3 posts tagged “poetry”

This Biscuit Suits My Taste
-By Cait Stuff

For J.D. Nelson

Why are you making funny faces at me?
I don't like it.

I like cheese.
And oreos.

I don't like it!
Your faces are not
cheese or oreos.

Two updates for the price of one! Now with a free soda!

(I should just do these more often, and then not feel
like I have a backlog of things worth commenting on.
But boy, do I have a backlog of things worth commenting on.)

The Best American Poetry 2006 (Best American Poetry)

One of my friends, and I can't remember if it was here, or somewhere else on the interwebs, or by federal post (being one of those rare individuals who sends handwritten letters, I occationally have the good fortune to recieve them as well... try it, you might like it.) told me that I was too smart for poetry and that, hence, I would probably be good at it. I like to be a good fiction writer and pretend to not like poetry. I do try to maintain my dry fiction-writer sensibility. And yet I keep getting suckered back in.

This spring semester, which is two months over, and yet I'm still not sure to have recovered from, I became resuckered. Poetry of the rambling words on top of words, meaning perhaps found in the density of it, or maybe just the sound of it, is the sort of thing that I tend to fancy... exactly the opposite of what typical New Yorker fare tends towards. So... Best American? I have my reservations.

The 2006 is deeply rooted in narrative arc. Poems that go somewhere. Out of the 75 of Billy Collins' top choice, I found 12 that spoke to me, and only three of particular note. Poems that forced me into a slow pace, pondering plodding alliterations of metaphors mesasoaic I read through once, read the author's note on the poem, and moved on. But Daniel Gutstein's prose poem, Monsieur Pierre est mort about a pet rock which meets a grusome end is a little fantabulous, and Julie Larios' Double Abecedarian: Please Give Me had the wonderful sound and word usage I adore, the sort of randomness forced through order of the sort Oulipeans rejoice in. Meanwhile, James Tate's was the only one with the kind of engaging pacing that I enjoy, and I liked the surrealism of the ending, although, being the good fictionista I am, I felt like perhaps he hadn't earned it in the setup.

***

The Red Book (Caldecott Honor Book)

Barbara Lehman

And now for something completely different:

Barbara Lehman's The Red Book has no words. And I'd always been of the mindset (sort of like my imagined fiction-writer stance on poetry) that I just wasn't the picture book sort of girl. What did I know about picture books? I was writing word books before I could write words, creating line after line of scribles in a blank book with teddy bears holding heart balloons on the cover. I couldn't make them yet, but I loved the way words traveled across a line, the wonderful horizontality of it all. But I've been suckered there, too. (More on that in a life update section, as opposed to the book update section. Hopefully I'll get around to a life update section. We'll see about that.)

But, inherent prejudices aside, what I like about Lehman's book, what I really really like about it, is that it's a complicated idea. A little fantasy, a little surrealism, and a large dose of metafiction. Not bad for a book with no words that I thought was going to be about color. The climax of the story we see through the pictures of some pictures in a book. Talk about layers. That's the kind of depth that I favor at all levels, and I'm glad to have added this one to my collection. I take it all back guys. Picture books are better than I thought. My mistake. Call me fooled.

I hope to do a full picture book round-up and review sometime soon. I've added a few more to my collection, and I've barred a few from ever being spoken about in my presence. Sometime I'll get around to talking about which are which. For now, I just wanted to say this is one of the awesome ones.