Such poetry! Such hardboiling!

(photo of may swenson held by laverne harrell clark photographic collection: university of arizona poetry center)

.

Since writing this, I’ve decided this Terry Pratchett is a lesser satire compared to, say, his Moist Von Lipwig books because it ends by erasing everything. There’s no room in Discworld for movies when things close. And the presumed future of Holy Wood is left unstated. Which might be artistically justifiable but this is a novel in which his wizards play a large role so this is irrelevant.

Anyway, that’s my hot take this time!

☞

025) New & Selected Things Taking Place by May Swenson, finished April 2

This was an exciting find one time walking through Pegasus Books. And now, lo these many years later, I have finished reading these 297 pages of May Swenson poems.

Starting, I knew snippets of her work well enough to predict some sexy stuff and some playing with type on the page, but thinking that was embarrassingly reductive. It’s appropriate here, the day after we sent someone to the moon for the first time in my lifetime, to celebrate May Swenson, the great poet of NASA space missions. She is also the great describer of everyday New York, the sly master of sexual metaphor, the acute observer of plants, the undercover agent of distant Mormonism. She has no shyness to be silly, no aversion to splashing words and notwords across the page. She’s happy to carry on longer than seems necessary—but is.

I straight-up loved this book. I’m glad I spent so long on it. Reading it in bursts and trickles then setting it aside only to return for fresh pleasures months later.

I’ve marked the book with favorites and with things for class and potential epigraphs. The two main questions left for me now are 1) as I put it on a shelf, how easily accessible should this shelf be? and 2) how many years should pass before I return it to my nightstand?

gosh probably fifteen years at least

☞

026) Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett, finished April 4

This was one of the hardest times I’ve had getting through a Terry Pratchett novel. First it was my in-the-car book then it was stolen and read by a son then it moved from car to car, from book-stashing location to book-stashing location—no matter who was reading it, it tended to get lost.

So when I say it seemed liked lesser Discworld to me, who knows is that is at all true or fair. But it’s take on the movie industry seemed less intellectually rich than takes on journalism or the post office (for instance) and while funny it seemed to rely more on taking established characters and sticking them into new situations for laughs. In other words, for a series that really welcomes anyone no matter where they show up, I’m not sure this would be anyone’s best first-Discworld book.

But there are smart observations and funny bits and cleareyed satire and interesting characters and provocative observations on the nature of the world and all those sorts of things that we love about a good Pratchett novel. So maybe the issue is really losing the book over and over and taking so long to get it read. Maybe that’s the problem.

But who can say with absolute certainty what is cause and what is effect?

likely well over a year

☞

027) Loved Ones by Kevin Klein, finished April 4

Kevin and Scott Hales both had books come out from Greg Kofford at the same time. I’d known about Scott’s and preordered it, but Kevin’s came as a surprise. I figured I’d pick it up but before I got around to it, he sent me a pdf. I don’t usually finish booklength pdfs, but a collection of poems means whenever I stop, when I start, I’m starting with something new. So that worked. Plus, the collection’s a manageable size and Kevin’s poetic manner is easy to slide back into.

I was talking to someone recently about how to make poetry more appealing to a broader audience and I mentioned Loved Ones and how Kevin is reading and commenting on the poems in his newsletter—in fact, each poem in the book has an accompanying qr code which you can scan to see as much. Accessible! Anyway, the person I was speaking with noted that might be the elementary-school teacher in him.

Could be.

Anyway, his poems are lovely: easy to enter and welcoming. How about if I, right now, share a short one? Click the title if you want to see a discussion of the poem that goes from simple to studied.

Your Hair Your hair, my love, is soft and black with gleaming brown streaks and gray gobs that drip down my arm from the clot I pulled out of the bathroom sink trap with my bare hand because it’s your hair.

month and a half

☞

028) Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: an urgent paraphrase of paul’s letter to the romans by Adam S. Miller, finished April 5

I’ve owned this for a while but picked it up after reading Miller’s Original Grace.

This much shorter book is, of course, largely Paul’s words rather than Adam’s, but in a very real way this book is well read as a necessary preliminary work, preparation for Original Grace.

Funny: I bought my copy used. The first nine chapters are filled with underlining from the original owner. The final chapters, however, are filled with my own marks.

Because this is a great way to read Romans. You will find things to mark.

Perhaps the making of urgent paraphrases should be an exercise we all undertake.

seven months

☞

029) The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, finished April 9

Of what I’ve read so far, I think I like John M. Cain best although Dashielle Hammet’s Red Harvest might be my favorite but then maybe that’s recency bias talking. Anyway, now I’ve met Raymond Chandler and he’s great too. I thought the book lost its way for a while but it all came together. The ending makes me wonder if he’s a little softer than Cain or Hammet, but I don’t have enough data to be sure.

I picked up my copy, a beat-up paperback from the early ‘80s, not that long ago and didn’t take long to dive in. I think I have me an epigraph that I found on page 268 but it’s too soon to say if I’ll use it. Anyway, I had to tape the cover more than once over the last month to keep it from falling off.

I was carrying it the other day when a friend and former colleague of mine asked what I was reading as said a friend of his at Berkeley was teaching it this very moment. I wonder what the class is.

Anyway, Philip Marlowe starts the novel by making a friend, but things don’t go well for the friend. He ends up dead in a Mexican hotel room. He works his way through every element of society—hoods, cops, money—seeing what he sees and keeping his thoughts to himself without it feeling like he’s hiding anything from us the readers. He’s just not a chatty guy. But he has his moral code. He’ll never make money or slide into bigger slots but he’ll be able to live with himself. That has to count for something.

a shade over twenty days