The Bone Dish
Publishing icon and poet Hilda Raz gave a beautiful--and teacherly--reading last week to celebrate the release of two new books, All Odd and Splendid and What Happens. Hilda has devoted her long and generous career to making sure that other writers, particularly women, see their work in print in Prairie Schooner, so it was lovely to have a chance to hear her own voice. My Little Sister Amara came along, and here's the verdict of a fifteen-year-old (smiling): "Not as bad as I thought."
All you poets might be interested in Tony Hoagland's essay in the just-out Summer/Fall 2009 issue of Gulf Coast, "Litany, Game, and Representation: Charting an Arc from the Old to the New Poetry," with the old poetry being that which believes that "[t]o name is to recognize and endorse material reality, to encourage it, and at the same time to illuminate and spiritualize it" (226), and the new poetry being that which is deeply suspicious of naming's claims to meaning. To give you a sense of the essay's scope, the seven poems Hoagland quotes at length or in toto, in order to illustrate explain this linguistic-epistemological shift, are by the following poets: Rilke, Christopher Smart, Stanley Plumly, Hoagland's pal Dean Young, Jordan Davis, Robert Hass, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. (No women? No.) I was interested to find my own preferences falling sort of midway through the century, represented, according to Hoagland, by poets "from Allen Ginsberg to Adrienne Rich, from Sharon Olds to Phillip Levine" (no writers of color? no):
Having read Hoagland's witty, disjunctive poetry, I didn't expect that the essay would cohere, but it did, and it was helpful to me.
Sharon Olds, by the way, has a new book out. I am a huge fan, but I had to laugh when I saw the title: One Secret Thing. I was surprised that, after a long career of extraordinary confessional candor, she had even one left! The New York Times Book Review was mixed about it, but I'll be checking it out.
If you have the chance to see the Swedish film Everlasting Moments now in theaters, please do. It's based on a daughter's memoir about her mother in the early twentieth-century; the family lives in poverty, but the mother's life is changed when she begins taking photographs of the beauty around her. It's crushing and breathtaking and beautiful. I especially want poet and memoirist Faye Snider to go see it (it must be showing somewhere in Boston!), because some of the material resonates with her project. For you Lincolnites, it's at the Ross now. For trauma survivors, I should add that the (brief) scenes of abuse are very realistic and may trigger stuff for you. But it's a great film if you can stand it.
Something on my mind lately is that my mother, if my addition is right, turns 70 this year--the mother who adopted and raised me. We'd been on rocky footing for many years, but since The Truth Book came out, she has refused contact with me altogether--understandably, I suppose. (She has reconnected with my brother, which is a good thing.) I think of her often with sympathy and warmth, and I sometimes wonder if she misses me. As a mother myself, I can't conceive of her not doing so, but then, we are very different, so it's hard to know.
On the topic of mothers and daughters, I'll end with this poem that Hilda Raz read (from What Happens):
All you poets might be interested in Tony Hoagland's essay in the just-out Summer/Fall 2009 issue of Gulf Coast, "Litany, Game, and Representation: Charting an Arc from the Old to the New Poetry," with the old poetry being that which believes that "[t]o name is to recognize and endorse material reality, to encourage it, and at the same time to illuminate and spiritualize it" (226), and the new poetry being that which is deeply suspicious of naming's claims to meaning. To give you a sense of the essay's scope, the seven poems Hoagland quotes at length or in toto, in order to illustrate explain this linguistic-epistemological shift, are by the following poets: Rilke, Christopher Smart, Stanley Plumly, Hoagland's pal Dean Young, Jordan Davis, Robert Hass, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. (No women? No.) I was interested to find my own preferences falling sort of midway through the century, represented, according to Hoagland, by poets "from Allen Ginsberg to Adrienne Rich, from Sharon Olds to Phillip Levine" (no writers of color? no):
The plain style most trusts language in its spare, forceful incarnations. Like all aesthetics, the plain style made a bargain with the poetry gods: in exchange for the powers of intimacy and clarity, it would forswear the more specialized possibilities of prosody and artifice. (234)Yep: "intimacy and clarity." I'll take those, please.
Having read Hoagland's witty, disjunctive poetry, I didn't expect that the essay would cohere, but it did, and it was helpful to me.
Sharon Olds, by the way, has a new book out. I am a huge fan, but I had to laugh when I saw the title: One Secret Thing. I was surprised that, after a long career of extraordinary confessional candor, she had even one left! The New York Times Book Review was mixed about it, but I'll be checking it out.
If you have the chance to see the Swedish film Everlasting Moments now in theaters, please do. It's based on a daughter's memoir about her mother in the early twentieth-century; the family lives in poverty, but the mother's life is changed when she begins taking photographs of the beauty around her. It's crushing and breathtaking and beautiful. I especially want poet and memoirist Faye Snider to go see it (it must be showing somewhere in Boston!), because some of the material resonates with her project. For you Lincolnites, it's at the Ross now. For trauma survivors, I should add that the (brief) scenes of abuse are very realistic and may trigger stuff for you. But it's a great film if you can stand it.
Something on my mind lately is that my mother, if my addition is right, turns 70 this year--the mother who adopted and raised me. We'd been on rocky footing for many years, but since The Truth Book came out, she has refused contact with me altogether--understandably, I suppose. (She has reconnected with my brother, which is a good thing.) I think of her often with sympathy and warmth, and I sometimes wonder if she misses me. As a mother myself, I can't conceive of her not doing so, but then, we are very different, so it's hard to know.
On the topic of mothers and daughters, I'll end with this poem that Hilda Raz read (from What Happens):
Birthday
You made a small grey dish of clay,
glazed it something purplish
and filled it, years later,
with minute bones, perfectly intact
you delivered with your scalpel thumbnail
from an owl pellet: scapula, mandible,
four perfect teeth the size of seeds,
and pieces of a backbone ladder,
all pure matte white, "from a mouse,"
you said, pushing up your glasses.
We sat looking, forehead to forehead.
The air was steamy. The shaggy residue
went, swept to the floor by an elbow,
but the rest is here where I sit by the window
on my birthday, looking out, missing you
daughter, preserver, maker, eyes.
I stroke the bone dish and write this down.
fayepoet said:
I recall being intrigued by a review of Everlasting Moments. It came & went awhile back, nowhere to be found in the Boston area.You've peaked my curiosity and so I will try to locate a DVD.
May 2, 2009 11:29 PMMothers & daughters— a topic I return to over and over— and in fact, I just completed a piece on the very topic of sadness. I'm sad that you are disconnected from the mother who raised you and sad that at 70, she has immersed her heart in steel.I admire your candor and feel blessed that my own mother lived to 93, having survived 11 years after my father's death. That period opened up dialogue & resolution I had not thought possible. Hopefully, there may come a time....
KrisBelucci said:
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.
June 2, 2009 7:23 AM