And Her Soul Out Of Nothing - Olena Kalytiak Davis

Ever since I read this collection of poetry (I was recommended this book by my friend Jeremy about a year ago), I fell in love with the entire thing– literally, in love. And now that Jeremy is gone, I read this book over and over again because it’s the closest thing I can find to having a conversation with him. There are many books I lean on for this same purpose, but none of them really quite fit like And Her Soul Out of Nothing. This book of poetry just encompasses everything I can ask for in a good conversation. It’s quirky with a nice combination of many of life’s dichotomies (joy and suffering, light and dark, love and hate, etc.), all of which make life exactly as it is. You love it an you hate it, either way, we keep on kicking. Simply put, I could re-read this book every week for the rest of my life– and be happy, or content, or in love… I’m not sure which.

A couple sample (short) poems:

Hey Precious, Listen

Now that my heart has stopped
screaming it is just a tired ambulance
parked on the left side
of a highway six lanes thick.

The driver is thinking.
The driver thinks tragedy is a joke.
He thinks: No accident, this.
He starts thinking about a place
where wingspan is not
a flip of a coin,
where birds pass themselves
off as doorbells,
where you don’t have to choose
between calamity
and light.

It’s Shaped Like A Fork

This house is a mess
of solid notions
that keep turning into objects:
this simple sadness
that’s shaped like a fork
and the vague fear that crusts
these dishes. I’m vacuuming
over this grass-like pain.
Emptying pockets for teh wash:
such a burden: not just wrappers
but keys and mints, those sticky
and sorry-coated stones.
And this larger grief
that always needs to be folded.

All day I’ve been chewing
on my own acrid gloom,
trying to put away
the things you keep carrying
home from work: the possessions
of children and women
and drunks, stolen or cheated,
the tasteless unhappiness
of others into jars labeled:
Heartbreak, Injustice,
Just-Plain-Bad-Fucking-Luck.

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss

Jeremy also recommended me this book about a year ago, and, as with the one above, this one was extremely comforting after his death. Painful really, but comforting. Not only were there many things in this book that reminded me of him, but there were also many excerpts that I wanted to share with him, discuss with him, love with him. I wanted this mainly because I knew he would appreciate them more than anyone. This book is an extremely well written piece of creative writing about a homage to all things lost– love, life, work, etc. If you’ve ever read anything by Jonathan Safran Foer, then you’ll definitely recognize the writing style. Surprisingly enough and despite the likeness in styles, Krauss and Foer are now married but didn’t meet until after their first books were finished.

An excerpt (one of my favorites):

“My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will by my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit?–small daily humiliations–these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. I don’t mean to make it sould like i’ve made a science of it. It’s not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It’s just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it’s been returned to me at the end of my life. I have to run them under the hot water, steam clouding the mirror, outsides the rustle of pigeons. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the tiems I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing fora moment that soneone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Lonelineness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

I picked up an ancient, dilapidated Laurel Poetry Series book of Whitman’s about four years ago in a used book store here in Jackson, and I’m pretty sure I’ve carried this book with me (literally, on my person) ever since then. It’s my own little piece of wallet-sized literature. I always liked Walt Whitman, but I never owned a copy of his works until I bought this book. Needless to say, it was worth the buck I paid for it. There’s just something so candid about Whitman’s writing that I find extremely comforting, for some reason. He praises nature, while also emphasizing human’s role in it– without diminishing the importance of either of these two things. Although like many brilliant writers, Whitman wasn’t exactly widely accepted during his time, I think he’s pretty deserving of praise.

An excerpt:

from Song of Myself

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July

This book is a collection of short stories by none other than Miranda July. Miranda is a performing artist, writer, filmaker, musician, actress, all around awesome person. Seriously. She makes me laugh all the time. There is just something so quirky and childlike about her skits and her writing (yet somehow serious and adult in theme at times) that really amuses and entertains me. It is really hard to pick a favorite story from this book, but I would have to say that “The Swim Team” and “This Person” are definitely two of my favorites. Also, Miranda inspired me to start The Coalition for the Proliferation of Praise (still in the works) with an article she did with Becky Stark, lead singer of Lavender Diamond. I think she put the motto simply: everyone loves to be praised, no matter what the praising may be. It’s pretty much the whole elementary “gold star” concept overflowing into adulthood. And true it is.

A couple of excerpts:

from the Swim Team

“You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn’t male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.”

from The Sister

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I will ask myself: Is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

from This Person

“Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occassion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believeing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an email re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.”

from Something That Needs Nothing

“She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters - Arthur Rimbaud

I took a class on Arthur Rimbaud when I lived in Pontlevoy, France in 2005. There were all of four people in the class, but I must say, for many reasons, it was probably one of my favorite classes ever. There is just something so powerful about Rimbaud’s writing, and the amazing way it seemingly effortlessly translates into English. Don’t get me wrong, poetry is always better in it’s original language, but for those of you that don’t speak French out there, don’t let that keep you from reading this poetry. Arthur Rimbaud was a brilliant kid yet a restless soul, and amazingly enough, he wrote most of his work between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. “The Drunken Boat,” written when he was only seventeen, has to be one of my favorite poems of all times, hands down. There’s just so much knowledge and depth in his work that I can’t ever seem to let this book rest; it shall never get dusty.

A couple of my favorite poems (in English, for your reading pleasure):

from lluminations

Phrases

When the world is recuded to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes–to a beach for two faithful children–to a musical house for our clear understanding-then I shall find you.
When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.
When I have realized all your memories, when I am the girl who can tie your hands–then I will stifle you.

When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us?
Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window.

Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! Hwo little you care about the wretched women, and the machinations and my embarrassment. Join us with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this base despair.

A dark morning in July. The tase of ashes in the air, the smell of wood sweating in the hearth, steeped flowers, the devastation of paths, drizzle over the canals in the fields, why not already paythings and incense?

I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

…

The Sleeper in the Valley

It is a green hollow where a river sings,
Madly catching on the grasses
Silver rags; where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a small valley which bubbles over with rays.

A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,
And the nape of his neck bathing in the cool blue watercress,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under clouds,
Pale on his green bed where the light rains down.

His feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling as
A sick child would smile, he is taking a nap:
Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold.

Odors do not make his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
Quieted. There are two red holes in his right side.

Tags: arthur rimbaud, book, jeremy lespi, miranda july, nicole krauss, olena k davis, Poetry, short story, walt whitman