Pitch of Poetry by Charles Bernstein

I love poetry, so I had to get the book. I started reading and although my english is really good, I couldn't quiet follow the reasoning of the author. The concepts were too strange, too far away from what I knew. But I finished the book, underlining large portions and after a day of rest I started rereading the book. And yes I am understanding more. I mark new thoughts. And I fell for the concepts about plagiarism, working on the basis of an older text, a preexisting text and taking away thoughts, words, and stealing from the source text... Charles Bernstein edited during 4 years with Bruce Andrews the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine.
The main slant is on making meaning, not taking for granted anything from vocabulary to process, program, nor subject matter. The poetry of the magazine was in stark contrast to the poetry of the time. It included critical writing by the poets of the magazine. Some names of poets I knew because I have participated in the MODPO course by Al Filreis twice, fascinated as I was by it and will follow it again... I learned that process, mood and inconsistency is more important than stylistic uniformity. The book also addresses translation and it problematic aspects. I have translated quite a lot from English to Dutch, from Dutch to English (not as much).
It is clear from the text that the civil right's movement had a deep impact. I was also happy to find a reference to George Lakoff and his theory of frames and reframing and oppositional poetry. I know language is not neutral...
If you're interested in poetry and the politics, the evolving views the do read this book.

Omheind - Fenced

Yesterday in Het Letterenhuis Omheind / Fenced, the second novel by Hilde Keteleer, published by the young publishing house 'Vrijdag', was presented. Leen van Dijck welcomed the substantial crowd and spoke, explained a bit about the task of Het letterenhuis and  spoke warmly about the new book of Hilde. Jos Gijsels spoke eloquently about her book. It was obvious they have known each other for a long time and he pointed out the importance of her book. The the desert came to us with the haunting music by AISHAM, a Palestinian-Syrian ensemble. Their music lets you feel the sand run between your fingers... and then Hilde read pieces by each of the four voices of her novel. The novel introduces us to a hybrid, checkered family with hankering for  the love of the mother and unknown fathers. Hilde is an accomplished writer and does good research so in reading the novel you glean a lot of information. She does, what I couldn't do weave reality into fiction, incorporate it as the spine of the story. Her description of what a desert can do with a person did hit home for me and the difficulties of  not so simple love between different cultures. She sparingly incorporates a few Arabic words underscoring the fact that you are 'elsewhere' in her interesting, mature novel.

Train Dreams- Denis Johnson

Seldom I do read books in translation if the original is written in a language I know. Yet when a friends passes me a book he enjoyed, I'll make the effort and Denis Johnson's book was well worth the effort. It is barely a hundred pages but carries a wealth of metaphor, insight in the hard life in Idaho as exemplified by the main character Robert Grainier. He lives through disaster and the hardships of the American West at the beginning of the twentieths century. The novel exemplifies how personal loss works in a person, how mythical thinking and magic helps and destroys. The main character who starts out as a day laborer is also a prime example of doing what needs to be done. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in 2012. The Dutch translation by Maarten Polman does read well, keeping the sober language of the original. The novel opens with Grainier participating in the killing of a Chinese man who had been accused of stealing... The harshness of those times is immediate and haunting.

Stoner by John Williams

A Dutch friend gave me the book “Stoner” by John Williams. It is a very sad book, yet at the same time wise and deep. The quest for love is a main theme throughout the book. Yet also trying and failing and then picking up the pieces or yourself and go on doing what you have to do. The main characters are all young before the first world war. To me that generation and the generation born between WWI and WWII is unfathomable. To them it seems normal to do what one must do. Life is as it is and you have to live it and accept what is handed to you. A simple life of a simple man. A quest for love, not just between parents and children, man and woman, but also a deep love for literature and teaching. You are thwarted in your endeavors, be it by meanness, jealousy, yet you do your duty, even if what you do is considered by yourself as rather mediocre. Although often the main character doesn’t do anything at all remaining passive in a stubborn way, accepting what is put in his way. The language in the Dutch translation by Edzard Krol is elegant yet not clamoring for attention. Acceptance and duty, not giving up are the painful virtues of the unlikely hero. Just living one’s live seems after closing the book to be true heroism. The book is much like an ostinato in music. Thank you for this wonderful present.

