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February 22nd, 2012
Dear Instant Library patrons,
Welcome! The Instant Librarian contains two years of book reviews and writing-related posts.
It began as an experiment in using technology I felt a little wary of, as a way to chronicle my reading, and as an avenue for connecting with friends and family. The title comes from my love of libraries and my one-time interest in becoming a librarian.
I learned a lot in the first year, and moved from the free WordPress platform to my own site, encouraged by the connections I made with readers and writers– people who found my posts from across the world and right down the street. I also began a low-residency MFA program and found myself posting less regularly, and more reflectively, opening the posts to include thoughts on faith and writing.
I now find myself faced with a lot of questions about the role of publication, blogging, the internet, and social media in my life. My ideas about career and identity have also undergone a big shift this past year. I married my partner of seven years and took a part-time cafe job, in order to focus more on studying and writing poetry. I’ve discovered that my definition of success as a writer is founded on my sense of growth, the quality of work I produce, and the quality of living I do.
Like many people in these shifting times, I feel called toward less busy-ness, and more cultivation of the life growing under my feet. I’m ready to devote my energy to becoming a better poet and preparing to be a teacher, and that seems to mean moving off-screen for the time being.
In gratitude for this experience and for the comments and support of regular readers, I offer the archives here as a resource, for whatever it may be worth to you. I hope you’ll enjoy what you read! Please feel free to contact me.
With love and thanks,
Melissa
February 21st, 2012
 A few weekends ago, I went up to Seattle for the Search for Meaning book festival, and brought along a copy of Lauren F. Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. It was the perfect read for a long train ride and a weekend of lectures from writers on spirituality, faith, and social justice.
I discovered Winner’s first book, Girl Meets God, through writing this blog, upon a reader’s suggestion. That was Winner’s book about her conversion to Christianity; Still is about what happens after conversion, the much longer and usually much less dramatic story of living into faith.
When we think about a crisis, if it’s the mid-life variety, the story usually involves an abrupt change in career, lifestyle, or at the very least, a new car. A mid-faith crisis is different. The crisis to which Winner refers is less an event in and of itself, than the very uneventfulness of the middle part of a faith story. The crisis is that there’s no crisis. None of the powerful drama of a conversion experience, with which to shape one’s prayer life, through which to feel one’s connection to God. Meditating on the concept of being “mid” faith, one gets quickly tangled in the ineffable: how to describe the complex interrelationship of God, self, community in chronological terms?
While there are certainly crisis events in the book, such as the loss of her mother and her divorce, the story is about Winner’s apprenticeship as a person of faith. It’s sort of a non-story about a non-event, gracefully shaped into a narrative through short chapters. These “notes” draw forth questions rather than conclusions about God’s existence and hiddenness, the hills and valleys of prayer, trust and anxiety.
“The middle” plays a key role in this book, as metaphor for all that is murky and unknown in life. The middle’s not often looked upon with appreciation. We speak of getting stuck in the middle, or lost in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a very attractive place. It’s the place you want to run from, and the place that has the most to teach you. It’s a wonderful metaphor for contemplating the interaction of our purpose-driven egos with the much more soul-concerned body of mystery.
In the preface, Winner describes this place not as a milepost along a journey, but as a room in a house. “Something will show up in this room, and what shows up will be faith. I am less certain now than I was ten years ago, but I sense that this place is certain.” What I love about this reflection, and about the book, is how it shifts the location of certainty or uncertainty from within the self to outside of and containing the self. If a crisis of faith comes from the fear of unknowing what was once known, then the deepening of faith grows out of surrendering to that unknowing, and trusting that it is known by God.
When I went up to Seattle for the weekend, I was finishing a paper on how modern poems end. I laughed when I read this bit from Don Fowler, one of the many great epigraphs included in Still: “There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of what comes in between.” Here I had been reading Poetic Closure, a 1968 scholarly study of how poems end, focusing on traditional poetry, and feeling very much the opposite. I had a hard time finding contemporary literature on closure in poetry, and the sense, in reading an anthology of experimental poetry, that poetic closure might be in crisis. Or to put it more accurately, in transition.
Fowler’s words, and the rest of Winner’s book, opened my eyes to the peculiarity of focusing on beginnings and endings, to the exclusion of the bulk of a story, a life, a poem. The middle is a kind of cultural blind spot, and modern poetry’s resistance to traditional methods of closure seems to me a sign of the creative consciousness endeavoring to reflect our changing understanding of experience.
