Poet is a Verb: Read

I came to writing as a reader. I know this about myself. While other little kids were doing sports and playing outside, I was reading. I loved (and love) being able to immerse myself in language, another person's perspective, and an invented narrative. Writing, for me, is an extension of reading, a mirroring of what I love.

That being said, there is some business reading I normally don't enjoy. For instance, I subscribe to Poetry magazine, because it is *the* magazine to be published in. When I went to the Minneapolis Public Library a few months ago, I looked at the archive of Poetry magazine and found that for each year, they truly published the poets that endured in literature. So, I subscribe to it, knowing I am reading the Important Poets.

When I actually get down to reading it, though, I feel like it's a chore. It's not the magazine's fault - I am always pleasantly surprised when I read the issue. I actually enjoy the poetry, most of the time. But it just feels like work -- the poems can be too intellectualized or too well crafted or just too tidy. It's not a poetry I can normally aspire to writing, nor the poetry that I find myself recalling later.

This morning, I had nothing to read while I walked on the treadmill, so I grabbed this month's issue. (I know there's a metaphor in there, for what if feels like to read the magazine.) But this issue was really well done. I found myself highlighting almost every poem that appeared, because I liked it so much. Some favorites from this issue:

All of Heather McHugh's poetry, but these two are good.

The translations of Elfriede Jelinek's poetry are fabulous, although the translator's note is a little high-falutin'.

Peter Campion's "Just Now" and Robin Robertson's "Cat, Failing," are both pretty astonishing as well.

I guess the moral of the story (if I need to have one right now) is that I need to return to reading, even the good-for-me, broccoli-type reading, because it all feeds the writing.

On the Book I'm Halfway Through...

I have a bad habit of falling in love with a book while reading it and posting about it, when I'm about halfway through. Today is no different. So, if you've read this book and finished, please don't tell me the ending.

Right now, I'm reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and it is pretty amazing. The book describes her childhood and adolescence in pre-war Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya. She is Somali by birth and she never seems to fit in, among her clan relatives in Somalia, her Christian neighbors in Kenya nor the strict Islamic community in Saudi Arabia. As a young woman, she struggles with her allegiance to Islam, because she tries to be a devout Muslim but cannot reconcile her faith with its treatment of women.

This book is very scary, at parts, but also very touching because she balances the difficulty of her upbringing with a sense of fierce independence. I would strongly urge you to pick up this book and read it, if you're at all interested in learning more about a woman's experience battling fundamentalism and discrimination.

If You Claim the Name of Poet...

...you should run to the bookstore to buy Donald Revell's book, The Art of Attention. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I picked this up at the Twin Cities Book Festival, a lollapalooza of local presses. I thought it looked interesting. I just finished the first section and I am floored by how good it is.

In this book, Revell examines the lyric eye, probably the most important quality of a modern poet. He contrasts the poetry of cleverness or wit against the poetry of rapture and focus, favoring the later. In Revell's view, a poem is a tangible product of our fierce attention to the world, rather than our shaping of the world. We don't invent the world when we write, we notice it in its glory. The poetry of attention as he calls is it is intimate, peaceful, unagressive and watchful. As he says, "the poet reads the world with writing."

This is pretty revelatory writing. I find myself underlining every third sentence. When I read it back now to isolate a few quotes, his sentences are so intertwined that I cannot excerpt it to give a good representation of its breadth and depth. Needless to say, if you write poetry or want to write poetry, this is the book to read.

October Poetry Book Club -- We Have a Winner!

After two surveys, one typical and one sudden death, we finally have an October Poetry Book Club Selection.

We will be reading Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist. I'm very excited to read this book; it was my first choice, although I didn't rig the votes.

I will be ordering the book off of Amazon today, so I should have it soon. But to accommodate those people who may be scouring used bookstores or (heaven for fend) try to find it at their local big box retailer, I will be posting the discussion post on October 29. Hopefully, this will give you enough time to find and read the book.

If you have any suggestions for future Poetry Book Club books, or would like to have more information on the project, please let me know!

Happy reading!