Ben Okri: Songs of Enchantment

Ben Okri's book calling out to me in a secondhand shop fulfilled all the promises it held. Years ago I had read The Famished Road, the book to which Songs of enchantment is a sequel. Azarro still lives in the mythical villages among malevolent forces and powers, corrupting the villagers. The child is still the narrator. Yet the book is not just a next installment, it does take you in a whirlwind of events and once again I lost myself in the dreams and charms, the magic of wandering lights, the sorcery, the transferences all told in an truly enchanting way. The story is driven by the supernatural events yet it does deal also with very earthy and human issues: poverty and power, politics with the party of the rich and the soul eating of the poor turning their followers into ghostlike creatures. I couldn't lay down the book. The words kept haunting me. Okri's language will do that to you with its firework of words that will cast a spell over you, will mesmerize the reader. Do read both books and don't forget to pack them for your desert island stay... The ghosts and spirits evoked may keep you company.

Ben Okri is an eminent and politically astute and aware author. Read every word and then read again between the lines.

Ben Okri, born in 1959, is a Nigerian poet and novelist one of the real strong post-modern African voices.

With the last sentences he comes full circle from the opening paragraph: : Maybe one day we will se the montains ahead of us. Maybe one day we will see the seven mountains of our mysterous destiny. Maybe one day we will see that beyond our chaos there could always be a new sunlight, and serenity.

Louisville Saturday by Margaret Long

 My mother was a war bride and sailed to the US either in 1945 or 1946 after she got married in Belgium to my father, a GI, and settled for a while with his family in Ohio. Her library is a treasure-trove of old American books. Having visited Louisville briefly I picked up Louisville Saturday, by Margaret Long. The book was first published in 1950 as a Bantam book. I enjoyed Long's writing. Her descriptions of time and place just before I came into this world was enlightening. The strength of men, the keen observations about relationships, the meaning of doing one’s share in the war effort, the babies as a result of it all in colorful detail. Basically she describes in a serious way the effects of war on American women in that time. In it’s time it may have shocked some people that finally a women’s perspective was heard: lonely women and soldiers, all looking like heroes in their military outfits, the longing, the heartbreak, the drunken quarrels between a couple with harsh beatings, prejudice, the fierce longing for independence of these women, the longing to be all they could be. Louisville now known for the Kentucky Derby has an aura of ‘class’ nowadays. Yet in the second part of the 1940’s the proximity of an army camp influenced the whole town. Male longings for some one to love and be loved by, for some one to mold so that they would be exactly as they like their women. The strong if mostly futile effort by women to do what their soul demands and the dichotomy, the chasm between the two that is the real subject. By the way, don't you just love the old covers of pocket books?

Shedding Skinns - Four Sioux Poets

My two friends from the Leonard Peltier chapter gave me ‘Shedding skins’ a poetry book by four Sioux poets. The book is introduced and edited by Adrian C. Louis. After reading their poetry a couple of times I know I am charmed by the authors different approaches whereas the subject matter of the four poets seems similar. Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Steve Pacheco, Joel Waters and Luke Warm Water deal with the realities of reservation life and of being an urban Indian. Notwithstanding the comparable experiences and circumstances on reservations of the northern Plains or the cities they roamed or lived in, they have each found their own voice. Their different life experiences, development and style, even when referring to the same external circumstances and situations lead to a common thread and attitude of ‘survival’. You’ll find classical elements of native American poetry like humor and raw honesty. The writing skills of these four poets are abundantly clear, some veer a bit more to the academic, others incorporate elements of slam poetry and performance art.