Closure is a fiction, I wrote in the margin, a snapshot of a continuing. Poems and books, being limited by ink and paper, have to end somewhere. Still ends with a series of questions and answers with Winner about the process of writing the book. She writes about reading Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr, who suggests that in the second half of a spiritual life (after the dust and glitter of conversion have settled), “you may find yourself reading a lot of poetry…you like the space that poetry offers. I read Rohr and thought it was no coincidence that most of what I’d been reading [while finishing Still] was poetry.”
In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith suggests that “the poet reveals the ideal truth, the truth of the heart.” I would go a step further and say that good literature in general does that. The truth of the heart doesn’t always adhere to real-time chronology. Its story might not fit into the container of beginning, middle, and end. Still does a wonderful job of telling the truth of one heart, without forcing it into an artificial shape. This, in turn, allows us to find our own truths within it, and maybe feel a little more able to speak them.
February 19th, 2012
Daniel’s one of the wise elder poets in the MFA program at SPU. His poems impressed and delighted me during my first residency on Whidbey Island; his skepticism of easily-digested poetry gave me pause. As a brand new student, I listened hard to his senior presentation on poetry that risks, challenges, arrests.
A recent graduate, Bowman saw his first book of poetry published this January by Virtual Artists Collective, a small independent poetry press in Chicago. It’s stunning.
I tucked A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country into my backpack and took it to work with me today at the cafe. It certainly lives up to his own criteria, above. And it also holds its own in the barista’s behind-the-espresso-bar reading material test. Possible to read in 1-3 minute intervals? Check. Narrative or thematic cohesion, allowing for regular pauses to grind beans, refill mugs, wipe counters? Check. Stirring and unusual, thereby engaging said barista on a rainy, slow night? Check.
Okay, I don’t actually have a checklist, or the luxury to curate my at-work reading. On deadline, I patch together bits of my assigned reading on the bus and behind the counter. Reading Bowman’s book this evening, I was struck by its strength as a collection of poems one could call both “accessible” and wonderfully elusive.
Chez Bowman, you have a Williamsesque spareness of line, and a voice whose clarity seems to travel from feet firmly grounded in particular haunts, known patches of earth. These poems sing of Buffalo, Cincinatti, and most of all, the Mohawk river valley. Here you’ll find a frank pastoral: river, tree, lake, cardinal flying at night. You’ll also find the very real fragility of daily life: the smell of hot rolls and coffee, an awkward wander into a dive bar after a Yankee game, the sound of bleak-sky November blues, or chip packages scuttling down city streets. You’ll have the strange dream-like sensation of having entered your own life, or something almost like it:
Now I dream that I’m the stranger
in someone else’s dream,
that I’m walking
through the dream of a stranger
and the stranger’s dream turns out like
dreams I had when I was young
(“Walking Through the Dream of a Stranger”)
Many of the poems in A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country directly address and express the odd feeling of deja-vu that characterizes certain moments of self-recognition or self-questing/questioning. Who am I? Is that me, over there? Or is that a reflection, the warped image in the mirror I made for myself?
Poems like “When the mailman dies,” “The Poet Goes Before the Board of Directors,” and “Your Room” launch us directly into alternate realities, extrapolated from the surrealist universe of ordinary human thought. The results are comic and frightening at once.
This is more interesting territory for self-exploration than the confessional mode that characterizes so much of our modern intake, literary or otherwise. The thinking “I” is shoved outward, observed. Or the inverse: a third-person meditation is stilled and investigated, in poems like “Diner, Midtown Manhattan,” within the more familiar atmosphere of the personal lyric:
The thought that she can’t stay beautiful much longer
on cigarettes and coffee
nags at her a little more
now that it’s fall.
But not today.
The book’s sections are punctuated by haiku from Basho, Bakusi, Onitsura, and Issa. There is certainly a haiku-like precision within these poems, the work of a careful ear/eye honing both image and texture down to the essentials, as in “Directions”:
It may seem like you’re going
in a circle.
That’s perfectly natural;
you’re almost there.
Just bang a hard left
through your father’s Jersey City
and turn wide
around your mother’s ear,
through the cigarettes and pigeons.
At this point,
you’ll be under the compass.
Which is not being lost
and also is not somewhere but not nowhere.
Reading A Plum Tree, I recognized my own sense of being “not somewhere but not nowhere,” the part of me that interrogates memory, experience, environment for affirmation of my own not-lostness. I also felt plunged into a new ecosystem, with its Delaware sky and its snowy fields.
That juxtaposition of distance and immediacy resonates in these poems, drawing the reader in and making for compelling future reads and rereads.
January 14th, 2012
Lee White, “Lite Bike”
To the driver of the champagne-colored SUV:
I’m okay, in case you were won-
dering. Just sore and sad, one
blue elbow, two black knees, plus
a giant purple welt on my ass.
