A Return to Poetry

I don't know whether it's spring or some other force of nature that has impelled my return to reading poetry recently. I am mostly a devourer of fiction, mostly novels. But from time to time, I read poetry voraciously. This time someone quoted William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl and when I was at the library to borrow it, I looked at some other autobiographical writing by writers--and I checked out Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and Li-Young Lee's The Winged Seed. And then, before I knew it, I was back in the poetry section, pulling slim volumes off the shelves.

So today I'd like to write about Ruth Stone, whose In the Next Galaxy (2002 National Book Award Winner) I read last night. I am primed to love those women artists who have a western Virginia-Vermont (or New York State) trajectory, and Ruth Stone started out in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poems are spare. It is typical for her to yoke disparate elements to arrive at some hard nugget of insight. She does not shy away from the hard insights either. Perhaps I'm drawn to her honesty about loss and deterioration. As I read In the Galaxy, with its many mournful remembrances of her husband, who committed suicide, I was reminded of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Also, perhaps, of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. There are some wounds that never heal, but we return to them again and again to process them from new perspectives. I thought, too, of Maxine Kumin's Inside the Halo and Beyond and recent poems. It is a reflection of my own aging, no doubt, that I love these writers' willingness to share their vulnerability. These are the books I'll be carrying with me into old age.

Actually, though, one poem that really spoke to me dealt with remembered experience from adolescence--"Reading the Russians," which starts, "Of course they are gloomy;/they drink a lot of vodka./It's a frost bitten country./The women are trivialized, used, thrown aside." Pretty accurate, eh? But the remembered experience comes here: "All those Victorian translations/where I was transfixed:/lying stomach down on my bed/that summer of my fourteenth year" after which Stone goes on to describe her "heart rushing/with the wolves, the exhausted horses,/the over-turned sleighs,/the cold veil of the Steppes." Here she's captured a feeling that feels very familiar to me--that enthrallment with an alien world that actually had started even earlier, when I read a biography of Catherine the Great in elementary school. Two years ago, on sabbatical, I reread The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, which had nothing to do with my sabbatical project, nor will I ever teach these books. I realized that I'd been far too young for the books when I first read them--but I'm glad I did read them young, and I'm glad I reread them, and I'm pretty sure I'll reread them again, for no other reason than the reason I read poetry: these texts feed my soul.

But why Hughes and Lee? The pull of writers' stories, initially. As a teacher of writing, I'm constantly on the lookout for stories and quotations I can share with my students, and memoir and autobiography are wonderful sources. And then there's the fact that I didn't manage much reading of Black authors in February, as I intended, and the desire to read/reread/read further in the work of the Asian American poets I spent a year or so studying several years ago. I got away from my focus on American minorities' texts when I was writing my book on YA lit, but it wasn't for lack of interest--just lack of time. And I'm moving into summer mode--even though there are three weeks left in the semester: choosing books that I simply want to read, not books that I have to read.

In short, it's time for some poetry--some that maps out a path for me, that may help me through the decades ahead, some that helps me see the world through vastly different experiential lenses. Mostly, though, I just love to immerse myself in poetry--and it's way too long since I did so.

I am looking forward to Ruth Stone's forthcoming book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. It will be available May 1.