Trevinio L. Brings Plenty starts out with a fun poem about white prejudices: spirituality, beautiful hair, tell me a sacred story, connection to the earth... So the reader warned. He writes about too young alcoholic mothers, the destroyed hope of the new generation, living off of the city. He sees reality as it is, sees what it does to the people and is not judgmental when people can’t escape from their situation of poverty.

Steve Pacheco starts out with a return to the reservation of a soldier in his fatigues. Diabetes is another all too familiar subject. Discovering that it runs in the family because of the commodity cheese, and the rest of government issued fat, preservatives and salt. His description of prairie winters in the house has a wry humor. He knows the littered streets of cities with loners and bastards. Great stuff.

Joel Waters titles speak for them self: Devil’s Playground, The Outhouse, Wannabe. The poems that haunts me are Cherry and The Cigarette Burns... Beautiful in it’s horror of rape and ridicule and the aftermath of that.

Luke Warm Water is maybe the most critical of the four poets. In his poetry we hear and feel the kids in ‘the backseat of a rusted nest one-eyed Chevy’ He must have felt the pain of the loss of many people whatever the reasons: sickness, alcoholism, suicide. This all thanks to 'Welfare Bliss’

The book is an important and good read.

Juli Zeh - Hilde Keteleer

I don't know why I deserved a present by Hilde, but there it was 'Nullzeit' by German author Juli Zeh. Hilde Keteleer translated this book into Dutch and knowing her quality I am sure she did a great job. Hilde will interview Juli Zeh on May 2nd at 1 pm in the Permeke Library in Antwerp. Nullzeit is zero-time in diving. This novel is an ingenious construction with a seemingly simple enough story. A dysfunctional couple travels to a faraway island to learn how to dive as a preparation for the leading role in a movie. The novel interweaves information about diving, descriptions of the volcanic island and the inner life of the main characters. One could say that 'Water' is the main character getting the best and the worst out of the human protagonists. The psychological crime novel is craftily constructed: changing narrative positions Most of it as told by Sven (the diving instructor) yet the interspersed by diary fragments by Jola, the rich actress hoping for a role. The reason for this construction becomes clear in the lasts pages of the book. The underwater descriptions are really pleasant to read and instructive just as the description of The Dorset, a famed painstakingly restored sailboat. The relationship between Jola and Theo are bordering on the sadistic and/or masochistic.

Sven is kind of forlorn in this and his girlfriend Antje is the no-nonsense element at the end regretting her choices. There is a nice fluidity to the book, in the writing and the elaborate construction which one sees only at the very end. I am always glad to learn something new. I didn't know this German author and thank Hilde for her present.

Cruel Beauty - Mieke De Loof

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MiekeDe Loof writes historical crime novels. The first one I read was ‘Duivels offer’ in 2004 situated in the Vienna of 1913. For this she was awarded the Hercule Poirot Prize. The latest novel Cruel Beauty plays in 1914 in Vienna's learned and moneyed circles filled with paintings, psychiatry, sacred texts and young girls and a predator on the prowl. It a sequel in a series which eventually will consist of seven books. The main characters Jesuit and spy Ignatz and his friend Elisabeth return. The city Vienna itself still is a marvelous backdrop creating atmosphere and giving a chance to inject a few historic or urbane facts into the story. In this book there is a serial killer on the loose. The murders are staged as paintings by Egon Schiele who is a minor yet very present character through which art and death become interwoven. I read the book in one day, intrigued and charmed. For a word nut it is also great to learn a new Dutch word ‘Altaardwaal’ the cloth surrounding the altar. Well, no I am not going to tell you  the story, just if you read Dutch: go get the book snuggle up on a cold night and you will have a great time. Mieke does great work.