But it could have been worse.
Then again, you could have stopped
completely at the stop,
turned and seen me, bright
with seven flashing lights
on my bike, in the pre-dawn night.
Instead you decided to go,
knocked me over, yelling “Whoa!”
as if your car were a wild horse
out of your control. Of course
it wasn’t. It was your choice
to leave me sprawled there
in the crosswalk. Are you aware
a hit-and-run’s a felony?
You didn’t stop to see
if I was hurt, or did you care?
Do you think all’s fair
in the road-war push and shove
in a city of bike love?
I’m no soldier, just a scared
cyclist unprepared
for such coldness, trying to forgive,
unable to forget, lucky to live.
January 5th, 2012
There are gifts, and there are gifts. One of the best ones I received this year was a collection of poems by Keetje Kuipers, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. On Christmas day, I tucked the book in my backpack and took it to the coast.
Lyle and I camped out in a yurt near Tillamook, where the campground hosts ate paper-plate turkey dinners, their motorhome windows strung with lights and tinsel. The ocean sounded like it wanted to come into our yurt for a bite of lasagne, but I curled up on the bottom bunk and read this collection cover to cover, something I rarely do with a volume of poems. I usually tend to sift through a collection at random, sampling a poem here or there, letting the book ride around with me for a while until I realize I’ve grown familiar with all of it.
 Beautiful in the Mouth is as compulsively readable as a good novel. It compels you to listen, propelling you forward through intensely personal experiences you nonetheless feel as your own. Kuipers’s poems are prosey, direct. They do not confess or converse so much as reveal. It’s as though the self speaking in the poems has been saving up truths, polishing them in order to pour them out all at once, breaking them into lines only so you can better absorb them.
These poems are infused with awe at the body’s impermanence and power, its beauty and its strangeness. They explore how inseparable our experiences are from our interior worlds, how inextricable our bodies from the larger body of the universe. The lovely, terrible entrapment of the self within flesh, world, time.
And yet there’s no trace of the grandiose– far from it.
In “Memorial Day,” everything carries a whiff of the abject. Pieces of wind-born sawdust are compared to “star-shards blown out a comet’s ass.” How’s that for poetic language? Here we encounter the President (presumably Bush) in a radio broadcast, laughing so loudly at his own bad joke, he can’t hear the reporter’s question. The sun is “just-dead,” and in the speaker’s thoughts we see the image of her uterus, seen at a recent doctor’s visit, “black holes stretched on my flesh.”
This is her memorial day: a pause near a drainage ditch to reflect on her health, and feelings of regret, guilt, indifference, denial. If these aren’t emotions to mark the dawn of the 21st American century, I don’t know what are. “I’m always ready to deny exactly what I’m guilty of,” the poem admits to us, and the inclusion of our former president takes on more weight.
The courage to compare oneself to a much maligned President, the courage to compose a poem of ugly things, and to construct a world of breathtakingly unfeeling, yet human-like natural forces– all of this risk-taking is part of Kuipers’s enormous gift. “Intention doesn’t really matter once you’ve been charged with a crime,” this poem concludes. Such a pat statement would feel shallow in a less skillful poem. Here, it drops to the bottom of the stomach, a heavy and cold truth we can recognize as personal. For who among us hasn’t committed some kind of crime, whether against self or another, whether contained and defined by law or hidden inside?
The unprettiness of life lived within a body articulates itself within these poems. Cartilage grinds to fine dust in hip sockets during an act of love (“Finally”); a mother’s mouth becomes a “soldered pout” (“Why I Live West of the Rockies”); and the hips of adolescent boys are “narrow barbs” (“The Undeniable Desire for Physical Conduct Among Boys of a Certain Age”). These are poems of embodiment, filled with a precise understanding of what it means to live inside a human body.
The last lines of “Santeria for the City: Blackout, Summer 2003″ (what is for me the most luminous poem in this collection), nearly encapsulate the tension wire upon which the entire collection is strung:
As the body is a home
as the city is a body
as circuitry runs the lengths
of my arms, these streets– we are a flash
in the fuse box, a blown kiss
into blackness, the perfect
thrill of your last departure
orbiting its small plane inside you.
“You” is code for the self, Kuipers tells us in another poem, and in fact she seems to hold the hand of each former self as she witnesses again her passage through time and trial, relationships, mistakes, solitude, grief. How close are creation and dissolution, death and sex, chaos and absolute silence. How close, unto itself, is the body to an entire world.
This collection is truly a gift, each poem as beautiful in the mouth as it is on the page. Thank you, Keetje, for giving us what we need to hear.
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