Despair":

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

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