Louise Erdrich: The Plague of Doves

Having read several of Louise Erdrich’s books I was thrilled at the airport in Washington to find her latest book: The Plague of Doves. The circumstances not being quite right I had a hard time getting into it. Yet at a certain point I got involved in the different narrators pushing on the novel which has a marvelous layered complexity. Events are described with their own momentum and at the end there is a kind of closure by the search for and discovery of the truth. In the interwoven settings of the reservation and the small town of Pluto, the weight of historical injustice comes to light through the conjunction of many different elements, as well in an historical setting as a contemporary. Themes are: religion, the unsolved murder of a family, a stamp collection, a violin, burning love, racism, family, the reservation and an untold past.

Read it, take your time over this intricate tapestry and achievement of Louise Erdrich.

Quotes:

Unable to sleep, he lighted a candle stub and paged through the Meditations until he found the one he needed, the one that told him no longer to wander at hazard or wait to read the books he was reserving for old age, but to throw away idle hopes (Louisa!) and come to his own aid, if he cared for himself and while it was in his power.

As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace (....) (Yet there is something to the love and knowledge of the land and its relationship to dreams – that’s what the old people had. That’s why as a tribe we exist to the present.)

The Indian women I knew were shy and very studious, although a couple of them swaggered around furious in ribbon shirts with AIM-looking boyfriends. I didn’t really fit in with anybody.

Like Anaïs, I reviewed every thought, all visual trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger.

My consciousness is fragile ground, shaky as forming ice. Every morning, when I open my eyes and experience my first thought, I am flooded with relief. The I is still here.

Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver

What to do on a blustery day with showers except photographing the light and shadows of life.

Just find a warm place inside and read.

Being a fan of Barbara Kingsolver’s writing I was pleasantly surprised to find her book in a small town for $2. I have read five of her books, this being the sixth one. She writes rich stories, with a tapestry of characters which ring true. In Animal Dreams Codi, the main character is at a juncture in her life, and goes back to Grace, Arizona where she grew up with her sister Hallie, who is in Nicaragua, helping the people with  their crops, and a distant father. Codi is in the habit of running to another place when life doesn’t turn out the way she wanted. One could say it is all about the luxury of forgiveness and living a sweet life so one has sweet dreams... Her memories seems unreal until the day she fully participates in life with loss, love and belonging. Some quotes which touched my heart:

* I couldn’t ask Emelina for directions to my own childhood home; I didn’t want her to know how badly dislocated I was. I’d always had trouble recalling certain specifics of childhood, but didn’t realize until now that I couldn’t even recognize them at point-blank range.

* Children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

* ”Insomnia’s different,” I said.  “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.”

* The winter rains would soon dry up. Then there would not be another drop till July. During those brittle months the taste and smell of rain would be lost to us, beyond the recollection of children and the deepest root tips of trees. That is the way of the seasons in a desert place.

My Grace is Chloride, AZ.

Lighthouse and Traces have arrived

Two books for the presentation on March 23rd in De Zwarte Panter in Antwerp (8 PM) have arrived Roger Nupie's Lighthouse* Lichthaus was the first to come out of the crate. The title of the book refers to the novel of Virginia Woolf, just as the moving poem The waves. His poetry presented here is solemn, speaking of missing and longing. In the cycle  Her handwriting he remembers his grandmother kindly with the deep love of  grandson. Roger Nupie questions conventions in Self portrait, is playful and explicitly erotic in several poems, a.o. in Olivette. Yet he also challenges conventions in his self-portrait, no longer fulfilling the romantic image of a poet, but also in two poems about war and its consequences. The German translation is by Fred Schywek and the English by Annmarie Sauer. The translations are always proofread with the authors who authorize  them.

To the lighthouse                                                Zum Leuchtturm

De liefde                                                               Die Liebe

verliest                                                                 verliert

haar getijden.                                                      ihre Gezeiten.

Dat wegebben blijft                                             Das Wegebben bleibt

ons bij, versteend                                                uns erhalten, versteinert

op de oever.                                                          auf dem Ufer.

Nooit                                                                      Nie

halen we                                                                holen wir

morgen.                                                                 das Morgen.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Love

looses

its tides.

This ebbing away stays

with us petrified

on the shore.

