Review: Mary Oiver: A Poetry Handbook

Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection American Primitive, has died at 83. Somehow, I've managed to not read her poetry, although I did read this one, once upon a time. Another from the late, great Epinions.

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is one of those books on writing that I think will become a workbook for anyone interested in poetry.

Oliver is quite clear in her introduction that, like most people, she firmly believes that making poetry is not something that can be taught in school; like painting, music, and other forms of art, one can learn the craft, but the vision can’t be taught. This book is about the craft of poetry, pure and simple: types of verse, rhyme schemes, the line, meter. She also makes a point, very early in the book, about the value of reading poetry for those who would write it, and about imitating the masters (fine as a learning tool – don’t let it become a trap). Oliver builds the discussion as an organic whole, beginning with sound, which, after all, is one of the things that makes poetry poetry: the music of the spoken word. From there, it is a logical and natural progression to rhyming, the structure of the line, various forms (with a very intelligent and sensitive discussion of free verse, which is much more difficult than most people think), and a lot of common sense on diction and imagery.

The various sections are beautifully illustrated by examples by a wide range of poets, from Bashō, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, and more, both household words and treasures known to few outside those who make poetry part of their regular diet. The illustrations are, for the most part, subject to incisive and intelligent analysis in the text that relates them firmly to the topic at hand – aside from being a joy to read in and of themselves.

Oliver also takes on those two bêtes noires of any writer, discipline and revision, with, again, remarks based firmly on common sense. (Make appointments with your Muse – and keep them.). She has words to say as well about the relative merits of writing groups, workshops, and solitude. (As one who values his solitude but thinks that enough is enough and is looking for a local writing group to join, I am taking her words to heart – they make a lot of sense: you need to be alone to write, but without input, you have nothing to write about that’s going to be worth reading.)

This is also a book that will be inestimably valuable to readers of poetry, simply because knowing what tools the poet has available, which ones he chose to use, and how she used them, can’t help but increase your understanding and enjoyment. In fact, Oliver stresses that, until the early years of this century, poetry was strongly metrical and rhymed; we are now unused to that, since free verse and blank verse have become the norm, and rhyme is for greeting cards. Consequently, many contemporary readers find the great poets of the English language difficult or incomprehensible, simply because of unfamiliarity, which is sad and unnecessary. (To be perfectly honest, rhymed verse makes me crazy, unless it’s Sir Thomas Wyatt or John Donne. OK – I suppose I can handle Yeats, too.)

Although I can’t claim to have perused every handbook on the craft of poetry, of those that I’ve looked at, Oliver’s stands out as a gem: clear, concise, intelligent, and sensible. What more can you ask? A definite must for any writer’s – or reader’s – library.

(A note: This one appears to undergo revision and expansion periodically – I’ve found copies in my local used bookstores, and, while there seem to be more examples in my edition, the meat of the text seems to be substantially intact. Happy browsing.)

(Mariner Books, 1994)

Review: Kenny Fries: The Healing Notebooks

First, a note: I'm trying to kick myself into doing some substantial writing again, and found myself going through the review pages and found a number of reviews that were originally published at Epinions and are no longer available there. I may re-use some of them at other sites, but they will have to be re-worked first (different audiences need different approaches). So I thought I'd revive the Sunday reviews department here and republish some of them, which may help me start writing original pieces. This is the first, originally published in 2003. If you have a reaction, leave a comment.

I first read The Healing Notebooks several years ago, when the second wave of friends was dying around me. Like so many of the literary works produced by gay men in this period, these poems are about loss, but they are much more than that.

What keeps me coming back to these poems, what has kept me coming back to them for ten years, is their incredible simplicity, which opens to amazing depth and strength. My long-time favorite of these twenty brief works, a sketch made at the dinner table, starts “Not the way they hold me,/but the way they hold/the cup . . .” In fourteen short lines Fries paints a picture of love that may have been matched, but never exceeded, and he does it through a spare, distilled observation of the commonplace, ending “of all hands/your hands/of all men/you.”