My Last Dance

Today, I gave my swan song presentation at work today. For banned books week, I gave a half-hour presentation on the power dynamics of book censorship. We discussed the cycle of banning ideas we are afraid of, in order to avoid discussing the issues. I also suggested the 5 books that "The Man" doesn't want you to read. They were:

1) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
2) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
3) Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
4) Howl by Allen Ginsberg
5) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

At the end of the presentation, I played this video, which is a collage of post-WWII images set to a portion of "Howl."

When the presentation was over, one of my students came to me and said that he felt bad that we were discriminating against the books. This made me miss teaching, just a little bit.

Jessica Fox-Wilson, Poet, Educator, Writer...and Book Reviewer?

I've been trying to figure out ways to practice my writing more and get a jump start on my writing career. About a month and a half ago, I remembered that a friend of mine is the editor of a neighborhood monthly newspaper and he was looking for a book reviewer. I thought to myself, I can do that. So, I emailed him and lo and behold, I now have a regular book review column in a monthly newspaper.

My first column appeared in this month's Uptown Neighborhood News. (My column is on page 11 of this pdf file.) In this column, I reviewed a pretty amazing book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by professor and academic Robert Jensen. I picked this book because the author will be reading at Magers & Quinn, a local bookstore in our neighborhood. I'm lucky that I happened upon this book, though, because I really liked it.

Since this is a monthly column, I'll be posting the pdfs each month, once they come out.

Read Books & Save Trees

I just learned of an interesting company called Eco-Libris. Eco-Libris works like a carbon offsetting company. But rather than neutralizing your carbon footprint through planting trees, Eco-Libris neutralizes your paper usage from your book buying habit. See, publishing companies often use virgin paper for books, which causes deforestation. (Also, paper production companies can be incredibly huge polluters, another environmental concern.) At Eco-Libris' site, you can pay $10 to plant ten trees, to offset the paper usage of 10 new books. The company works with a couple of non-profit planting partners to get the environmental action done. They are like middlemen in the process, connecting readers to eco-organizations.

When I look around my house, I see hundreds of books -- and therefore hundreds of trees that have been chopped down to print those books. Honestly, I've never thought of the environmental impact of my book buying addiction. I like books and I like the ideas that they transmit. This site opened my eyes to another aspect of my environmental imapct on the world, and it isn't pretty. Interestingly enough, even though they are a for-profit company, Eco-Libris' blog promotes other ways to limit your paper usage while still enjoying books.

for ee cummings fans like me

I am a pretty big e.e. cummings fan. I teach his poem Buffalo Bill's in my lit class, much to my students' dismay and chagrin. In college, I taught a poem of his to seventh graders, who actually liked it! Once, I even went to a party in a costume inspired by his poem, "i like my body when it is with your.". But, I never knew he wrote prose. However, I just learned that WW Norton is reissuing his travelogue of his experience in Russia, entitled EIMI. This sounds like an interesting read, although I am a little scared as to what his prose reads like. I pray for punctuation.

Do You Remember...

the first book that made you a reader?

According to this Publisher's Weekly article, a new ad campaign encourages conversations about literature by asking well-known figures about the books that inspired them to read. If you are interested in what books people as diverse as David Duchovny and Joyce Carol Oates loved reading as a kid, click here. You can also view the national top 50 favorite list.

So, if you had to pick the one book that turned you into a reader, what would it be? I think for me it would have to be this one, this one, or this one.

It's Like Waking Up From a Dream...

I'm emerging from my Harry Potter Coma, so my Poetry Book Club will be a bit late this month. I'm going to try to have it up by Thursday. Sorry!

This One's For the Muggles...

I don't know about you, but July is Harry Potter Month for me. I am awaiting, on baited breath, the release of the fifth movie next weekend and of course, the final book in the series later this month. I may even try to visit the Harry Potter theme park, once it opens.

So imagine my wonder and delight as I read this New York Times editorial. The NY Times asked 4 writers to imagine their own endings for the series. My favorite re-imagining is by Damon Lindoff, a writer for the enigmatic Lost TV series.

Countdown to next movie: 3 days
Countdownto last book: 13 days
Countdown to Potter induced coma and subsequent withdrawal: Approximately 15 days