Never

will we make it

to tomorrow.

Outer Dark - Comac Mc Charty II

Cormac McCarthy made me think  through Outer Dark about blindness, propriety, avenging angles or devils, namelessness and about fear. The word apocalyptic has been used concerning McCarthy’s novels, the triple devastating disasters in Japan. I think of the death who because nobody recognized them are buried nameless, like the unknown soldiers in Der Englisher Friedhof  near Kamp Lintfort in Germany.

© sms:foto duisburg/rhein 2010

I think of the grief of  the survivors of family members with a name. McCarthy’s themes are woven through the stream of information, through the extent of death and suffering in the now and wonder about my own fears. I see the old lady with a woolen vest and hat in the snow, cold and all alone: everything and everyone lost. How will she go on? How does one maintain one’s humanity and dignity under such extreme circumstances and maybe it is even harder to maintain in every day life.

The last image of Rhinty in Outer Dark is her coming upon the deserted fated place where she finds a small ribcage among the ashes of a recent fire. McCarthy’s mastery is that he says no more referring us all to our own emotional meltdowns.

Outer Dark - Comac Mc Charty

Outer Dark hard and dark book where the beauty is only in the language of the inevitable apocalyptic end. Lost people wander in a violent world where with some grace they sometimes find a piece to eat or a fire to sit by. The setting is the beginning of the 20^th century in the Appalachian mountains and the hard life of survival till a violent demise. The story: Culla Holmes takes the baby born from his incestuous relationship with his and lays it out in a wintry wood. A thinker with a cart goes looking for it and places it with an other woman. Rinthy, sickly and weak, goes looking for the tinker in order to find her child. The novel is peopled with cripples, murderers, violent men, all constituting a graceless  world without redemption.

The language however is so precise that it hurts, so beautiful that one longs for the next page.

Examples of beauty in this godless mythology: The sun hung on the cusp of eclipse and the prophet spoke to them.

(...) the dull lowing of an alligator (...)

He crossed to the table and took the lamp and lit it, shaping the room from darkness.

(..) these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

What discordant vespers do the tinker’s good chime through the twilight...

Yes in this novel darkness and blindness reigns supreme yet in beauty. This is a truly existentialist novel till the last sentence: Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.
Cormac McCarthy, one of the best...

Child of God

Planning a trip to the Appalachian  Mountains and not quite finding the information I was looking for,  I remembered that Cormac Mc Carthy had several books  situated in that area. Knowing that I greatly appreciated his work, I started reading Child of God. His language, his style, his observation, his description of people and landscape are at the same time surgical, compassionate, non-judgmental and passionate. I have a list laying around of precise, beautiful words, the correct names of plants and landscape elements, tools.... all found in his writing. The child of god here is Lester Ballard a violent, dispossessed man, driven out of his ancestral home, roaming the mountains, surviving on his wits and ruthlessness. People disappear, are murdered and the women then are used to calm his loneliness, to satisfy his needs. It is amazing to me that through his brilliant writing, Mc Carthy doesn't neither glorify not vilify Lester Ballard. In a way his survival skills are as admirable as his actions are unconscionable and degraded. The main protagonist lives, like many of the other characters in abject poverty. To a degree I have seen these in small rural communities in the Mojave desert. I don't like to read horror stories nor violent tales, yet I find something sublime and compelling in Mc Carthy's novels, as if with his insight in people's actions he warns us for our dark sides.

A few words and phrases:
In the pines the voices chanted a lost litany.
(...) and then swept out the window howl on howl carrying first the muntins, then the sash
A windy riffle of whispers went among them.
(...) as if the sound authored the substance (...)

