I named my poetry bookshelf the Empress twenty-odd years ago. Ishmael Reed frequently uses the line, "Feed the loas." He considers 22 his favorite number (February 22 marks his birthday), and he sometimes suggests the existence of 22 loas. I tended to associate this with the 22 trumps in a tarot deck. P. G. Wodehouse's later Blandings Castle stories feature a prize winning pig named the Empress. It seemed to me that reading poetry out loud from a bookcase named the Empress seemed a way of feeding that particular loa.
A few years ago it seemed to me I had bookmarks in too many poetry books, so I decided to pull some bookmarks out and to finish a few other books of poetry. I decided I wanted to get down to the number of poetry books which corresponded with the year, e.g. bookmarks in ten books of poetry in 2010, eleven in 2011, etc. I had succeeded in this for a few years, but last fall I found a few more books I had started and not finished by Ed Dorn, John Wieners, and Desmond Egan, I started reading a couple of Zukofsky books, and my wife got me a book of poems by Rumi for Christmas. I ended 2013 in the middle of nineteen books of poetry.
Well, I finished "A" last week, and I hope to finish The Essential Rumi tonight. Next month I hope to finish Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry and the Desmond Egan. That will get me down to fifteen, much closer to my goal. (Man, this might seem silly to some.)
Poets I find myself reading in the Empress right now: Ray Bradbury, Chaucer, two translations of Dante, Emily Dickinson, Ed Dorn, Desmond Egan, Robert Frost, a collection of Irish poetry, Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Hara, an anthology edited by Ishmael Reed, Rumi, Anne Sexton, Spenser, John Wieners, William Carlos Williams, and A Test of Poetry by Louis Zukofsky.
Marvelous omnivorous idiosyncratic high level reading! I read this and find myself wondering at the phenomenology of this: from the goal as set, the correspondences of personalized shelves, bookmarks, the time "spent" and what qualities do you note as you move from Rumi to Zukofsky to Chaucer to, whomever: Ann Sexton. Do you read the Dantes side-by-side? How do you make evaluations of translations? What is the inner "space" where all this poetry goes...like?
ReplyDeleteI read The Portable Dante, translated by Mark Musa, with the Dante Society at my high school. We started the Dante Society a little over four years ago. A group of tenth graders wanted to read Dante, so we read the Inferno in tenth grade, the Purgatorio in eleventh grade and the Paradiso senior year. I planned to stop at that point, but some new tenth graders said they wanted to go to hell, er, to start over again. That group graduates in a few months, and we plan to finish the Divine Comedy April 28, 2014. We'll start over again in hell when the new school year starts in August.
ReplyDeleteI have a bilingual edition of the Inferno as well; I don't remember the translator. I've begun reading both the Italian and the English in that edition. I understand very little of the Italian, but I plan to finish it over the next fifteen months while the Dante Society reads the Musa translation.
I spend far less time reading poetry than I did in the 1980's, although writing this blog has gotten me going again. In the last few months I've mostly tried to finish books to get down to fourteen active books. (I finished The Essential Rumi last night. I have 29 pages left in Desmond Egan's Collected Poems. I hope to finish that and then A Test of Poetry and then the Collected Poems of Jonathan Wiener to get down to fourteen.)
Over the years I've spent a lot of time going from poetry book to poetry book, reading two pages or so each to try to open my ears and discover what poets worked for me at any given time. I would read poets I felt I ought to read (thanks mostly to Uncle Ezra) and poets who simply delighted me (Zukofsky, Christopher Logue, Ken Koch, Robert Creeley, etc.)
I often found myself using reading poetry out loud as a legal means of activating the fifth circuit. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's late poetry seemed to work best for that for me.