pile of reading

It’s been two years since I did a pile of reading post. Two years! Wow. I used to do them pretty regular. The pile I have going right now is small. These are the ones I’m in the midst of. Several books are piled up, totally ready to be in the reading, but I haven’t actually gone beyond putting a placemark at the first page of text. So they aren’t technically in the pile of reading. So I won’t list them today.

The Best American Poetry 2009 David Wagoner, editor; David Lehman, series editor

This one barely counts, according to the above criteria. I’ve read the first page of Lehman’s intro. He’s talking about poetry criticism. I don’t get that he likes it. But maybe the argument will develop beyond that. For the first several years of BAP I read each volume as it came out. Then I let that annual ordeal go. I’m catching up on unread volumes. If you don’t like the poetry of the guest editor, you probably won’t like the poems the guest editor chose. They like to read what they like to write. 

Deaf American Poetry: an anthology edited by John Lee Clark

I’m also not far into this anthology. Past the intro! Four pages into the 19th century verse essay by John R. Burnet. You can’t make a deaf person hear, Burnet agrees. “We cannot bid the long seal’d ears unclose, / Nor give the nerves to thrill when music flows[.]” But you can educate their minds and stir their souls!

Unthinkable: an extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains by Helen Thomson

I like this sort of thing. Thomson says the writings of neurologist Oliver Sacks inspired her to pursue an interest in science journalism. Sacks writes with a literary bent. Thomson not so much. Her prose may not be particularly evocative but I liked her casual rapport with some of these strange brains. One Spaniard who sees auras, among other synaesthetic experiences, talks about red and how men he finds sexy look red to him. “‘I had a boyfriend up until a few years ago and the first time we met, I remember thinking he was this bright red. But he had this amazing voice and these blue, almost green, eyes — and those two things, the color of his voice and the color of his eyes were so distinctive that they mixed and that became his color. It was this pale gray. No one else had that color.’”

Haiku, vol. 1: Eastern Culture by R. H. Blyth

Blyth’s books on haiku, this first volume was published in 1949, have been in my hands a few times, but Blyth surrounds the haiku with so much interpretive prose that I’ve been put off up to now. I prefer to form opinions without a whole lot of handholding. The handholding starts to feel clammy and uncomfortable when I find myself disagreeing. But the Blyth books are comprehensive, a serious and thorough discussion of the topic, probably the best up to that point and, perhaps, since. Blyth has spent many pages on religion and philosophy, not just Eastern but Western as well. It’s fairly interesting. “They spoke no word, / The visitor, the host, / And the white chrysanthemum.” — Ryota

The Weary World Rejoices by Steve Fellner

At only 57 pages, it’s a pretty brief book of poems. There’s a batch toward the end about Matthew Shepherd. “I am at the Hole in the Wall alone. / Forty years old. Twice the age that you, Matthew, were / before you died. You can see the lines under my eyes, / the gray in my hair, my flabby belly. Here I like to pretend / that everyone is looking at me. I like to pretend a lot of things.”