2014 Reading and a Tribute

It was a mixed reading year. I read books published in 2014, like Running through Beijing, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Baboon, but I read more old ones, like Lady Oracle, Brown: the Last Discovery of America and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Those three I’ve always meant to get around to. Lady Oracle was a case of saying, “wait—there’s a Margaret Atwood book I haven’t read?” I read Richard Rodriguez because a review of his new book which made me remember I hadn’t read Brown yet and how much I enjoy the way he puts sentences together, how he thinks about things. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: why did I take so long to know this American classic? It’s a early version of the immigrant experience, so much worse in hardships that I feel better about where we are now, but so much the same in discriminating against newcomers, whoever they are, that I am ashamed.

I tried Don Quixote again because of Edith Grossman’s translation and while I got a lot further this time, the worthy and deluded knight from La Mancha is still not my cup of tea. “Unfinished” was a theme of my reading in 2014. I didn’t finish Don Quixote and I didn’t finish Girl with Curious Hair or Che: A Graphic Biography, which may have been in comic form but was dense and often dry nonetheless.

I read scattered selections from the anthologies. That goes for most of the poetry too. As Joe Hutchinson, Poet Laureate of Colorado says, poetry, if it is good, is slow reading. I read a lot in Spanish too, but with a working focus. I’ve now read big chunks of Laura Méndez de Cuenca: Mujer indómita y moderna (1853 – 1928) by Mílada Bazant because I’m translating it.

The Heart of Redness, by Zakes Mda, contemporary South African writer—his title is a correction to Conrad more than a tribute—is a lyrical and lively mix of ancient and new. Baboon was a 2014 Two Lines Press title, a press devoted to translation. What a treat, to be able to read a stunning contemporary Danish writer. Warning: she’s intense. I had trouble sleeping after one of her stories.

Galway Kinnell, an Irish American poet, rooted in New England, also lived in New York City. Born in Rhode Island, he died in October in Vermont, where he lived many years. I heard him read once here in Denver, but my friend Kathleen Cain has the better story about that, for she spoke to him in the tongue of the Irish and he sighed, “Ah, it’s been so long since I’ve heard that: say it again.” I have a signed copy of his Selected Poems that won the National Book Award in 1982.

When I heard he’d died I got all the books of his I have off the shelves and spent some weeks flipping through them, savoring poems at random. He’s one of our finest, Galway Kinnell, a poet who does well what poets do best: strip the blinders from our eyes; remind us what matters.

In a poem called “Old Arrivals,” we see immigrants arriving “in the Harbor/that chops the light to pieces:”

They floated in at night

On black water, cargoes

Which may not go back, waves

Breaking the rocks they break on.

Those who arrive on these shores can’t return because landing here changes them and changes us. What we are as a country has always been the constantly transforming and richly diverse result of such arrivals. But how much better in the poet’s words: waves breaking the rocks they break on.

“The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” is an epic masterpiece New York poem, full of grit and color, Jews and the Holocaust and Puerto Ricans and Chinese on Avenue C, full of moments like this, making us see produce anew:

In the pushcart market, on Sunday,

A crate of lemons discharges light like a battery.

Icicle-shaped carrots that through black soil

Wove away lie like flames in the sun.

Like any good poet, Kinnell was always writing about death. For a farewell, from “Why Regret?” the last poem in Strong Is Your Hold, one of his last books:

What did you imagine lies in wait anyway

At the end of a world whose sub-substance

Is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?

Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren

And how little flesh is needed to make a song.

 

 

 

2014 Reading List

How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas Foster

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, Two Lines Press

McSweeney’s No. 46: Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America

Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, which started brilliantly but ended poorly

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin

Running through Beijing Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen (thank God for translation and gifts it brings like this vibrant look at an underside of Chinese society)

Don Quixote, Edith Grossman’s translation (not completed, again)

Girl with Curious Hair, stories by David Foster Wallace

Che: A graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays and Other Short Prose Forms, Edited by Alan Ziegler

Last Call, David Lee, poems mostly set, as the title indicates, in bars

New Border Voices: An Anthology, edited by Brandon Shuler, Robert Johnson, and Erika Garza-Johnson

The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, poems by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Richard Rodriguez

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

Baboon, Naja Marie Aidt, translated by Denise Newman

MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood

The Heart of Redness, Zakes Mda

Strong is Your Hold and other collections, Galway Kinnell