Now I am looking forward to  Outer Dark

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

In just a few days I finished Franzen’s latest book. It is a rich tapestry of contemporary America. Different ‘issues’ are dealt with: nature conservancy in the form of a cerulean warbler, a small songbird, MTR or Mountain Top Removal, indeed a blight on the landscape not only in the Appalachian mountains, but also on the Hopi and Navajo reservation. Of course family entanglements, networks, the pain, the mistakes, the loyalty, the hurt and goodness of human relations, poignancy about growing pains and the music scene, all is etched with a sharp needle and colored with a touch of compassion. Also the dealings with contracts for the war in Iraq is a cynical criticism of the warmongering and corruption in the Bush era.

I for one don’t like to read weighty books, so with 582 pages in my edition I struggled sometimes but the insightful comments on our times proved to be riveting. The real estate bubble is as much part of this book as are forays into drugs and infidelity. Yet there seems some redemption or warning in this book, for all of us. Find the time, you’ll enjoy to learn and think. One caveat: by his seeming realism one tends to read this as a classical naturalist novel and thus as the truth. The ambition of the book to be all encompassing however makes that at certain points I felt ill at ease with the flow of the narrative. Yet, a good read.

Life & Times of Michael K

Life & Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee is all about the voyage, the road, the process, never about the result. The quest is more important than the finding. And finally it is all about the stories…The point if view of the teller is the story is first the all knowing author and then the care taker of Michael K. trying to know his stories, treeing to save him and in the process being a changed human being. The book ’The Life & Times of Michael K.’ is a fundamental anti-war book. The other protagonists are Time the flow of it and Freedom. A must read.

Quotes:

* Now surely I have come as far as a man can come; surely no one will be mad enough to cross these plains, climb those mountains search these rocks to find me; surely now that in all the world only I know where I am, I can think of myself as lost. p66

* But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over he face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids.

* He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand.

* At last he spoke: I am not in the war.

William Boyd

This novel Any Human Heart gives us in the form of the diary of Logan Mountstuart an idea of the last century, better than any history book could. Ideas about war, love, sex, booze, countries, fascism, duty, aging and the modern art scene are found in a fast moving story. Of course we find also the life of a writer and comments on historical figures from that time spicing up the biography with personal insights. Grand.

William Boyd uses, as authors do, the experiences of his life to imagine an other person’s life, projecting hope and fear. His attention to detail is masterly and the dark night of the soul is rendered with caring detachment. (I know it’s an oxymoron, but not really). He provides a good, fast paced, enjoyable read and valuable food for thought about the past century and thus also for our life now and tomorrow which hopefully will remain a riotous mess.

Misunderstandings

When people talk in set discourses and frames and then the listener reacts to it in the habitual way, you end up in a stalemate. that way also a honeymoon can go sadly wrong. Ian McEwan in On Chesil Beach: "And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. nothing much at all."

Definitely a must read.

Birthed from Scorched Hearts

Birthed from Scorched Hearts Women respond to War was compiled and edited by MariJo Moore. She produced an important, powerful book. 54 women from all over he world have sent in their words, their feelings, their insights, their stories. Some give courage, some are heart wrenching, some are wise. Reading the book I learned about old, historic violence beginning with Medusa and the daughters of Celtic Boudica. We learn about massacres and forgotten people, the plight of indigenous peoples in the USA and in the rest of the world. The chronology then brings WW I and WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, followed by the protesters and peace workers. I am moved, humbled by the creativity and life lessons of these women. I like the historic fiction by MariJo Moore writing about Creek War and the Indian boy Andrew Jackson took home. MariJo imagines the mother’s tale about her lost boy’s life. Great. Then another important piece is by Rebecca Bevins Faery about Vietnam and the repackaging now of Nam as a tourist destination. She was married to a soldier in that war and was a peace activist. It deeply resounded in me as it was my first confrontation with war and as a consequence peace work. I should mention Laura Tohe’s testimony about her brother. Molly Mc Glennen writes about Native American women’s poetry and the reinterpretation of war: insightful and moving. We need to understand creative expression as sacred and to acknowledge the continuum among the speaker, writer, reader, listener, creative spirit and the word. Doing so, your writing will have political implications. Your love flowing out can change the world.