And perhaps I’ve already said too much. These are fragile-seeming works, small, quiet poems that keep resonating long after you have put the book back on the shelf, slight songs that do not really speak to intellect. (How much magic is there in a spectral analysis of sunrise?) There is something almost Japanese about them in their serenity, their fine distillation of the mundane into a potent, numinous draught that takes us far from the everyday events that they describe. There is a particular vision in this collection, perhaps born of the necessity of making every second matter, measured against the reality of time that suddenly has a limit: “Watch the moment./It is nothing complacent.”

What makes us human? Scientists, theologians, everyone has tried to answer this question, and the answers come up lacking. Kenny Fries provides an answer that I don’t think will have to be revised: We make our art as our common humanity, a memory that is much more than history. Our paintings, our dances, our music, our poetry are all guardians of the moments from our lives that have meaning far beyond the mere events. “. . . It is the leaf I am/holding, the orange burning/the heat of summer into my hand./How else can I remember this orange/in the winter gray?” Poetry like that of Kenny Fries, in its elegance and simplicity, peels away the layers of irrelevance and makes our souls tangible.

Culture Break: Sam Hamill: What the Water Knows

I promised you something besides music for a "Culture Break" post -- here's Sam Hamill reading one of his poems.

I find it hard to come up with an example of poets reading their own work that aren't almost painful to watch. I really think they should all take a class in the oral interpretation of literature before they're allowed to read in public. I watched a video of Jorie Graham, a poet for whom I have immense respect, reading one of her works -- it looked like she was in pain. (I don't understand why people think that a poet is automatically capable of reading his or her work aloud in public. There's an element of acting in that, and let's face it -- poets aren't actors.)

Yes, of course I've reviewed one of Hamill's collections: Dumb Luck.

Culture Break: Billy Collins on What Dogs Think

I realized I've been focusing almost exclusively on music here, and there's a lot more to culture than that. Here's Billy Collins with a couple of poems on what dogs think:

I reviewed his collection Questions About Angels some years ago at Epinions, and happily, it's still there.

Culture Break: Jorie Graham reads "Later in Life"

Jorie Graham is one of the more amazing poets I've run across, although not the best reader of her work. (Which seems to be a trait of poets, unless they've also been trained as actors.)

If you run across a copy, pick up her collection The Dream of a Unified Field -- it's a retrospective collection, but also an excellent introduction to her work. Some riveting stuff in there.

Culture Break: Billy Collins Reads Three Poems

I stumbled across Billy Collins' work several years ago, picking up a copy of Questions About Angels on a whim, and was charmed. It's funny, whimsical, circumstantial, and more serious than it appears at first. How many poets do you know of who get laughs -- intentionally -- at their readings?

Culture Break: Mark Doty Reads "Brian, Age 7"

Mark Doty is one of my favorite poets -- there's something almost crystalline about his best work, rich, multifaceted, throwing the world back at us taken apart and rearranged so we can see the parts we never knew were there. Unfortunately, like so many poets, he's not very good at reading his own work, but I thought it was worth getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

I'm presently wading through The Art of Description, a nonfiction work in which Doty discusses how poets make it happen (that's the closest I can come to a summation -- it reads like his poetry.) A friend recommended it; he's a curator at the Illinois State Museum and had just done a show based on the book (which was a pretty interesting show, although it was sobering to realize that I had known, at one point or another, half of the artists.) It's not a hefty tome, by any means -- it's quite slim, and small. I'm just not patient with reading these days.

In Memoriam

Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries. I have a copy sitting here in my to-read stack. And I've never heard his music that I know of. But I've read his poetry, in a collection I reviewed some years ago at Epinions, Fear of Dreaming.

I love them, although they are not easy going. Carroll’s imagery has been called “hallucinatory,” and that seems as good a word as any to describe the associations he sets up. It is worth mentioning that Carroll is also a rock musician, with four albums to his credit, as well as a “best of” album, because there is a hard-edged, eerily beautiful music in these poems that sets off and supports the strong, unnerving images.

It was really a sort of "collected poems" volume. Excellent, the kind of poetry you can really lose yourself in.

And he was only 60.